I grab the pad of paper and pen next to Lucas. Quickly, eager for answers, I jot down names to include the chef, Emma herself, her deceased husband, her fiancé, and of course, the real Naomi Wells. I slide it back in front of him. “Are they part of the game?”
“Everyone uses a code name assigned by the game system,” he replies. “I’ll have to search IP addresses and phone numbers.”
“Who owns the game?” Andrew asks.
“Unknown,” he says, “and every time you try to track the servers, they show up in another part of the world. But that said, I haven’t tried to find out myself. I’ve just heard the chatter on random forums. There are rumors it’s used for nefarious communication of various types, but I can’t confirm that.”
“Try,” I say. “I’ll get you a payday from the FBI and credit. That will help you find some level of immunity for your other activities we both know you didn’t stop.”
At this point, I’m already pulling up the photos I took of Emma’s text messages. I write down her and Jamie’s numbers. “That’s the victim’s phone number,” I point to the first number. “And this,” I add, pointing to the second, “is someone named Jamie she was texting with about one more time for the history books. Jamie’s phone number is a throwaway. Show us what you can do.”
He smirks and gives a small incline of his head toward Andrew. Andrew finishes off his pot pie. “I won’t arrest you until after Christmas. And since I’m told you’re an FBI asset, maybe not until after the New Year.”
“Just do it,” I say, and Lucas doesn’t seem to need more encouragement. He tugs the paper closer. I pull Kane’s pot pie between us. We don’t touch it. Both of us are watching Lucas. It takes him all of two minutes to say, “Neither of these numbers are on the game system. But—Jamie’s phone can be partially traced.”
“Not per our tech team,” Andrew says, motioning to the waitress, and mouthing, “Cake,” before he adds, “That was one of the first things we tried.”
Lucas punches in a few more keys and says, “It was purchased at a smoke shop, aka a corner store, three months ago.”
He grabs his notepad from me again, scribbles down the address, and hands it back to me. “It’s in the city. And they don’t have security cameras. I checked. However, there are street cameras. I pulled up the nearby feed for the timestamp. All I got was this.”
He turns the computer around and shows us an image of a person in a large jacket and a baseball hat pulled low. “That’s doesn’t help,” Andrew says, “but what the hell, Lucas? What are you doing, man? Besides trying to get yourself in trouble?”
“Working for the FBI,” I say, focusing on Lucas. “What about further down the street?” I ask. “Can we get a better image?”
“The person goes down into the subway,” he replies, “and there’s no way to know where they come back up to the street level.”
“In other words,” I say. “Jamie made damn sure he wasn’t going to be found.”
“He bought six phones that day,” Lucas says, turning his computer around to face him again. He scrolls through some kind of data and writes down the six numbers. He then starts keying them into his computer. A minute later he says, “Bingo. Two of the numbers are registered on the game. If I can get to them while they’re on the game live, I can track their IP address.” He eyes Kane and gives him a little chin lift, like, “See, I’m a badass.”
Kane actually laughs and Andrew and Lucas both look at him like he’s an alien. Because they don’t know the Kane I know. “Who are you?” Andrew asks him.
“I thought you already knew all there was to know about me,” Kane challenged. “So you tell me.”
Andrew’s cellphone rings and he scowls at the interruption, apparently eager to continue that challenge with Kane. Thankfully, for his own good, he glances at his caller ID and takes the call. “Talk to me. Did we get her?”
I wait for that answer, disappointed at my brother’s scowl that tells me all I need to know before he tells his caller, “I’ll be at the station in twenty.” He disconnects. “We found the car fake Naomi was driving. No fake Naomi. The car was stolen from a Westbury, Long Island, address a good hour and a half away over a month ago.”
“What about cameras on the highway?” Lucas asks.
“Not on that stretch of highway.” He glances between me and Kane and adds, “Bottom line, unless we get some kind of DNA or prints from the car or your place, that we can actually match up to the database, she got away.”
My mind flashes to the moment when fake Naomi brought us that plate of shrimp. She was wearing gloves. “Fake Naomi was wearing gloves every moment I saw her in the house,” I say. “I’m guessing she wore them in the car as well. And even if you found DNA evidence, as you said she has to match up to the database. I’m betting she won’t. This was well planned and she was calculated in all she did. We might as well all be wearing clown noses. She made fools of us. And yes, she got away.”