Twisted Prey (Lucas Davenport #28)(71)

“Good to know,” Clark said. “That’s better than Ritter driving himself back home, stopping to get a bite to eat, where he gets shot behind the restaurant by muggers and thrown in the dumpster.”

“That’s unbecoming skepticism,” Rae said.

“Only because the Washington area has the best defense attorneys in the country, because it needs them,” Clark said.

Rae was looking over Lucas’s shoulder, and said, “Call the FBI phone guy, get Parrish’s track.”

“Of course,” Lucas said.

He did that, and the phone guy said it would be another hour.

While Lucas was talking about the phone, Smith, the computer expert, showed up. He was a balding black man, who first took a long look at Rae, then used some electronic boxes to mess with Ritter’s laptop. After a few minutes, it opened up. Lucas, looking over his shoulder, said, “Thank you.”

“You’re premature,” Smith said. “Everything in here seems to be encrypted. Everything. All his email and a dozen or so documents. It’s standard heavy business encryption . . .” He tapped the screen showing an icon for an app called SanderCrypt. “That means there’s no possibility of reading this stuff without the key.”

“Well, hell, what would the key look like?” Bob asked.

“Could be anything. Might not even exist anymore, if he memorized it, and of course now he’s dead.”

“What if he wrote it down?” Rae asked. “How many numbers would it be . . . or letters . . . or whatever?”

Smith shook his head. “Can’t tell. It could be anything, but probably quite a few letters, or numbers, or symbols . . .”

“And you guys can’t break it?”

“Nope. The NSA can’t. Nobody can.”

“So let’s say he wrote it down? What should we be looking for?”

“Well, anything that’s sort of out of place,” Smith said. “Most people don’t write ‘Hey, diddle, diddle, the frog and the fiddle and the moon jumped over the plutocrat’ on the typing tray of their computer desk. If you find something like that, it’s probably a key.”

“We’ve been all over this place, inch by inch, and haven’t found anything like that,” Lucas said. “Would it just be a regular sentence, though, instead of random stuff?”

“Oh, depends on how much he knows about computers. If it was that ‘Hey, diddle, diddle’ thing, and, say, thirty letters long, it’d be impossible for any computer to break through with brute force. At the same time, it’d be easy to remember,” Smith said. “Most non-techies don’t know that, so they create a long random sequence. But random sequences are a lot harder to remember, and they get written down. That’s what you’d look for—random numbers and letters that are out of place, that don’t connect to anything else.”

“Haven’t seen anything like that, either,” Lucas said.

“Then you’re SOL,” Smith said. “I’ll take the computer—let me know if you find anything. Maybe he’s got the key in a safe-deposit box or something and you’ll find it later.”

“That seems unlikely if he has to use it,” Bob said.

Smith shrugged: “You’re right. With all the encrypted emails, it looks like he used it quite a bit.” He paused, then added, “We had one guy who used the serial numbers on a dollar bill—ten numbers, two letters; once forward, once backward. He told us he almost spent it a couple of times. He finally tucked it into the back compartment of his wallet to make sure he didn’t.”

“That’d be impossible to see even if we had Ritter’s wallet, which we don’t,” Rae said.

“Yeah. We didn’t see it, either, with the dollar-bill guy,” Smith said. “He told us about it as part of a plea bargain.”

Lucas shook his head. “There’s gotta be a way to break it . . .”

Smith shook his head. “Sorry, man. There isn’t. That’s the way of the world now.”



* * *



—

SMITH WAS PACKING UP when the FBI phone technician called and said that Parrish’s phone had been turned on at his house all evening. A few minutes later, the Arlington cops called and said they’d found Ritter’s car a block from the Applejack’s. The doors were locked, but the car appeared to be empty, with no bloodlike discoloration on the fabric seat. They’d tow it and open the trunk, but the Arlington cop said the trunk was more like a lunchbox than a cargo hold, and nobody could have squeezed a body inside, with or without fingertips.

“But there could be documents,” Lucas said. “I want a callback as soon as you open the trunk.”

“We’ll call,” the cop said.





19


Forte ran the passports through the relevant databases to see where Ritter might have gone with them; he called back after dinner to tell Lucas that both had been used for trips to Europe and back to the U.S.

“He didn’t stay long—two days in France, three in Spain, for one of them; three days in France, two in Germany, for the other,” Forte said. “I could be wrong, but I suspect he was validating the passports with travel. Used passports already carrying visa stamps are less interesting than brand-new ones, if you’re working passport control. They’ve already been checked.”