Pharma

[Grimnir]

To quote Glenn Frey - The Heat is on.

[LtBroccoli]

Thanks @Shocker and @Grimnir . Things get interesting going forward and give me some ideas for the future. I'll keep posting here until close to shutdown and start loading stories up to AO3 by end of the month.

Speaking of that song from Beverly Hills Cop, I introduce a new character in a few chapters named Murph. I modeled him after Taggart. Wrote a few chapters with him right before the actor died.

[LtBroccoli]

Chapter Tags: Nosex, setup
Content Warnings: Breaking bad news and Monologuing
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The Really Useful Crew gets unexpected visitors and unwanted news...
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Chapter 85(nosex,setup)


Steve Wilcox looked forward to getting back to the normal grind of work and kids. It was his week with his children and had just gotten them off to school before he had a moment to gather his stuff for heading into the office. Wednesday’s were usually in the office. He was dressed in a green polo shirt and khakis on a brisk September morning. It was going to be a hot one today. Like most wage slaves, he had his pattern for leaving the house down to the minute. His coffee, lunch, laptop, and gym bag were ready to go by the door. He began to grab everything when he heard a knock at the door. After a brief pause, there was another knock. He peered out through a side window and saw a tiny woman in a business suit standing on his porch. She waved at him as she watched him watching her. A moment later Steve undid the locks and opened the door.

“Are you Steven Wilcox?” The tiny brunette asked. She looked up to Steve but didn’t show the slightest bit of fear or hesitation in her voice.

“Uh, yes. May I help you?” He gave her a quick look up and down. She was a tiny woman, he figured she must’ve been a gymnast or something like that.

The woman pulled a wallet out of her business coat. “Carly Graspper, Chester County PD. Mind if I come in? I’d like to ask you a few questions.” She held the badge up in front of Steve’s face for him to get a good look at it.

Steve looked perplexed. He’d lived in Chester County most of his life and never heard of the county having it’s own police department. Still, he thought for a moment to see where things go. “What’s this about?”

“It’s about a friend of yours named Ray. I’ve got some bad news, may I come in?”

Steve opened the door and let the short woman in to his living room.


—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————


Steve felt numb as this woman told him the news of Ray’s passing last night. He didn’t remember what he said or she said for a few minutes after that until his work phone rang. He answered it without thinking, interrupting Carly as he spoke to his boss.

“Yeah…. Oh, sorry, something just came up, I’m gonna be late this morning…. Ray died last night…. Yeah, just found out like five minutes ago, cop stopped by to tell me…. Well, he wasn’t really close with his family…. Yeah, as soon as this wraps up I’m coming in. See ya in a few. Bye.” Steve hung up the phone, and that call seemed to shake him out of his funk. He turned back to the young woman sitting across from him in his living room and shook his head. “Sorry about that, boss was wondering why I’m a whole…” He looked at his watch, realizing that time passed by talking to Carly. “Wow, 40 minutes late.”

“Sorry about that, I’ll try to wrap this up soon. So you’ve said that you’ve known Ray for a while, and that you’ve worked with him on and off?” Carly had a sip of coffee as Steve took one of his.

“Yeah. Met a couple years back at some networking function. We were networking over networking.” Steve said. The joke fell flat given the mood.

“I’m sorry, I don’t follow.” Carly said, making sure her notes were up to date.

“It was a networking event about the newest trends in computer networking. Ran into him one day at a trade show, next thing I know I’m calling him up to help work some jobs and we hang out every so often after that.” There was some truth to his story, but Steve was purposely fuzzy on the details. Like, the first time he really met Ray was a Club task where they used network cable to tie a waitress to her bed and fucked the shit out of her for a few hours.

“How often would you see him?” Carly asked.

“We’d work together a couple times a year, in between classes. He liked to work to keep busy and nothing is worse for idle hands than downtime. He was always pretty high energy.” Steve said. “You said he had a heart attack?”

“Yes. He had a heart attack and stroke after he struck his head during a fall. He passed away last night. When was the last time you spoke to him?” Carly asked, putting on as much sympathy as she had to.

“Last time was Friday afternoon.” Steve said. He was starting to notice things a little more out of his fog, like how she was more interested in whereabouts than friendships and knew something she wasn’t willing to say to him.

“What happened?”

“Well, me and a couple friends had a weekend plan fall into our laps and spent it up at Lake Hiawatha. We tried calling Ray a bunch of times to see if he wanted to come. No response for a couple days until we were already halfway there. He said he had some plans of his own, but thanked us for the offer. I tried getting a hold of him Monday on the way home, but no response.” Steve said, pausing for a moment before continuing. “Did you talk to anyone from his work yet?”

“No, not yet. The last few people he talked to either via text or call were his son, you, and this other number. Wondering if you might recognize it?” Carly showed him a cell phone with a Harbor City area code and it took Steve a moment to confirm what he was pretty sure he knew.

“One sec, pretty sure that’s Sam’s number. We both tried texting Ray on the way up to the lake. Yeah, that’s Sam’s.” Steve said.

“And Sam was with you this weekend?”

“Yeah, the whole time. Him and his girl asked if I wanted to come up with them for the weekend, I said sure. We drove up Friday, hung out the whole weekend up by the lake, then drove back down.” Steve knew something was off from how the cop was asking questions. “Was Ray in any trouble?”

Carly paused, thinking over her words like she was trying them on. “Ray might’ve been involved with something, we’re trying to figure that out. Did he ever go into any hobbies? Anything that was off the wall? Any strange habits that you noticed, or anything… “

“Like was he doing drugs?”

“Yeah, that’s one thing.” Carly said.

Steve used this as an opening. “Look, I didn’t want to say anything to get him in trouble, but I think Ray might’ve had a problem.”

“What kind of problem?”

“Nose candy.” Steve said. Carly nodded in acknowledgment. “He had this little tradition where he’d like to ‘party’ during semester break where he’d stay coked up for days at a time. He never let it interfere with his work, but he would cut off the outside world and do enough cocaine to kill a horse. A big reason I asked was that a man his age can’t keep up coke benders like this forever. Sooner or later they can’t keep up. We called him because we were worried about him.” Steve said, putting on a little more sympathy to his speech.

Carly sat for a moment and took a couple more notes. Her eyes took in the bigger man sitting across the living room from him. She felt that he was hiding something else, but couldn’t put her finger on it until after the coke thing. She felt that Steve must’ve partied with Ray once or twice, at least about the cocaine thing. But that’s a large leap to go from ‘let’s do coke’ to ‘let’s rape a random woman we saw online.’

She thanked Steve for his time and gave him her card, in case he remembered anything else. Carly took a quick look around the living room like she was casing the joint. It looked like a normal house for a semi-normal family. He was okay with her using the first floor bathroom, which was just a powder room with nothing special in it. Again, she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

Carly left, leaving Steve by himself for a moment, realizing everything that he just heard. His first order of business was to text his boss that he was on his way in. The second was to go onto WhatsApp and message Sam in a group chat seen by Pedro. “We got a problem. Ray’s dead.”


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Bubbles woke up later than she liked to on a day off at 8AM. She probably could’ve slept in, but with everything that happened the last few days, she wanted to get a quick start to the day. Sam was already awake in his home office hard at work putting things together for their new business venture. She climbed out of bed and made her way to the master bath. The fake tattoos were starting to peel off and her pink hair had served it’s purpose. It was time for a change. She drew herself a long, hot shower to scrub off the last of the temporary tattoos then applied a black hair dye over her pink hair. She dried off, put on a black satin robe and a pair of blue cotton panties and made her way downstairs to get a coffee. The smell of the coffee drew her down to the kitchen like a siren’s call.

“That smells delicious, what kind did you…” She stopped talking when she walked into the living room and saw Sam, dressed in a green polo and khaki shorts, talking to two other men in suits. “Oh, hello.” Bubbles was taken aback.

“These are police officers, they just arrived a couple minutes ago, we’d just gotten some coffee.” Sam said, standing as Kim stood next to his leather recliner. The two other men stood as well. One was a huge black man, and he approached first, hand extended.

“Detective Xavier Harrison, Chester County Police Department. This is my partner, Dr. Lewis.” She grabbed his hand, his engulfing hers completely. She barely came up to his neck.

“Kim, Dr. Park.” She freed her hand out of the black man’s grip and shook that of the bald white man with the red beard. For a second she thought she recognized him from somewhere. “Dr. Lewis.” She shook his hand.

“Please Dr. Park, call me George.”

“Call me Kim. What’s your specialty in?”

“Criminal psychology, you?” George asked.

“Anesthesiology.” Kim said with a slight smirk. She looked at him again. She knew where she recognized him from, but dare not let him know that she saw him last night in the ICU waiting room unless he brings it up. But that’s not the case that made him famous. “Please, sit. What’s this all about?” Bubbles leaned up against Sam’s chair, putting her hand on his shoulder as the cops sat back down.

“They were asking some questions about Ray.” Sam said, looking a little uncomfortable to put mildly.

“What happened?” Kim asked.

“Ray died last night.” Sam said. He seemed upset about it, but held together a brave face for her and the cops.

“I know, I’m sorry.” She said, catching Sam and the cops a little off guard. “I wanted to tell you last night, but it was late and wanted to tell you face to face, but you were already asleep when I got home, so I wanted to tell you before you heard from anyone else.” She grabbed Sam’s shoulder tighter and he her hand.

“Wait, how did you…” Xavier said, his voice a little too loud for the room.

“You were there last night, weren’t you?” George said.

“So were you, I think. I was the resident on-call for the ICU last night. I’m normally assigned to the Children’s side of the complex, but for some reason I was the resident in the ICU. We had a John Doe come in on Sunday with an ischemic stroke in the rear left quadrant of the brain following an acute coronary episode. While performing open heart surgery, the doctors discovered that the patient also had Stage 3A lung cancer which had spread to the lymph nodes. Patient experienced severe distress during his brief moments of lucidity. He was CTD by the time I arrived.” Bubbles said coldly, like she was describing a random patient and not one of Sam’s friends. She mindlessly tugged at her robe sleeves, making sure they covered her arms completely.

“CTD?” Sam asked.

“Circling the drain. My wife’s an ER nurse, she says that from time to time.” Xavier replied.

“Throughout the shift we found out that John Doe was Ray, but by that time it was already too late. His son put in a DNR earlier in the night. Attendee on shift called TOD at 9:27. I’m sorry hun. I didn’t know he was Ray until late at night, and the next time I saw him he was coding.” Sam was sad and a couple tears came out. Bubbles looked crestfallen as she told him what happened.

The two cops looked at each other, then waited for the couple to look back at them, signaling they were good to continue. Bubbles wiped Sam’s eyes with her sleeve.

“Sorry about that. So, where were we?” Sam asked. X looked back down to his notes.

“I was asking you to take me back through your past with Ray. You said that you’ve known him about 6 months.” X asked.

“Yeah, something like that.”

“How did you meet him?” X asked.

“Through Steve. Met them around the same time at a little get together back in the spring.” Sam said.

“And you ma’am?”

“Me? Last night, I guess. Don’t think I’ve met him face to face before then, and even then wasn’t sure until later on. What’s this about?” Bubbles asked. She knew what they were likely going to dig two and wanted to put a kibosh on anything that might come up.

“Just trying to figure out how well you knew Mr. Hibberton. You were one of the last three people to call or text him before his little accident. Also, his car was found in a parking lot for a building that Mr. Mapleton owns.” X said.

“I’ve never met Ray until last night. I’d call him more of a friend of a friend than an actual friend. He’s always bouncing around, up to some stuff.” She said looking around the room. Sam just held her hand while X took notes. George kept yawning between sips of coffee. Not just yawning, but obnoxious yawning. She noticed his yawning. “Need some more coffee?”

“Yes, please. I was just about to ask for another cup.” George said as he stood. Kim grabbed the cup from George and went to the kitchen to get her own cup. She didn’t ask how he took it, nor did she really care. She grabbed two cups of black coffee and a small bottle of creamer from the fridge. She loaded up hers with the French vanilla creamer before taking all three out to the living room. George tried to stifle a yawn as he grabbed the cup and creamer. “Thank you.”

“I was wondering if you knew why he left his car in one of your parking lots?” X asked.

“Probably because he’s cheap and hates paying for parking. He knows I own the building and when the staff is looking for people parking without a permit.” Sam replied.

“What do you know about Ray’s... hobbies or activities?” X asked, pausing to find the right phrase without letting on how much they knew.

Sam looked at Bubbles, and they both shrugged before turning to X. “Not much. He taught at the community college, liked to write but never published anything that I know of or that I’ve read, and was always finding an excuse to go out and party. Generally…”

“He was kind of a dick.” Bubbles said. “The party boy mentality is funny and cool in your 20’s, but it wears thin in your 50’s and 60’s. And I never heard of him with a girlfriend or his ex. Mostly just exploits from going to the bars and whatnot.”

“You concur with that Mr. Mapleton?” X asked.

“I mean I wouldn’t go so far as to call him a dick, but, yeah, he was a dick. But he was Steve’s dick, if that made sense. If things would go crazy, Ray would be there for him. Odds are he caused the craziness, but he would be there for Steve, and Steve felt he owed him. They were friends who went back a while, I think.” Sam said.

“Anything else he liked to do? Anything else you could think of?” X said, emphasizing that the anything else part.

The couple looked at each other again, and Sam started. “Well, I didn’t want to get him in any trouble before, but, well, um…”

“Ray was a cokehead.” Bubbles cut off her boyfriend. “He did a lot of drugs from what I can tell, and his tox screen would probably back it up as well. Cocaine was his drug of choice. I think that’s part of why he liked teaching at the community college. He had access to all of the drugs he could get.” She said as she took a sip of her coffee and adjusted her sleeves again, trying to ignore George’s incessant yawning. At least he was quiet about it this time.

“And your last few texts to him were Friday and Monday?” X asked.

“Correct.” Sam said.

“Why not Saturday or Sunday?”

“He asked to be left alone for the weekend, said he had some plans of his own.” Sam replied before continuing. “The three of us, us two and Steve, took a business trip up to Lake Hiawatha for the weekend. We left Friday, drove up, got there Friday night and checked in to the hotel.” Sam realized he made a mistake when he said business trip. Never volunteer information to the cops.

“Business trip? Thought you said it was a vacation.” X asked, paying a little closer attention to Sam and how he shifted in his seat.

“It was both.” Bubbles said.

“I had a business meeting. Well, we ended up having a business meeting up there. We had a free hotel room for the weekend. We went to the meeting while Steve hung around and relaxed. It’s his first weekend without kids in who knows how long.” Sam was beginning to ramble a little.

“What kind of business meeting? Sounds like you went to a meeting while Steve was stuck behind for the weekend.” X said.

“It wasn’t the whole weekend, just Friday night into Saturday.” Sam said.

“It was for a real estate deal, and the man we met asked us not to disclose any details outside of our attorneys.” Bubbles said.

“So he gave you a free room for a meeting? Where was this meeting? His office, a restaurant?” X asked, briefly glancing at the black stained towel lying on the floor that used to be on Kim’s hair. A stain that looks a hell of a lot like hair dye.

“Neither, it was on his boat.” Sam said as he was getting flustered remembering his meeting with Bob Kuntzmann, trying his best not to say anything incriminating.

“After we arrived in town, we cleaned up and joined our potential business partner on his yacht for a dinner meeting. He insisted we were a few miles away from shore before the meeting began in earnest.” Bubbles said. She read the room again, but something was different. George was no longer yawning while drinking his coffee, but paying absolute attention to the story they told. She could see he was putting something together.

“I just want to see if I understand this. The two of you asked a friend to join you for a free hotel stay at a very popular resort, on a Friday night on the busiest weekend of the year, meeting in the middle of the lake, late at night on a Friday because he values his privacy?”

“Yes. When you say it like that it sounds kind of crazy, but yes.” Sam said, getting nervous.

“Who were you meeting with?” X asked, keeping his voice as calm as he could. ‘This is not an interrogation. Not yet.’ He thought to himself, trying to keep calm.

“Our lawyers asked us not to-“

“What was the number on the Ballbuster Deluxe?” George said, putting his coffee down and cutting off the Asian doctor. He waited until everyone in the room stopped and looked at him before he continued. “That boat that you met Robert Kuntzmann on, it was named the Ballbuster Deluxe. What number is he up to now? 6? 7?”

Sam and Bubbles both looked like they saw a ghost in that moment. X put the pieces together almost as fast as George did, but wanted to see where this was going.

“8.” Bubbles said.

“Thank you. If you’ll indulge me, I’d like to skip ahead a few chapters, get us all on the same page. My partner and I are investigating Mr. Hibberton.” George said as he stood up and proceeded to walk around the living room. “You’re both smart enough to know that something is up when two police detectives who go out of their way to not describe which division they work with arrive on your doorstep early in the morning asking about your relationship with someone and they’re cagey about why they’re asking. As the kids would say, he was up to some ‘shady shit.’ We can’t say exactly what it was, but you brought up his drug use. He was found with a shitload of cocaine. At least 10 kilos. That’s a lot for the 1980’s. But that’s not all he was up to. Mr. Hibberton was also a predator. A serial predator, at best. Dr. Park, your intuition to stay away from Ray whenever possible was correct. But then that leads us to your trip up north to Lake Hiawatha. About 40 percent of all hard drugs coming into Chester County come from that area, and Hiawatha County is on lock. Only one person operates anything of importance or value in and out that place. And Mr. Mapleton, you are very successful at what you do. You’re making a small empire in the rental markets down here in Chester County. Everyone will have had to pay you rent or knows someone who has in the next 10 years. That puts you in a unique position to work with a certain individual up north who is basically barred from ever stepping foot down here again. He knows you’re big enough to notice but still small enough to control and work with. That makes you perfect for him. Now, everything you described, the comped hotel room on the busiest weekend of the year, the meeting at Friday night into early Saturday in the middle of the lake, a dinner proposal that probably had more than a little something extra to sweeten the deal and far enough away so that he’s the only one who’s listening and only he controls the narrative. How’m I doing so far?” George paused to take a sip of his coffee, reading the room. Sam looked terrified that he had been discovered but Dr. Park look… thrilled. Excited even. “You say you met with anyone other than ‘Big Ole Bobby K’ up north, your story is bullshit. No one is stupid enough to shit in his yard. But meeting with him now opens up a whole new can of worms. Bob can’t just be happy building resorts and casinos, no. He owns the underbelly as well. How long do you think it’ll take us to find out that Ray got his coke from Bob? Now that we know what we’re looking for, it’ll be about a week, tops. But you’re very protective about why you met with Bob. You’re trying to protect something, and odds are it’s perfectly legit and legal, with a nice twist of social justice and fuckery thrown in. Now, we could spend the next few weeks starting an official investigation into this new business venture, drag the lawyers into it, and go around in circles just to find out that on the surface everything is on the up and up, or you can tell us the project you’re building with his money.” He stopped right next to Sam, face cold and expressionless. He knew that portraying opposite emotions had disconcerting affects on people. Nervous people expect a freak out. When they get stone cold, almost bored disappointment, they panic. George made a career out of this.

He stopped his monologue, waiting for someone to make a move. The Asian woman looked almost giddy at this connection of logic the detective made while Sam took a moment to collect his thoughts.

“It’s…it’s affordable housing near well-to-do neighborhoods, reverse gentrification as he called it. He wanted to bring a taste of the ghetto back to Hillside Estates and other places where all the snooty rich people lived. He thinks that not only it’s needed, but will help and be funny as hell.” Sam blurted out, trying his damndest to only say what was absolutely necessary.

George laughed, then clapped Sam on the shoulder. “That old gag again. Love it. I hope one day he genuinely pulls it off, without the whole trying to use the apartments to smuggle drugs and kidnapping victims in and out of my county, like he's tried a few times before. Be very careful working with him. Always watch your back, and don’t ever go fishing with him. Ryland’s boys will be trawling the bottom of the lake looking for you two.”

“What, how-“

George cut Sam off. Dr. Park had a big grin on her face watching this. “Dr. Park recognized me from earlier, and not just from last night. I get that sometimes. You’ve probably seen or listened to a few True Crime podcasts over the years. But if you’ve had a conversation with Bob Kuntzmann that lasted more than 10 minutes, odds are he referred to some of his problems down south, one of them being ‘That Mother Fucker.’ I have put dozens of his associates in jail over the years, sent him up the river, and for a brief time I worked with him on a major case. Now, we’re like a snake and a mongoose. We go out of the way to needle each other, to keep the other honest. I’m the reason he can’t work in Chester County, and I’m also the reason he’s not on Death Row. To quote the Stones, please allow me to introduce myself.”

He took each of their hands one by one and shook them, saying their names as he did. “Mr. Mapleton, Dr. Park. My name is Dr. George Lewis, Detective, Chester County Police Department. I am That. Mother. Fucker.”
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To Be Continued...

[Shocker]

That’s one hell of an introduction, to close the chapter. I’m also certain we have almost caught up to where I read this on RU, only thing missing is the chapter Georg tells X that Bubbles failed his psychopath test, the yawning.

[LtBroccoli]

That’s one hell of an introduction, to close the chapter. I’m also certain we have almost caught up to where I read this on RU, only thing missing is the chapter Georg tells X that Bubbles failed his psychopath test, the yawning.

I wrote up to 89 but I'm not sure if I published past 86. Once I get to 89 I've got the last part of Sam and Bubbles, then anything new for Pharma. I started writing again yesterday and will go forward for a bit. Reading through the last few chapters gave me some fun ideas...

[LtBroccoli]

Chapter Tags: Nosex, Setup
Content Warnings: Time zone conflicts and breaking down what the cops know...
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Adam needs to take matters into his own hands as Aislinn and Bianca just want to put this behind them...
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Chapter 86(nosex,setup)



Aislinn’s life was turned upside down over the past week. She arrived in Harbor City just a week ago for the job of a lifetime and a chance to spend more time with her sister. Since then she’s been hired for said job, went on a vacation, hooked up with a really hot guy several times, was kidnapped, sexually abused, mentally and physically tortured, raped dozens of times, witnessed a murder, approached about signing a 6 to 7 figure NDA to keep everything quiet, watched her sister’s marriage crumble in real time, and found out right before she left for the airport that she’s going to be an aunt.

7 days. As she stared out the plane’s window, an old quote ran through her head. ‘There are some decades that feel like weeks, and some weeks that feel like decades.’ She checked her phone to make sure it was still the 21st century.

‘The Pacific never looked so lovely. All of our hopes and dreams could end in an instant with one slip of the controls. All our problems vanish in a second. No more work, no more families, no more responsibilities, no nothing. Just a slip into the drink in the middle of nowhere.’ Aislinn hadn’t had intrusive thoughts for an eternity, but going through all of what she did in such a short time was more than enough to rattle her to the core. Nothing like having your sister being made to eat you out in front of half a dozen people and cameras to shake one’s being.

As Aislinn looked out the window onto the nothingness below, she came to an epiphany. No matter what she did or where she went, she’d have to live with this. Was she going to let this define her forever, or would she do something about it? She’d put off these thoughts until she was on the plane. Monday was spent laying in bed and Tuesday went from flipping back and forth between crying uncontrollably, being a catatonic mess, or flipping out and throwing her stuff around. It wasn’t until late Tuesday that she calmed down enough to pack for her return trip to Melbourne and put her affairs into order. When she came out to say goodbye, she saw Morgy and Drew hugging, and they told her the news. The best bright spot out of this whole mess is that she’s going to be an auntie. But even that bright spot was short lived as she rushed to the airport, hopped on her first flight, caught the connection in L.A., then sat in the seat on the trip back home. For the first time since the news, she’s had a moment to herself. The one person she didn’t want to be with for the next 16 hours.

As she flew through the day, trying to ignore everything that happened to her was impossible, so she decided to do what she did best: confront the problem.

Aislinn pulled out her iPad as she listened to some classical music on her AirPods and pulled up Notes to get her thoughts in order. First things first, what to do for her health and recovery. After getting settled back in, she’d head to the clinic for a quick check, just to make sure none of those wankers gave her anything serious. Then, schedule time with a therapist. That one lady cop gave her a number for someone back in the states, but she will need someone at home. Third, self healing and self love. She’d allow herself a little while to have some self-destructive tendencies, but for the most part would need to fix her sights on how to get back to normal. She deserved to be happy, and she just came out of a harrowing ordeal. Maybe she did deserve that new Louis Vuitton bag after all. The next part was readying for her move to the states and preparing for her new job. As far as she knows, she has two housing offers up in the air. She could take over the lease on Morgy’s old place, or move in with them to their new place. Before the baby, she would’ve easily taken over the lease, but the thought of always being there for her new little ankle biter made her giddy. At least that was until the one a few rows in front spent the next few hours being miserable. Suddenly having her own place seemed like a much better use of company assets. She selected the apartment. If needed, she could find a roommate to help with bills and for the company. Other logistical stuff would be handled once things look a little more certain, but she didn’t want to get a gas car. She thought about a Tesla but the owner’s become a real cunt recently. Drew said that the company will probably get her a meeting with someone from the local Mercedes dealer. She had to admit, his ride was real nice.

She was halfway through the flight when she came back to the inevitable. She had to go through what happened and put her Barrister’s Wig on. She replayed everything in her mind, from coming back from the cabin to the cops leaving. She broke down her notes into the 5 W’s and a rough timeline. There was the Asian girl with the pink hair and green eyes, Kim. The hair was fake and most certainly the eyes as well. She couldn’t be sure about the tattoos, but wouldn’t put it past that skank to cover herself in fake tats for a crime. Didn’t matter though, according to the cops she was dead along with her boyfriend. But she was the only one she had a face for that she could identify. Her boyfriend, the fat one, was also dead. They were both Yanks, their accent was thick, though the fat one went out of his way to speak with an educated manner. What do they call them, Grammar Nazis? She noticed how he spoke versus everyone else, and how he corrected them out of habit. She called this one ‘Fat Dave.’ Aislinn wrote ‘Dead?’ next to his name since the cops said he was likely shot by the Bouchet Boys. That’s what that Deputy Aly called the group of hunters. ‘Skinny Dave’ was the bloke that was skinny as a rail that went out of his way to hurt Bianca. That one took perverse pleasure in making her suffer. Either he was a sadist or he had and axe to grind. She figured it was the latter, he was just too personal in his hatred. If he was such a sadist, why not do as bad or worse to anyone else? The final one was ‘Dad Dave’, and she wrote down what she could. He was tall, but not as tall at Tommy. He was a brutal fuck, and spoke in a fake voice almost the whole weekend. The only times he didn’t was when he was either surprised or convinced it was safe. Otherwise, it was a deep bass, like he was pretending to sing a funk song from the 70’s. That told her that he knew someone in the party, or they knew him. He spoke in his normal voice when it was just her and James was around, so James doesn’t know him either. Then there were the Judas twats, Joe and Mary. They came in so obnoxious no one noticed what Kim was doing in setting things up for the attack.

Aislinn wrote ‘Inside Job?’ on her note and circled it several times. She made two columns, For and Against. Suspicious Timing, Leaving, Joining in were on the ‘For’ side, while Beating, Rough Sex, Bad Luck, Just Arseholes, and Stockholm Syndrome were on the ‘Against’ side. After sitting on it for a while, she couldn’t decide whether Joe and his wife were in on the attack from the beginning, a case of bad timing, or switched to avoid worse and dove into their roles.

As she was going through a list of all of the acts she was forced to perform so she could recount them to her therapist down the line, she received an important email. It was from Marcus, Bob’s lawyer.

‘Dear Ms. Walker,

I hope this letter finds you well. As per our recent conversation, I have adjusted the terms of the settlement to something that I hope is more to your liking. The NDA terms are still the same, but I have modified the language regarding whether or not your party is ever approached by legal authorities in this matter. As you are aware, it is illegal in the United States to include a penalty clause for reporting criminal activity and so I have cleared that section up. Also, you would retain any rights to fictional works made off of any references to these events, as long as the publishing of said works would not occur until after the standard criminal statutes would expire. I was curious about your desire to make sure this clause was in full effect.

As far as restitution goes, we feel that the original proposed amount was an ample amount for the pain and trauma that you have unfortunately experienced. However, we have decided to increase the amount from $150,000 to $350,000, given the strong case you made for wanting this disappear into the rear view mirror, as well as an additional $50,000 per person you could help to agree to the newer terms. However, the bonus is only available until the end of Sunday, due to some restrictions we face on our end.

Please reply back at your earliest convenience, and I hope that you have a safe and healthy trip.’

Aislinn read through the legal form. Everything was on the up-and-up. There weren’t any crazy clauses like only applicable to left-handed veterans of the Falklands War, and only redeemable on the third Tuesday after every other Blue Moon following a Penrith playoff win. She thought about the figures for a bit. 350k was a lot of money, and getting an extra 50k per person just for getting everyone to do what they would likely do anyway was a bonus. With 5 other people receiving similar offers, she accepted almost a little too quickly. 350k plus a fully realized bonus comes to 600k. $600,000 would pay off a lot of debts, and her little niece or nephew would get a nice start to their college fund. She replied back to Marcus that the terms were fair and accepted them. Some back and forth through DocuSign and by the time she landed in Melbourne, everything was confirmed. When she came back to the states in a few weeks, she’d have enough in her savings to buy a house just like Morgy’s if she wants.


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Adam decided to take a work from home day from the police station as he said that he was feeling a little under the weather. He wasn’t so sick that he couldn’t come in, but just sick of commuting for the next couple days. At least that’s the excuse he gave to his boss, Captain Jenkins. In reality, he had a ton of work to do to protect his Club.

The man eponymously known as Pedro stood in front of his whiteboard hanging in his personal office, drinking a cup of tea as he looked at the sketch of his plan. He thought about what he knew, what his people knew, and most importantly what the cops knew. It was early in the morning on Wednesday. Ray died last night, and he was pretty sure Bubbles killed him. ‘She’s smart, so let’s assume it’s listed as natural causes.’ He would check in a few minutes to confirm, but wanted a list of all the things he would need to check upon intruding into the hospital’s IT systems. Same with the HCPD and CCPD crime labs.

Most computer security is based on the front door approach, with a little of locked filing cabinet mentality. The most secure part of a computer network is usually the web interface, the outward facing part of the world. Security experts see a web site just like the outside world sees a front door. This is where the most security is placed because this is the easiest way into the home. They’ll give credence to the windows and other entry points, but most protection is centered around 1 or 2 points of entry. Those points are monitored in most modern computer systems for unauthorized accesses. But this assumes that the intruder wasn’t supposed to have access in the first place. If someone opens the front door with a key or valid code, they’re good to go. Now, there might be some areas that are locked off from them without some elevated access, but that once again depends on whether or not they should have access.

Adam knows that he has to be careful when traipsing around inside of protected networks. It’s why he makes plans of what he has to do before doing them, and never plays them by ear. He knows that the external network for the Harbor City General Hospital and Children’s Hospital Complex is protected against several layers of intrusion, but the employee intranet isn’t as robust because it is designed only for authorized users. They never thought that anyone would hardcode a permanent Admin-level account into the main HR system under a slightly misspelled name of one of the mid-level managers that always worked from home, or that said account would have two others hidden in similar ways in case that one was discovered. Their system would read a login attempt to the account via VPN, authorize it, and go on it’s merry way. But he also knows that doing this several times in a day is suspicious. Once or twice a month won’t raise any red flags.

The police systems will be a different story. He knows the CCPD infrastructure very well. Fuck, he built the thing. He left just enough wiggle room in the system in case he ever needed to do something dangerous, but also knew where the acceptable risks were and how to exploit them. He knew the document system they used for storing old handwritten notes had issues with OCR on some handwriting and would interpose digits. He knew that if files were misplaced in the wrong case they could be lost forever without the proper tagging. He knew that the backup system was tied to a UPS that hadn’t been tested in a few months and the battery was due for replacement but wasn’t prioritized due to budget issues. He knew the RAID 10 system was mostly bulletproof as long as they didn’t lose multiple drives at once. He also knew that if the server was corrupted during a power outage while a drive swap occurred, they’d be lucky to recover anything from that server rack. As for the Harbor City Crime Lab, he’d pwned that mother fucker a decade ago out of shits and giggles and was waiting for just the right time to brick their system.

Adam knew he couldn’t attack both systems at once without casting a much wider net, and that would bring in the Feds. He was good, but not outsmart the NSA and FBI in a counterterrorism investigation good. If he attacked only these two police departments at this time, they’d ask why now, and the only new case that both of them are working on is Ray Hibberton’s. That would be just enough motivation to give someone like George Lewis a reason to tear the system down, even if he looked like a dog in an engine bay any time he visited the server room. Same with two accidents. One crazy set of circumstances to take down heavily protected police evidence is a rarity in itself. Twice at the same time sounds contrived. So Adam knew he would need either a new big case to serve as a distraction, or an accident and an attack. One had to look like a malicious attack, the other a series of unfortunate events. Since he had access to the Chester County system, that’s the one he’d set up the accident. Harbor City PD would be the victim of a hack. He just had to make sure he knew what to go for once the attack was on.

He listed what evidence he would have to destroy, then committed that list to memory and wiped the whiteboard clean. Phone records would be impossible, but he could destroy Harbor City’s copy of the phone’s image. Ray’s computer was hopefully already dead. The hard drives they recovered might have something, but they would have to go, too. He wouldn’t have access to the physical evidence, but the digital copies could die off. Assuming Ray didn’t write down every phone number and message during his coked out binges, there shouldn’t be any physical evidence. Ray knew a few people, but almost no one kept journals anymore. He thought about how he would destroy the hard drives, and was kicking himself for not thinking that part through before he sent the HCAF command. There’s a chance that he could’ve sent the command on a time delay to destroy any drives, but then he calmed down and remembered that there was no guarantee that those drives would be anywhere near his computer ever again.

Adam figured out how to destroy those drives. He would launch an attack inside of the Harbor City IT system that would corrupt the disk drives of their evidence locker, then reach out for those drives on the network and wipe them out. But since he didn’t know which drives those were, he’d have to wipe out all attached storage in the evidence locker, starting with the newest cases. He knew their offsite storage solution was a tape backup once a month, and that was performed on the 27th each month and that their cloud backup system was a push not pull system. He had a few weeks to work with but wanted to move fast. He could write this program and get it into the Harbor City system by the end of the day if he had do. Getting it in could’ve been a problem, if he didn’t already have access to their system thanks to being one of the county’s top IT professionals in the public sector. He knew their security because he helped them implement the latest rounds of updates. He knew where the weak points were to get in the network. They were hidden well enough that no one should expect to find them, but not so impossible to find that no one wouldn’t ever find them. He’d launch the attack from a series of VPN’s tied to an Iranian IP address and leave some vague references to All Cops Are Bad, or Antifa or some shit like that. This would cause him to get called into the office to secure CCPD’s systems, and while doing that he’d insist on doing a safety check. While that’s happening, a power outage would occur just as a series of unfortunate events took place, corrupting the data they received from Harbor City PD in the last two days.

Adam went to work writing this nasty little bug. It was bigger than a virus, but didn’t have the characteristics of a Trojan or anything else like that. It was a small piece of malware that once it was on the system would give itself root access to reformat and rewrite every drive on the rack, starting with the newest files and volumes and moving through the rest of them. By the time anyone would know what was wrong, anything for the last few weeks would already be overwritten with 1’s. He’ll put a front-end message up saying to pay a certain amount of Bitcoin to a specific address that will point to the Iranians. CCPD will think they got hacked by ransomware while the IT staff tries to save what they can. He’d set this up so that it looked like it came from Ray’s drives, too, as a failsafe against being read.

He thought about how to erase the phone itself when the simplest idea hit him. He wouldn’t do anything to it. He’d change the case number and tracking number on the phone and replace it with one from a different phone. Ray’s phone would be lost and one day when the heat died down, it would get thrown out with some other case’s stuff.

As he made his way through writing this little nasty, the WhatsApp rooms lit up with activity. That’s pretty rare for a Wednesday morning. It looked like Steve, Sam, and Bubbles were chatting away. Adam looked at the messages and nearly ignored them, until he saw the newest message from Bubbles.

“WHY WAS THAT MOTHER FUCKER IN MY LIVING ROOM!?”


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Detectives Lewis and Harrison entered their unmarked maroon Ford Police SUV after taking a slow walk out of Sam’s house. After George’s little monologue sucked the air out of the room, there wasn’t much else to talk about. Dr. Park had a few questions for George off the record about the First Union Holy Church case, but generally speaking there wasn’t much more they could do. Xavier entered the driver side of the car. George closed the door behind him. The shorter white detective sat in the seat and fumed to himself until the car was safely away from the house. At the next stop sign, George yelled.

“FUCK! FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK! MOTHER FUCKER!” George screamed, pounding his right fist on the door panel. “I fucked up. I went too hard.”

“Gee, ya think?” X said sarcastically. George glared at him, but the older man knew when his partner was right. “Yo, next time you want to do a soliloquy, quote Hamlet. Don’t do it in my interview.” X drove the car out of the suburban plan that Sam Mapleton lived in. “What are we thinking?”

“From before I shit in the punch bowl or after?” George replied, looking out the window.

“Before. Wasn’t expecting those two to work with Bob, but I get the feeling that that’s not why they know Ray. We need to meet up with Carly, trade notes from her conversation with that other guy, Steven Wilcox. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he was up to something.” X said in his booming, deep voice.

“First off, she failed my psychopath test. I must’ve yawned for 20 minutes, not once did she yawn back. Sam was too nervous or out of it to notice me, but Dr. Park not only noticed me yawning, even subtly called it out but did not instinctively yawn. Seeing another person yawn is a reflex, and only those deep in the Cluster B Personality Disorder spectrum don’t react instinctively by yawning. I’m not saying she’s a psychopath, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she was. Second, she killed Ray. I’d put dollars to donuts that she overdosed him on morphine or something else on purpose, but with how bad he was there was no way he was leaving the hospital in one piece. Figure he had maybe a 20% chance of making it through the week and even less to ever recover. But suddenly the anesthesiologist from the Children’s Hospital side of the building is pulling a shift in the ICU. She knows how dangerous the combination of drugs and treatments he was on could be, but increases his pain meds 10 fold, claiming it was because he was in constant pain. He was out like a light most of the night and non-communicative the rest of the time I was there. What did he do, blink in morse code with his good eye for more happy juice? Finally, she said she didn’t know who he was until later, but his records indicated a high drug dependency, hence why she had to up the dosage to the maximum. That much morphine would knock out Andre the Giant, and here she is prescribing it to a cokefiend after open heart surgery. But even with her damn near confessing to that part of the story, we’d have nothing. She was the intern in an area doing a job that should’ve been covered by her Attendee. They’d sign off on it to avoid a malpractice suit from the family.”

“Yep”. X said, driving them onto the main highway of Farrell Township. “You notice that she just dyed her hair?”

“No, didn’t see that.” George said with a slight tone of surprise.

“Yeah, when she came down before she knew we were there, she was toweling off her hair. When she dropped it, I noticed a few black stains on it that matched her hair. She had just dyed it right before coming down and it was still wet. Tells me a few things.”

“Like what?” George asked as X drove.

“She dyes her hair a lot. This wasn’t a Clairol grey cover box job, this was more like one of them freaky color jobs going back to black. My wife was in that phase for a bit. Sexy as hell with the blue hair, too. She did this mostly blind and quick. Black is a cover up color. Her hair is naturally black, so why dye it that deep black again? Next, Kim either just moved in or doesn’t stay there all the time. We know that Sam bought the house a couple months ago, only his name is on it. They’re close enough that she sleeps here after working at a hospital in Collegetown where he owns a bunch of apartments. That’s a decent drive when she has a place a few blocks from the hospital. Most recent change of address for her still points to the apartment that’s 6 blocks from the hospital. But she hasn't dyed her hair here yet until today. She used a fresh towel that’s now gonna be her hair dying towel here.” X said.

“A hair dying towel?” George asked.

“Yep. Most women that dye their hair on the regular will have a dedicated towel for dying cause they will stain it. Either Dr. Park doesn’t care about staining his towels, or she’s never done this here.”

“And you think she likes to change her hair color a lot?”

“Too young for a ton of gray, though she’s got the right job for it, but doesn’t strike me as the type to worry about what others think of her appearance. Didn’t that crazy ass story from your friend mention an Asian girl with pink hair?” X said. George nodded.

“It’s thin. Real thin. But not too thin to make sense. Sam, Steve, and Kim being part of that rape gang with Ray would tie a couple things together. How long did he say they were dating, a few months? Kind of fast to move someone in.”

“Yeah…”. X paused as the SUV came to a stop light. “She’s out of his league, by a country mile. He’s at best a 5, and she’s a solid 8 to 9. She could easily do much better than him, so why him?”

“He’s rich. Well, rich enough. That adds a few points right there. And she’s probably got daddy issues. Find me an Asian doctor that doesn’t have overbearing parents and I’ll say you found a unicorn. But now they know that we know that they’re working with Bob, and they’ll be twice as cautious.”

The light turned green and X accelerated to keep up with traffic. “You think he’s part of this Club thing, too?”

George thought long and hard on the question, chewing on his lip as he thought. “No, don’t think so. He couldn’t keep quiet about it long enough to take part. Besides, he’s living like a king up in Hiawatha County, he doesn’t need to come down and do this. And with as much attention as he brings to himself, I doubt any Rape Club would even think about letting him in. If he wants a piece of ass, he’ll either pay for it, take it on his boat, or kidnap it like that Madeline Kosar girl. This is real fucking thin.”

“Yeah. Let’s talk to Carly back at the station, we’ll put this all together.”



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Bianca was glad to be back in the office, and even more glad to see that Morgana was back too. One day at home was enough to drive her mad, and there’s only so much stress cleaning she can do before little Sophie knows that something’s wrong with Mom. In between work tasks she scrubbed the whole house down from top to bottom, just trying to find something to do to distract her from the pain of what she went through. The physical marks were going away, but she knew the mental scars would be there for a long time. But as much as she wants to go see a therapist about this, it would be just another bullshit thing for her ex to use against her. Which is why she was taken aback by the message she received from Aislinn.

‘I signed my deal this morning? I’m getting a little bonus for each of us that signs. U in? Split it with you.’

She was confused by the text, and asked about the question mark after morning. ‘Timezones’ was the answer. Aislinn nodded. It wasn’t whether she questioned whether she signed it, but what time of day it was for her. They went back and forth a bit on how. Bianca knew she was going to sign, her only question was how to make sure that her ex-husband Phil never saw a dime of it. Aislinn recommended putting the bulk of the settlement into an irrevocable trust for Sophie, payable only to her after she turned 18. Only Bianca and her designated executor would have access to it before then. This way she could avoid taxes on it while keeping it away from Phil. As long as that other lawyer Marcus agreed to things, they could make it work.

About 10 minutes later her phone rang. It was Marcus to confirm details. She would receive the same offer that Aislinn received at 350k minus taxes, and all of it would be listed in a trust payable only to Sophie upon turning 18, and to avoid her name being attached to this at all, the payment would come from an LLC that was set up for this specific reason out of state. By the time Phil’s lawyers would even think to look for it, her 11-year-old daughter will be starting her Master’s degree. A few emails later and Bianca signed. She spent a good portion of her afternoon looking into how much Stanford would cost in a few years.



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George, X, and Carly sat in the bullpen of the Chester County Special Victims Unit. They recently changed the name from Sex Crimes, so the door still showed the old name, but with some smartass putting a post-it over it. The bullpen was a dimly lit conference room with a large whiteboard on one side. A large conference table took up most of the room while the three detectives sat across the room from the white board. A laptop was hooked up to a projector. From it, Carly projected a picture of Ray Hibberton. It was his faculty picture from the previous year. Ray’s photo was up front and center in the board. Next to him were pics of the victim Meg, her roommates Crystal and Zoe, Ray’s son David, Steven Wilcox, Samuel Mapleton, and Dr. Kim Park. Though, it took a couple tries to get the right Dr. Park’s picture on the screen. Next to them were a list of several potential cases that had a similar M.O. to Ray’s. There’s a note called ‘Aly’s Story.’ No known connection between the attacker and victim, but everything was recorded. The three detectives stared at the screen for a long moment before George spoke.

“So, let’s walk through this again. Ray’s a teacher over at 4C. Meg goes to HCU. No overlap there or with her roommates. Going through his belongings, he had a freshly made key and what looked like a schedule for Meg’s whereabouts. So someone knew her. But not Ray. The roommates were out of town and were even shown on ESPN in the band if you know where to look. Ray breaks in to her house with a copy of the key, and waits for her to get home. He sets up the cameras, which he recorded himself doing. Then waits and zaps her with a stun gun when she comes in her room. He bags her, tags her, then just as he’s going for seconds, Mother Nature says fuck you in particular and tries to kill him. Meanwhile, the day before Sam, Steve, and Kim go on a road trip up north. They call Ray, he says thanks but no thanks, I got a thing. No response when they call and text him on Monday on their way home. GPS puts them in a gas station right outside of Chester County, about halfway between here and Lake Hiawatha Resorts. At this time Ray wakes up, but his brain is applesauce. Fast forward to the next night, and an anesthesiologist resident in Children’s gets assigned to the ICU of Harbor General, where our good Mr. Hibberton is circling the drain. Just after the son David signed off on the DNR order that a woman doctor he didn’t get her name told him about how shitty it is to get CPR done, Old Ray here gets an OD of morphine and croaks. We also find out that Kim and Sam are working with Bob Kuntzmann up at Lake Hiawatha. What else we got?” George asked, looking at the screen.

“Mr. Wilcox says he met Ray a couple years ago and became friends with Sam earlier this year. He was vague with names and dates when pushed. Says that Ray would work with him from time to time when he either wanted the extra money or had the extra time. Also says Sam had an offer for a business trip and they used the weekend to hang out and get away from everything. They tried not to spend any money up there aside from things they had to put on cards. Says that he took a couple grand in cash with him just in case so he wouldn’t dip into his bill money. Before I told him about Ray’s death he was undressing me with his eyes, and couldn’t help himself after things calmed down.” Carly said, referring to her notes on her laptop and tablet.

“Dr. Park and Mr. Mapleton are in a relationship, not sure how or when they met. Sam seemed to almost forget that she was there when he let us in. She wasn’t expecting us when she came down. She was just coming out of the shower in a silk bathrobe, drying her hair. Most likely just dyed it as well, as there were stains on her towel. She failed George’s Psychopath Test when she didn’t yawn back at him after he yawned at her over and over again. Dr. Park was the resident on staff when Ray died, and she administered the lethal dose of morphine that killed him. Her story didn’t line up with why she was assigned there, but the Attendee signed off on the death certificate as complications from heart attack and stroke as cause of death. Son doesn’t want an autopsy. Tox screen came back, Ray loved his nose candy more than life itself. Units on site found 10 kilos in his pad.” X said.

“At least. He had more that was opened up but used. Either this guy was selling on the side or he went to the Costco of Cocaine to buy in bulk.” Carly replied.

“Now, all of this is well and good and nothing really sticks to anything, except 3 other things. Next slide please.” George said, and waited as Carly progressed to the next slide. “Like I said, 3 things are off. First, the vagueness of how they all met. No one went into details about how they met these great friends and lovers, it was all just random meetups at bars. X, when you met your wife Serena, if I pressed you for details would you just say ‘at a club’ or would you give me the long story?”

“It’s my wife and I almost like you, I’d give you the deets.” X said with a small chuckle.

“Cause that’s human nature. We remember when and how we meet our partners, good friends and the like because those are pivotal moments. Only reason to obfuscate that is they got shit to hide, which leads us to number 2, their descriptions. Ray matches the description of at least 2 other attacks over the years, and Steve fits a broad description of a couple others. There’s at least a few reports from over the years where a good looking tiny Asian girl drugged and/or assaulted some women, each time the description was similar but the hair was a different color. And X saw that Dr. Park had just dyed her naturally black hair black. Which implies-“

“Which implies she just covered up.” Carly said, interrupting George. “Which then brings us to point 3, the crazy story from Aly Holmes up at LHR over the weekend. Which described a group of assailants that included a barrel-chested man with a dad bod, a fat guy, and an Asian girl with pink hair covered in tattoos. Which if she put on temporary tats, they’d start flaking off right about now and would be easy to peel off and remove.”

“Didn’t the Sheriff say that the pink haired lady was chopped up and turned into bear food?” X asked.

“Aly doesn’t buy it, thinks the guy that said that is on the take. Still, they’re not pursuing anything with the pink haired lady or the fat man.” George said.

“But let’s assume they are part of this rape gang and they went all the way up to LHR. Why? Why not just do the whole thing down here? Why drive 3 hours each way to do what they could….” X’s voice trailed off as an idea hit him in the face. “This wasn’t their first attempt. They tried something here and it failed. It was small in comparison. Something went wrong, like they lost access to the house or a guest came to visit or a victim changed habits. What did Aly tell us about those other people?” X said.

Carly was already ahead of him, pulling up info for another slide she put together. This listed all of the people that Aly told George about. On the screen showed a beautiful blonde woman and her tall husband on their wedding day, a skinny man who looked like Clark Kent, a middle-aged man with very angry eyebrows, a skinny brunette from a modeling site, and a very attractive well-endowed woman in her 40’s all on the left side of a slide named ‘LHR CABIN’. The right part of the slide showed a picture of Kim Park with poorly photoshopped pink hair, Sam Mapleton, Steven Wilcox’s headshot from LinkedIn, a skinny yet well-defined swimmer, a picture of Kate Gossling, the prototypical Karen, and Stone Cold Steve Austin covered in blood.

“Really, that’s who you pick for Karen and Ken?” George said, laughing a bit.

Carly continued, using the mouse to highlight each person as she described them. “Aly described Mary as a real Karen, and Kate Gossling was the OG Karen. And Joe bled like a stuffed pig after getting hit in the face, and I thought Stone Cold from back in the day. But the story goes like this. Everyone here on the left works at or with Pharma’s HQ. Angry eyebrows and Clark Kent are James St. Croix and Thomas Gearheardt. They’re working in construction of the new HQ. The married couple is Morgana and Drew Williams from Melbourne. She’s in some auditing department or something like that, working for Bianca Jones, the mom of the group. The skinny model here is Aislinn Walker, Morgana’s sister. Drew and Aislinn are both barristers, lawyers down under. Even got those funny powdered wigs and everything. Drew and Aislinn work for Pharma’s legal department. When they came up to LHR, it was just the six of them and everyone hooked up in pairs, though Aly suspects that Thomas, Tommy to his friends, is screwing Morgana and has been for a while. Fast forward to Saturday morning, they all go on a hike. They split up, but are close enough to call out to each other. Tommy and Aislinn go off the trail to knock boots while Morgana and Drew are talking about her morning sickness symptoms being something more. James and Bianca run into the Asian girl who calls herself Kim. I’m using Dr. Park’s picture with pink hair. She’s pretty bad off, showing signs of a bad fall and a possible concussion. Bianca goes mother hen on her and tries to take care of her. While James and Bianca are taking her back, Joe and Mary, our Stone Cold and Karen, show up and she tries to kick these guys out of their own cabin. Everyone gets back and a big fight breaks out. As they’re going around in circles, Kim suddenly feels better and takes position by the back door. 3 men carrying guns enter the cabin and hold the place up. The three guys were described as a fat guy, a skinny guy, and a muscular dad-bod type. They called themselves Dave, so I’ll say that none of them are named Dave. They subdue the crowd but at some point Drew and Joe try to play hero. Two of the Dave’s subdue Drew and the other either pistol whips or buttstock smacks Joe in the face. He falls to the ground, gets up, and has a crimson mask like Stone Cold Steve Austin from his Wrestlemania match against Bret Hart. I watched a lot of wrestling with my dad growing up. Anyway, the Dave’s play rock paper scissors on who gets to fuck Morgana first, then they all take turns on all of the women, and even Kim gets herself a piece of Drew’s ass. The Aussies hate Mary with a passion and so when given the opportunity to fuck her over, they do and vice versa. They all get separated at night where the rapes continue. Sunday, Mary and Joe switch sides as long as they don’t get hurt anymore they’ll do anything the Dave’s say. Another day and night of gang rapes and everyone is spent. Then the crazy shit on Monday morning.”

Carly advanced to the next slide. This listed the “Bouchet Boys” along with a few other names that Aly told George about. Most of them are mug shots of the various members of the Bouchet Boys. A couple are known associates of Bob’s, one is of Bob, one is a pic of Pete Davidson from SNL as a known accomplice, and finally a pretty woman with black hair and two large dogs.

“Monday morning, just as everyone’s leaving, Kim loses her phone and Fat Dave stays behind. The Bouchet Boys, Hiawatha’s Most Wanted, rolls up after gaining a half a dozen members including one fat fuck who gets first dibs on Morgana’s ass. Aly thinks that’s Bob Kuntzmann. Another round of gang rapes, now including Kim getting some just desserts and a sex slave in training that matches the description of Madeline Kosar, heiress to the Kosar Development Group and missing since last week. Hell, even the dogs got in on the act. At some point the boys drag Kim out into the lot and supposedly whack her. Her and Fat Dave are listed as deceased but unidentified. Later on the K9 unit finds bits of her clothes covered in blood and a toe. Still waiting on the ID to come back on her. Aly suspects it’ll be someone sort of connected to Bob’s business. Then the staff shows up, sees 3 women and a man tied up in the living room, and calls Bob, then Bob’s lawyer, then the Sheriff on the non-emergency channel. They refuse to pursue charges in the matter and are acting like they just want this behind them.”

Carly finished, reaching for a bottle of water.

“So what are the ties between these groups?” George asked.

“Mr. Wilcox looks like he’s the only one with a direct connection to anyone from the cabin. He works at Red Briar Security on their corporate side and appears to work with Pharma with their construction projects. Where James and Thomas work.”

“That's thin.” George said, looking at the screen.

“Real thin.” The other two cops said in unison. They all looked at the screen, wondering how and if the pieces fell together.

“Anything else happen that was strange? Any plans thrown off at the last minute?” X asked, rubbing his chin as he leaned back in his chair.

“What are you getting at?” George asked.

“Do we know what their original plan was? Like, how many people were supposed to go to the cabin at first?” X clarified his thoughts as Carly looked through her notes and George went through his texts with Aly. They both had the same info, but Carly was faster.

“Got it. According to Aly’s interview, Aislinn and Bianca were last minute additions. Aislinn arrived Wednesday as a surprise and Morgana invited Bianca at the end of work Thursday.” Just as Carly read that, something clicked into place in George’s mind.

“That's why they called Ray. Backup. Ray wasn’t part of the original plan, and neither were the other two girls. It was just Morgana. She was the initial target. At least one of those 3 guys are on the inside. How else do those people know which cabin to go to?” George waved at the three men on the left. “I’ve got dollars to donuts that at some point in the previous month or two Morgana had a close call with one of those men, she just didn’t know it at the time or didn’t know it was them. That’s why this happened out of town. And they called Ray for backup because 3 people with guns could subdue 4 people for a weekend and have their fun, but 6 is pushing it, especially when they want to rape 3 of them and film it. That’s 1 person on camera and gun duty. They need more people. That’s also where Skinny Dave comes in. He was likely brought in at the last minute.”

“And the Karens, they on the inside too?” X asked. George thought about that for a moment.

“I wanted to say no, but why that cabin? Out of all of the cabins they could’ve gone to for a romantic holiday filled with bondage gear and cameras, why this one? It was the plan. But they showed their faces so they had to just be there until given an opportunity to flip. Worst case scenario, they’re in on it. Best case, bad timing. Let’s assume worst case.”

“So, who would be the inside man?” X asked.

“What do we know about them?” George asked. Carly was already 3 steps ahead of them.

“No one in the first two groups have any priors. Bianca Jones has a few calls about disturbing the peace and harassment, but it looks like the standard asshole ex-husband game. No one else has anything other than a couple speeding tickets except Ray. DUI back in the 90’s and some calls about domestic disturbances. He was a POI in a couple of these previous cases, but always either had an alibi or we couldn’t tie him to the crimes. James has lived in Harbor City for at least a decade, Tommy’s from Chicago, went to school here for a few years and stuck around after getting a real job. Drew and Morgana came to Harbor City a couple years ago and just bought a house in your neck of the woods, George. They’re in Hillside, almost neighbors. Aislinn was in town for a job interview and Bianca was a late addition.”

“Maybe that’s why Clark Kent looks familiar. Think he was at Chuck’s 4th party. I’m ruling out those three women right off the bat, and Drew. This rape club requires people to be available to make trades work, and there’s no way he can catch a redeye from Melbourne because Cindy from accounting is home alone tonight. It’s at least Angry Eyes, if not Clark Kent as well. What do their social medias look like?” George asked. Carly was pulling up Instagram and LinkedIn for both.

“Tommy is private on Insta and Facebook. LinkedIn is pretty normal for both. James only shows pictures of architecture. He only follows a few other architects and the occasional sports match. As for the rest, Bianca is on lockdown. Aislinn has a public page showing some modeling work but it doesn’t get updated often and a personal one that’s private. Drew is also private. But Aislinn’s public page shows that everyone here except Bianca follows it. Dr. Park is private. Sam doesn’t have one but Mapleton Realty has a public Insta. Steve only has a LinkedIn page, where he’s connected to Drew, Tommy, James, and somehow you, George.”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Chuck Hartman knows both of you. Aside from Steve’s LinkedIn, no other connections.” Carly said. She looked through her notes as the men stared at the screen. “Aly said she had the feeling that Tommy and Morgana were hooking up from the interview. Tommy tried to gloss over part of the assault where they made him and Morgana have sex in front of Drew, and Drew’s body language said that he suspected them of having an affair. Aly says that Tommy likely tried to downplay it during the interview but thinks it’s because he was a little too good at cucking Drew.”

George looked at the screen for a moment. “So, here’s what I’m thinking. Either Tommy or James, maybe both are part of this club. If both, James was in first. He sees the pretty Morgana and wants a piece of her, but knows he can’t have her. So he sets her up for one of these other guys, either Steve or Mikey Phelps there to attack her for him. But something goes wrong. Maybe it’s a home invasion but they moved and no longer have access or schedules changed or she now works from home. Whatever. This backfires, and Tommy’s rented a cabin up at LHR. James calls up Steve and tells him the plan. It’s crazy, but he’s in. He sets this whole thing up, but James finds out at the last minute that Morgana’s sister and boss are coming. He could back out, but can’t or won’t. He’s in too deep, so he tells Steve to bring some backup. Steve calls Ray, no answer. Steve calls Phelps, no answer. Steve calls Joe and Mary, they respond and are on their way. At some point Phelps responds that he’s in. Ray’s a no-show because he has a date in Collegetown. East Oakville to be precise. They work out a plan where they use the good doctor’s charm to get into the cabin and begin the Labor Day Fuckfest. Wait, James is boys with Bob, right?” George asked. Carly checked her notes once again.

“Yep. Aly said that James swore at Bob like no one she’s ever heard. They come back a few minutes later arms over each other like they had a good laugh.”

“Won’t. He won’t back out because he’s shitting in Bob’s yard, and Bob wants a piece. The only way he’ll let James do this is if he gets some of Morgana’s ass, but that requires the first part going through. That’s why all the backup. And we won’t know what was up with Bob’s part until we find out who that toe belonged to. They wanted to fake a death, and used Dr. Park to cover it up.” George said, leaning back in his chair as he sipped his coffee.

“What about Tommy? He could be the inside man, or an extra insider.” X said.

“How you thinking?” George asked.

“Tommy’s got a crush on Morgana, damn near stalking her. Let’s say they’re knocking boots. He wants her all to himself, get Drew out of the way. Drew’s already half out the door with his job. Can’t kill him, she divorces him she gets nothing if she’s cheating, but maybe use this to make Drew want to leave. Tommy sets up the previous attack and tries to all White Knight her, but it falls through. That’s why he rents the cabin, makes sure that plans don’t fail a second time. But all the extra people throw a ripple in things and he’s now balls deep in a crazy plan he has to see through.” X said.

George nodded along. “I like it. Either one of James or Tommy is a stalker, or both.”

“But what can we do with this?” Carly asked. She pulled up a map of where they were and where the attack took place. “This is way out of our jurisdiction. Even if all this happened like you said, unless we can prove that part of this took place down here, we’ve got nothing.”

“Except Ray’s part in this and his ties to the rest of the Club. If we can prove they included him on the conspiracy down here, we might have a case for this attack. Otherwise, we have to keep our eyes out for them in the future. What did we get from Ray’s raid?”

“A bunch of crazy notes, some hard drives, a laptop, a phone, and a bunch of old tech. Let me see if City is done cataloging things yet.” Carly navigated to the web portal where Chester County Police can interact with City cases that both are working on. She tried to log in, but kept getting error messages like ‘ACCESS DENIED’ and ‘THIS SERVICE IS NOT AVAILABLE’. “Hmm.”

“What Hmm?” George asked, not liking the sound of Carly’s reaction.

“Connection must be down. I’ll check to see what we got from the phone on our side.” Again, Carly navigated to a different interface, this one for Chester County Crime Lab. She went through the process to pull up the phone’s image, but was met by another problem. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. X, did that phone have anything on it?” Carly asked, looking at the large black man.

“Yeah, locked and everything. Had a pic of an old dog on the lock screen.”

“You swear?”

“Absolutely. I followed correct procedures for bagging and tagging the evidence.” X said.

“Well how did this happen?” Carly navigated to the phone in the crime lab. It showed an Android phone, reset to factory settings.

“IT WAS NOT LIKE THAT WHEN I PUT IT IN EVIDENCE YESTERDAY!” X’s voice grew louder and louder as he forgot that he was inside and ignored his hearing aid.

“X, I’m just saying-“ Before Carly could say anything, three loud knocks on the door preceded Captain Janella Jenkins opening the door in a rush. The light skinned black woman in her late 50’s to early 60’s stuck her head in.

“We’ve got a problem guys, City’s crime lab got hit by a hacker.”

-------------------------------------------------------------

To Be Continued...

[Shocker]

Looks like Adam gets sloppy.

[Grimnir]

The story may be nearing the end but it clearly isn't over yet. It will be interesting to se what kind of a last hurrah will end it.

[LtBroccoli]

Chapter Tags: Nosex, setup
Content Warnings: Unsafe IT practices and recrimination
-------------------------------------------------------------

A crisis in the crime lab clears one threat for the Club, but may awaken another...
-------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter 87(nosex,setup)


“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. X, did that phone have anything on it?” Carly asked, looking at the large black man.

“Yeah, locked and everything. Had a pic of an old dog on the lock screen.”

“You swear?”

“Absolutely. I followed correct procedures for bagging and tagging the evidence.” X said.

“Well how did this happen?” Carly navigated to the phone in the crime lab. It showed an Android phone, reset to factory settings.

“IT WAS NOT LIKE THAT WHEN I PUT IT IN EVIDENCE YESTERDAY!” X’s voice grew louder and louder as he forgot that he was inside and ignored his hearing aid.

“X, I’m just saying-“ Before Carly could say anything, three loud knocks on the door preceded Captain Janella Jenkins opening the door in a rush. The light skinned black woman in her early 60’s stuck her head in.

“We’ve got a problem guys, City’s crime lab got hit by a hacker.” Her voice had a hint of panic to it that was imperceptibly there. Something had her rattled, and she tried her best to keep things calm in front of her detectives. Janella left the room, telling them to follow her without saying a thing.

“What the fuck?!” George said, standing while pushing his chair back so fast it hit the wall behind him. X followed suit. Carly locked the screen of her laptop, grabbed her gear, and followed a few steps behind. The three of them made the quick walk down the hall to Captain Janella’s office. She was already on a conference call when the detectives entered.

“What’s going on? We muted?” George asked, and Janella nodded. Several voices talked over each other on the call, but eventually one of them took charge. It was Deputy Chief Cartier.

“Are our systems affected by this hack?” The Chief asked, no one responded for a moment until Carly motioned for Janella to unmute the phone.

“Chief, it’s Graspper. Can we get a sitrep? I was trying to access the City Labs when I kept getting error messages, then saw some weirdness on our side.”

“What kind of weirdness?”

“Well sir, we went to access the contents of a phone that a detective confirmed had information on it, only to see that it was wiped clean. Nothing on it.” Carly said.

“Chief, it’s Adam.” A different voice came on, that of the IT guy. “I’m driving in now. Just got off the phone with City’s IT team, it’s pretty bad. I locked down what I can remotely but want to be sure nothing’s happening, so I’m on my way in. I’ll be in there in about 20 minutes, can someone set up one of the conference rooms for me?”

Janella spoke up. “You can use our bullpen, what do you need?”

“A spare router, cables, some power outlets, Carly, and some coffee.” Adam said.

“Why me?” Carly asked.

“Cause you’re the only one there who has a slight inkling how this tech is supposed to work and I might need help. I’ll be there in 20 minutes. In the meantime, spread the word, don’t let anyone else connect to City’s computers. Be there in 20.” Adam said.

“10-4. Spreading the word.” Carly pulled out her phone and was already on two group chats around the precinct telling people not to connect to the City Lab site. Several responses back and forth confirmed, though a few were bitching about how things weren’t working right.

“Adam, when you said bad, how bad is it?” Deputy Chief Cartier asked.

“Real bad. East Oakville precinct lost everything for the past week. I mean everything. Looks like something got in to their lab system and jacked everything up. The whole server farm needs rebuilt, everything is deader than Disco. Their best most recent backup is from last Thursday. They shut down a lot of systems but a couple of laptops were affected as well, older ones that were behind on updates. Looks like a ransomware, but they don’t know how it got in. Once I get in and we lock down all our stuff, I can help them restore from their backups, hopefully they didn’t lose too much.”

The officers in Captain Jenkins’s office gave each other a look that could best be translated as ‘Computers suck.’

“We’ll be here.” Janella said before muting the call.



—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————



It was close to 45 minutes before Adam was in the office, and another 20 minutes before he was up and running in the bullpen. He had his laptop hooked up to a router switch he dragged from his office, along with a few extra cables. After a lot of muttering to himself and swearing at his computer, he yelled out “It’s about fucking time, you cocksucker!” This was his clue to everyone else that he finally had the County’s servers safely protected from whatever shit was going on over at the East Oakville precinct. He projected his screen to the wall for everyone to see what was going on. George, X, and Janella stood along the back wall while Carly sat at the table on her laptop, following his instructions for testing.

“So, it’s pretty bad.” Adam said, turning around to speak to the cops behind him. Before anyone could ask the ‘how bad is it’ logical response, he kept going. “Basically, we’re lucky we didn’t lose everything on our end. Still trying to find root cause, but they accessed something that had a nasty virus on their side which pwned them pretty hard. Our security is a little better, but I had to sever all connections with the city’s crime labs until they fix their shit.”

“What caused this?” Janella asked, arms crossed taking in the scene in front of her.

“Best I can see, I guess they accessed an infected device or drive with a pretty nasty bug on it that spread to the rest of the crime lab server before they could shut it down. Mitch over at City’s sending over logs soon, that might answer what happened.” Adam said. As he said that, a new mail notification popped up on the screen. “Speak of the devil.” Adam clicked on the mail and opened a plain text file that looked like a bunch of gobbledygook to everyone else in the room. Carly could make out a little bit here and there, but everyone else was out of their element. “Hmm…. Oh, that’s not good.” Adam said, pausing as he scrolled through the logs.

“What?” George asked.

“Looks like it was something from that case you guys are working on. See right there? That is a command to run a script from one of the drives attached to the server which then called an encryption technique which locked up the entire drive. My guess is ransomware, if they can ever get in. Carly, I’m sending an IP for you to connect to. Tell me what comes up.” Adam said.

“One sec.” Carly opened the link he sent and a moment later, she saw a weird message on her screen. “Ransomware. There’s a QR code here and a URL to a bitly link. I can’t make this out. I don’t recognize the language.” Carly said. X walked over and looked at her screen.

“Persain. Saw this a lot in Afghanistan. Don’t ask me to read it, but I recognize the letters.” X said, his booming voice filling the room.

“Wait, are you saying the Afghanis did this?” George asked.

“No, not the Afghanis. Iranians did this.” Adam said. Everyone in the room gave him a look. “Hey, the Iranians have some really good hackers. Some of the best in the world.”

“So why did the Iranians hack the crime lab?” George asked.

“They didn’t. They wrote the ransomware that was sitting idle on a computer or hard drive, then when it was accessed on the city crime lab server, it pwned the server.” Adam said. “They took over control of the server with the software, encrypted it, and started to spread to other machines in the system to take over those. Once it stopped, it encrypted the drives it can. The way a ransomware attack works is that the hackers will have a link set up in bitcoin or other crypto to submit payment to. Victim pays, hackers release the drives, or are supposed to at least.”

“That assumes they’re trustworthy.” Janella said with a hint of suspicion in her voice.

“Precisely. Most of the times they’ll work nice, but you’re dealing with terrorists here. These guys work with Hamas and Hezbollah and the other groups Iran funds. Not much reason to be trustworthy. Plus, I think this is pretty old. Carly, can you send me that link?”

“One second… There.”

The link appeared on the screen and Adam clicked it. It went nowhere but to a 404 error. He dove into the command line to do an nslookup on the website followed by a packet trace. Searching through DNS went nowhere as well. “Just as I thought, it’s old. So old that the link to unlock it is dead. No one’s on the other end to fix this.”

George looked at the screen for a moment. “So East Oakville just lost their crime lab servers. How bad? How much did they lose?”

“One moment.” Adam composed a quick email and sent it to Mitch telling them what they know and asking how badly compromised they are. As they waited, Adam did a search of the Chester County servers. “Did anyone download anything from City today?”

“No, we tried.” Carly said. “We’re working with City on that SA case with a recently deceased John Doe that might have ties to a few other cases that have come our way over the years. I was trying to pull up what City had for his computer and drives when we hit some error messages. We also ran into an issue with his phone.”

“No phone image?” Adam asked.

“No, nothing on the phone. Everything was good yesterday, today, gone.”

“Can you show me?” Adam asked Carly. She sent him a link to the phone in the Chester County server. He navigated to it, checked out the stats on it, and made a noise that sounded like a mix between a cough and a choke. “Uh, guys, someone wiped the phone remotely. Last night around 3AM, there was a remote command to wipe a lost or stolen phone from an MDM system.”

“WHAT?!” All three of the cops said in unison, followed by shouting and yelling.

“Guys, guys, guys. I don’t know what happened, but either someone reported this phone lost to his employer and it was remotely wiped, or someone was able do so through a personal system. I’d need to look at it further.” Adam sounded exasperated, nearly scared at the response. Though it wasn’t unexpected, their freakout shook him. Just as he tried to explain what might’ve happened, Mitch from East Oakville replied to his mail. Adam read it, but so did everyone else in the room.

“Oh fuck. That doesn’t sound good.” Janella said. “The entire crime lab server is dead and needs reimaged.”

“Yeah, not good. They can wipe and reload from a backup but they lost everything since the last update on Friday. They had a handful of laptops get bricked. I’ll help them get through this mess, but they’re up shit crick without a paddle. Best case, they get the ass-chewing of a lifetime and find out how this happened to keep it from happening again. Worst case scenario, they’re all getting fired.” Adam said.

“They lost everything for the last 5 days? Was it the whole city or just East Oakville?” George asked.

“Just them. It didn’t spread any further. They’ll get a report of what was lost once they know how bad things are, but it looks like they got lucky with the timing. Holiday weekend, no murders in the town, a few drunk and disorderlies, and a couple thefts and a few DUI’s. Almost all of them still have physical evidence and backups to go to. There’s even a chance that this case you’re working on could still have the drives and laptop. Small chance, but still possible.” Adam said the last part trying to make the officers feel a little better. “Still, I want to make sure everyone’s security is up to date. Captain, I’d like to do some checks on everyone’s computers in the precinct, make sure we didn’t let anything in through the back door.”

“How long?” Janella asked.

“Not too long. Once I’m done with this, I can check everyone remotely. Anything that looks out of the ordinary, I can remote in and fix. Should be done either tonight or tomorrow.”

“Do it.” Janella replied, and Adam nodded. She knew that they’d have to tighten up computer security after this. She just hoped that whatever took down East Oakville didn’t hurt them, too. She was glad to have Adam on her staff.



—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————



It took Adam most of the afternoon working with Mitch remotely to assess the damage and start a security scan of the Chester County Police Department IT landscape. Upon further review, not only was the server bricked but the router switch for the lab was pretty well fucked. The software that crippled and encrypted the server also transmitted something off but then destroyed the router and all logs after it. That’s what initially told them there was a problem. When the main switch for the server went down, the backup took a little too long to come up. Once Mitch had everything going on the backup systems, he did a quick assessment of Ray’s tech. It was all fucked. His laptop was bricked and wouldn’t even POST, the external drives were encrypted and couldn’t be unlocked, and even the cameras were wiped. All they had were the copies of the videos they saved on Pascal’s laptop and the copies sent to Chester County.

For the most part, everything was running good on Adam’s end. Some cops needed their antivirus packages updated or their firewalls tweaked, but for the most part everything was good. Carly’s laptop was the only one that directly interfaced with the infected servers, so he insisted on running an intensive scan. She would end up losing a couple files in her cache, but nothing that she didn’t have backups of on the cloud. Adam took a peek at Carly’s computer to see what she had on the Club. He knew George hated keeping his notes on computers and X never seemed to write down anything that he could trace down until it was time to submit a form, but Carly was the youngest member of the team and grew up using digital devices for taking notes. What she had shook Adam to his core. She had almost everything on Ray, Steve’s details, Sam and Bubbles’s info, and a solid working theory on what happened up at the cabin. Carly pointed out how Steve and Bubbles matched persons of interest in several open cases over the years, and how Bubbles looked like she just dyed her hair black, and that she was the doctor that administered a lethal dosage of morphine to Ray.

Adam was careful with his next actions. He changed a few key details around on her local copy of the notes and made sure they overwrote the copies on her phone and tablet. Nothing much, just transposing a couple digits on phone numbers or case files or addresses. Then he deleted the active files that she had open at the time they connected to the server, like the powerpoint she was working on and the local copy of the notes. Adam told her that they were infected but she could back them up from the cloud.

He also made sure to cover his tracks with Ray’s phone. It was still in the storage locker near where it was left, but under a different case file. The image they pulled up was actually from a different phone of the same make and model from a different case that was going nowhere. By the time anyone found Ray’s phone in that mess, they’d all be dead and buried. When the dust settled and no one was paying attention, he’d properly dispose of Ray’s phone.

When Adam got home, he’d have to see if his little program was able to get the raw footage from Ray’s cameras off of the servers and uploaded safely before it nuked the server and the switch. If he was good and lucky, they might still get something out of this yet.


—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————


George, X and Carly sat in Captain Jenkins’s office while Adam did his IT stuff in their bullpen. Cappy had gone home long ago, asking her detectives to keep her informed of what happened. George sat behind her desk while X and Carly sat in chairs across from him. There was a defeated sense in the air. The silence was broken by one scream.

“FUUUCCK!!!” George yelled out before dropping his head into his hands. “We’ve been on this case for months, finally get a big break, and lose everything in one go. We’ve got a perp who’s got a fucking toe tag on him, a bunch of his friends that are hiding something but won’t say shit because what they did was way worse than him, a bunch of hard drives that are locked by some crypto bullshit, and a dead laptop. Even the phone is a wash. FUCK!”

“Got that out of your system, George?” X asked matter of factly.

The older detective nodded. “Yeah. It sucks, but sometimes ya just need to…”

“I know.” X said.

“So what do we got?” George asked. The three detectives looked at each other for a moment before Carly spoke up.

“Definitively? We got nothing. Dr. Park killed Ray, but that could've been an accident, or at the most medical negligence. Steve, Sam, and the doc took part in that gang rape up at the lake and Sam is balls deep in Bob’s business. But none of that happened here. Whatever proof we had of a conspiracy went up in smoke. And there just isn’t enough probable cause to even think about bringing any of them for the other cases we have on file.”

“So we need a witness that can tie one of them to another crime?” X said.

“Yeah. We need a witness or a victim that can positively ID either of those 3. Then we might have a chance at building a case. But tying them to the case won’t be easy. We could get them for one crime, but it would be an uphill battle. All we can do is just keep an eye out.” Carly said, slumping in her seat and rubbing her eyes. “God dammit. We were so close to proving that this crazy group of yours exists. Just one video from that laptop could’ve been enough to prove it’s existence. Just a little diving into the logs and BAM!”

“Instead, we get screwed by IT.” X said. “Leave it to some idiots not paying attention to how our systems should work. It’s not like it’s their job to know our computer systems.”

Something clicked in George’s mind. His head raised out of his hands and he had a look of realization.

“What did you say X? It’s their job to know.” George let his words hang in the air for a moment, waiting for his fellow detectives to catch up.

“Wait, are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Carly asked. X nodded and answered for George.

“They have to have someone that’s either a cop in their club or cop adjacent, and who’s more cop adjacent than the IT team?” X said.

“So what you’re saying is-“

George cut Carly off. “That our suspect pool just shrank from a couple hundred thousand down to a dozen, if that. We’re not just looking for a random cop, we’re looking for someone skilled enough to cripple a police server and make it look like an accident or a terrorist attack. This person also has the ability to cover their tracks for years. This person isn’t a new member, they’ve been at it for years. The risk to reward isn’t there for some random member who may or may not know Ray, but Ray could take everyone down if he talked or if he saved some videos. This person is deep in the club, like a senior member or leader. They knew about Ray being in the hospital. Hell, they…fuck, HE probably ordered a hit on Ray and somehow Dr. Park pulled it off. He nuked the East Oakville server, knowing what antivirus the city ran. He pulled this off to cover the club because he knows that none of them will go down for him because they either don’t know him or don’t like him. I’d say they don’t know him, and he keeps his identity a secret because if any of these perverts found out that the guy running their rape club was a senior IT member of the police force they’d think this was a sting.” He looked at the other officers as they nodded in agreement to what he said.

“How do we proceed?” X asked in his booming voice.

“This doesn’t leave this room. Not even Cappy for a while. Don’t trust your computers, because if he can nuke the server, he can do a lot worse to our digital records. We have to do this on the down low. First thing is gather what we can offline and find out what we know about our friendly neighborhood IT guy, Adam Finnegan.”
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To Be Continued...

[Shocker]

George is at it again. Making those deductive jumps, and this time Adam might have cooked his own goose.