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CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

SEDONA, ARIZONA

THURSDAY, MARCH 23, 2023

10:00 P.M.

B. was already in bed and Ali was thinking about joining him when Frigg sent her another message:

Would now be a good time for an additional briefing?

Yes, please. Call me.

Moments later the call came through. “Good evening, Ali. I hope you’ve had a pleasant day.”

“Not exactly,” Ali said. “I’m glad it’s almost over. What have you found?”

“I decided to press the easy button,” Frigg said.

That made Ali almost laugh out loud. Frigg’s conversational abilities were becoming more and more human all the time.

“How so?”

“By pinging cell towers,” Frigg replied.

Ali happened to know that procedure generally required search warrants, but for Frigg it was just a matter of sorting through numbers, something the AI was exceptionally adept at doing.

“Even if a phone isn’t actively in use,” Frigg continued, “it still registers with nearby cell towers. That’s what I did. I started pinging phones registered off the cell towers closest to the Brewster residence in Edmonds, Washington, on the day of the party. At approximately six p.m. on Sunday, March 12, 2023, three cell phones with Huntington Beach area codes—prefixes 562, 567, and 714—all pinged off towers near the Brewster residence at the same time. The 562 number is registered to Adam Brewster, and the 657 is registered to Joel Franklin. The 714 is a burner. All three devices arrived in the area at the same time and departed simultaneously four and a half hours later.”

“Having a burner may sound suspicious,” Ali interjected, “but it isn’t exactly against the law.”

“No, it’s not,” Frigg agreed, “but please bear with me. I continued to analyze all devices registering on that tower throughout the evening, from the time the party started until three hours after what the medical examiner estimated to be Charles Brewster’s time of death. There was a mass exodus of phone numbers around ten p.m.”

“That would be about the time the party broke up,” Ali said.

“Correct,” Frigg agreed. “As the night wore on, the number of devices registering on the tower dwindled because there was almost no traffic. The remaining IP addresses appear to belong to neighborhood residents.”

“I’m sure the cops did the same thing,” Ali said.

“Perhaps they did,” Frigg agreed, “but they might not have been quite as thorough. I went above and beyond. I analyzed all numbers pinging off those towers over several days both before and after the party. On Friday, March 10, I found a second Huntington Beach area code, another 714, registering on that same set of towers. This one is registered to someone named Marc Atherton. It first pinged off the Edmonds cell towers at eleven fifteen p.m. on Friday and departed at twelve forty-five a.m. on Saturday.

“Since that seemed like an odd time for someone to be visiting the neighborhood, I looked into Marc Atherton’s background. He was born Richard Mansfield in Bend, Oregon. At age twenty he was involved in a hit-and-run automobile accident, in the course of which passengers in the other vehicle were seriously injured. He spent six years in a Portland area prison. He changed his name after moving to California and lives in Huntington Beach where he’s a bartender at a local establishment called the Meet and Greet. I think there’s a good possibility Atherton is involved in all this, and that Saturday night visit was for recon purposes.”

“What makes you say that?” Ali asked.

“Remember that unidentified burner phone that showed up at Mr. Brewster’s birthday party? The call history on Mr. Atherton’s phone shows a steady stream of calls and texts between those two devices, his phone and our unidentified burner. Many of the texts have to do with a screenplay the two individuals seem to be writing together.”

Ali knew that Frigg shouldn’t have been able to hack into anyone’s cell phone, but it was hardly surprising that she had. As for why people resorted to using burners? Because they didn’t want people to know what they were doing.

“So who owns the burner?” Ali asked. “And did you find anything incriminating?”

“I’m quite sure the burner belongs to Mr. Franklin. As for finding something incriminating? Perhaps. On the night of Mr. Brewster’s birthday party, at 9:03 p.m., I found an incoming text from the burner on Mr. Atherton’s text history.”

“One word?” Ali repeated. “What did it say?”

“?‘Done!’?” Frigg replied.

“Done what?” Ali asked.

“There’s no further explanation,” Frigg answered. “It’s the 9:03 timing that makes it possibly incriminating. That’s approximately the same time when Adam Brewster said that Joel helped an inebriated Clarice Brewster negotiate the elevator when she made her early exit from the party.”

From the start, Ali had wondered how Clarice, lying in the same bed, could possibly have slept through the violent attack on her husband.

“Wait, are you suggesting Joel may have drugged her?” Ali asked.

“I believe that’s possible,” Frigg answered, “but since no blood work was done on her the following day, without an admission of guilt on someone’s part, that will be difficult to prove. And the question remains—was Adam Brewster involved?”

Ali thought about that, remembering Adam’s demeanor during his interview with Detective Horn as he spoke about reconnecting with his father after their long estrangement. The regret in his voice in the aftermath of the homicide had seemed genuine.

“My gut says no,” Ali answered. “He seemed thrilled about finally having his father back in his life. There’s no way he would have been involved in murdering him. But if Marc Atherton and Joel Franklin are responsible, what have they got to gain?”

“Everything,” Frigg answered at once. “If Clarice pleads guilty to or is convicted by a jury of murdering her husband, she will be assumed to have predeceased him and won’t be eligible to inherit his estate.”

Ali nodded to herself. “At that point, Adam Brewster, Chuck’s only son, might very well inherit the whole shebang.”

“The what?” Frigg asked.

“Shebang,” Ali repeated. “It means ‘all of it.’ And if something were to happen to Adam after that, Joel Franklin, as his spouse, would be next in line. Are you suggesting that maybe Joel Franklin and Marc Atherton are playing a long game—murder Chuck, frame Clarice, and subsequently get rid of Adam?”

“Exactly,” Frigg replied. “Strategic planning is my specialty.”

“Yes, it is,” Ali agreed. “Unfortunately, Detective Horn seems permanently stuck on convicting Clarice and Donna Jean Plummer. So what do we do now?”

“We wait to see if his investigation catches up with ours.”

At that point, Ali changed the subject. “Any luck on the Adrian Willoughby case in the UK or Bogdan Petrov’s in San Bernardino?”

“So far interviews and progress reports from the Essex Police are somewhat more challenging to access than those in the States, but I’m working on it,” Frigg replied. “As for Petrov? His time of death is estimated to be sometime in the early morning hours of Saturday, March 18.”

“In other words, he died shortly after Cami’s foiled kidnapping,” Ali said. “Isn’t that the same day and about the same time Adrian Willoughby died?”

“It would be except for the time difference,” Frigg replied.

“So if Petrov and Willoughby were both involved in the attempted kidnapping, whoever was really behind it didn’t waste any time covering their tracks by taking them both out. How was Petrov killed?”

“Shot execution style in the back of the head. A nine-millimeter slug was extracted from his skull but was too damaged to obtain any further information. No casings and no footprints or tire tracks were found at the scene.”

“So no physical evidence,” Ali breathed.

“And no surveillance videos, either,” Frigg added. “I’m pinging nearby cell towers for the number retrieved from the GPS locater found in Cami’s rental car, but I’m not making any progress there. However, I’m seeing numerous calls on that phone between Petrov and Willoughby—between them and no one else.”

“Okay,” Ali urged. “Keep working.”

“We will,” Frigg replied. “My CPUs and I never sleep.”

And now neither will I , Ali thought as the call ended. Rather than going to bed right then, she sent a quick email to Cami, giving her an overview of what Frigg had just told her. That way Cami would have the information first thing in the morning when she awoke in London.

With that done, Ali went to bed and really did go to sleep. Tomorrow would be another day.