“Cloned his phone?” I repeated. “Isn’t that a little high tech for our two?”
He just snorted. “Don’t be daft, Con. An organisation like Locke’s would definitely have bought themselves an illicit software package for a simple little thing like that. Do you think they’d just recruit random dopes like Whitaker without an easy way to check them out first, and to keep an eye on them once they were in? Call logs, keystrokes, messages, browser history, location, everything, they’d want access to all of it. They probably even have a hub set up, to send all the collected data to. Which reminds me, that phone you confiscated from Whitaker needs to stay off, and he’d better get himself a new one when you move him.”
Seriously? You’d think it might have occurred to him to mention all this earlier. That sounded like it could be very useful. “What if it didn’t stay off?”
“Then they’d soon realise he was in this building if they happened to look. That’s not what you want, is it?” He eyed me suspiciously. “You’ve got that ‘great idea’ face on. What are you thinking?”
“Could you modify their software and turn the tables on them, using Whitaker’s phone to access all their collected data?”
“Probably.” He shrugged. “It might take a while, depending on how sophisticated their package is. Why, do you want me to try it? You always complain that you can’t use anything I get like that, anyway.” Well, that was true, but it often gave me the chance to find evidence I could certainly use and wouldn’t have found otherwise. “Besides, that’s not our case,” he added rather emphatically.
I knew that Shay didn’t want to get involved in the smuggling investigation, which was understandable. He had no intention of volunteering to help anyone lock more little guys like Whitaker up, and I wasn’t about to ask him to. That wasn’t what I’d had in mind.
“What are the chances that Cory Phelps uses his own personal phone for business purposes?” I ventured. “I think he’d have taken steps to protect that against anything Locke might try to install if he knows about the cloning system. Nobody wants their employer snooping into their personal life so invasively. So he’s probably got a second phone, supplied by Locke, and you just said that you might get a location from a cloned phone.”
“Not if he’s turned that one off too, but yeah, I’ll have a go at it. I’ll let you know when I’m ready to go.”
So that wasn’t going to happen just yet then. My cousin had probably already mentally queued it on his current task list, but he wouldn’t budge until he’d finished whatever he’d decided was a higher priority. I’d allowed myself to become distracted, anyway. I was still no closer to knowing why Damien Price had been murdered.
I pulled up Cory Phelps’ record again and began to read through it for the second time. With no clear motive for either of our suspects to attack Price, I was really beginning to wonder how much psychiatric damage his time in prison had left Phelps with. Was it possible that Damien Price had merely reminded him of someone he’d hated so much that the mere sight of him had been enough to trigger some kind of psychotic episode?
Delusions, violent behaviour and even hallucinations were not unusual in such instances. As a theory, it made as much sense as anything else I could think of. Maybe the testimony given by the advanced undercover operative who’d worked alongside Phelps for over five months, before the NCA task force took the whole operation down, could help give me a better picture of how mentally stable Cory had been before he was arrested.
I soon ran into a brick wall with that line of research. The operative in question, Sean Osborne, had not been called on to testify at Phelps’ trial. Nor were more than a few of his bare, factual statements attached to the case record. Well, their handlers did all they could to protect undercover agents from exposure and scrutiny, a rather self-serving policy as it meant they could keep them useable in the field for longer, advisedly or not.
As for what Phelps may have gone through in prison, nothing of note had been documented in his records. Who had the time or the inclination to intervene in every altercation between inmates these days? If you weren’t injured badly enough to require a trip to the infirmary, then, from an official standpoint, nothing had happened. No wonder the self-harm and suicide rates kept rising dramatically year by year. But Cory Phelps had seemingly served his time quietly, with no more than a few, minor disciplinary charges on his prison record. There was no mention of him being prescribed any of the available psychotropic medicines during his time in custody, not even antidepressants, and I knew prescription rates were much higher in our prisons than they were in the general community.
So no, nothing at all to indicate mental disturbance, and I was back to square one, for now. I’d still like to look into what Osborne had had to say about him, though.
“Poking around for a motive?” Shay asked, interrupting my reading. I’d been so engrossed in my thoughts that I hadn’t even noticed that the constant tapping sound to my left had finally stopped. “It’s irritating, isn’t it? I can’t figure it out either. Want to get Whitaker’s phone for me to play with?”
“Yes.” I did. With Shay’s skills, that, at least, had a good chance of getting us somewhere. I got up to go and
