By the third day, Brooke was frustrated. Mr. Juth did nothing different in his routine every day. He never changed the route he drove to work, never spoke with anybody, never made any contact with another human. Brooke could not fathom how ‘Mr. Leather Pants,’ the not so wild and crazy guy from the disco, could all of a sudden live such a monastic life. He made and received no phone calls. He only worked on local files from the hard drive on his computer, no Internet, no e-mails, Facebook, or messaging. She reached out to Kronos when she saw that he had no social network presence. That was unfortunate, because nowadays a ton of potentially incriminating or exculpatory evidence was available, voluntarily offered up by the eight hundred million citizens of the virtual nations of Facebook, Twitter, Four Square, Tumblr, Instagram and the like as social data, just waiting to be scraped by police agencies around the globe. Kronos assured her that once something is posted online it never goes away.
Except in the case of Raffael Juth; even Kronos couldn’t figure how he did it. Not a trace of him. Even the founder of Facebook had his personal pictures hacked, yet Raffey was off the grid. Kronos, not one for complimenting another genius, said, “This guy is good!”
To Brooke the total impression of all Raffey’s inactivity was almost as if he knew he was being — watched, she thought.
“Okay, where are we?” Bill asked in the conference room of FedPol. After a great four days in Paris together, they flew to Geneva now that the lead Brooke, Joey and Parnell Sicard were following was getting hotter.
Sicard started first, “It’s very nice to meet you, Mrs. Hiccock.”
“Nice to meet you too, Mr. Sicard.” Janice looked over to Bill as if to say, “He’s not only good looking, he’s got manners as well.” Bill gave a sour look as he stuck his tongue out.
Sicard continued, “Our man, Juth, is a mid-level programmer at the Hadron Collider; he has distinguished himself and received awards. He is an exemplary employee and never absent a day’s work.”
Joey clicked a mouse, which brought up two side-by-side photos on the eighty-inch plasma screen at the end of the table. “The security camera, which scans the entrance he uses every day, shows a bruise under his left eye, and a day or so old, bloody fat lip, the Monday after the murder. It is not there on the tape from the Friday before.”
“How do you know it’s a day old?” Janice asked.
“I used to box on the FBI team,” Joey said.
“So he’s our Arab’s killer?” Bill looked at the two candid photos on the screen.
“If that were the case, we would have simply turned him over to the Swiss. But there’s more here.” Brooke took the mouse and brought up two other files. “These photos were taken of his desk in the office. In the picture frame there, that’s his sister and her daughter; they live with him, or lived with him. In the four days since we began watching him, they haven’t been home.”
Sicard referred to a folder. “There are no out of country passports scanned or stamped, no visa or other travel records that Captain Lustig here at FedPol could find, so they are still somewhere in Switzerland. Or the continent if they drove across the border off road.”
“There is only one family member outside the country; we had local constabulary check them out and the mother and daughter weren’t staying with them. Of the four relatives in country, they have not seen or talked to the brother, the sister or the little girl since before the murder,” Joey added.
“I know I have asked this before, but could he have killed them?” Bill flipped back the mouse and brought up Raffey’s photos again.
“Bill, since she accompanied you on this trip, I took the liberty of asking Janice to profile our Raffey. Janice, will you share with us your thoughts.” Brooke gestured to her.
Janice read the puzzled expression on Sicard’s face, “Parnell, I run the Behavioral Sciences Department at George Washington University Hospital, and I have worked with and been a part of this team in the past.”
“In fact,” Bill jumped in, “Janice has personally briefed the President of the United States and was dead-on accurate in her assessment of the threat matrix we faced at that time,” Bill said like a proud dad bragging about his son’s touchdown. “So her analysis of who we are up against is something you could take to the bank.” He turned to his wife, “Janice.”
“Well, it’s quick and preliminary; I just got all of the information this morning, but outside the slim chance of total schizophrenia, he’s no killer. His actions are defensive, not offensive, and from his lifestyle to his chosen profession, he is a thinker, not a person who acts. His seemingly sudden shutting out of the outside world is more an act of isolation or self-imprisonment.”
“Janice, could that self-detachment be a result of extreme guilt of getting his family out of the way?” Bill asked.
“You mean like he locked himself up in his own jail for killing his family? Not likely, Bill, because the rest of his pattern is wholly unaffected. It would be quite rare that his self-imposed sentence would be that surgically exact. Remorse or conscience would have a widening effect on the mode of behavior, which is not evident from what I have reviewed.”
“Janice, could we be looking at a bi-current… er, whatever it was that we dealt with during the Eighth Day affair?” Joey asked.
“You mean, induced bi-stable concurrent schizophrenia?” Janice said.
“Yeah, that,” Joey said.
“To be sure, we should also have Kronos run a scan on his computer just to check for the interstitial images that triggered those individuals, but that only affected those perpetrators when they were seeking or were close to their particular targets. In his case, he is living this reality twenty-four/seven. That fact alone doesn’t rule subliminal programming out, but it’s just not in keeping with what I have observed before.”
Bill thought for a second, then closed his briefing book. “Brooke, get Kronos to take a look, but I am going to go with the notion that we left that brain-scrambling hardware and software twenty thousand feet below the Pacific Ocean in a deep trench. Thanks Janice, glad you are here.” He smiled at her and placed his hand over hers on the tabletop.
“Nice to be back with the team again,” Janice said with a genuine smile.
“Bill, I heard they captured the whale. Any leads?” Joey said.
“Naval Warfare and Tactics has it, and a team from NCIS is processing it for any traces or prints. The unfortunate thing, and who could have known this, is that when the SEALS took the machine they used high-voltage, which expanded the fluid to the degree that the one, sole pilot who was driving the thing was crushed to death.
“How did the pilot breathe?” Joey said.
“Blowhole, just like a real whale. Two bladders in the compartment expanded and contracted forcing bad air out and pulling in 20 minutes or so of new air whenever it was running on the surface. It was those bladders that over-expanded under the high voltage, crushing him to death.”
“Do we know who he is?” Brooke said.
He had no ID on him. They are doing a workup on his bio-metrics now, but no clues as to who was behind it.”
“Shame, those tests are going to take time we don’t have.” Joey said.
“So absent any evidence from that end, what’s your operating theory, Brooke?” Bill asked.
“Well, Joey and I concur on most of this. The murder took place three days before the day Parnell was coming to Geneva. So this crime happened 24 hours prior to our two day crime computer search on each side of that date.”