Лиза Гарднер - Never Tell - A Novel (A D.D. Warren and Flora Dane Novel)

“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 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!”

Chapter 39 FLORA

I CAN’T KEEP ROAMING HARVARD SQUARE in hopes of spying an arsonist. For one thing, being the heart of a college campus, the area is swarming with kids in hoodies. Rocket blends right in. Also, with emergency response vehicles and news vans piling up, it’s getting hard to move.

I don’t like crowds. I don’t like the feeling of bodies bumping, jostling, hemming me in. My heart rate is too high and that’s not simply from chasing Rocket.

I discover a little side street and exit the teeming masses. I take a moment to breathe more easily, exhaling little puffs of steamy air. Shouldn’t all these kids be on Christmas break? It’s been too long for me; I don’t remember how my own college calendar worked, let alone what a place like Harvard does. It makes me feel old—and, for a moment, adrift. The life I used to lead. The dreams I never returned to.

Okay, time to think like an arsonist. If I can’t follow Rocket, how can I out-anticipate him?

He’ll want money. Two big jobs in one day, he’ll return to his neighborhood to pick up his cash. Phil told me the police had it under surveillance, however, so that doesn’t feel like a good use of my time.

But wait—is Rocket done for the day? The criminal attorney’s stately brownstone must have taken some finesse. No way a fancy lawyer didn’t have a state-of-the-art security system—and no way a kid like Rocket didn’t stand out in a neighborhood that upscale. So, a finesse job. Like disguising himself as pest control for the Carters’ residence. He could’ve used the same ruse for Delaney, except the police sightings of him afterward didn’t reveal any uniform.

Maybe a delivery boy? Pizza? He’d just need a cap to pull that off. In a city of twenty-four-hour takeout, no one notices delivery people either. He could’ve stashed the gasoline earlier, as many of those town houses have patios in the back. A kid as athletic as Rocket could definitely scale a fence.

Then exit the same way. Watch his handiwork. Bolt when the police presence got too high or he needed to get moving to his next job. Which took him to the T stop. A simple transfer to the Red Line and Harvard Square it is.