23: “You can’t possibly expect me to work my magic surrounded by the scent of freshly ground coffee without a venti caramel macchiato in my hand, can you?” Kloz said as he sat behind the manager’s desk in the back office of the Starbucks on Kedzie.
The room was cluttered, no more than a hundred square feet, with the desk pressed against the back wall and random boxes of supplies littering every inch of open floor space. With Kloz behind the desk and Nash standing to his right, the manager had to stand in the hallway outside the office.
“What about you? Would you like something?” the manager asked Nash. He had thinning brown hair, glasses, and about thirty pounds more than his frame was built to carry. He shuffled from side to side, his hands in constant movement. Nash couldn’t help but wonder what inhaling coffee fumes for ten hours a day would do to a person. “Can I get a regular large coffee, black?”
“What kind? We’ve got blond, dark, decaf Pike Place, Caffè Misto, Clover—”
“Regular large coffee, black,” Nash repeated.
His shoulders slumped. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Nash watched him disappear down the hall toward the front of the shop, then turned back to Kloz. “Well?”
Kloz had three windows open on the monitor. He was studying the text on the third with narrow eyes. “This thing is old, at least five years. The drive is only a half gig, and they’re running an HD camera setup at 1080p.”
“Don’t make me hurt you. I need it in English.”
Kloz rolled his eyes. “Because the camera is recording a high-end, detailed image, it takes a lot of space to record. This computer doesn’t have a lot of space. When the drive runs out of room, the program automatically starts recording over the oldest images.”
“How far back can you go?”
Kloz expanded one of the windows and studied the text. “It’s not as bad as Sophie said. I can pull all recordings going back for about two and a half days. Full recordings, nothing deleted. When computers overwrite data, they don’t do it in a linear, date-based way as we would, they record in bytes. This means when older videos are written over, fragments of that full video can stay on the drive.”
Nash leaned in. “So you can pull snapshots older than two and a half days but not full, uninterrupted video?”
A grin spread over Kloz’s face. “Now you’re getting it.”
“So, anything with our girl?”
“I think we’re too late for that too. I’m running a program to piece back together the fragments, but so far the oldest image we’ve got is less than two weeks.”
“And she went missing three weeks ago.”
“Yep.”
The manager returned holding two large cups and handed them to the detectives. Nash sniffed at his, then took a sip. “It’s coffee?”
“That’s what you wanted, right?” the manager asked.
Nash nodded. “Yeah, I just expected you to come back with some froufrou drink.”
Kloz took a slurp from his cup. His lips came away covered in white foam. “I love me a good froufrou drink. This is three hundred calories of yum.”
“Are you serious?” Nash frowned. “Three hundred?”
The manager shrugged. “That’s a venti, twenty ounces at one hundred fifty calories per ten, so yeah. Three hundred.”
Nash set his cup down and stared at it. “How much in mine?”
“Zero, unless you add sugar. It’s just black coffee.”
Kloz took another drink. “Don’t judge me.”
The manager glanced at the computer screen. “Any luck?”
“This thing is a piece of shit.”
He nodded. “I told that to the detective who came by the last time. Corporate rarely upgrades them unless they break down, and believe me, I’ve tried to break this one, but it’s a workhorse. They really don’t care about long-term storage. If we get robbed, corporate wants to capture the event, but there is really no reason to keep more than a day or two’s worth of footage.”
The manager’s phone dinged, and he pulled it from his pocket, read the message on the display, then put the oversize Samsung away.
Kloz was staring at him. “You have Wi-Fi here, right?”
“Of course.”
“What kind?”
“A, B, G, N, and AC at 2.4GHz and 5,” he replied.
“All the best, right? Your customers probably demand it.”
He nodded. “Corporate does stay on top of that. Our best customers park themselves here for hours.”
“What are you getting at?” Nash asked.
Kloz stood up and began tracing the wires, particularly a thick blue one. He followed the cable behind three cases of cups stacked in the corner. There were shelves behind them. He slid the containers aside, revealing a number of gizmos with flashing lights, nothing Nash recognized. He stopped at one device in particular, a small black box with two antennae sticking out the top. Kloz flipped it over.
“This is their Wi-Fi router and access point. It’s a Ruckus ZoneFlex, state-of-the-art. Remember all those people staring at their laptops and smartphones out there? They’re all connecting to the Internet through this,” Kloz told him. He opened the lid on his MacBook. “See? I’ve connected to Starbucks Wi-Fi before, so my computer connected automatically. Now I’m on the same network as all the people here.” He was pointing at an icon in the corner near his clock.
“How does this help us?” Nash asked him.
Kloz clicked at his keyboard. A new window opened, and data began to fly past much faster than Nash could read. “This is the traffic on their router in real time.” He turned to the manager. “You shouldn’t keep your username and password on a sticker attached to the router. That’s the first place a potential hacker will look if they have access.”
He raised both hands. “That’s all Corporate. I don’t touch that thing.”
Kloz went back to his MacBook. “I can see every e-mail, web page, picture, or song accessed by the people out there, right here, right now, by watching this log file.”
“I’m still not sure how that helps us,” Nash said.
Kloz smiled. “If I were a hot leading lady and you were Tom Cruise, this is the part where you would try to kiss me.”
“I’m not going to kiss you, Kloz.”
“I’m not going to let you.”
“What does all this mean?”
Kloz held up his index finger and began typing again. Nash watched him cut and paste some data from an e-mail into the program he was running. Then he clapped his hands and grinned. “We can’t watch Ella Reynolds on video because that is long gone, but we can view everything she did while she was here dating back over a year and ending on January twenty-first. Her phone and computer.”
Nash thought about this for a second. “The twenty-first? That’s the day before she was reported missing. That means she never made it here on the day she disappeared. That narrows down our timeline a little bit. What else you got?”
Kloz wasn’t listening to him. He was busy typing again. He didn’t speak for nearly three minutes, then: “Kids will always be one step ahead of their parents.”
“What do you mean?”
Kloz had two windows open on his screen. He selected the one on the left. “This represents all the data we pulled from Ella’s computer and her online accounts. Her phone disappeared with her, but we have her laptop. Her browser history was nearly nonexistent. She either used a secure browser or encrypted her traffic. Most kids know how to do it—they don’t want their parents snooping around. So, I took her Mac address—that’s an ID unique to her computer—and ran it through the Starbucks router. That’s this window here.” He clicked on the box on the right. “The router captures all her activity, encrypted or not. If I compare the two windows, filter one against the other, I can see what she looked at while encrypted. Basically everything she didn’t want her parents to find.”
“Is it porn?” the manager asked. Nash had forgotten he was still standing there.
“Sadly, it is not porn,” Kloz said. He opened another window and turned the computer so Nash could see.
Nash clucked his tongue. “Huh. I wouldn’t have expected that.”