I looked up to see Mike Stempien, our FBI computer tech, coming through the door.
He looked as excited as if he’d found a can of gold coins under his sink. He definitely had something to tell us. Conklin stood up, and Stempien took his chair at the desk and opened a laptop.
“This,” he said, “belongs to the Barkleys.”
I said, “Mike. I want to hear everything, but we’ve got a meeting upstairs with Mrs. Barkley and her attorney.”
“This’ll take one minute. You’re going to want to see this before your meeting.”
Conklin and I were standing at the edges of the desk.
Stempien said, “This was on the kitchen counter. I pulled up the last sites the Barkleys visited and found—ta-da.”
He turned the laptop so we could see it better.
What appeared to be a video game from the Pac-Man era filled the screen. There was a drawing of a carnival wheel of fortune in the center, and a chat box off to the right. Mike said what I was thinking. “I haven’t seen a game like this since the ’90s. But then I got the feeling there was more to it than it seemed.”
“How so?”
“This site doesn’t have an internet address. If you want to play, you’ve got to know your way around anonymous browsing and posting. Meaning, there’s a browser called Tor, which stands for the Onion Routing. It’s got different layers. One layer knows only what the next layer is. You can’t see the whole picture. The address isn’t something like Google.com or CNN.com. It’s like ABQ3d.
“A jumble of letters gets you to a point. Your connection’s not so quick because you’re bouncing all over the world, and that means you’re not going to have the speed to load a site with fancy graphics. Then it’s like you need to be in the secret circle to know what site to go to. So if this is just an archaic video game, why the mystery?”
“So a mystery wrapped in an enigma,” Conklin said.
I said, “That wheel is a gambling device, right? Are bets being made for prizes?”
I reached down and moved the curser over the wheel, and it started to rotate and make a faint clicking sound. When the wheel stopped, a number flashed at the top of the page.
“So look, Mike. I just got points?”
“Points. Status. A better chance than a different player? My initial feeling was that this site is in disguise for something illegal. Drugs. Or some kind of trafficking. But I was able to make out some of the encrypted chat. The name of the website is the same as the game on it: Moving Targets. And then I got a different feeling.”
“What? What kind of feeling?”
“Don’t hold me to it, because…well, because. I’m still just turning things over, but I think Moving Targets is a website for hitters. It seems that many of them, from the slang they use, are military or police. The kills they were chatting about could have been your drug dealers. Lots of excitement about the precision of the attacks, about the ‘scores.’ At least that’s the vibe on the site.”
I was almost panting with anxiety and anticipation. Had Stempien found the key to the shootings in the Barkleys’ computer?
“Can you tell which of the Barkleys was playing?”
“From the activity on their laptop, they both played. But was it just a game? Or was it reflected in real life?”
“Can you figure it out?” I asked.
He was quiet for a moment, thinking about it.
“We’ll see,” he finally said. “No guarantees.”