Never Tell (Detective D.D. Warren #10) - Lisa Gardner Page 0,73

flip with hardly any usage. Certainly no texts or anything useful.”

“I don’t remember him ever using a cell,” Flora said. “I would’ve guessed he had no one to call.”

“Meaning the lack of evidence is the evidence,” D.D. filled in. “Someone must’ve taught Ness how to cover his tracks, both with this computer app, and the prepaid flip.” She glanced at Flora. “But the only time you remember him meeting up with another person was the one time you saw Conrad at the bar?”

“That’s the only person I saw. But Jacob would disappear for days, sometimes even a week at a time. I always assumed he went on drug binges. But he could’ve been meeting up with other buddies. Maybe he was going on mini crime sprees, I don’t know.”

“Don’t you think he’d brag to you?” Quincy spoke up. “He spoke to you about a great many things. And wasn’t above threatening you with replacement.”

Flora shrugged. “Jacob bragged. If he’d spent days with another woman, whether victim or prostitute, he might say something. But …” Flora took a deep breath. “Jacob was clever. He knew who he was. From a very young age, he told me, he knew he was different from others. And he knew he had to hide it. He was very adept at self-preservation. If he’d found some group, started networking with other predators, even met them from time to time, no, I don’t think he’d tell me. He liked his secrets, too. And it amused him when others underestimated him. Saw just a white-trash trucker, when he knew himself to be more.”

“What about a Tor browser?” Edgar spoke up.

Quincy regarded the computer analyst coolly. “As a matter of fact, in addition to SteadyState, Ness’s laptop also had the Tor browser.”

“What does that mean?” Flora spoke up.

“Tor, a.k.a. ‘the Onion Router,’ is a browser that uses a peer-to-peer network that intentionally obfuscates source IP addresses,” Edgar explained. He looked at D.D. “It’s perfectly safe and legal. It also happens to be the primary browser used to access the dark web.”

D.D. got it. “Where Jacob could very well have trolled chat rooms filled with other perverts such as himself, picking up all sorts of new tricks and forensic dodges, while rebooting his laptop each night, allowing this SteadyState to automatically clear all record of such site visits and chat-room logs.” She glanced at Quincy. “And knowing all this, the FBI can’t magically do anything to rebuild the computer’s history?”

“The FBI has tried its magic,” Quincy drawled drily, then turned to Keith Edgar. “Don’t even think about it. No matter how brilliant a geek you are, I assure you, my geeks are better. Nor is the FBI in the business of sharing evidence.”

Edgar sank down. D.D. started to remember how much she liked Kimberly Quincy.

“What about his trucking log?” asked D.D. “Don’t long-haul truckers have GPS and computer monitoring and that kind of thing? Seems like that should be a significant source of data.”

“Once again, the answer is yes and no,” Quincy said. “The company Jacob worked for only kept the backup data for three months. So we know his last three months of movement, give or take, but as for the time he had his rig at his safe house to first load up Flora, nada. Likewise, even if we had a specific time period—say, Flora could pinpoint the week or month Jacob met your murder victim at the bar—we can’t look it up. What we did find … Jacob drove the highways of the South with some side trips to cheap motels, et cetera. We also discovered gaps in the data, which leads us to believe Jacob may have figured out how to turn off his computer monitoring—and that’s not easy to do. These systems are required by law and designed to track how many consecutive hours a trucker has traveled and basically demand driving breaks. You can’t just turn them off with a flick of a switch, or all drivers under a tough deadline would do it. Again, a surprising level of electronic sophistication from a man with a ninth-grade education.”

Quincy tilted her head toward Edgar, who’d first made the point.

“So what exactly is the plan here?” D.D. asked. “Go after Jacob Ness’s principal hideaway? See if we can find new evidence there?”

Quincy and Flora nodded.

“And to do that, Flora has volunteered herself as what, a hypnosis subject? Because you know experts still don’t agree on the validity of recovered memories, and juries just plain hate that