Page 58 of Havoc

“Whoever is doing this is using a rotating ISP program to protect themselves from getting caught,” Hacker replied. “But don’t worry. I’ll dig deeper and see if they’ve left evidence of any kind behind.”

“How long would it take to upload and install a program this sophisticated?” Again, Havoc was all over this situation, asking all the right questions.

Hacker told him, “It wouldn’t have taken very long. Maybe two or three minutes if they had experience with this sort of thing. My best guess is they uploaded the app, installed it, renamed it, changed the icon, and then put the phone right back where they found it.”

“How long will it take you to dig deep enough to find out who did this?” Mace just kept drilling down on the details.

“I’m scraping the routing log now.”

When I leaned closer to Havoc, his big arm slid around me like it was the most natural thing in the world. His hand tugged the blanket from the far side of the sofa, and he pulled it over me. That’s when I realized that I was shivering.

“Okay,” Hacker said, sounding excited. “I tracked down the IP address of the final destination server. It’s registered to a dummy corporation out of Nevada, but the actual signal bounced three times before it hit the server.”

“Where were the other two bounces?” Havoc asked.

“The first one was Cavar County courthouse, and the second one was a private server located in a fairly remote part of Carver County.”

I felt my heart thud hard against my ribs. “I remember you telling us that his father is the Carver County sheriff. Do you think their precinct is located in the courthouse?”

“I’ll check,” Hacker responded excitedly. “Yeah, the Sheriff’s office is housed in the basement along with the county jail. I think it’s some kind of backchannel between father and son. Their version of an encrypted system. I am picking up a lot of traffic between the three servers.”

“Wait,” Hacker muttered. “I’ve hacked one of the servers. A lot of the log files are corrupted.”

“What does corrupted mean?” Havoc asked, glancing anxiously at me.

Hacker elaborated, speaking quick and fast. “Someone tried to clean house. Deleted a bunch of files, call logs, and audio dumps. I’m not gonna lie, it was done badly, like whoever was in a rush. But here’s the thing. This wasn’t done by Slater or his old man. It would take an expert to set up a system like this. If I didn’t have advanced military skills in computer surveillance, I wouldn’t have known what I was looking at. I think these assholes have hired themselves a computer expert. And something made that expert fly into a full-blown panic. There are packets of information, where the headers were left intact, but the contents were deleted.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Why not delete the whole fuckin’ file?” Havoc asked.

“Because whoever this was didn’t have much time. They created a program that targeted certain information. It was probably set up to wipe the contents of any file with certain keywords in it, thus the packets and file folders were left intact.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” I told them. “What does any of this have to do with me?”

“Maybe nothing,” Hacker admitted. “But there was something in those files and on those recordings, something they didn’t want anyone to see or hear. If we can find out what it was, we might be able to use it as leverage against Slater.”

“And use it to keep his father from interfering, like he’s done in the past when Slater got into trouble.”

My world tilted back into alignment as hope bloomed in my chest. These clever bikers were right. This could be my ticket to getting Slater to leave me alone. Or better yet, get him charged and put in jail. He can’t stalk me from jail, I told myself.

“What you’re saying is that you think he recorded something that could incriminate him?”

“It’s really common for dirty cops to put people in compromising situations and then use that against them. Nobody likes to get blackmailed, but it’s a surprisingly effective way to get people to do what you want.”

“Hold on for a minute. I found a file with audio that was partially deleted. I’m gonna see if I can restore the audio.”

We listened to him typing away for a bit and some cursing under his breath and more keystrokes before he finally spoke again. “The audio is too corrupted to be restored, but I might be able to reconstruct the metadata. This might take a minute.”

While he typed, Havoc got up and started a fire in the fireplace. This time of year, the days were okay, but the temperature tended to drop significantly at night. Outside, the wind whistled through the trees, and I could hear an owl hoot. Since Nine paid it no mind, neither did I. I just kept petting my four-legged hero, and he was soaking up all the well-deserved attention.

“Alright, I think I have something interesting,” Hacker stated at long last. “The file with the audio recording had an unusual file name. It’s what grabbed my attention in the first place. Most of the files containing recordings had digital file names, numerical sequences to be exact. They looked to me like they might be dates. Only one had a word name.”

“Don’t leave us in suspense, brother. What was the word name?” Havoc asked, his voice almost irritable.

“The word was ‘confession.’”

Shock roiled through my body because it sounded an awful lot like they had captured someone’s confession and then, for some reason, deleted it.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Mace said, speaking up for the first time since the beginning of the conversation.

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