KEITH RAWLINS’S MOHAWK had been redyed flaming red and shellacked to jut off his head like a jaunty rooster’s comb. But the normally upbeat cybercrimes expert looked subdued when he came into the room.
“Dr. Cross, Chief Stone,” he said. “I need to show you something. With your permission, I’d like to connect my laptop to your television screen?”
“Go ahead,” Bree said.
“What’s going on?” I asked Mahoney when he came into the room after speaking with Nana and my dad.
Ned said, “Rawlins says he knows why Lourdes Rodriguez was so quick and quiet about leaving her old apartment. He started to explain it on the way here, but most of it went right over my head.”
“I’ll try to dumb it down further, Agent Mahoney,” Rawlins said, sounding annoyed as he typed on his laptop.
A moment later the television screen came on, showing a gibberish of coded numbers, letters, and symbols. Rawlins scrolled down through the mess until he found what he wanted.
He highlighted a sequence in the sea of code. “That’s a time stamp from a few days ago, immediately after Lourdes Rodriguez’s name was entered into the FBI’s database as part of the ongoing investigation.”
Rawlins typed. The screen jumped to another coded document and highlighted a new sequence.
He said, “Two seconds after Rodriguez’s name goes i
n, this second time stamp is triggered in a different file, a familiar file, that ingenious, eloquent piece of malware code I found in your computer and then in the FBI database.”
Bree said, “You’re saying Rodriguez’s name triggered the malware?”
“And the malware triggered Rodriguez’s swift departure from that apartment. The troubling thing is that I should have seen this sooner, but after the marathon work session I put in to resurrect Timmy Walker’s iPhone, I went home and slept for twenty hours, and I woke up with a nasty stomach bug that cost me another day.”
Rawlins said that he’d finally returned to his lab earlier that morning to see the alert from the code he’d attached to the malware.
“Where did the stuff about Rodriguez go?” Bree asked.
“Through onion routers, of course,” Rawlins said, typing. “A dozen in all. But I intentionally overrode the malware’s code so that every time it passed through the onion it would send me a ping so I could track it.”
The screen jumped to a map of the world with glowing lime-green pins denoting onion routers and orange arrows showing the direction of travel after the message cleared the device. From Quantico to India to China to the Philippines to Ecuador and on and on, until Rodriguez’s name reached Japan.
“That’s only eleven routers,” Ali said. “You said twelve.”
“I did indeed,” Rawlins said and he typed. The screen switched to Google Earth, a satellite view of a checkerboard of woods and farmland.
“You are looking at an unincorporated area in southwestern Pennsylvania due east of the Michaux State Forest,” he said, then zoomed down on a compound of three buildings. The biggest, a mansion, really, was sprawling and sat beside a large pond surrounded by hardwoods and pine thickets.
“That’s a twelve-thousand-square-foot home with carriage house, barn, and personal bass pond,” Rawlins said. “But notice the satellite dishes on the roof. Even for a big place, it’s overkill.”
“And this is where the malware went after Japan?” I said.
“Most definitely.”
“Who owns it?”
The cybercrimes expert sobered. “Nash Edward Edgars. You’ve probably never heard of him, but Mr. Edgars is infamous in certain circles. Circles that often disappear into the dark web.”
Rawlins described Edgars as a secretive, reclusive, and extremely wealthy computer-code writer in his late thirties. At seventeen, after his freshman year at Cal Poly, Edgars left and became the behind-the-scenes coder for several edgy, successful tech businesses.
“That we know for sure,” Rawlins said. “The dark-web stuff is rumor and conjecture, but some very smart people swear Edgars has been developing and operating in the unorganized, encrypted, and untraceable Internet for a decade. Maybe longer.”
I squinted at the screen. “What connects him to Rodriguez?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“No photo of him?”