Megan
I was standing at the curb on University Drive, waiting to cross after my afternoon class, when Derek Mackey pulled up in his cruiser, rolling to a stop as the light turned red. His face puckered in irritation as he reached for the mic on the dash and responded to dispatch. Looked like he was having a hectic day.
Too bad, so sad.
I had to admit, I was enjoying this undercover gig. Besides the change of pace and scenery, it was exciting to get to focus on one big goal rather than being pulled in a million different directions and dealing with minor matters all day. I liked the thrill of being a spy. And I liked that I got to wear shorts and sneakers to work instead of that hot polyester police uniform.
Brigit and I crossed the street in front of the Big Dick’s cruiser. He didn’t spot us among the students. Sheesh. For a guy who also aspired to make detective, he could be darn oblivious.
I took long strides back to the dorm, Brigit trotting to keep up with me. Inside the room, I pushed my desk chair over to block the door in case Emily came back from class early. The last thing I wanted was for her to catch me searching the air vent.
I grabbed the screwdriver from the drawer, climbed on top of my desk, and reached over the dusty top of the bookcase to remove the screws at either end of the vent. I pulled the cover off. Given that the top of the vent sat only an inch below the ceiling, I couldn’t get my head high enough to see inside the air duct. I’d have to stick my hand in. I only hoped I wouldn’t be bitten by an errant mouse or spider.
I slid a glove onto my right hand, reached into the duct, and felt around.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Bingo.
I pulled out a small green plastic bottle. The lack of dust on it told me it had been placed in the vent not too long ago. The printed label on the outside identified the contents as vitamin C capsules, but I didn’t buy that for a second. The bottle might have once held vitamin C, but now it held five small white capsules that had to be Molly.
I reached down, stuffed the bottle into my backpack, and stood back up to screw the vent into place again. My immediate mission accomplished, I plopped down on my bed to think things over.
Had the bottle been full of pills, I’d say we’d caught our dealer and the case was closed. But with only five pills in the bottle, it looked more like I’d happened upon Miranda’s personal secret stash. Hmm.
Rather than risk being caught taking the bottle to the police department on campus, I texted Detective Jackson for guidance. Found five pills in air vent in my dorm room. What should I do with them?
A couple of minutes later, she sent a reply. Bring them to the station. Make sure you’re not followed.
I did as ordered, keeping a careful eye on my rearview mirror to make sure I wasn’t being followed. As an extra precaution, I parked my telltale red Jeep in the lot of a fast-food place a block down from the station and circled around the backs of the buildings where it was less likely I’d be seen.
Derek’s gleaming black pickup caught my eye as I passed through the parking lot. The truck was his pride and joy. He’d decorated the thing with a pair of rubber truck nuts that hung from the trailer hitch in the back. Clearly, he was overcompensating.
Something about the truck looked different, though. What was it? It took a moment for me to figure it out. The rims. The truck bore a set of shiny new chrome rims. They’d probably set Derek back a grand or more, a significant sum for public servants like us. But, like they say, the only difference between men and boys is the size—and in this case the price—of their toys.
It crossed my mind that the street value of the drugs that had disappeared, the ones I’d confiscated from Graham Hahn and given to Derek to take into evidence, approximated the value of the rims. But surely if Derek were dirty, he’d have the sense to hide it better, wouldn’t he?
I found Detective Jackson at her desk and handed her the bottle of pills. “What do you think?” I took a seat and signaled for Brigit to sit beside me.
The detective unscrewed the top and peered inside. “If this is vitamin C, I’m Beyoncé.” She slid the bottle into an evidence bag, using a fine-point marker to fill out the form on the side to document the chain of custody. “I’ll send this to the lab. They can check it for prints and tell us for sure if it’s Molly.”
I had little doubt the lab would confirm our suspicions regarding the pills, but we’d need their results in order to go forward with arrests. Of course that assumed we’d eventually figure out who to arrest. We weren’t there yet. If there were any fingerprints on the bottle other than Miranda’s—Emily’s, perhaps?—those prints might prove useful.
“Did you get a response to your e-mail yet?” Jackson asked.
I’d checked my account several times since sending the message to funtimemolly this morning, but it couldn’t hurt to take another look. I pulled up the account on my phone. Nope. No response. “Still waiting. What about the phone? Any news there?”
She held up a sticky note on which she’d jotted some information. “It’s one of those cheap burner phones, a basic Samsung bought at a Dollar General store. Service is paid through a TracFone airtime card.”
In other words, “The phone and the buyer are untraceable, then.”
“The buyer, maybe,” Jackson agreed. “There’s no remaining security footage from the time the phone was purchased. But the phone? We can ping it. Of course we’ll need some hard evidence that we aren’t chasing a rabbit first.”
“Some proof that the owner of the phone is selling Molly.”
“Exactly. Once you get a response to that e-mail, forward it to me and shoot me a text. If it looks like fun-time Molly is selling, we’ll ping the phone.”
While landlines provided emergency dispatchers with a firm origination point for incoming calls, mobile phones did not. For years, law enforcement had been able to use triangulation to narrow down a cell phone’s location by testing signal strength from the three closest towers. Given the greater number of towers in highly populated urban areas, it was somewhat easier to locate a phone in cities than in more remote areas where the towers were more spread out.
Still, the technology wasn’t as precise as needed, especially in emergency situations. Given that an estimated seventy percent of calls to 911 came from cell phones, and that young, injured, or emotionally rattled callers might not be able to give the emergency dispatcher an accurate location, the Federal Communications Commission had pushed for regulations requiring technology in new phones to provide Enhanced 911, or E911, capabilities. Just as aviation officials could narrow in on pings emitted from downed aircraft, law enforcement could now narrow in on pings emitted from cell phones and trace them with much higher accuracy.
The Fort Worth Police Department owned a portable cell phone tracking system called KingFish to help locate and identify priority offenders. When the department purchased the system a few years ago, the ACLU had raised concerns about privacy and probable cause. The department had assured civil rights advocates that the system would be used only after obtaining the proper search warrants.
“By the way,” she said, “those dorm rooms Brigit alerted on last night? The university police found small amounts of weed in the two on the third floor. The boys were processed and released. First-time offenders. The two are friends. They took a hiking trip to Colorado earlier in the summer and bought the marijuana there using one of their older brother’s driver’s licenses.”
The patchwork of state drug laws was making it easier for people to get their hands on pot. As this instance illustrated, much of the product was bought legally but then transported into states where marijuana use was prohibited.
“What about 518?” I asked.
“Nothing was found in the room.”
“Huh.”
I knew a person was never supposed to say never, but Brigit’s nose was never wrong. There might have been no illegal drugs in the room when the police searched it this morning, but there’d been something in the room last night when Brigit alerted on it. No doubt in my mind.
“These are the girls who live in 518.” The detective pulled a printout from a manila folder and slid it across her desk for me to take a look.
I picked up the page. On the left side was a photograph of a girl with fair skin and long hair so straight and pale it was nearly transparent. I didn’t recall seeing her around the dorm. When my eyes moved to the right, my lungs gasped in air. Smiling up at me from the page was the redhead with the wavy hair I’d seen at Panther Pavilion, Miranda’s friend. “Ruby Rathswohl lives in 518?”
“Yes, indeed,” the detective said, her expression wry.
“I ran into her really early behind the dorm. She was taking a bag of trash out to the Dumpster.”
“Or disposing of evidence,” Jackson replied, arching an accusing brow. “Keep an eye on that little redhead.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Our mutual update complete, I bade Jackson farewell and returned to the dorm. Emily was back at her desk, working on homework, a frozen microwave dinner on the desk beside her, steam rising from the sauce-smothered entrée.
I laid my backpack on my bed. “You’re not eating in the d-dining hall, I take it?”
Rather than respond verbally, my roommate merely picked up the plastic tray that held the food as if that were the answer. Talk about moody. Emily could benefit from a chill pill. Then again, maybe pills were the reason for her erratic mood swings. Paranoia and depression were side effects of many illegal substances. Then again, she’d called her former roommate a “druggie” and seemed disgusted by drug use. Was she just prone to mood swings?
Rounding up Brigit, I ventured into the hall and knocked on Paige and Alexa’s door. A moment later, Alexa answered.
“You two want to grab dinner?” I asked.
“Paige is out,” she said, “but I’ll go. I just need to put on some shoes.” She waved me into the room.
As she sat on her bed and buckled her sandals, I glanced around the space. The side that belonged to Alexa was neat and tidy, her bulletin board featuring numerous candid photos of her with family and friends, including several of her with Paige. On the opposite side of the room, Paige’s bulletin board was also covered with candid snapshots, though her space was much less neat. Her bed was rumpled, clothing lay draped over the back of her desk chair, and several pairs of shoes were scattered haphazardly about the floor. Still, the risk of tripping aside, a little mess never really hurt anyone and, besides, I’d seen much worse.
I turned back to Alexa. “Have you and Paige been friends for long?”
She stood. “Since our sophomore year of high school,” she said. “We were on drill team together.”
“I was—” I stopped myself just in time. I’d been about to say I’d been a twirler with my high school band. Yikes! I could’ve blown my cover. “Always jealous of girls who could dance,” I improvised. “I’ve got two left feet.”
“It’s not about the feet. It’s about the hips.” She whipped her hips around, performing a little spin maneuver and chuckled. “See?”
“Not bad.”
Alexa, Brigit, and I took the stairs down to the dining hall, where we joined April and Jasmine for dinner. Unfortunately, while chatting with the girls was entertaining enough, the meal did nothing in terms of advancing my investigation.
Rather than stay in my room after dinner, I opted to take my textbooks and laptop down to the study lounge on the first floor. Since it had comfy sofas and large tables, a number of students chose to study or work on group projects there. The wide, open doorway would also provide me a vantage point from which to keep an eye on the comings and goings of others in the residence hall.
I plopped myself down in an overstuffed chair, kicked off my shoes, and rested my feet on the coffee table. Brigit lay down next to the chair, in a corner. I pulled her chew bone out of my backpack and handed it to her so she’d have something to do.
After completing the assigned reading for my political psychology class, I took a selfie with my textbook and sent it to Seth along with a message that read Do I look smarter?
A moment later a ding told me he’d replied. I consulted the screen to find his message. You can give me an education anytime.
“What are you smiling about?” asked a friendly male voice.
I looked up to find Hunter staring down at me. I pushed the button to turn off my phone. “Kitten videos on YouTube. I treat myself to five minutes of mindless entertainment when I finish my homework.”
He swung his backpack down from his shoulder and dropped it onto the coffee table with a plunk. “Mind if I join you?”
“Sure.” It could give me another chance to see what he might know about Colby Tibbs, Ashleigh White, Miranda Hernandez, and whoever might be selling drugs in the dorm. I’d hoped to raise the subject at lunch, but after he’d shaken Brigit’s hand he’d received a text and immediately excused himself.
He unzipped his backpack and pulled out a laptop before easing back onto the couch and propping the computer on his thighs.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
“American history,” he said. “I’ve got a paper due on the Bay of Pigs invasion by Friday.”
“That seems soon,” I said. “The semester just started.”
“Every week of summer school is like three weeks in a regular semester.” He glanced down at Brigit. “It’s sort of like counting time in dog years.”
On hearing the word “dog,” she stopped gnawing her bone and paused to listen, tilting her head and pricking her ears.
Hunter laughed and reached out to ruffle her head. “You’re a smart girl, aren’t you, Britney?”
Funny how so much human communication with dogs involved asking them questions they had no hope of answering.
“Are you a history major, then?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “Engineering. But I didn’t dare take an engineering class in the summer. It would’ve kicked my ass.”
Always good for a person to know their limitations.
As Hunter returned his attention to his computer and began typing, so did I. I logged in to my e-mail account. Surprise! Funtimemolly had replied to my message. I leaned in eagerly to read the response.
Get a PO box for delivery and send me the address. $40 each. Tape cash to bottom of the trash can in the bathroom at Tio’s Taco Stand on Vickery. E-mail me after you’ve left the cash.
I knew the place. It sat only a mile or so northwest of the campus. Tio’s Tacos was a small mom-and-pop Mexican restaurant, a mere hole-in-the-wall, really, but insanely busy given its great food and “so low they’re loco!” prices. I stopped in on occasion for a bean burrito, though I always avoided the lunchtime rush hours, when they’d have a takeout line extending out the door.
Funtimemolly’s response told me several things. First, the response told me that the message on the bathroom wall was indeed targeted at students looking to buy Molly. Second, the message revealed how the exchanges were taking place, via a drop site and post office box rather than in-person transactions. It was an unusual yet clever arrangement, one that would make it much more difficult to identify and nail the dealer. In many cases, dealers were nabbed after police caught a customer with drugs and the DA offered a reduced sentence in exchange for information that would lead to the dealer’s arrest. By delivering the drugs through the mail rather than in person, the dealer ensured that his or her customers couldn’t identify their source even if they wanted to. Finally, the response told me that while it would require some craftiness to identify this shrewd and surreptitious dealer, we were nonetheless a step closer to catching the culprit than we had been only seconds before.
I replied to the e-mail. Got it. I will leave $ tomorrow. After responding to the e-mail, I forwarded it along with my reply to Detective Jackson. She could have one of the department’s tech specialists take a look, see if they could determine what IP address the dealer’s message had been sent from. Given that an IP address is unique to the network connection used to send the message, they might be able to use the information to identify the dealer. Of course an IP address could fairly easily be hidden if the sender used a proxy server or a service such as Tor, which sent messages through a network of virtual underground tunnels via servers operated by volunteers. Journalists had used the service to communicate with whistleblowers and dissidents who didn’t want to risk arrest. The system could also be used in reverse, to circumvent censorship settings and allow a user to view blocked content. Not that I understood how any of it actually worked. Technology was like magic to me. Still, I knew the detective would also need to get a court order to force the Internet service provider to identify its client, and that the response could take several days. I wasn’t counting on the e-mail leading anywhere right away.
I looked up to find Hunter eyeing me intently. “What?”
“Just thinking,” he said.
“About what?”
“About whether I should ask you out.”
I laughed. When he said nothing further, I said, “Well?”
He gave me a coy smile. “Still thinking about it.” With that he returned his attention to his computer screen.
I scoffed in indignation, though I had to give the guy credit. He knew how to flirt, to get a girl on the hook and play with her. He’d never reel me in, of course. I decided to take advantage of the moment to see if I could pry any information out of him, assuming he had any to pry free. “I heard something about the campus police finding weed in the dorm today.”
“Weed?” he said. “That’s nothing. There’s a guy on my floor who ended up in the hospital last weekend. They say he took bath salts or something. He hasn’t come back yet.”
He must have been talking about Colby Tibbs.
“Bath salts?” I said, though I knew that information was off. “Whoa. Where’d he get something like that?”
It was Hunter’s turn to scoff now. “It’s not hard,” he said. “You just go to a party or club and start asking around, eventually someone will come to you.”
He might have misidentified the drug that had taken Colby Tibbs out of commission for the time being, but he certainly seemed to know how things got done. Was Hunter simply street smart, or had he seen these deals in action? Might he know who was selling drugs to the kids in our dorm?
As long as we were on the subject, it couldn’t hurt to press further, could it? “Are you speaking from experience?”
He simply stared at me for a moment before replying. “What you’re really asking is whether I do drugs.”
It was a statement, not a question. I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond, so I said nothing, cocking my head and raising my brows in inquiry.
Alas my brows did not get the response they sought. He stared at me another long moment before speaking. “I better get back to my paper.”