Never Tell (Detective D.D. Warren #10)(111)

“Maybe he was working contacts of his own. Is knowing there’s been a transaction the same as knowing who’s going to carry out the hit?”

“He needed more information,” D.D. agreed.

“Except the hired gun must’ve found him first.”

“And what? Walked into Conrad’s own home and shot him three times with his own gun? That doesn’t sound like any professional hit I’ve ever heard of. Hang on. Conrad isn’t the only one who needed more information. We do, too.”

D.D. pulled back out her phone, dialed SSA Kimberly Quincy. She walked down the block, away from the noisy din of the firefighters. Phil followed in her wake. The air smelled acrid. Later, she figured, she’d blow soot straight out of her noise. So many fires in a single afternoon. And somehow, she had the unsettling feeling they weren’t done yet.

“Quincy,” Kimberly answered her cell.

“D.D. here. Have a question for you and Keith. Okay, you’re Conrad Carter. You’re investigating an evil son of a bitch, Jules LaPage, who’s currently locked behind bars, but you’re pretty sure engineered the death of your parents, and given the first opportunity will strike again to take out his ex-wife. So you set yourself up on the dark net, you learn the lay of the land.”

“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.”