Page 95 of Goodbye Girl
She took the car keys and kissed him goodbye. “So, dance night is a keeper?”
He smiled, but it only masked the guilt he felt for having alluded to problems beyond their clash of careers. “You bet,” he said.
She kissed him again, a little longer than just goodbye, and hurried toward the door.
Cy came to the table and took her seat. “My boys are here for another forty-five minutes.”
Jack raised his cocktail and clicked glasses with Cy. “Let the band play on,” he said, still wondering what Andie’s “solution” was.
Andie’s meeting was in the first-floor conference room of the Miami field office. The Miami ASAC was with her, along with an IT specialist. A tech agent from the Boston field office and a computer forensic examiner from the FBI’s New England Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory joined by video conference. The tech agent’s voice was on the speaker, but Andie couldn’t see him. He was sharing his computer screen in Boston on the LCD in Miami. On it were the results from the FBI’s search of all electronic devices owned by Boston’s most recent victim of homicide, Shannon Dwyer.
“At first, we thought Agent Henning’s music piracy theory just didn’t hold water,” said the Boston agent. “We searched the victim’s cellphone and tablet. Nothing. We checked the computer she sometimes used at work. Nothing. We even checked her boyfriend’s devices. Still nothing.”
“And then?” asked Andie, hanging on his opening words “at first.”
“Then we discovered that Shannon sometimes visited a certain internet café in Cambridge. And it almost gets funny.”
“Funny?” said Andie.
“Yeah, well, funny from a tech standpoint. I can’t tell you the number of people who go to an internet café to run searches or send emails ‘anonymously’ with a temporary username. That can be done, of course. But not if you pay the internet café with a credit card linked to your name. Which is what Shannon did.”
“So you were able to link certain internet activity to Shannon based on the credit card records?” said Andie.
“Exactly. And that’s when we hit paydirt.”
The LCD screen blipped in Miami, and then it changed to a new image shared from Boston. It was line after line of white code against a blue background.
“What am I looking at?” asked Andie.
“Shannon Dwyer’s browsing history at the internet café,” the agent said. “I presume she didn’t want to risk infecting her own devices with malware, or worse, when getting free music, TV shows, and movies.”
“These are all piracy websites?” asked Andie.
“Every single one of them,” said the tech agent. “It looks like your hunch was right, Henning.”
The ASAC looked at Andie. “Right about what?”
The Miami office had more than a hundred agents, but just three ASACs. All three had been hyperfocused on one of the largest sting operations in the history of the Miami office. That left no time to hear every angle Andie was pursuing in a homicide investigation for which, as yet, primary responsibility lay with the Boston police.
“Let me tell you the story of a tiny island in Boston Harbor called Nixes Mate,” said Andie.
Chapter 38
The trial resumed Thursday morning.
Jack liked the way things were going so far, with the only admissible evidence of guilt pointing to Shaky alone, and even that was “shaky.” Despite her “under the table” threat to Jack—“If there’s a bad guy here, it’s your client, not mine”—Shaky’s lawyer had not yet turned against Imani and tried to make her into the bad guy.Yet.Jack wondered if she was just keeping her powder dry.
“The state of Florida calls Deacon Betters,” announced the prosecutor.
Betters was dressed in a sharply tailored designer suit, a light blue shirt with French cuffs, and a red Hermès necktie. The cost of his gold cuff links alone probably exceeded the average juror’s weekly salary. Betters was one of many witnesses whose name was on the state’s list, but who had not testified before the grand jury. What Jack knew about him had come from his client.
“Mr. Betters, what do you do for a living?” the prosecutor began.
“I am a senior investment banker in the New York office of Saxton Silvers.”
“Have you ever met either of the defendants in this case?”
“I know Mr. Nichols. I have never met his ex-wife.”