J. Jance - Cruel Intent

“Sure,” Ali said. “Go ahead.”

He opened the case and began hauling out two separate laptops as well as a whole series of cables and power cords, which he began connecting.

“Why so many computers?” Ali asked.

“Since we have to assume our friend is monitoring your computer at all times, we’ll have to do our own file sharing via cables rather than over the Internet. Oh, and I’ll need your computer.”

With a nod, Ali went to fetch it. When she came back, she couldn’t help noticing that a subtle hint of aftershave had permeated the room. Good stuff, she thought. I wonder what it is?

B. took the laptop from her. After removing her air card, he placed it on the table, where he began connecting the computer into what was by then an impressive tangle of computer cables.

“So here’s the thing,” he continued, talking as he worked. “High Noon has been looking after your system for over three months now. Until today, other than some relatively harmless adware programs and cookies, there hasn’t been anything out of the ordinary. The Trojan horse wasn’t there last night during our midnight scan, but it was there today at noon. So I have to ask you the usual clichéd computer troubleshooting question: What were you doing just before that happened? Had you visited any unusual websites, for example, or did you open any attachments this morning, even an attachment from a regular correspondent, from someone you know?”

“I logged on to something called Singleatheart,” Ali said.

“What’s that?” B. asked.

“An Internet dating site,” she replied.

B. stopped what he was doing long enough to give her an appraising look. “If you don’t mind my saying so, it doesn’t seem to me that you’d have any reason to go looking at one of those.”

To her consternation, Ali found herself blushing at his unexpected compliment. “Thank you,” she said. “But it wasn’t for me. I was doing it for a friend of mine.”

That sounded lame, she thought. Totally and completely lame.

“Right,” he said, then returned to his cables.

Bob and Edie had left Ali with the impression that B. Simpson was something of a recluse. She wondered if that was true or if it was simply what he wanted people to believe.

“How much do you know about what goes on in town?” Ali asked.

“Not very much,” he admitted with a shrug. “I’m more in tune with what’s out there on the Web than I am with what’s going on down the street. Why?”

“I have a contractor who’s working on my house,” Ali said. “My new house. His wife, Morgan, was murdered earlier this week, and now Bryan’s fallen under suspicion. I learned that his wife had been involved with this Singleatheart website. That made me curious. I logged on because I was trying to find out why a happily married woman would have signed up on a dating service to begin with. The problem is, you can’t go there and look around for free. You have to sign up and log on.”

To judge from the puzzled look on B.’s face, Ali wasn’t sure he was listening to her. “Did you say Bryan and Morgan?” he asked as though the words had just penetrated his consciousness. “Are you by any chance talking about Bryan Forester and Morgan Deming?”

Ali didn’t remember hearing Morgan’s maiden name, but clearly, B. Simpson had. “Yes,” Ali said. “Do you know them?”

“I knew them both,” B. replied after a slight pause. “It was a long time ago, when we were all still in school. I didn’t know they’d gotten married, but that’s just as well. As far as I’m concerned, they deserved each other.”

So you weren’t exactly friends, Ali thought. “What do you mean?” she asked.

Again B. didn’t answer right away. “Morgan Deming and Bryan Forester were part of the in crowd,” he said finally. “For all I know, you were, too, so maybe you don’t have any idea how it feels to be ‘out.’ The people who are ‘in’ go through school in a kind of Teflon-coated world. Nothing touches them. They get away with all kinds of outrageous stunts while teachers, parents, and coaches turn a blind eye. Bryan and his best pal, Billy, were the ringleaders of a particularly vicious little gang of thugs. I was still called Bart Simpson when I met them. Once The Simpsons showed up on TV, I turned into one of their favorite targets. Bryan and the other creeps made my life so miserable that as soon as I could, I took the only option available to me at the time. I quit school, went to Seattle, and never looked back. The day I left Sedona was the happiest day of my life. I couldn’t wait to get out of town.”

“You said Billy,” Ali pointed out. “Which one? Would that happen to be Billy Barnes?”

B. nodded grimly. “One and the same.”

“But you’re back here now,” Ali observed. “Are your folks still here?”

B. shook his head. “My dad died of a heart attack about ten years ago, and my mother went back to Michigan, where she came from originally. She still has family there. So what brought me back to Sedona? For one thing, it’s a beautiful place. I came back because I loved the red rocks, and I missed them. I loved the blue skies, and I missed those, too. I decided that I wasn’t going to let a bunch of school bullies keep me from living wherever I wanted. When I did come back, I did it with a whole pile of cash in my pocket and with the ability to be here on my own terms. By choice, I don’t have much to do with local yokels. I probably have more day-to-day dealings with your parents than with anyone else in town, and that’s pretty much how I like it.”

“What about Bryan Forester?” Ali asked.

“What about him?” B. said with a shrug. “I’m sorry to hear his wife is dead. That’s too bad, especially if they had kids. But just because I wouldn’t walk across the street to say hello to Bryan Forester doesn’t mean I wish him ill.”

Ali hadn’t anticipated that Bryan Forester and B. Simpson would have such a complicated history, but that was what happened in small towns. Inevitably, everyone knew everyone else, for good or ill. Ali would have liked to tell B. about Bryan Forester’s difficulties so she could enlist his help and advice on the two thumb drives. Realizing she had inadvertently poked a stick at a hornet’s nest, though, she quickly backed away from that idea. She’d have to deal with the thumb drives on her own.

“Unlike you,” she said, “I didn’t know Bryan Forester in high school. From what you said, it sounds like he was a complete jerk back then. But he’s not a jerk now-at least he doesn’t seem like one to me. And he doesn’t seem like a possible killer, either. As for Morgan? Maybe she never grew up. Apparently, she liked living on the wild side, otherwise she wouldn’t have been messing around in places like Singleatheart. But that’s why I went there, to try to find out more about it and see if her being involved in the website might have had something to do with her death.”

That comment seemed to get B. back to the problem at hand. “So you went to the site and logged on,” he said.

Ali nodded. “And paid money-a hundred bucks-to do it.”

“You paid with a credit card?”

Ali nodded again.

“That makes sense.” B nodded thoughtfully. “My guess is that someone who works at Singleatheart is capturing the information that comes in to the website and planting the Trojan horse on the computers of people who sign up. That gives him an unending source of information that he can subsequently use in identity theft scams. He may lift money out of an account here or there, or he may use pieces of real names to create what’s called a synthetic identity.”

“Synthetic identity?” Ali repeated. “How does that work?”