Never Tell (Detective D.D. Warren #10) - Lisa Gardner Page 0,131
new security guarantees, which is the primary attraction of the dark web. And you’d have sales, I guess, for lack of a better term. Real people working from their own shadowy desks to recruit new shadowy vendors. It’s a marketplace. You always have to be offering the latest and greatest.”
“So if Conrad had learned a hired gun had recently taken on a new job, he could take steps to learn the hit man’s identity. Starting with the site manager?”
More muted talking.
Quincy returned: “Conrad would probably want to make a financial offer of his own. For example, I’ll pay you twice that amount to do a job for me right now. But if that failed, his next—and I gotta admit, it’s a pretty clever play—would be to lodge a complaint against the vendor.”
“Excuse me?”
“Keith just came up with it,” Quincy said. “Remember, reviews matter. So if Conrad wanted to mess someone up, he could file a formal complaint against the hit man. I paid Vendor X and they didn’t deliver. Or better yet, Vendor X is a cop. Now the site administrator has to investigate Vendor X. The site’s credibility is shot until the matter is resolved.”
“So Conrad contacts the site administrator. Vendor X cheated me or is a rat,” D.D. filled in.
“The web manager will then have to open up a case review, just like in the real business world. Talk to Conrad. Talk to the hired gun. Sort things out.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” D.D. murmured. Forget the criminals on the dark web, what Quincy had just described was pretty much the same way complaints were handled at BPD. “In the course of this interaction, Conrad might’ve learned the hired gun’s real identity,” she guessed.
“Keith and I are only now retracing Conrad’s virtual footsteps, but from what we can tell he’d established about as deep a cover as I’ve ever seen. Honestly, a professional agent couldn’t have done as well. Ten years of lurking, Conrad didn’t just visit the dark web. He became part of the landscape.”
“Until he learned too much,” D.D. said.
“Which cut both ways,” Quincy amended. “Conrad didn’t just learn a vendor’s identity. A vendor, a manager, a customer—someone learned his.”
And just like that, D.D. got it. The piece of the puzzle they’d been missing. She clicked off her phone. She stopped walking, stared Phil in the eye. Delivered the hard truth: “Phil. We’ve been idiots.”
“Again?” he asked with a sigh.
“Investigative one-oh-one. Don’t forget what you already know. We’ve gotten so caught up in the dark web and Conrad’s mysterious double life, we forgot to factor in the basics: our crime scene.”
“You were just talking about it. Conrad was shot in his own home with his own handgun.”
“Exactly. Yet we’ve spent the past twenty-four hours spinning our wheels over hired assassins and dark-web vendors and shadowy criminals that go bump in the night. Really? How would a hit man know that Conrad kept his gun stashed in his own bedroom? How would a hit man gain access Conrad’s house, given that Conrad lives under an alias and has been on hyperalert for nearly a decade? Then, having accessed the house, and crept up the stairs and retrieved the hidden handgun, how does this ninja simply stand in the doorway of the study and shoot Conrad three times without Conrad ever putting up a hand in self-defense?”
“Conrad would’ve been on guard.”
“Meaning Conrad never saw the threat coming,” D.D. concluded for both of them. “He let his killer into his home. He thought nothing of it when his killer joined him upstairs in his study. He knew the person, Phil. Conrad had to have known and trusted his shooter; it’s the only explanation.”
Phil stared at her. “He finally identified the gun for hire contracted by Jules LaPage, and it turned out to be someone he personally knew? That seems far-fetched.”
“Because I don’t think it’s the contract killer he identified. Or who identified him. I think Conrad stumbled upon a bigger fish. Not the vendor. The site manager. A person with a double life worth burning down the entire city to protect.”
“Who—” Phil started, then stopped. “We are idiots,” he said.
“Yep. We need to get to Evie’s mother’s house. Now!”
Chapter 39
FLORA
I CAN’T KEEP ROAMING HARVARD SQUARE in hopes of spying an arsonist. For one thing, being the heart of a college campus, the area is swarming with kids in hoodies. Rocket blends right in. Also, with emergency response vehicles and news vans piling up, it’s getting hard to move.