Abandoned

prison world of gray.

CHAPTER FORTY

“We found it,” James tells me.

It’s mid-afternoon. Alan and I barely spoke on the hour-plus drive back to the office. What was there to say? We’d condoned the rape of a man because of our rage. We felt vindicated and soiled, all at the same time.

“That was fast,” I say.

“It didn’t take long. It wasn’t that it was well hidden. It’s that no one would have found it unless they were looking for it. It seems innocuous enough, and under most circumstances, it would be, but it did the job it was meant to do.”

“Which was?”

“There were two programs. Both were installed with root access on the key servers at the ISP where Hollister worked. One was a search program. It would search email, chat rooms, instant-message logs when kept, and various other things, looking for combinations of keywords. Kill my wife, divorce, and hate, stuff like that. It was pretty sophisticated.”

“Sounds cumbersome,” I say. “Wouldn’t you come back with thousands of results?”

“Yes, but the sophistication of the program was that it grabbed a one-line snippet of each ‘conversation.’ It’s pretty easy to scan through and to then know what to discard and what to follow up on. Take a look.”

He hands me a printed page. Each line is preceded by a date, a time stamp, a number, and, at times, an email address. “What’s the number? An IP address?”

“That’s right.”

I read over the page and see that James is right. It’s simple to separate the wheat from the chaff. The keywords are highlighted in bold type.

One excerpt from an email sent by bob4121 says: That diamond ring as a gift, just killed my wife!

“Good job, Bob,” I murmur.

Another begins: I hate my wife. We are getting divorced and I wish she was dead.

I hand the page back to him. “I get the idea. What was the other program for?”

“It was a kind of digital drop. Like a mass mailer. Send a message to it, and it forwards that message to two or three hundred different free email addresses.”

“Free makes it virtually impossible to trace,” Alan points out.

“The first program interacts with the second. It puts together a summary and then passes it over to the digital drop. The drop program sends the summary to every email address on its list.”

“What were the benefits to him of doing this?”

“Numerous. Since the programs are given root access, they have permission to access anything on any server they’re placed on. This lets them perform without raising any red flags. They can get into email, server logs— anything they have the password for.”

“Let me guess: Hollister provided the programs with the passwords they’d need.”

“Unconfirmed, but it’s the best guess. Initial installation of a program like that would have had to be done by an administrator or someone with the admin passwords to the server.”

“Dali probably offered him a discount,” Alan says. “When he found out that Hollister worked for an ISP, he probably said, Put these programs on your servers and I’ll cut fifty thousand off what you’re supposed to pay me.”

“Sounds risky,” I say. “Wasn’t he taking a chance by leaving a trail?”

“Yes and no,” James explains. “They were very well written. They execute in the background and put no strain on the servers at all. They keep no logs themselves, and Hollister would do regular purges of references to the programs from the server logs. That’s actually how we found them. Hollister hasn’t been around to delete from the logs. Even if they were discovered—if Hollister had been hit by a car or had a heart attack—so what? They’d be dismissed as an interesting but generally unimportant exploit from a hacker. Even if they were followed up on, good luck tracing him via those hundreds of email addresses. Most of them are probably dormant, and even the ones that aren’t could be set to forward to another address, which could then forward to another, ad infinitum.” He shakes his head in reluctant admiration. “It’s his brilliance. Keeping it simple. He had you for four weeks, for example. Can you tell us where the building was or what he looked like?”

“No.”

“Same principle here. The difference is, Douglas Hollister took out some life insurance.”

Excitement surges inside me. “What?”

“He modified the program, or got someone to modify it for him. It had a built-in IP logger. Here’s how it worked: Dali would occasionally access the server directly so that he could modify variables that the programs used, such as adding or deleting keyword combinations or email addresses. Hollister had the program log every access to it.”

“Why not just look at the server logs?” I ask. “Isn’t every incoming access logged?”

“Sure. Millions of them.”

“Ah.”

“This was easier. It was isolated to the programs themselves, which meant the IPs logged would belong to Dali.” My eyes widen. “That’s good.”

“There’s more. Douglas compiled a list of all the email addresses Dali was using and plugged them into a custom email program, which he then made Web-accessible. He could access the program in any Web browser and do two things with it: send an email out to those addresses, or email a list of them to himself. It’s obviously how he sent the warning email to Dali from prison.”

“More insurance,” Alan says. “Maybe that’s why Douglas got overconfident about not paying Dali off. Thought he could blackmail him.”

“A miscalculation,” James observes.

I frown. “Seems strange Dali wouldn’t consider the possibility of something like this happening.”

Callie speaks up for the first time. She’s stayed quiet, though I’ve felt the weight of her gaze on me. “I think it goes back to what I talked about before: risk assessment. He could have weighed the possibility against the necessity and decided the risk was justified.”

“He did take precautions,” James continues. “We’ve tracked the IPs used to a series of Internet cafes, a library—he used public systems, probably paid in cash.”

“Shit,” Alan says.

Something stirs inside my head. A glimmering. I frown. James looks at me closely. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. I feel like what you just told me is trying to meet up with some other information about the case. I can’t grasp it yet. Tell me again where he accessed the Web?”

He checks a paper. “Internet cafe. Internet cafe. Internet cafe. Library—”

“Stop.” I feel it now, swimming toward me, growing in size and clarity. “Library. That’s it.”

“What’s it?” Alan asks. “I’m confused.”

“Earl Cooper,” I say. I smile at James. “Which of these things is not like the other?”

“Library,” he answers, nodding. “I get it.”

“Explain it to the lesser minds, honey-love.”

“Cooper talked about mental maps. We find places of comfort and security both consciously and unconsciously.”

“I remember.”

“Dali goes to Internet cafes because they provide anonymous access. It’s a faceless location. He goes to a library for the same reason, and while it does provide the anonymous computer access, the location isn’t faceless. Think about it. Libraries are personal places. They’re cared for by someone, and they belong to a community. Librarians remember people. They keep an eye on the books, make sure the patrons don’t mistreat them; there’s a