The aroma of fresh coffee greeted me the moment I stepped through the office door, Cinnamon Sugar Cookie from Cameron’s Coffee. It came as a surprise. Not the coffee—it was one of Freddie’s favorites. The fact that he was in the office before me. The man was never early.
“Morning,” I said.
He replied without looking away from his computer screen. “Holland.” It was my first name. Freddie rarely used my first name. Hardly anyone did.
We had one of those expensive, high-tech machines that brewed one cup of coffee at a time. I popped in a canister and waited while it poured a mug of Chocolate Caramel Brownie. I sat behind my desk, swiveled the chair, and watched downtown Minneapolis come alive outside the window. Freddie and I had talked on and off for months now of reducing overhead, of finding less expensive digs outside downtown, except we both would miss the hustle and bustle of the city—and the view—so we hadn’t pulled the trigger yet.
Eventually Freddie ejected a flash drive from his computer and crossed the office with it, stopping at my desk.
“Sidney Poitier,” I said. I never used his given names, either, unless I wanted to tease him. He wasn’t in the mood.
Freddie dropped the flash drive in front of me.
“I started reading this last night,” he said. “Couldn’t sleep afterward. That’s why I came in early.”
“Does it have a happy ending?”
“Some fucked-up shit in there, man.”
I slipped the drive into a USB port, brought its contents up on the screen, and began reading. I could understand why the attorneys didn’t want this information falling into the wrong hands, especially the public’s.
Meanwhile, Freddie moved to the center of the room, his back to the windows. We had a combination dry board and cork bulletin board on the wall where we kept track of our open cases. There was a white curtain that we could close to hide our work from visitors.
Freddie moved to the bulletin board side and started pinning up index cards labeled MURDER, DIVORCE, CLASS ACTION, BRIBE, and RAPE using thumbtacks. He put up a sixth card labeled HACKER and ran a thin strand of red yarn from that card to each of the first five. Afterward, he pinned up a seventh card—NIMN—and used more yarn to connect it to HACKER.
“I spent some time on the site last night and again this morning,” I said. “I don’t think we can connect the hacker and NIMN yet.”
“NIMN contacted the attorneys.”
“Someone claiming they were from NIMN contacted the attorneys. Could be a bluff. Could be that you were right the first time, that it’s a shakedown and the blackmailer wants our clients good and frightened before he names his price.”
“Point.”
Freddie disconnected the yarn that linked HACKER to NIMN and let it just hang there.
I gestured at my computer screen.
“I haven’t had the time to study it like you did, just skimmed, but—some of it really is fucked up. I know I wouldn’t want it to get out, either. Would you?”
“How much of it is illegal, do you think?”
“What the lawyers did? That’s the thing. I’m not sure any of it is illegal, just—”
“Fucked up?”
“Yeah.”
“Read it more carefully,” Freddie said. “Afterward, I’ll tell you my theory.”
“Tell me now. That way I can poke holes in it as I go along.”
“Asshole.”
Freddie gestured at the bulletin board.
“Remember what Mickelson told us last night about this being a smash-and-grab?” he said. “About how hackers steal what they can and figure out later what’s valuable?”
“I do.”
“Here you got two famous cases, cases that were covered big-time in the local media.” Freddie tapped the index cards labeled MURDER and BRIBE. “This case—” He tapped RAPE. “This case had some attention, but nothing compared to the others. These—” He tapped DIVORCE and CLASS ACTION. “No media coverage at all.”
“Okay.”
“Two of the law firms deal mostly with local clients, one is regional, but both Stanislav Kennedy and Hannum, Hillsman, and Byers, they’re multinational. Are you telling me that of all the clients they have and all the business they do all around the world that this is the best the hacker could come up with? One specific case per law firm? Nothing else interested them? C’mon, man.”
“Maybe it is. Who were the lawyers? David Helin…”
Freddie wrote a name on each card: Kaushal MURDER, Helin DIVORCE, Puchner CLASS ACTION, Mickelson BRIBE, and Jernigan RAPE.
“I don’t think these cases were chosen based on whatchacall notoriety is what I’m sayin’,” Freddie said. “Or how fucked up they were or how damaging they might be t’ the law firms.”
“What’s your theory?”
“I’m thinkin’ Puchner mighta been right last night when he said that it was personal. Somehow these five cases are all connected directly to the hacker, or vice versa. He wasn’t phishing. The hacker went after our clients because of these cases.”
I gave it a couple of beats and turned to my phone. I punched in a number. A moment later a woman answered. “Stanislav, Kennedy, Helin, and DuBois. How may I direct your call?”
I asked for David Helin.
“Just a moment, please.”
A few seconds later another woman spoke to me. “Stanislav, Kennedy, Helin, and DuBois. David Helin’s office.”
“Hi, Judy. It’s Holland Taylor.”
“You handsome devil, how have you been?”
“Pretty fair, Judy. Pretty fair. Say, is the boss in?”
“Just a sec, hon.”
Helin was on the phone before I could take a sip of coffee.
“Don’t tell me you already need more cash,” he said.
“What you already gave us should last until lunch. Listen, I have a question. The answer is important.”
“All right.”
“We know that the five law firms we met with last night were hacked. Do you know if there were any others?”
“No.”
“You don’t know if—”
“I spent the weekend making calls,” Helin said. “You need to be discreet because no one wants to publicly admit they’ve been compromised. Mickelson and Doug Jernigan made calls as well. As far as we can determine, it was only the five of us. At least, we were the only ones who were contacted by NIMN. Or, I should say, we were the only ones willing to admit it.”
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure. Why?”
“Just wondering if we need more index cards. I’ll talk to you soon, David.”
I hung up the phone.
Freddie and I have a thing—whenever we come across a piece of evidence that might or might not be significant to a case we’re working, we make a production out of resting our index finger against our cheek and saying “Hmm.” I was doing it now.
“Where do we start?” Freddie asked.
“Where do we always start? With the victims.”
“The law firms?”
“No, no. The clients of the law firms. They’re the ones who are gonna be most compromised by the hacks, the ones who’re going to be hurt. The question we need to answer—why them? Why their cases? There must be a common denominator. We should examine all of the media accounts of each case. I know you did some of that already. We want to take note of what a casual observer of the proceedings could learn about each case, the defendants, victims, lawyers, etcetera. We’ll also interview the victims individually, assuming the lawyers let us, to see if there’s anything that connects them. Try to find out what’s this guy’s motive.”
“Fuck motive.”
“When I was with the cops, motive was a big thing with us.”
“When I was a member of the United States Air Force Security Force…”
“Say three times fast.”
“We never worried about it. You try to figure out what motivates some asshole, you’ll go nuts.”
“Motive, means, and opportunity—didn’t you read the detective handbook? They’re the backbone of any investigation.”
“I’m just sayin’, you need to be a shrink to figure out the reason most people do the shitty things they do, and half the time you’ll get it wrong. Get the facts and prove some asshole did a certain thing at a certain time in a certain place. Leave the ultimate truth, the why, to someone gets paid a helluva lot more than we do.”
“Still, if we knew why—”
“The hacker could be like us. Did you ever think of that?”
“What do you mean?”
“A free agent selling his services, happy to do a client’s dirty work for a price.”
“He’d probably make more blackmailing the law firms for bitcoins.”
“Unless he thinks he’s an honest man.”
“Like us?”
“Man doin’ what he’s doin’ cuz someone’s payin’, motive ain’t gonna find him, is what I’m sayin’.”
I rested my index finger against my cheek again. At the same time, we heard a soft knock on our office door and Sara Vandertop entered.
“Darlings,” she said.
I rounded my desk and moved toward her. She held her arms open and we hugged.
“Always good to see you, Holland,” she said.
“You, too.”
Sara turned toward Freddie. She opened her arms again.
“Give me some love, sugar,” she said.
“I thought our appointment was with Steve,” Freddie said.
“Steve is having a bad hair day.” She tousled her own golden locks.
“Dammit.” Freddie walked into her arms and they embraced tentatively. “You know you make me nervous.”
“Are you afraid you’ll lose control again?”
“I never did hear what really happened after Freddie took you back to your loft that one time,” I said.
“A girl never tells,” Sara said.
“You two are messed up.” Freddie pointed at me. “You especially.”
“Me?”
“My, my, my.” Sara fanned herself with the flat of her hand. “Did I come at a bad time?”
“Best time,” I said. “We have need of your particular skill set.”
“Should I sit down?”
“I would.”
Our office is one long rectangle with six large windows in one wall facing downtown Minneapolis and a single door in the middle of the wall across from the windows. Freddie’s desk, chairs, and file cabinets were on the right. I was set up on the left. In the middle were the coffeemaker resting on top of our safe, a small refrigerator, a low round table, and four stuffed chairs arranged around it. Sara sat in one of the chairs and crossed her exquisite legs. Her skirt hiked up to there to reveal plenty of deliciously smooth thigh kissed with gold.
The American Psychiatric Association used to list transvestitism as a paraphilia or fetish. It claimed people derived abhorrent sexual pleasure from cross-dressing. Hell, maybe it still did. Steve Vandertop—yes, he was one of the Vandertops—once told me that he simply enjoyed dressing like a woman.
“Is that wrong?” he asked.
It didn’t bother me, I told him.
It did bother Freddie, though. At least it used to.
I think that might have been because he met Sara first and Steve later. I knew Steve long before meeting Sara. He was a hacker. Excuse me—“an intelligence research professional.” I asked him once, what was the difference? He said about $150 an hour. Back then—was it really seven years ago?—he was living cheap in a loft in the Warehouse District, before it became gentrified, and rebelling against his old man’s obscene wealth. Personally, if my father had been rich I would have embraced it like crazy, but that’s just me.
Anyway, I hired him to help with a case that I was working, hired Steve. We had our ups and downs. Turned out he wasn’t above skimming a few bucks off the top if he had the opportunity. Yet I liked him. Besides, it wasn’t my money. Afterward, he introduced me to Sara and actually gave me a step-by-step demonstration of the process he went through to become her. It was fascinating if a little disconcerting.
Steve told me that he began cross-dressing when he was about twelve, Amanda Wedemeyer’s age, quit when he started high school, and picked it up again after college. He wasn’t gay, bi, or transsexual. He didn’t think of himself as a woman trapped in a man’s body or even for a moment contemplate gender reassignment. He just liked to dress as a woman, and he became so skilled at it that women seldom realized he was a man, and the vast majority of men never did.
Like Freddie.
I had introduced him to Sara over drinks. He actually kissed the back of her hand and complimented her on her figure—Freddie was a smooth operator in those days. ’Course, Sara was flirting back, so I just sat there and watched, waiting for the train wreck that never occurred. At least not in front of me. Instead, Sara said she had to return to her loft, and Freddie volunteered to walk her there. What happened next had never been fully revealed by either party, although Freddie did call me several obscene names the next time we met for not giving him a heads-up.
“How’s the family?” I asked.
“They’ve seemed to mellow considerably over the years,” Sara said. “Steve’s invited to all of the Vandertop family gatherings now. ’Course, I never get to go.”
“Bastards,” Freddie said.
Sara’s head snapped toward him. “Freddie,” she said.
“I’m just sayin’.”
“My, my, my.” She began fanning herself again.
“If you two are done flirting,” I said.
“Dammit, Taylor,” Freddie said.
“Let’s get down to business.”
“Is this a straight-up security job?” Sara asked. “Or are we going rogue again?”
“This time we’re on the side of the angels.”
“Where’s the fun in that?”
I gave her the basics.
“What do you want from me?” Sara asked.
“Is it possible to trace the hacker?” I asked.
“Track the hack?” Sara smiled. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“On how it was done. Lawyers are no different than anyone else. They put themselves at risk because they do stupid things. Emails. Attorneys may be wary when they receive generic-looking emails from businesses. But what about an email from the hacked address of a professional organization? The bar association or the Minnesota Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, for example? Or even an email that comes to them from an attorney within the same law firm? I have legitimate clients, believe it or not—”
“Are you sayin’ we ain’t legitimate?” Freddie asked.
“One of the things we do is send test emails to employees with attachments that they’re not supposed to open. Half the time the attachments are opened anyway. The employees are chewed out big-time and told never to do it again. Six weeks later, we send them more test emails and the attachments are still opened. Unbelievable. My experience, lawyers aren’t much brighter than anyone else when it comes to this stuff.
“Also, you have Wi-Fi networks. Attorneys travel a lot. They need to use their smartphones and laptops, so what do they do? They use public Wi-Fi networks. Which means they could be logging into a hacker’s network. They look just like a legitimate connection offered by a business. An untrained user can’t spot the difference. The result—all the data they send is intercepted.
“Or thumb drives. A hacker litters the place with USB devices branded with the logo of an attorney’s client or the logo of a convention the lawyer might be attending, something like that. Only it’s loaded with all kinds of malicious software that hackers can use to siphon off intel once they’re plugged in.
“What else? Passwords. People use the same damn passwords for everything. LinkedIn. Your bank account. Your company’s server. It’s like making a hundred copies of your house key and leaving them scattered around. Hacker finds one and now he has access to everything.
“Lawyers, like everyone else, also have a tendency to live online, posting about their family, their friends, their pets, their vacation to Wisconsin Dells. This helps hackers guess both passwords and the answers to security questions. ‘What’s the name of your pet? Where were you born?’ Give me access to your Facebook account and I’ll probably be able to figure it out.
“I’ll tell you this, though—it’s much harder for us to catch a hacker than it is for them to hack a system or network.”
“But you can do it,” I said.
“Well…”
“C’mon, Sara,” Freddie said. “It’s a simple question.”
“It’s not a simple answer, though. Tell me this—is the information we gather going to be turned over to the authorities for prosecution?”
“What difference does it make?”
“The cops are required by law to obtain warrants issued by a judge to compel a service provider to give up its records, to tell the cops exactly who was using a specific IP address at the time the illegal activity was taking place. Most hackers, though, hide behind a digital smoke screen of multiple service providers. By the time the cops work their way through them all, poof, they’re gone. This also assumes the service provider actually keeps records. In the United States, they’re supposed to for a minimum of a year. Not all countries are as diligent. That’s why it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that most hackers attack targets outside their own countries. If it takes time to get a warrant for a provider in the US, imagine getting a warrant for a provider in Belarus. And if the hacker is using a proxy server—”
“Proxy server?” I asked.
“I won’t bother you with the details.”
“Please don’t,” Freddie said. “My eyes are already glazing over.”
“I’ll just tell you that proxy services are free and widely available. It allows anyone using a computer to bounce their activity off a system that is either in a distant country or keeps no records of where the activity originated. They were set up to help people in hostile regimes like China, say, get their information out anonymously.”
“Whistle-blowers?” I asked.
“Absolutely. But, of course, hackers quickly saw their potential. Then there’s onion routing—”
“Stop,” Freddie said.
“I’m just trying to make you understand, there’s finding the hacker and then there’s building a case against the hacker. Only about one percent will actually do time because it’s so hard to gather evidence legally.”
“Find ’im first,” Freddie said. “We’ll worry what’s legal later.”
“What it comes down to, then, is the hacker’s skill set,” Sara said. “Everyone makes mistakes. Did he? Plus his ego. Hackers tend to be boastful. They like to show off to their peers. They like to brag about their technical prowess. Some will even taunt their victims, the companies they hack. ‘Catch me if you can,’ they’ll say. That might help, too.”
I stood and walked to the bulletin board and stared at the index cards pinned there.
“The hacker sent emails to each of the law firms,” I said. “He wanted the attorneys to know what he did.”
“Ego,” Sara said.
“Or part of a revenge fantasy.”
“Which brings us back to my theory,” Freddie said.
“Why is he so pissed off at these five law firms and no others?”
“Yeah.”
“We’re going to have to do this the hard way. With good old-fashioned police work.”
“Except we ain’t the police anymore.”
“That’s why it’s fun to work with you guys,” Sara said.
“We also have more than one client,” Freddie said. “There are subpoenas we need to serve the sooner the better, skip traces for Henderson, some employee background checks for Sackett, and one of the few lawyers we work with who wasn’t hacked—she needs us to finish vetting some jurors.”
“I know.”
“I’m just sayin’.”
“I know. Most of it is computer work, though, so why don’t you do all that, and I’ll get started on the legwork for the lawyers.”
“’Kay.”
“In the meantime, Sara, I’ll contact the law firms and tell them to give you access to their computers. Anything you can do to track this guy…”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“I just had a thought,” Freddie said.
I might have made a joke about it—something like Is it lonely in there?—only it didn’t seem the proper time.
“Maybe we should reveal ourselves,” Freddie said.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Maybe we should make just as much noise as we can goin’ after this guy.”
“The clients want it done quietly.”
“Yeah, but if this guy’s got crazy skills and an ego to boot like Sara says, and he learns that we, meaning you and me, are after ’im, what’s gonna stop him from comin’ after us? Even if it’s just to laugh at us. You follow me?”
“Set a trap? I like it. Sara?”
Sara spread her arms wide, stretching the material of her thin bodice over what I would have thought was an ample bosom if I hadn’t known better.
“Boys,” she said. “It’s me.”