“We’ll look,” Lucas said.
—
CLARK,the Frederick County detective, gave up first. “If there’s anything else here, I’ll be damned if I know what it would be. I don’t think he left a note that says ‘I’m going to Joe’s house, and he might shoot me.’”
“No, but he might have left a trail to the house,” Lucas said. “The FBI is looking at his phone records. Hang on a while longer, we ought to be hearing back from them.”
They did, but not for an hour. An FBI tech called Lucas, and asked, “Do you have a cell phone or an iPad?”
“An iPad, in my car,” Lucas said.
“Give me your email, and I’ll send you a link. We’ve mapped his track for the twenty-four hours before his phone quit.”
“When did it quit?”
“About eleven o’clock last night, over in Virginia.”
“Where in Virginia?”
“There’s a place called Applejack’s...”
“That’s where his body was dumped,” Lucas said. “How long before I get the track?”
“About thirty seconds after you give me your email address.”
—
LUCAS WALKED DOWNto his car, got the iPad, and walked back to Ritter’s apartment, bringing up the email as he walked. The FBI file was simply a pdf of a Google map, with the track played across it in a red line, with ant-sized numbers attached to the track. A legend with the map showed the time for each number.
The track started at Ritter’s apartment for eight hours—he was asleep—then touched at the Heracles office, where it stayed for a few hours, followed by a wandering line at noon—lunch, Lucas thought. The phone went back to the office in the afternoon, went out to a location in Arlington, touched at the office, went over to Georgetown in the evening, and looped back toward Virginia, where the signal disappeared.
Lucas got back to the apartment, and Bob, Rae, and Clark all looked at him. “Ritter was at home last night, and he drove over to a restaurant that’s about a block from Parrish’s house,” he said. “There are some squiggles on the map, where he maybe walked over to Parrish’s place. The phone goes back across the river to that restaurant, where the body was probably dumped. Parrish killed Ritter and drove him back across the river and dumped him.”
“Good to know,” Clark said. “That’s better than Ritter driving himself back home, stopping to get a bite to eat, where he gets shot behind the restaurant by muggers and thrown in the dumpster.”
“That’s unbecoming skepticism,” Rae said.
“Only because the Washington area has the best defense attorneys in the country, because it needs them,” Clark said.
Rae was looking over Lucas’s shoulder, and said, “Call the FBI phone guy, get Parrish’s track.”
“Of course,” Lucas said.
He did that, and the phone guy said it would be another hour.
While Lucas was talking about the phone, Smith, the computer expert, showed up. He was a balding black man, who first took a long look at Rae, then used some electronic boxes to mess with Ritter’s laptop. After a few minutes, it opened up. Lucas, looking over his shoulder, said, “Thank you.”
“You’re premature,” Smith said. “Everything in here seems to be encrypted. Everything. All his email and a dozen or so documents. It’s standard heavy business encryption...” He tapped the screen showing an icon for an app called SanderCrypt. “That means there’s no possibility of reading this stuff without the key.”
“Well, hell, what would the key look like?” Bob asked.
“Could be anything. Might not even exist anymore, if he memorized it, and of course now he’s dead.”
“What if he wrote it down?” Rae asked. “How many numbers would it be... or letters... or whatever?”
Smith shook his head. “Can’t tell. It could be anything, but probably quite a few letters, or numbers, or symbols...”
“And you guys can’t break it?”
