Lonesome Lawmen Mini Bundle

One-3

The sun was hanging low on the horizon by the time they hauled Ollie out in his body bag. Outside the window, the low-rent district where Oliver Smith met his end looked sad under the fading August sun. Inside, the light was merciless when it found its way through the dirty windowpanes. It bumped up the smell of garlic, old deer meat and onion. It outstripped the pitiful air conditioning and put beads of sweat on poor Mac’s face. The detective was already showing stress at being caught between the immovable FBI agent and the hard-as-a-rock Deputy Marshal, Jake noted with amused sympathy.

The techs faded away in a discreet hurry, leaving Jake to finish up with Bryn, who was seated in front of the computer. Mac went out, too, muttering something about getting them all something cold to drink.

“How long has it been since we’ve had a whiff of a trail on Hyatt?” Jake stood in the middle of the room, turning in a slow circle. In one corner, shoved up against the peeling green paint of the wall, was a rumpled bed, in another a lumpy chair and crooked floor lamp. But it wasn’t the place he was straining to pick up on. It was the people who’d been there. Even in the most generic of settings, it was hard not to leave some traces of your personal taste behind.

He stopped turning when he got to Bryn and the sturdy desk tucked in a kind of alcove next to the closet. She’d been sitting there for what seemed an hour, like a virgin trying to make up her mind to have s*x, while the crime scene slowly cleared.

“Two years, almost to the day. The Interplex Technology heist,” she said.

“I remember that one. Almost perfect piece of work. Like to meet the guys who plan their heists.”

“You and half the law enforcement agencies in the country.”

Something in the way she said it triggered Jake’s instincts. Jake walked over to her, propping a shoulder against the doorjamb. “It’s not one guy, is it?”

She hesitated, then nodded. “I had my hands on one of Phagan’s kids for a very short time. He let slip a nickname.”

Jake arched a brow.

After another hesitation she said, “The kid called him Pathphinder. Apropos, isn’t it?”

“Almost too.” Pathfinder. More modest than mastermind, Jake mused. Not a lot to go on, but then, if the file Bryn had reluctantly shared with him was accurate, the FBI knew about that much about the notorious hacker who called himself Phagan. They knew a little more about Dewey Hyatt, his second in command and the fugitive Jake now had his sights set on, and that their operation somehow involved teenage runaways. Precious little, unless Bryn was still holding out on him, which was possible, since interagency cooperation was a contradiction in terms.

“Kid could’ve been blowing smoke up my skirt, but it didn’t feel like it,” Bryn said. “As usual, Phagan spirited the kid away before I could find out more.”

There was something in her voice that told Jake she’d let this particular hunt get a tad personal. Big mistake, but she already knew that. Bryn was as strict with herself as she was with a colleague. It was what made it both pleasure and pain to work with her.

“Fagan?” The question came from Mac, who had returned bearing soft drinks. He handed them out while Jake looked at Bryn for direction. She gave a slight shake of her head. No reason to make Phagan more of a legend than he already was. Besides, if the locals smelled a big fish, they’d start withholding information, hoping to make a big collar on their own. Why make it easier for Phagan to elude them? Not that he was having any trouble now.

“The thief in Oliver Twist,” Jake said.

Mac rubbed his forehead as if it hurt. “Oh.”

Jake hid a grin with a long cool drink from his cup, not too surprised Mac wasn’t into classic literature or musicals.

Bryn took a drink, then a deep breath, one that seemed weighted with purpose, and turned back to the computer. Her hands hovered above the keyboard as if it were a bomb that might go off. The screen was dark, but the green cursor glowed in the lower right hand corner.

“Anyone touch the computer while securing the scene?” Bryn asked with a reluctance that was out of character.

“No, ma’am,” Mac said, “except to dust for prints.”

She wriggled her fingers, like a maestro, then lowered her hands and tapped a few keys. Nothing happened. The computer wasn’t going to give up its secrets without a fight. She scowled. Mac shifted, dabbing at the sweat on his brow.

Jake leaned across her and picked up a plastic wrapped sheet from the clutter of evidence bags. It was a simple flyer advertising a country-western bar called JR’s located near Estes Park, Colorado. Though Jake was assigned to DC and had an apartment there, he called Denver home. He’d been born and raised in Denver and his mom and brothers still lived there. He knew Estes, too, and thought he remembered the bar. His family had a cabin just outside Rocky Mountain National Park. It took him a bit of thinking to pull up a memory of a log structure east of town on 34. Good music. Better beer.

The flyer was an odd thing to find so far from its home. Even odder, the series of numbers and letters written down one side.

“Any idea what this is?” he asked, distracting Bryn from her attack on the computer.

She seemed relieved at the distraction, rather than annoyed as she took it. “It’s an Internet address for a MUD.”

Jake blinked. “A mud?”

Bryn smiled with a decidedly superior air. “A multi-user dungeon. A place on the Internet where people meet to play games. Looks like home is in Colorado.” She gave at Jake with a tense look. “Dewey and his friends like to play games.”

As if on cue, Jake heard a humming sound. A small airplane flew across the computer screen dragging a banner that had written on it: You’ll have to do better than that, darling.

Bryn choked and banged on the keyboard with her fists. The airplane did fly out of sight, but it wasn’t over. A small Yugo putted across the bottom of the screen with the words Love, Phagan on a sign on the roof.

Jake opened his mouth, but Bryn’s look shriveled the words in his throat. He took a careful step back, avoiding eye contact with Mac. His elbow bumped a pile of evidence bags, starting a small avalanche that spread to the other side of the desk and continued onto the floor. He bent to pick them up.

Bryn looked at Mac, her eyes scary and her smile steely. “I don’t want anyone but you near this computer, until this person,” she scribbled a name on the back of her card and handed it to him, “comes to pick it up. Don’t show that name to anyone. Don’t tell it to anyone. You, yourself, bring the guy here to pack it up, and stay with all the way back to the airport. Understand?”

He nodded. “But...”

“We might still be able to pull something off the hard drive.” She stood up and stepped close to him. “No mistakes. I’d hate to have to come back and rip your heart out.” She stared at him for a long beat. “And eat it.”

Mac gulped twice before he managed to say, “No, ma’am, I mean, yes, ma’am. Whatever you say, ma’am.”

Jake started to dump the bags of evidence back onto the desk when he saw what the bags had been hiding. An answering machine, with a blinking message light.

“Looks like somebody has a message.” Jake crouched down and studied the machine, then looked at Bryn.

Bryn turned to stare. “Somebody wouldn’t be that stupid, would they?”

Mac craned to see. “It wasn’t doing that before.”

Jake still had on surgical exam gloves, so he tilted the machine. Fingerprinting powder fell off it in a mini-shower. He found the volume at zero on both ringer and recorder. With the volume turned up, he rewound the tape, then pushed play.

A tinny voice came out of the speaker.

“If you’re there, pick up.” A pause, then a sigh. “Call Pathphinder ASAP. And if you see Phagan, tell him the egg’s in the nest—should hatch right on schedule. If we still have a schedule. You know where to reach me.”

A hesitation. Then a click.

“Well, I’ll be—” Bryn looked at Jake in awe. “Pathphinder is a woman.”

“What was that about an egg?” Mac asked, the effort of trying to keep up written in neon across his face.

“A cuckoo’s egg.” She hesitated, as if she’d like to stop there, but Jake arched his eyebrows for more. “In cyberspace, an ‘egg’ is a computer program laid in a host machine where it will ‘hatch’ at some later time or from some specific action.”

“Laid?” Jake frowned. “To do what?”

“Anything the cuckoo wants. Give unauthorized access. Crash, maim or destroy. Phagan’s used them to disable security systems and to download sensitive data. Like the Trojan horse, they’re bad news for the ‘nest’ computer.”

Jake nodded then looked at the phone. “I wonder…”

He lifted the receiver and punched in the callback code. In a few moments it was ringing. He held the phone out so Bryn and Mac could hear a voice with a decided Texas accent say, “JR’s in Estes Park. What can I do you for?”

Jake replaced the phone without answering and then grinned at Bryn whose jaw had dropped.

“It couldn’t be that easy, could it?” she asked.

“If the bad guys were sensible, our job would be harder.” He looked at his watch. “Just enough time to catch the last flight to Denver.” He grinned at Mac. “Thanks for the assist.”

“No problem.” The detective looked at Bryn gathering her stuff up. “No...problem.”

Jake held the door for Bryn. “Ladies first.”

She grinned, looking like the easygoing farm girl her parents had hoped for. “Let’s go catch us some bad guys.”