Never Tell (Detective D.D. Warren #10)(62)

“That’s the only person I saw. But Jacob would disappear for days, sometimes even a week at a time. I always assumed he went on drug binges. But he could’ve been meeting up with other buddies. Maybe he was going on mini crime sprees, I don’t know.”

“Don’t you think he’d brag to you?” Quincy spoke up. “He spoke to you about a great many things. And wasn’t above threatening you with replacement.”

Flora shrugged. “Jacob bragged. If he’d spent days with another woman, whether victim or prostitute, he might say something. But …” Flora took a deep breath. “Jacob was clever. He knew who he was. From a very young age, he told me, he knew he was different from others. And he knew he had to hide it. He was very adept at self-preservation. If he’d found some group, started networking with other predators, even met them from time to time, no, I don’t think he’d tell me. He liked his secrets, too. And it amused him when others underestimated him. Saw just a white-trash trucker, when he knew himself to be more.”

“What about a Tor browser?” Edgar spoke up.

Quincy regarded the computer analyst coolly. “As a matter of fact, in addition to SteadyState, Ness’s laptop also had the Tor browser.”

“What does that mean?” Flora spoke up.

“Tor, a.k.a. ‘the Onion Router,’ is a browser that uses a peer-to-peer network that intentionally obfuscates source IP addresses,” Edgar explained. He looked at D.D. “It’s perfectly safe and legal. It also happens to be the primary browser used to access the dark web.”

D.D. got it. “Where Jacob could very well have trolled chat rooms filled with other perverts such as himself, picking up all sorts of new tricks and forensic dodges, while rebooting his laptop each night, allowing this SteadyState to automatically clear all record of such site visits and chat-room logs.” She glanced at Quincy. “And knowing all this, the FBI can’t magically do anything to rebuild the computer’s history?”

“The FBI has tried its magic,” Quincy drawled drily, then turned to Keith Edgar. “Don’t even think about it. No matter how brilliant a geek you are, I assure you, my geeks are better. Nor is the FBI in the business of sharing evidence.”

Edgar sank down. D.D. started to remember how much she liked Kimberly Quincy.

“What about his trucking log?” asked D.D. “Don’t long-haul truckers have GPS and computer monitoring and that kind of thing? Seems like that should be a significant source of data.”

“Once again, the answer is yes and no,” Quincy said. “The company Jacob worked for only kept the backup data for three months. So we know his last three months of movement, give or take, but as for the time he had his rig at his safe house to first load up Flora, nada. Likewise, even if we had a specific time period—say, Flora could pinpoint the week or month Jacob met your murder victim at the bar—we can’t look it up. What we did find … Jacob drove the highways of the South with some side trips to cheap motels, et cetera. We also discovered gaps in the data, which leads us to believe Jacob may have figured out how to turn off his computer monitoring—and that’s not easy to do. These systems are required by law and designed to track how many consecutive hours a trucker has traveled and basically demand driving breaks. You can’t just turn them off with a flick of a switch, or all drivers under a tough deadline would do it. Again, a surprising level of electronic sophistication from a man with a ninth-grade education.”

Quincy tilted her head toward Edgar, who’d first made the point.

“So what exactly is the plan here?” D.D. asked. “Go after Jacob Ness’s principal hideaway? See if we can find new evidence there?”

Quincy and Flora nodded.

“And to do that, Flora has volunteered herself as what, a hypnosis subject? Because you know experts still don’t agree on the validity of recovered memories, and juries just plain hate that crap.”

“There are other techniques.” Flora spoke up first. “I’ve done some research. The human brain works a lot like a computer. First, there’s the matter of what data is recorded in the moment. Particularly in traumatic situations, some people’s senses heighten and they see all. But most people actually shut down. They squeeze their eyes shut, cover their ears, try to block what’s happening. They don’t want to know. Meaning the data is incomplete.”

D.D. arched a brow at her CI.

“I was a long-term victim,” Flora supplied in response to the next logical question. “In the beginning, maybe I did try to shut it out. I certainly don’t remember many specific details of the first … assault. But over time, the … continuity”—Flora picked the word carefully—“made the events less traumatic and more normal. At which point, I had plenty of opportunities to note and record more … data. So it’s not like I’m trying to recover one memory, which might be suspect, but a string of impressions I had months to form.”

On the table, Edgar’s hand moved closer to Flora’s. Still not touching, D.D. noticed, but closer. In return, Flora’s hand drifted slightly toward his. Fascinating. D.D. had never known the woman to even look at a member of the opposite sex. Now this: a true-crime buff. She hoped Flora knew what she was doing. And she hoped like hell Keith Edgar saw Flora as a person, and not just the object of a macabre criminal case.