The Match (Wilde, #2)(83)

“And did you in this case?”

“No. We decided that it wasn’t worth our effort.”

“Why?”

“Like I said, we can’t take them all on, and a lot of us felt that Peter Bennett wasn’t a very sympathetic victim, what with the accusations of roofying and cheating leveled against him.”

Added up, Wilde thought. “So you dropped it?”

“Yes. And normally that’s the end of it. Case closed. We move on to the next. That’s what we all did. Except for Panther.”

“What happened?”

“What I didn’t know about Panther—what I couldn’t even imagine—was that she was a huge Love Is a Battlefield fangirl. Like she was really into the show. That was why she pushed to bring the case forward. Hard to predict who likes what, right? Panther was a hardened FBI technician, incredible at her job—but her head got turned by celebrity.”

Wilde saw it now. “Panther was Katherine Frole.”

Chris nodded. “I’m still putting it together, but once I had Katherine’s name, I was able to hack into some of her accounts. Not all. Not even most. She was an expert too, remember? But she was openly a massive fan of this insipid reality show. So when Boomerang nixed the Bennett case, my theory is Katherine couldn’t resist breaking protocol and reaching out personally to the applicant.”

“To Peter,” Wilde said.

“This is all speculation, but maybe Katherine called him and said how sorry she was that Boomerang rejected his application. Maybe she took it a step further. Maybe she met with him. Maybe she gave him the name of his biggest stalker.”

“Henry McAndrews,” Wilde said.

Chris nodded. “You can guess the rest. Not long after that, someone murders Henry McAndrews. When the body is discovered, maybe Katherine Frole realizes what she has done. Maybe she confronts Peter. Or maybe Peter realizes that he has to silence her.”

“A lot of maybes,” Wilde said.

“Either way, Katherine Frole ends up dead.”

“So that might explain Henry McAndrews and Katherine Frole,” Wilde said. “But how does Martin Spirow figure in?”

“Spirow was another troll presented to Boomerang.”

“Did he harass Peter Bennett?”

“No. He posted something truly vile under a dead woman’s obituary. The dead woman’s family applied to us.”

“Did you accept or reject the application?”

“Not me,” Chris corrected. “Boomerang. We do everything as a group. But in this case, we accepted it. But see, Boomerang had various levels of punishment. His was mild. Let me cut to it, Wilde. I think someone—it could be Peter Bennett, it could be whoever filled out his application, it could be someone close to him or even a crazed fan—decided to take matters into their own hands because Boomerang did not act.”

“By killing Henry McAndrews?”

“Yes. Then they killed Katherine Frole to either cover their tracks or, I don’t know, as punishment to her. Her body was found in a small office she kept near her house. Very secretive. It’s where she did her Boomerang work. I think whoever killed Panther forced her to give them names and files, and now they are on a killing spree.”

“Do you know which names?” Wilde asked.

He shook his head. “Panther handled over a hundred cases.”

“Why are you coming to me?”

“There’s no one else,” Chris said.

“Why not the authorities?”

Chris chuckled at that. “You’re joking, right?”

“Do I look like I’m joking?”

“The entire Boomerang menagerie is a top-priority target of the FBI, Homeland Security, the CIA, National Security…” Chris spotted Wilde’s skeptical expression and said, “Yeah, I know. I sound full of myself. But this is why we had all those protocols in place. You called us vigilantes. To the government, we are worse. We’ve hacked into law enforcement databases, private government websites, secure military mainframes, you name it. Some of the cyberbullies we’ve punished? They are very powerful people. The top echelons of society. They want revenge. The government wants us too. You may think black sites have all been closed down. They haven’t. They’ll drag us there in a heartbeat. Best-case scenario? We spend years in a federal penitentiary.”

Wilde knew that Chris was probably right—the feds would arrest them at a minimum.

“But at the same time,” Chris said, and tears formed in his eyes, “I caused this. I can’t just walk away now, can I? I need to stop it before more people end up dead. So I’m pulling out all the stops and marshaling all my knowledge and resources. I have trackers, interception software, and most of all, the hacker’s main tool—people. Everyone thinks that what we hackers do is magic, but here is what they all forget: Behind every firewall, password, security package—whatever—are human beings. You can trade favors with them.”

Funny, Wilde thought. Hester Crimstein, who knows nothing about technology, had arrived at a similar conclusion when she talked about people’s self-interest. Everything changes, nothing changes.

“When I searched through this entire situation, one weird name kept popping up. Yours, Wilde. When you called Vicky Chiba half an hour ago, I listened in. I know why you’re involved. You’re a skilled outsider. You get what I’m trying to do. I can’t go to law enforcement. I can’t put the other members of Boomerang at risk. I can’t betray them or those who filled out applications and entrusted us to help them. Any kind of exposure could be catastrophic.”