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Weather left forwork at six in the morning, as usual, but Lucas wasn’t an early riser. On this day, his phone rang at seven-thirty, and he groaned, woke up, thrashed around, and after five rings, the phone went to voice mail, and he subsided, relieved.
For thirty seconds. Then the phone started ringing again. This time, he was awake enough to get it. He looked at the phone’s screen: Virgil.
“What the hell?”
“Maggie Cooper called me. She won’t admit it, but she’s got our report,” Virgil said. “The one we put up about, oh, twelve hours ago. She called me because you mentioned you like to sleep late, but I lived on a farm, so she figured I got up with the chickens. She called at seven and I gave you the extra half hour.”
“Do you? Get up with the chickens?”
“No. I worked until one o’clock last night. Then... never mind.”
“You got laid until three o’clock? You only gave her two hours?”
“Let me talk. Maggie’s seen our statement,” Virgil said. “The whole thing. She even knows that Subject A is Heath.”
Lucas didn’t exactly know how to respond, so he didn’t for a moment, then he said, “We need to jack her up.”
“Jackherup? She’s demanding that we come to her house. Like, now. She’s jackingusup. I told her I couldn’t get there before eight-thirty or so. If I’m going to be miserable, I thought you should be, too.”
“Goddamnit...”
“You want me to meet you at her house, or pick you up at yours?”
“Pick me up. We’ll hit the Caribou Coffee before we go.”
—
Virgil arrived, andthey took his Tahoe to Caribou Coffee. On the way, Lucas called Sandy, who was still at home. “How hard is it to identify an IP address?”
“Well, if it’s a naked IP, not too hard. If it’s run through a VPN, it’s hard. It can be hard in the sense of impossible.”
“Could you look at Internet accesses to BCA data files, specifically, the report that Virgil and I filed last night? We left there at seven o’clock and access was probably last night or very early this morning, if it happened. And it would be coming in from outside.”
“Yeah, I can do that,” Sandy said.
“How long will it take?” Lucas asked.
“Mmm, five, six minutes.”
“Sandy, I will give you four dollars if you can get it to me in five minutes,” Lucas said.
“Call you back,” she said.
—
She called backas they were waiting for their coffee: “Yup. Somebody came in. Strong protection with a VPN, so I can’t tell you who it was. Came in at eleven o’clock with a sign-in password I don’trecognize. We had two other hits, one internal from Durey, and another external, from the St. Paul cops.”
“Russo,” Lucas said. “Thanks, Sandy.”
“You said something about money. Four dollars, I believe.”
“I’m a little short this week, so, remind me someday,” Lucas said.
—
Virgil: “They’ve gottheir own access and password. I’d like to know how that happened.”
“Every reporter in the Twin Cities can get into DMV files, so... the state’s security is crap. We even know it’s crap, but nobody does anything.”
