Chapter 23
“When did it get here?” he asked as soon as they entered the lab.
“About an hour ago. Amy got the mail but then she got sidetracked by a traffic death, so it sat on her desk until I noticed it.” She handed Jack a white Tyvek envelope with the return address of the analysts who had examined Diane Cragin’s cell phone.
Riley said, “That puts us in a nice little moral dilemma. We’re supposed to put our fingers in our ears, hum a tune, and send this right over to the people who probably killed her in the first place.”
“Maggie already opened it,” Jack said.
“I had to make sure which case it related to! The number isn’t on the shipping label.”
“I’m not criticizing. I’m just saying they won’t know that we looked at it.”
“There’s no point,” Riley said. “If we get a lead from it, eventually we’d have to explain in court how we got a lead from it.”
“Very true,” Jack said, then turned to Maggie. “Do you have a room I could use? And maybe a pair of latex gloves?”
Riley goggled at him. “You’re going to read it anyway?”
“As you pointed out, we’re not getting anywhere with this investigation. Diane Cragin kept this phone locked up tight for a reason. It might help us to know why.”
“Fine.” Sigh. “Let’s take a look. I’ll be damned if I let a bunch of politicians hide all the clues and then hand us the blame for not solving this case.”
“No. There’s no point both of us possibly sinking our careers.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Riley looked to Maggie for support, but she could offer none. She understood Jack’s thinking all too well. He had nothing to lose. He was the man who didn’t exist, nothing but a fake name and a temporary address. He didn’t have to worry about protecting a pension he never intended to collect. If the feds came knocking, he could disappear to another city and start his extracurricular justice project again without her disapproving eye. Come to think of it, why hadn’t he done that already? What was keeping him here?
“The report has everything.” She spoke only to keep Riley from watching her while clearly wondering why she didn’t seem concerned about her supposed boyfriend losing his job and risking federal prison at the same time. “Call history, texts, photos, websites she surfed. But the numbers called won’t do you any good if you immediately give yourself away by dialing them back. The texts, you might fake your way around them for a while, but as Riley said, unless you can come up with another way you would have settled on a suspect, you’d only sabotage your own case. The evidence would be thrown out.”
“It’s worth a try,” Jack said. “Or someone is going to get away with electrocuting a woman on her own doorstep. Besides, we have a signed consent to search. We have not yet received any subpoena to not search.”
“Splitting hairs,” Riley said.
“Or strict adherence to the rules,” Jack argued, not too persuasively.
Silence fell, during which Maggie heard Carol humming in the DNA lab. Denny, luckily, had gone to court. A worrywart under the best of circumstances, this situation would give him heart palpitations.
“Make that two pairs of gloves, please,” Riley said.
She put them in her chemical processing room, both balancing awkwardly on the waist-high, wheeled task chairs with the hard rubber seats.
“Stinks in here,” Riley observed. Errant wafts of ninhydrin and dye stains lingered.
“It won’t kill you,” Maggie said, holding out a box of latex gloves. “I think.”
“I feel silly looking like a cat burglar,” Riley said, pulling one on.
“I don’t,” Maggie said, which made both men look at her.
“You can’t be here for this—” Riley began to protest.
“Of course I can. I didn’t get any court order to cease and desist. My job is only to turn the report over to you, which I have done.”
Jack gave a tiny smirk.
They developed a system. Jack read the texts, lingering over any that sounded significant. Riley cross-referenced the numbers against the detectives’ case notes to determine if the call came from the phone of an already-identified player, such as Kelly. If any were not familiar, Maggie did a reverse search via the Internet.
“A text two days ago.” Jack read: “ ‘Does he have it?’ ”
“Who’s that to?” Riley asked.
“That’s the problem. It just says ‘Skinny.’ But the number is here,” Jack said, and read it off so Maggie could search. She did, and came up empty. Then she pulled the gloves back off, since she wasn’t touching the phone report anyway, and poured herself a cup of coffee. If she planned to defy the powers that be in order to catch a killer, she would need caffeine.
“We’d already noted it in her call history as a burner,” Riley declared after perusing the sheets he held. “So whoever Skinny is, Cragin called him a bunch of times as well as texted. He sounds like her drug connection, but our senator didn’t partake, and we didn’t find any other illegal objects among her belongings. So it had to be payoffs, toting up that stash in her safe.”
Jack said, “Which we can’t connect to the texts or calls because we can’t establish when any of that money showed up. It could have been there for years, for all we know.”
“Clever, in a way, to throw it all in a pile. It can’t be linked to any pattern or other event.”
“Maybe . . .” Maggie mused, and then continued when both men looked at her. “That bunch of fresh bills that went from the Fed to Fifth Third three weeks ago. If the bank can tell us who they gave it to, that might make some sort of time line.”
“Will they do that?” Riley asked.
“Not without a subpoena—I asked. From the Fed to the bank is one thing, but from the bank to a customer, that gets into the bank-client privilege.”
“Is that even a thing?”
“Enough of one that, according to the Fed, it will be faster to get a subpoena than to spend a few days arguing about it.”
Riley grumbled but pulled off his gloves and said he’d get the warrant started. He trundled out of the lab, and Maggie took over his half of the Cellebrite report. There were so many categories of information—photos, websites visited, downloads. Phones did so much more than make calls.
“Here’s another,” Jack said. “From someone she named Tubby, shortly after one from a Blondie. I’m sensing a lack of imagination from our senator, as well as a touch of mean-spiritedness.”
“Wow.”
“What?”
“You made a joke.”
He ignored her until she finished searching the number, without results. “She tells Tubby to meet her at four. I assume that’s a time, unless it’s the name of a restaurant or a place on East Fourth that they’re both familiar with. Then she says ‘We can work.’ We can work out? We can work this out? We can work together? This woman’s worse than teenagers. At least they use the same unintelligible shorthand. Tubby, by the way, responds ‘Ok.’ Big help.” Jack continued through the report. “Here’s one from Mole: ‘Gave note.’ And she wrote back, ‘pmt in mail.’ No question mark. Sounds like a payment she was making instead of getting.”
Maggie perked up and set her coffee cup on the counter with a soft clink. “When was that?”
“Day before yesterday. Why?”
“She paid someone to give someone a note.”
Jack got it. “David Carlyle. So Mole is her spy at the EPA.”
“Or at the Ohio Department of Health. Probably the guy who had to give up his supply closet to give Carlyle an office.” She searched the number, which gave no results. “Does everyone have a burner phone?”
Jack coughed. “She sent one to Skinny that says ‘turkey wheat.’ No reply. What does that mean?”
“Stock tip?” At his look she explained, “Turkey is the world’s largest flour exporter. I read that somewhere.”
He considered this. “She’s got a lot of cash, has to invest it somewhere. Why not in Turkish-grown wheat?”
“They don’t grow it. They just mill it.”
He gave up on that line of inquiry. “Another one from Tubby. ‘Don’t mention su at fr.’ She writes back, ‘okay water contract Tue mtg.’ He writes, ‘K.’ Wait, another new player—Wawa. Wawa writes, ‘$ on way.’ She writes, ‘$50K?’ Wawa sends a Y. Here’s the number.” He read it off, and Maggie typed at her keyboard.
“Nothing.”
“This isn’t helping. She kept everything sufficiently vague, and now that she’s dead, these contacts can make up any story they like to explain their texts. Plausible deniability, the politician’s stock in trade.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling Tubby,” he said.
“No, wait—”
But he had already dialed and held the phone to his ear. He said nothing, listened, and his eyes widened just a flicker before he hung up.
Maggie said, “Your number will come up on the caller ID of whoever you call. They’ll know you’re from the police department.”
“Um . . . not that phone.”
She paused, coffee cup halfway to her lips, gazing at him with both surprise and a touch of betrayal.
“Like you said, everybody’s got one.”
She set the cup down. “And everybody lies. I can’t scoff at the politicians when I—”
“And even if the PD did come up on the phone screen, I don’t think it would bother Tubby.”
“Why? Who is he?”
“Joe Green.”
This surprised her out of her self-recriminations. “So the two mortal enemies had made a separate peace.”
“Or a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
“Su is StartUp? Don’t throw StartUp Central under the bus when you’re talking to—fr? Fund-raiser? Financial Revenue Committee? Mr. French?”
“In return, he doesn’t bring up Vepo’s history with water filtration.”
“It’s hard to tell which of these two people had the worst environmental record.”
“Does it matter? Let’s try Wawa.” He dialed the number, listened, and told Maggie that someone named Clinton invited him to leave a message. “Now, Skinny.”
She searched, got nothing. “Maybe that’s Kelly. ‘Turkey wheat’ could mean exactly what it sounds like—turkey on whole wheat. It’s a lunch order.”
“She uses a burner phone to order lunch? If it is Kelly, she’s not answering.”
“A phone is a phone. And Kelly seemed to do everything short of scrubbing her toilets so it makes sense.”
“What about Blondie?” That, too, was unlisted in cyberspace, so he dialed its digits.
Maggie searched it. “That doesn’t come up, either.”
“Blondie doesn’t answer. Maybe she’s with Skinny-slash-Kelly.”
Maggie got up and glanced over Jack’s shoulder at the texts. They had already established that outgoing activity had ceased after 9:30 Saturday night when, presumably, Diane Cragin had returned to her home to be electrocuted by her own doorknob. Before that, there had been the call to the lobbyist at 9:20 and a photo uploaded to Facebook at 8:30, Maggie now discovered in the section of photograph information. The report even gave a thumbnail of the photo—a group of people in a large room, obviously the fund-raiser event. Jack leaned close to her long enough to point at a group of print next to the thumbnail. “What’s that?”
“Metadata. It will give information about photo, time, even location if you have location services turned on in Settings. Let’s look at the cell tower information.” She tapped keys on her laptop, then said, “This text to Green at four p.m. went through the cell tower on Breakwater Avenue. That’s in Lakewood, nowhere near her house. Her house is practically right next to the East Seventy-Seventh tower.”
“Opposite side of town,” Jack said.
She cautioned, “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. If the closest tower gets busy, it will bounce signals to other towers. Although I would think it would bounce it to the downtown ones first . . . but this really isn’t my field.”
“It sounds as if they agreed to meet at four o’clock. Can either phone tell us where?”
Maggie went back to the Cellebrite report. “Maybe. Now that we’re looking at the time before the fund-raiser when we had assumed she was home . . . the last photo she took . . . here. At 4:16 p.m. she took a photo.”
Jack leaned over her sheets. “A mushroom? She took a picture of a mushroom?”
“I guess so,” Maggie said.
“Who did she send it to? That lobbyist guy is into mush-rooms.”
Maggie said, “She sent it to Blondie.”
“Weird.”
“But the metadata along with the photo gives the location, in latitude and longitude. She must have had location services turned on.”
“How are we supposed to figure out by latitude and—”
She had already typed it in. “Wendy Park. It’s a spot in Wendy Park, on Whiskey Island. That explains the Breakwater cell tower.” She tapped some more keys. “It looks like, if you go nearly to the end of Whiskey Island Drive and cut back into the trees, away from the river . . . you could park there and be fairly hidden.”
“Especially in early November. Nobody on the volleyball courts then.”
“You play volleyball?” She tried to picture that, and couldn’t.
“Not since grade school. She’s meeting Joe Green on Whiskey Island. At 4:10, he’s not there yet. Even if they kept it short, how does she get back home on the east side and then to a fund-raiser downtown? Kelly was sure she had arrived right on time at five, apparently unusual for her. And where is the Secret Service guy all this time?”
“It was Saturday,” Maggie pointed out. “No rush hour. But why were they meeting at all? They were deadly enemies, both running for the same Senate seat. Isn’t it unethical for them to meet privately . . . like, you know, prosecutors and defense . . . well, they meet all the time, but like prosecutors and judges without defense—”
Jack said, “The only thing I am sure about is that ‘unethical’ wouldn’t bother either of these two characters. Were they agreeing to rig the election—but in whose favor? Was one paying the other to forfeit? But that wouldn’t help, since if one stepped down, the party would put in their Plan B, like they’re doing with the assistant state treasurer.”
“She couldn’t have done it,” Maggie announced. She had been tapping away as they talked.
“Who couldn’t have—”
“According to Maps, even if he arrived at 4:11 she couldn’t have gotten from Whiskey Island on the west side, driven to her home on the east side, and driven back to the fund-raiser to arrive by five o’clock. Not without driving ninety miles an hour on inner-city streets.”
“Which we assume somebody would have noticed,” Jack said. “Preferably one of our patrol officers.”
“So maybe she went straight to the fund-raiser.”
Jack gripped her arm, finding the words. “This changes everything. We had assumed the killer set up the wires to electrocute her during the fund-raiser, between five and nine p.m. But if she hadn’t gone home all day, then they could have been installed any time after eight a.m. Cragin had a breakfast meeting, and then she and Kelly were going nonstop until a meeting with David Carlyle at three-thirty. Again, she must have gone straight from there to be on Whiskey Island at four.”
“But why don’t Kelly and the Secret Service guy know that?”
“Good question. Whatever their story is, the window for our killer just got a whole lot wider. It also puts Green back in the running, TV studio or no TV studio. He could have stopped over to Diane’s at any point during the day.”
Maggie said, “He doesn’t even have a Secret Service guy to ditch or bribe or whatever.”
“Very true,” he said absently.
“What’s up?” Denny asked from the doorway.
Maggie’s heart leapt, spiking with guilt even though she had nothing to feel—oh, wait, she did. She had a great deal to feel guilty for but tried to force that knowledge from her face. It should have gotten easier after six months. “Um . . . nothing.”
Jack stayed still and didn’t speak.
Denny studied their sheepish looks, said that was all right then, and turned away with a slightly disappointed expression that made Maggie think he would be searching for a way to send a gentle reminder that canoodling would have to be done on her own time.
Jack began to gather up the papers.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to deliver this report to the RNC,” he said, “like the good little boy I am.”
“Okay,” Maggie said uncertainly. “Good luck.” She thought of adding Happy hunting, but that would pass a little too close to the bone in Jack’s case. And in hers.
At least she had forgotten about Lori Russo for ten whole minutes. To keep it that way she thought about mushrooms, and not only because she had skipped lunch.