Page 11

Ten

“What are you thinking?” Jude asked, glancing Vicky’s way as he drove.

“Well, I’m hoping we find our buried treasure,” she said. “Other than that, I was putting together in my mind all that we know and, of course, it keeps leading back to Marci’s law firm and the connections between the people who have died by manipulation—that we know of. We know for a fact that Carlos Rodriguez hired a killer through a site on the dark web. We have the site, but, of course, it was taken down. Now we know that they planned to take us out—or whoever as far as investigators went in case Maric’s death wasn’t being seen as an accident. We got lucky in Tennessee—someone knew that the team on the crash would be getting a car from the local offices, but they didn’t see us, so they couldn’t recognize who we were, therefore we were able to manipulate the situation. When we find Samuel Hutchins’s phone, we’ll have more for Aidan, Cary, and the cyber teams to go on and—”

“Burner phone,” Jude said.

“Of course. Anyone sending that kind of message would only do it on a burner. But our people may be able to find something. They can track the cell towers, maybe find out what kind of phone, where it might have been bought, who knows what they can discover! If we can discover the phone, that is!” she said.

“We will.”

“Days have passed!” she reminded him.

“But we’re good,” he assured her.

She laughed at that. “We’re as good as time and the elements allow us to be! Some kid might have found the wallet and phone—”

“Eh! We’re almost there. Don’t be a pessimist!”

“Not a pessimist. A realist!”

“All right. Let me be the optimistic realist, then!” he said lightly.

They arrived in the area and Jude found some parking just off Aviles Street. They exited the car. Vicky immediately saw the building that Samuel Hutchins had described. It was an old building—not dating back to the beginning of the settlement, but still architecture that had first gone up sometime in the early to mid-1800s.

The stone wall surrounding the property might have been there longer, guarding another property. Somewhere else, the old stone might have just appeared dirty and chipped.

Here, it seemed fitting.

It also ran the length of the street on two sides.

“Maybe we should have gotten the guy to be a bit more specific,” Jude told her.

She laughed. “Divide and conquer?” she asked.

“It’ll save time. Still…” His words trailed as he looked around. It was a typical late afternoon. Some people were getting off from work, others were tourists, some parents were simply out to dine or eat with their kids. It was busy enough.

“Are you suggesting that I be careful even though I’m going to look certifiably crazy while I crawl around the ground looking for a loose stone?” she inquired.

“Something like that.”

“I am always careful,” she assured him, heading off in her own direction.

Buried treasure! Well, as it seemed as with the rest of the area, St. Augustine had dealt with an era of pirates. There was a wonderful venue, The Pirate’s Museum, on Castillo Drive. She had a friend in Daytona who taught history and specialized in the pirate era, always frustrated about the fact pirates had become so romanticized and that every story had an X mark on a map and there was always buried treasure. Why would pirates bury their treasure? Wouldn’t they want to use it? They did exist! They pillaged the coastline of Florida from the first settlements through the centuries. And when sanctioned by their governments, they were called privateers.

Today, however, she had to hope they could really come across the buried treasure they needed!

Passersby, be they tourists or locals, frowned, looked at her oddly and hurried around her as they saw that she was stopping every few feet to check the stones near the ground.

One man, middle-aged, gray-haired, and dignified in a gray-pinstripe suite stopped and said, “Excuse me, ma’am, you should know that it would be illegal for you to steal any of these stones. I realize it’s a wall that’s been here forever, but it’s on private property and I believe it would also be considered a historic matter.”

She winced inwardly and smiled at him. “Oh, don’t worry, sir! I just lost a—a medallion near here and I’m hoping it got kicked into a wedge where the stone meets the earth.”

“Oh, well then excuse me, I hope you find your medallion.”

She wasn’t at all sure he believed her, but he was moving on. She wondered then if they shouldn’t have informed the local police about what they were doing because, of course, they did appear to be more than a little weird at the very least.

But it was as if the man had brought her good luck! The next stone she wedged sat on top of something that was leather. A wallet.

And beneath the wallet…

Yes!

Samuel Hutchins’s phone!

She gathered her treasure and ran around the corner where it seemed that Jude was politely explaining himself to a pair of young women, one a young and attractive brunette and the other a young and attractive redhead. They looked to be little more than a year or two out of college and while she heard Jude explaining that he’d lost a ring, as she neared them she could see that the young women were grinning away, far more fascinated with Jude than with whatever he might be doing.

“Hey, darling!” she called.

She was glad to see that he looked at her with gratitude.

“Vicky!” he said. “Still looking for the ring. These young ladies wanted to help me once they realized what I was doing. Nancy, Madeleine…this is my…partner, Vicky. She helps me with everything. It’s so nice of you, but really…”

“Oh, you’re uh…” Nancy, the blonde began.

“Living together,” Vicky interrupted quickly and sweetly. Well, that much was true! For the time, at least.

“Well, um,” Madeleine, the redhead, said awkwardly, “I guess we’ll get a move on. We’re from Colorado,” she told Vicky. “Here to see some fantastic old sights! And we’re going to go and do that, right Nancy? Just needed to see if he needed some help.”

“And, truthfully, to figure out just what the heck he was doing!” Nancy said.

“Nice to meet you and enjoy the city. The sights are fantastic. Take a few tours—the history remains the same, but the spin can be different.”

The two walked off.

“Thank you!” Jude murmured quietly, watching them go.

Vicky laughed. “Can’t help turning on the charm, huh?”

“Haha, so—”

“You’re really going to thank me!” she informed him. “I have them!”

“The wallet and the cell phone?” he asked, his tone almost incredulous.

“Right, one of us was searching for buried treasure while the other was flirting.”

“What? I wasn’t flirting.”

Vicky laughed. “You were looking a little bit desperate.”

“I guess I did look a bit like a crazy person, digging around the base of the wall.”

“And yet they were willing to take a chance!” Vicky teased. But then she told him, “I know, I got asked what I was doing, too. No one cute, though, just an older guy in a business suit. But then I went on to find the buried treasure!”

She produced the wallet and the phone for him to see and he smiled and nodded.

“Let’s get them where they need to be!”

They returned to the car.

They drove to the main lab. Aidan was there with what had been recovered from the tractor at the graveyard.

“Obviously, it’s not easy to pull information from any kind of hacked computer,” he told them. “But it is possible to see that programs have been changed—that they have been hacked.”

Jude shook his head. “How does this person—or these people—even know what computer needs to be hacked?”

“Well, this is scary, but information for law enforcement agencies is stored on computers, too. That’s how they knew you would be following up in Tennessee,” Aidan told them. “They would have known your names, when you were arriving, and what car you were going to be given. They probably weren’t counting on a man like Carlos Rodriguez going totally whacko on a power trip and giving up info on the old murder-for-hire site, but they might have planned to take it down and start over just because, whoever this is, they know that others can hack into things, too. Though this person—or persons—seems to be a little like Carlos Rodriguez. Certain of their own invincibility. Long and short of it is this—we know that every incident, including the out-of-control tractor causing Celia Smith to go into the grave today—has been caused by a hack.”

“And the problem is that a hack can occur from just about anywhere—if there is a strong enough server,” Aidan told them.

“And this person knows how to use an algorithm,” Aidan said.

“Which is a set of rules that can be used to solve problems on a computer, right?” Jude asked.

“Technically, yes, the computer picks up on what is happening, be it a number, a specific search term…and through what it knows, it discovers more,” Vicky said. “In other words, the computer knows that the person is interested in the crash in Tennessee, the boat explosion, the house explosion. And the person already has access to endless law enforcement sites—supposedly protected up the wazoo! But put them together and—”

“National security could definitely be at risk,” Jude said.

“So far,” Aidan said, “it seems to be murder for hire, murder by machine, nice and clean. The person ordering the murder can have an alibi that can’t be disputed—dozens of people could have seen whoever wanted Marci, the judge, and people on the boat dead at the exact time that it was happening.”

“Except that Carlos Rodriguez is so proud of his accomplishments and so certain he could get himself off that he admitted the deed,” Jude said. “People!”

“We’ll get what we can from the phone,” Aidan said, frowning as he looked at it. “It’s passcode-protected, however, it’s easy enough to get into a phone through the manufacturer or provider. But—”

“Wait!” Vicky said, thinking about Samuel Hutchins. Aidan was still holding the phone. “We don’t need any of that—Samuel Hutchins is cooperating with us. We can just call him, except that I’m willing to bet I know his passcode. We can try it now. ‘Try ChloeJustin . Capitalize the C and the J .”

“His kids’ names, sure,” Aidan murmured.

But when Aidan tried the password, it failed. He shook his head.

“Reverse them,” Vicky said.

He did.

He looked at her, smiling. His smile faded after he looked back at the phone and brought up the man’s messages.

“We’re in,” he said. “My God.” He stared from the phone to Vicky and Jude. “Computer-enhanced, AI-generated images, but someone got a hold of real pictures of Jessy, Justin, and Chloe. You can see why the man was willing to kill himself rather than risk…this.”

He handed the phone to Vicky and Jude looked over her shoulder as they both viewed the gruesome images that had been created. Whoever had this might have taken a cue from the murders of Carlos Rodriguez’s daughter-in-law and her sister.

The images first showed Jessy trying to stop a masked figure in black with a machete from chopping at Justin. The next image was of Chloe on the floor in a pool of blood. And last, after witnessing the carnage of her children, was Jessy, eyes still open as her head lay on the floor in a pool of crimson next to her body.

“You must find out where those came from!” Vicky said passionately. “Obviously, AI, but…”

“We will,” Aidan said solemnly. “And these aren’t real, Vicky. Jessy is safe, the kids are safe. And the person who is behind all this didn’t commit murders like this—Carlos Rodriguez did and thanks to you two, he won’t get away with it now—even if the legal system is a machine all its own.”

“Filled with computers,” Jude noted.

But Aidan shook his head. “Rodriguez just made use of the site. The person behind this hasn’t committed the violence themselves—they let the machine do it and they revel in what happens, something they did at a keyboard and not in person.”

“I think you’re right,” Jude said.

“Well, go, get out of here. I’m on this. And Assistant Director Arnold is getting the necessary legal work done so that we can tear into the law firm’s computers. You’ll be bringing the warrant by tomorrow and interviewing everyone there to find out who has access to what computer and maybe, if the water is getting hot, someone will say something rather than boil.”

“Right. We’re gone,” Aidan told him.

They said their goodbyes and headed out. Jude looked ahead for a moment as he drove but then glanced at her speculatively. “So, darling, where to now?” he teased in response to her earlier words.

She grinned and leaned back.

“Food.”

“Yeah, that would be really good. Where? What kind?”

“The edible kind? Wait, I’m getting a real choice here? Dinner I don’t need to cook, and we have the time to pick anywhere! Should I pick?” she asked.

“Yes, you should. I like all food. And we’re not on again until the morning. We can pick any restaurant within driving distance—driving distance in a certain proximity, that is! We have time. I could take you to an elegant steakhouse—”

“Local food. Fun food. Delicious, fresh. I mean, I know of a few places in the city. I did grow up not all that far south from here. But—”

“Crave,” Jude told her.

She laughed. “Yes, let’s see, funeral, hospital, digging under stones like crazy idiots, lab, and now, having skipped lunch, I’m craving food!”

“No. I think you’ll like Crave. That’s the name of the restaurant. Nice outdoor seating, smoothies, salads, wraps, popular with locals and tourists—”

“You drink smoothies?” she interrupted. She knew men, friends, in law enforcement, who wouldn’t dream of touching something called a smoothie. Not all of them, of course. Just some. Which was maybe not fair—she had female friends who didn’t like smoothies, either! And again, in their hurried lives, they were all prone to drinking their breakfast often enough, even when it was only coffee.

“Yep. Good ones, sure. And they make great ones,” he told her, shrugging.

She laughed. “Then I’m craving dinner at Crave! And, of course, I’ll need to try a smoothie.”

Vicky looked forward for a minute as they drove. She lowered her head, smiling. Jude , she thought, will always stand by the truth, even his own truth .

As they drove, he told her that it had really become one of his favorite places.

“In this line of work, we become so involved, we often just don’t eat. Then we grab whatever junk we can find. Came here with a friend once. Food was fresh, healthy, and fun. I decided that if I was going to live this life, when I could, I’d come to a place like this. You’re going to love it. You’ll get a kick out of the smoothie menu.”

They parked and made their way to the restaurant.

She did. The place offered up mixes such as “First Date,” “Funky Monkey,” “So Matcha Love,” and more.

“I may have to go with ‘First Date,’” she told Jude.

“Well, it is, kind of, you know, darling!” he teased in turn. “So, smoothie and then—”

“Tuna wrap! I love everything in it!” she told him.

Jude opted for a shrimp bowl.

With food and smoothies, they sat outside. The early evening was beautiful, and Vicky loved being outside, so much foliage in her vision, and that night…

Just casual. Easy.

“And it’s good?” he asked her. “At this point in the evening, I should have taken you for a giant scotch!”

“This is perfect. We’ll get the giant scotch when we’ve gotten to the bottom of all this. Jude, it’s nice just sitting here.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

“Love it.” She sipped her smoothie and looked at him. “May I ask you a question?”

“That is a question. But, yes, you can ask me another question. I just don’t guarantee the answers all the time,” he told her.

“Okay. I know that even though it wasn’t your fault, you blame yourself for what happened to your old partner. But that’s not unusual. I know other agents who had their partners injured or killed in the line of duty and I guess there’s no way out of a certain amount of second-guessing and guilt. But what made you want to get into law enforcement to start with?”

He leaned toward her, drumming his fingers on the table, partially looking very serious and partially holding back a grin. “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.”

“That’s very suggestive— darling ,” she teased.

“Not suggestive—flat out there,” he said. But he leaned back and grinned. “My story is easy and probably a usual one. My dad was a cop, a detective with the state. I probably heard too much as a kid, but he and his friends were good guys, always working hard. They worked tough cases, but there was one that always stuck with me. A kidnapping/murder situation—the kid’s babysitter was left for dead, and the kid was taken. The attempted murder was a last-minute thing—the killers had gone there to rob the place. The father was a diamond broker. Anyway, he and his team were gone for weeks—the guys responsible had hightailed it into the Glades north of Tamiami Trail. My dad found the boy in one of the old hunter’s shacks that used to be common there. He’d been tied up and left. He would have been dead from dehydration, starvation—or a dozen other lethal things that can get you out there—if he hadn’t been discovered when he was.” Jude shrugged with a smile. “The kid grew up and he and his family keep in contact with my dad, though my dad retired years ago. Oh! The babysitter—who survived three good stab wounds—keeps in contact, too.”

“What about the would-be robbers who were going to let a kid die out in a shack?” Vicky asked.

“They got them. They seemed to think they were the only people who knew their way through our great ‘River of Grass,’ but they underestimated Florida law enforcement. Oh, don’t get me wrong—we know that people have gotten away with all kinds of illegal activities during the years because you can go deep, deep into the wilderness, but…”

“Still in prison?” she asked.

“One died in prison of cancer. The other will be there for life. The babysitter was in tears and had half the courtroom in tears as she testified about being terrified and nearly dead as she was repeatedly stabbed.”

“Wow. So, horrible people made you want to go into law enforcement—”

“No,” he interrupted. “The fact that the babysitter survived, the kid was found—and the men who did it went to prison and were off the streets before they could do something like that to anyone else—that’s what made me know I wanted to be in law enforcement.” He laughed. “Like I said, my dad was a cop. Adored him and still do. When I was a little kid playing cops and robbers with my friends, I was always a cop. That’s it. Now. Your turn.”

Vicky winced.

“Eh! I said, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours!” he reminded her.

“It was bad. I was in college. We had a big room with a big bath—and four of us in it, dormitory style, I guess. Anyway, one of the girls didn’t come home one night and her body was found a few days later in a canal—it had been weighed down with rocks. We were all devastated, of course, but I had known Casey better than the others—we had just clicked in our history classes and liked to roam the state together to find locations we learned about. Anyway, she had been seeing a guy, big man on campus, football player, the works. But she had suspected he’d been cheating on her and I heard the argument they had—they’d gone out in the hall but left the door ajar by accident, I guess. I suspected him. No one wanted to believe it—except for the homicide cop on the case. And he set me up with a wire and we found the right time and place and…”

“And?”

Vicky shrugged. “He tried to kill me—”

“They never should have put you in that position—”

“No, no, he didn’t even get his hands on me. The cops were right there. He was hauled off to face murder charges, and I wasn’t just fine, I was so relieved! This guy was kind of like Carlos Rodriguez—he thought he was too cool for anyone to touch. And my friend, Casey, embarrassed him, I guess, because she meant to leave him in the dirt. And, in his mind, girls did not break up with him. During the trial, a woman burst into tears and started shouting at him and demanding to know where her daughter was. Turned out he’d dated a young woman in high school who had mysteriously disappeared, and he laughed at her and claimed to know nothing about it. But the homicide cop on my friend’s case started investigating and they found the other girl, decomposed after so many years, but with DNA and dental records they made the identification. And he’d been offered a chance to get the death penalty off the table if he gave the mother peace and let her find her child. He’d been so convinced no one would find the body—he’d used a fresh just-filled grave to get rid of her—that he wouldn’t take any kind of a plea deal.”

“What happened to him?”

“Death penalty. Honestly, I don’t know how I feel about the death penalty,” Vicky told him. “This guy was a monster and given the chance, he would have killed again. But I do always have it in the back of my mind that at some point the wrong man will be convicted as when Derek Bentley was hanged in England when it was his friend who did the shooting and his words, ‘Let him have it, Chris,’ which referred to the gun, were taken as a threat. I’d never want an innocent man or woman executed. All that philosophy aside—it’s not up to me. I want to stop people doing horrible things to other people, bring them to justice, and let judges and juries decide the rest. Wow. Sorry. That’s why I don’t—”

“Get into lengthy discussions on the past?” he asked her.

She nodded. “Depressing, but—”

“But it gave the system an amazing investigator,” he told her.

“Well, thanks. You, too. We’ll be amazing if we get this done.”

“We will. And I can tell you a good story, too,” he said.

“Your story was a good one! Babysitter lived. Kid found!”

“Trust me, not all my dad’s cases ended so well. But I wound up going with the Bureau—with my dad’s blessing—because he was friends with an agent. We had a horrible hostage situation. Bank robbery gone bad. The FBI was in on it. A couple, a regular Bonnie and Clyde, were making demands and threatening to start shooting the customers and employees if they didn’t get what they wanted right away. Anyway, when the bank was being surrounded, the Bonnie in the duo was shot and my dad’s friend was able to go in, get the guy to allow a paramedic, and while the ‘paramedic’ was armed, the agent talked the guy into giving up so that she could live. Everyone walked out safely. Bonnie and Clyde both lived, they’re doing time, but as model prisoners attending church services and both hoping that they’ll eventually be pardoned and spend the rest of their lives in wedded bliss. Sometimes, talking the good talk is a more valuable weapon than a firearm.”

“You’ve taken classes in negotiation?”

“Negotiation, profiling, and psychology. Hey, I like school, believe it or not.”

Vicky laughed. “I like school, too, learning new things…profiling, of course. A few psychology classes and a special workshop on profiling at Quantico. And—”

“Lots of computer courses?”

“Yes.”

He sighed. “Here’s wishing I had more of those!”

They had finished eating. She sipped the last of her smoothie and let out a soft breath. It had been an interesting dinner. She didn’t talk about the past that often herself. Maybe it hadn’t been fair to ask him to talk, then again, fair in the end because they knew so much more about one another now—about everything that made them tick.

And while different events had occurred to them, the outcomes had brought them to a similar place in life.

“I guess we should head back,” Vicky said.

“Bummer.”

“Bummer?”

“First date,” he teased. “We should have been hitting the town, staying out late!”

“Well, in truth, I loved this idea. My ‘First Date’ was delicious.”

“Oh, you don’t know the half!” he teased.

“I don’t? I wonder what a ‘Second Date’ is like!” she responded, laughing.

“Now, wait a minute. This was almost like a first date.”

“Only for weird people in law enforcement!”

“Now, hey, come on. We talked. Deeply. In a way, this was more than anyone usually discovers on a first date—”

“Because we’ve been almost glued to each other for the past few days?” she groaned.

“Because we talked. Really talked,” he said, and for a minute, he was close and serious and she could feel as if his soul emanated from him, everything that she had come to care for and admire so very much.

And then, of course, he was simply physically attractive…

“So, honestly, would you go on a second date?” he asked her.

She couldn’t tell if he was still teasing or not. She just knew that their knees brushed beneath the table, that their fingers almost touched on the table, that they were almost intimately close.

“Would you?” she countered quietly.

“A thousand more,” he said, and she smiled as he rose, looking at her.

He meant it.

“And you?” he asked.

“I really love this restaurant, but I doubt we could come a thousand times!”

He grinned and offered her a hand to rise.

He kept her hand as they left the restaurant and returned to the car.

“It’s still not that late. Ordinarily, I’d be a better date. I’d take you to a play or a movie, or, if you were into it, a sporting event—”

“I’m fine with sports. Basketball, football, and baseball, in that order. Basketball because, as my dad once told me, the game was often won or lost in the last ten minutes!”

He grinned and opened her car door.

“No basketball game tonight, I’m afraid,” he said. “But then there’s always… Well, you know that dating thing.”

“Which dating thing? I’ll be honest. I have dated, of course. But not a hell of a lot. It seems that all I do is work.”

“Wow, we managed to work and have a first date!” he said lightly.

“Maybe not so bad. People like us…we may be the only ones who can really understand each other.”

“And you are one good-looking partner!” he told her.

She laughed. “Hey, you got the girls trying to pick you up today. I just got one serious old business guy who was about to call the cops on me.” She frowned. “What’s that old dating thing that you’re talking about?”

“A hotel room,” he said. “Not that I’m suggesting—”

“If we didn’t show up at the house, Cary and Aidan would have the cops out on us!” she said lightly.

“We do have rooms.”

“In a house with other people!” Vicky said.

He’d opened the door for her. She was seated with her legs still out of the car. He hunkered down close to her.

“So…you would go to a hotel room with me?”

His eyes were so intently on hers. She loved his eyes, so green, sometimes as if they truly emitted the heat of an emerald fire…

She swallowed and he said, “You know, they do have their own rooms.”

“But, um…”

“One of us can do the kid thing and sneak down the hall into the other’s room,” he suggested.

“Which one of us?”

“I’m willing to take the dare! Oh, of course,” he said, still smiling but feigning worry, “I would want to make sure that you’d let me in.”

His face was almost touching hers. And he managed to delve into the depths of her soul and make her laugh and…

She reached out, cupping his jaw, looking into the incredible green of his eyes, and leaning forward. Her fingers moved delicately over his flesh, and she found his lips with her own.

She’d meant a gentle kiss, a kiss that just said yes…

But it became deep, and he drew her up and into his arms and the kiss became heated and deep and intimate and it seemed to awaken a dozen senses and instincts within her, so often forgotten or shelved and it wasn’t wrong because they were so very right for each other in so many ways and…

It was something she wanted.

But, of course, they both realized that though they were standing by a darker parking area and it wasn’t exactly as if they were on stage, there were people out at night and they were probably becoming a little passionate for a public display.

They broke apart almost simultaneously.

“So, if I slip down the hall…”

“I will open the door. And then…?”

He grinned. “I told you. You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine!”

She laughed and said, “Then I guess you’d better drive!”