“Now you flash your fake badge around and show everyone Oswald’s photo, and hope we get lucky.”
“Just because I bought it online doesn’t mean it’s fake. It says fugitive recovery agent.”
“Whatever.”
CHAPTER THREE
I cruised through the showroom and spoke to four salesmen. Three couldn’t remember seeing Oswald. The fourth said he might have seen him bring a car into service. I left the sales floor and went to the service department. I showed his photo to a woman in the receptionist cubicle.
“He was here last week,” she said. “I remember him because he ate all of the complimentary mini doughnuts and then got verbally abusive over his loner car being a base model.”
“Can you give me some information on the vehicle he dropped off? Did he leave it for service?”
“It was left overnight,” she said, scrolling through the shop history. “Here it is. Oswald Wednesday. He brought in a 911 turbo S for an oil change. It was one year old.”
“Color?” I asked.
“Black. 9,432 miles on it.”
“Did he give an address? Phone number?”
“He gave a New York address. He declined to leave a phone number.”
“Do you have a license plate?” I asked.
“It was a New York plate. I’ll print the information out for you. We’re always happy to cooperate with the police.”
Diesel was standing a couple of feet behind me. “Did he pay with a credit card?” Diesel asked.
“He paid with cash.”
I thanked the woman for her help, and we left the building.
I called Connie and asked her to run another check on Oswald Wednesday. “I have an address for a condo in Manhattan. See if that turns up anything new.”
“What’s Oswald’s Trenton connection?” I asked Diesel. “Has he been here before? Does he have friends or relatives here?”
“I couldn’t find a Trenton connection. That doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist.”
“Are you fibbing to me?” I asked him.
“Possibly,” he said.
It was hard to work up too much anger over this since I didn’t feel compelled to be totally honest with him, either.
“I assume you’ve been through the Manhattan condo,” I said.
“I have and it’s clean.”
“And you left some illegal surveillance devices behind?”
“Yes. No activity.”
“Does Oswald do anything besides hack into computers?”
“He has degrees in mechanical engineering and computer science from MIT. He’s never stayed at a job for more than six months. He holds a bunch of patents, mostly on obscure but essential nuts-and-bolts type stuff associated with artificial intelligence.”
“Wow.”
“He’s also a psychopath who feeds on suffering and chaos when his hacking projects get boring. He’s been involved in some of the most high-profile hacking incidents in the last few years. Most of those incidents were never revealed to the public for security reasons.”
“Wow, again. Does he work alone, or does he have partners?”
“He mostly works alone but he communicates with a loose network of other hackers and artificial intelligence researchers and tool makers. I know where some of them are located, but not all of them. It’s believed that two of them have been involved in at least one major ransomware job. They’ve disappeared.”
“None in Trenton?”
“None that I know about. They’re spread all around the world. Glasgow, Singapore, Nova Scotia, Boston, Atlanta, Osaka.”
“Where are his relatives?”
“His parents are gone. He has no siblings, and he doesn’t seem to have a relationship with any relatives or childhood friends. He grew up in LA but no longer has a home there.”
“Never married?” I asked.
“He had a wife, but she hasn’t been seen in eleven years. They were living in London when she disappeared. Several other female companions have mysteriously disappeared as well.”
“Connie has the best search software out there and we didn’t uncover any of this.”
“He periodically scrubs his history,” Diesel said. “My employer has sources not ordinarily available to the public.”
“This is the employer who needs to remain anonymous, sends you all over the world doing God-knows-what, and gives you a fixer?”
“Yeah,” Diesel said. “That’s the one.”
I thought the mystery employer was starting to sound almost as scary as Oswald.