“THAT WAS FLORA,” D.D. SAID to Phil, hanging up her phone. “She spotted Rocket running across the Harvard campus with a bag full of Molotov cocktails and gave chase. She lost him.”
“So this is definitely his handiwork.” Phil regarded the firefighters marching through the snowy grounds, hitting first this trash can, then that trash can. In the chaos of students stampeding across the grounds, a few bins had toppled. Fortunately, the wintry conditions made short work of any errant flames. “Is it just me, or does this seem haphazard?” Phil continued now. “I mean, for a kid known for taking down entire buildings with gasoline-soaked structural fires, this seems more . . . child’s play?”
D.D. nodded. She was struggling with the same thought. This hardly seemed up to Rocket’s established standards.
Phil’s phone rang. D.D. let him answer the call while she stared at the various plumes of smoke wafting across campus. To give Rocket credit, he’d covered a lot of ground. Seemed like everywhere she looked there was some sort of small fire. Add to that, building evacuations, panicking pedestrians, and sorting out this scene would take the fire department the rest of the day.
“That was Neil and Carol,” Phil reported in. “They just found Jules LaPage’s ex-wife. Or rather, she found them.”
D.D. waited expectantly.
“Carol reached out to Bill Conner’s retired partner, Dan Cain. As Detective Ange had theorized, Conrad went underground almost immediately after his parents’ death, keeping in contact with Cain while he worked his father’s old cases.”
“Batman,” D.D. muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Of the leads Conrad was pursuing, he felt it was most likely that Jules LaPage had engineered his parents’ MVA. Not that LaPage had personally done it. But using his considerable financial resources had hired it out. It was one of the reasons Conrad became fascinated by the dark web. He felt whatever happened to his parents, finding the actual driver would never be enough—the person would just be one more cog in the wheel. Whereas Conrad wanted to understand the entire system, so he could use it to trace all activities to LaPage, whom Conrad continued to believe was operating a criminal empire while behind bars.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.”
“As we suspected, Conrad was helping out LaPage’s ex, Monica. Sending her money. He and Cain both must have a way to contact her because, after Cain got off the phone with Carol, he dialed Monica direct, and she called Carol in minutes. Conrad had reached her about a week, maybe ten days ago. He believed LaPage had not only discovered her new identity, but had taken out a hit. She’s been on the run ever since, living with a burner phone, waiting to hear more from Conrad.”
“Except he never called her back.” D.D. sighed heavily. “Okay. Let’s take it from the top. Conrad has a whole second life on the internet, where he has spent more than a decade establishing himself as some shadowy figure. He spends his time working his way through the dark web, learning a little bit of this, a little bit of that. Comes across a Jacob Ness or two. Maybe has been getting to know various guns for hire, because those would be the kinds of contacts LaPage would tap from prison. Till one day Conrad learns what he’s been waiting to hear: A contract has been taken out on poor terrified Monica. LaPage is once again in motion, his ex-wife in his sight.”
“He calls Monica directly, warns her.” Phil picked up the story.
“Then sits around at home?” D.D. frowned.
“Maybe he was working contacts of his own. Is knowing there’s been a transaction the same as knowing who’s going to carry out the hit?”
“He needed more information,” D.D. agreed.
“Except the hired gun must’ve found him first.”
“And what? Walked into Conrad’s own home and shot him three times with his own gun? That doesn’t sound like any professional hit I’ve ever heard of. Hang on. Conrad isn’t the only one who needed more information. We do, too.”
D.D. pulled back out her phone, dialed SSA Kimberly Quincy. She walked down the block, away from the noisy din of the firefighters. Phil followed in her wake. The air smelled acrid. Later, she figured, she’d blow soot straight out of her nose. So many fires in a single afternoon. And somehow, she had the unsettling feeling they weren’t done yet.
“Quincy,” Kimberly answered her cell.
“D.D. here. Have a question for you and Keith. Okay, you’re Conrad Carter. You’re investigating an evil son of a bitch, Jules LaPage, who’s currently locked behind bars, but who you’re pretty sure engineered the death of your parents, and given the first opportunity will strike again to take out his ex-wife. So you set yourself up on the dark web, you learn the lay of the land.”
“Does this story have a happy ending?” Quincy asked.
“I don’t know yet. Conrad finally finds what he’s been looking for: whispers of a hit being taken out. A connection to one of the hired guns bragging about a new job. I don’t know. But Conrad called Monica LaPage over a week ago. He warned her to be on the lookout. Something tipped him off.”
“Okay,” Quincy said more thoughtfully. She was following the conversation now.
“So, what would be Conrad’s next play? The whole point of the dark web is to be anonymous, right? Except it can’t be completely anonymous. Flora was talking about escrow accounts, vendor reviews. At the end of the day, it’s still people, offering services to other people. And someone has to know what’s going on. At least one real person.”
D.D. heard a muffled sound as Quincy lowered her phone, then a distant exchange of voices. The fed was obviously hashing something out with Keith.
“So,” Quincy came back over the line. “You’re on the right track. The dark web is really just technology connecting real people to other real people. And, yes, it takes many key players to make that happen. IT gurus, for one—though, according to Keith, they spend more time coding than worrying about vendors. You’d have a management team. Who are actually funding individual sites, keeping their infrastructure running and paying the IT guys while coming up with new services, new payment opportunities, and more importantly, new security guarantees, which is the primary attraction of the dark web. And you’d have sales, I guess, for lack of a better term. Real people working from their own shadowy desks to recruit new shadowy vendors. It’s a marketplace. You always have to be offering the latest and greatest.”
“So if Conrad had learned a hired gun had recently taken on a new job, he could take steps to learn the hit man’s identity. Starting with the site manager?”
More muted talking.
Quincy returned: “Conrad would probably want to make a financial offer of his own. For example, I’ll pay you twice that amount to do a job for me right now. But if that failed, his next—and I gotta admit, it’s a pretty clever play—would be to lodge a complaint against the vendor.”
“Excuse me?”
“Keith just came up with it,” Quincy said. “Remember, reviews matter. So if Conrad wanted to mess someone up, he could file a formal complaint against the hit man. I paid Vendor X and they didn’t deliver. Or better yet, Vendor X is a cop. Now the site administrator has to investigate Vendor X. The site’s credibility is shot until the matter is resolved.”
“So Conrad contacts the site administrator. Vendor X cheated me or is a rat,” D.D. filled in.
“The web manager will then have to open up a case review, just like in the real business world. Talk to Conrad. Talk to the hired gun. Sort things out.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” D.D. murmured. Forget the criminals on the dark web, what Quincy had just described was pretty much the same way complaints were handled at BPD. “In the course of this interaction, Conrad might’ve learned the hired gun’s real identity,” she guessed.
“Keith and I are only now retracing Conrad’s virtual footsteps, but from what we can tell he’d established about as deep a cover as I’ve ever seen. Honestly, a professional agent couldn’t have done as well. Ten years of lurking, Conrad didn’t just visit the dark web. He became part of the landscape.”
“Until he learned too much,” D.D. said.
“Which cut both ways,” Quincy amended. “Conrad didn’t just learn a vendor’s identity. A vendor, a manager, a customer—someone learned his.”
And just like that, D.D. got it. The piece of the puzzle they’d been missing. She clicked off her phone. She stopped walking, stared Phil in the eye. Delivered the hard truth: “Phil. We’ve been idiots.”
“Again?” he asked with a sigh.
“Investigative one-oh-one. Don’t forget what you already know. We’ve gotten so caught up in the dark web and Conrad’s mysterious double life, we forgot to factor in the basics: our crime scene.”
“You were just talking about it. Conrad was shot in his own home with his own handgun.”
“Exactly. Yet we’ve spent the past twenty-four hours spinning our wheels over hired assassins and dark-web vendors and shadowy criminals that go bump in the night. Really? How would a hit man know that Conrad kept his gun stashed in his own bedroom? How would a hit man gain access to Conrad’s house, given that Conrad lives under an alias and has been on hyperalert for nearly a decade? Then, having accessed the house, and crept up the stairs and retrieved the hidden handgun, how does this ninja simply stand in the doorway of the study and shoot Conrad three times without Conrad ever putting up a hand in self-defense?”
“Conrad would’ve been on guard.”
“Meaning Conrad never saw the threat coming,” D.D. concluded for both of them. “He let his killer into his home. He thought nothing of it when his killer joined him upstairs in his study. He knew the person, Phil. Conrad had to have known and trusted his shooter; it’s the only explanation.”
Phil stared at her. “He finally identified the gun for hire contracted by Jules LaPage, and it turned out to be someone he personally knew? That seems far-fetched.”
“Because I don’t think it’s the contract killer he identified. Or who identified him. I think Conrad stumbled upon a bigger fish. Not the vendor. The site manager. A person with a double life worth burning down the entire city to protect.”
“Who—” Phil started, then stopped. “We are idiots,” he said.
“Yep. We need to get to Evie’s mother’s house. Now!”