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Garrett sometimes felt like the least appreciated member of this team. Sure, he was low profile. Some of that was deliberate. One of the aspects of being a prosecutor he had liked least was that he seemed to always be on the front lines, getting attention he didn’t want that invariably made his job harder to do.
He was better at the computer terminal than he had ever been in the courtroom, where theatrics and strategy seemed to trump research and evidence too much of the time. He preferred his current role as chief research hound—and acerbic commentator on whatever Dan was doing at the moment. He never asked for that role, either, but the world worked best when there was a system of checks and balances in place. Someone had to play devil’s advocate. Or to put it in the common parlance, someone had to call Dan on his BS. He liked Dan, but the man had blind spots.
Sadly, their current case was all about Dan’s blind spots, which was why he was currently in his upstairs office laying new skidmarks on the information highway. The idea of baiting Sweeney, then suing him for slander was clever, ingenious even—but fraught with danger and unlikely to produce any result that completely satisfied anyone. Worse, it put a target on their backs. But Dan remained blind to all that, or if not blind, at the very least, undeterred. Worse, he was convinced Dan’s focus was all wrong.
The most important clue The Captain dropped was the reference to Dan’s sister.
Why would the man say such a thing? Just to taunt Dan? Like a kid on the playground—I know something you don’t know? No, there had to be more. How would this drug smuggler know anything about Dan’s family history? He must’ve heard someone talking about it, but why spill the beans as he was being taken into custody?
Dan thought the man has slipped, that in his anger, The Captain had revealed something he shouldn’t. But Garrett had another theory. Was it possible that this dangling reference to an unknown sister was more than a taunt?
Maybe it was a piece of cheese placed on the tripwire of a mousetrap.
At any rate, he was going to look into it, while Dan was busy trying to win his case and exonerate his father. Once he knew the truth, he would decide what to do with it, which might or might not involve telling Dan. He was in a much better position to have perspective on this. And if he discovered this was dangerous, was a trap, he could bury it before it lured anyone to their doom.
In Florida, most courthouse records were online, which made research almost too easy to be considered a skill. Public records confirmed much of what they had heard. Dan’s father, ethan Pike, married a woman named Alice who had been married previously to Jack Fisher—the man he would later be accused of murdering. Judging from some of the allegations in the divorce Petition and how long the action dragged along, it had been an acrimonious divorce—but then, weren’t they all? The Petition alluded to domestic violence without giving much in the way of details.
All divorce petitions required a precise identification of the parties involved, as well as an identification of any children of the marriage. No children were mentioned.
He would have to try someplace else if he wanted to know more.
He heard someone sashay past in the corridor outside his office.
“Jimmy!”
His partner stopped and poked his head inside. He held half a sandwich. “You bellowed?”
“Busy?”
“Working on the brief for the Motion to Exclude. Needed to stretch my legs. Get some blood flowing.”
“And heighten your blood sugar levels?”
Jimmy shrugged. “A mid-afternoon PB&J is good for you. It’s brain food.”
He doubted Jimmy’s physician would agree.
“You must be on the trail of something important,” Jimmy said. “Something about Dan’s dad?”
Now how did he know that? “Are you mirroring my computer?”
Jimmy laughed and took another bite. “Maybe I’m just a mind reader. Maybe that phlegmatic façade of yours is more transparent than you realize.”
“Or maybe you heard the voice of God in a burning bush, but I doubt it. How’d you know?”
“There’s Rays game on today. Which”—He glanced at his phone—“started fourteen minutes ago.”
Garrett slapped his desk. “Damn. I was planning to—” He stopped short. “Oh. That’s how you knew.”
Jimmy tapped the side of his head. “Dan isn’t the only one with keen powers of observation.”
Apparently not. “You still have a friend in the records department at DHS?”
“I have friends every—”
“Yes, but answer the question.”
“I do have a contact there.”
“Works from home or office?”
“She works from home.”
“Can you send her an email? Ask for a favor?”
“Which would be?”
“I don’t care. Anything that makes her enter the archived records. Ten years or older. After you’ve forwarded her email address to me.”
“This sounds a little skeezy. Are you contemplating something inappropriate?”
“It’s my opinion that all the records should be public. That’s why they’re called public records. As citizens, we have a constitutional right—”
“Yadda yadda yadda. But answer the question.”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Right.” He snarfed down the last bite of his sandwich. “I’ll forward the email address.”
Garrett didn’t have to wait long. Once he received the email, he could ID Jimmy’s friend’s IP address. Once he had that, all he needed to do was to get into the DHS database, wait for that IP address to make its appearance, and follow it inside, mirroring the keystrokes to create a back door.
Hacking in public records was astonishingly easy. Granted, he had major computer skills, but he wasn’t the only one who did. Given the importance of online data to modern society, you’d think there would be more protection. Government couldn’t keep pace with the continuing exponential increase in hacker skills.
At first, he was disappointed. Just as the divorce petition had suggested, there was no child of the marriage between Alice and Jack. But he kept digging, following links, hopscotching around the records for that period, searching for connections.
Until he found something. Bingo.
The first problem was that the child was not “of the marriage.” The child was born before the marriage. Just barely, but before.
The second problem was that the records had been erased.
A lesser hacker might’ve missed this altogether, because someone had entered this database and deliberately expunged the birth certificate and everything relating to the child’s birth.
A baby girl. So far he could tell, never even given a name. The certificate just read: BABY GIRL
The trouble with putting things on a cloud storage system, of course, was that nothing ever completely disappeared. Despite someone’s best efforts to bury the birth certificate, he managed to find it.
Dan did have a sister. Half-sister, or so it appeared. The certificate listed his mother as the baby’s mother, though this was several years before she married, divorced, remarried, and gave birth to Dan.
And Dan knew nothing about it. Which meant that, despite everything that family had been through, no one had ever mentioned the girl to him. Not once.
How was that even possible? No one was that good at keeping a secret. And even if his parents were, wouldn’t someone else know? A sibling, a grandparent, a best friend—someone?
And why would anyone want to cover up the existence of a little girl anyway?
He found no reference to this child anywhere else, though to be sure, his search was impacted severely by the fact that he didn’t have a name. The most logical conclusion would be that the baby did not survive. He found no parallel death certificate, but it was possible it had gone the same way as the birth certificate, except more effectively.
What was the big secret?
He didn’t know the answers and he had few clues to move forward, except maybe one. The birth certificate did have the names of the delivering doctor and the attending nurse. A quick search revealed that the nurse had died three years ago, but the doctor was still alive. Retired and in his early eighties, but alive.
Is it possible he knew something about this? A major long shot—but when all you had were long shots, that was the trail you followed.
Everything about this made his stomach hurt. Who would have the power to hide records, bury trails, erase a person from existence? What did they want so desperately to hide?
And what would they be willing to do to maintain the secret?
He didn’t have any answers. But he needed to be very careful. Because if anyone discovered he was excavating long buried secrets—the next unseen assassin might be coming for him.