Jigsaw – Chapter Twenty-Eight

There were two nice choppers on Jo's walkway when Tim arrived home that evening. He wandered over to have a look, did a slow tour of each bike admiring, dreaming, finally reached out to run his hand over the artwork on Jack's gas tank.

"Hands off."

The rough notes blasted out from the house and Tim turned to the voice, Jack's blurred figure through the screen at Jo's door.

Smiling, Tim said, "Sorry, but some things just cry out to be touched." Then he immediately regretted his choice of words, thinking of Jo and who he was talking to at that moment, and how it all might be taken so badly. He pulled his hand back, stuffed it in his pants' pocket, trying to look harmless, trying to look like he wasn't choking on his statement, walked as casually as he could past Jo's dad and into her house.

"You pawing after everything that's mine?" Jack growled in his Harley voice, but quietly, someone starting a bike a few blocks away.

"Daddy, I don't belong to you." It sounded like an old argument the way Jo said it and she loped over and kissed Tim before he'd had a chance to get clear of Jack, making her point. "And it is good artwork he's admiring."

The growl softened. "Jo did it for me."

"She did mine too," came from the kitchen.

Ky, Tim figured, the owner of the second bike.

And Jack confirmed it. "Ky, come and say hi to the Marshal."

Another round of stereotyping was tossed out the door when Ky peered around the corner then clomped down the hallway. Jack's computer geek was young, sure, but any similarity to the Hollywood iconic nerd stopped there. No glasses, no hair except a chin curtain, neatly trimmed, easily a hundred pounds on Tim and all of it muscle, Ky was over six-feet tall, tattoos in two full sleeves and collar, leathers, jeans, boots. Tim wondered what was tattooed on Ky's knuckles – HARDER and FASTER, likely. He'd need an extra finger on each hand for it, and Tim caught himself counting when Ky held out a paw to shake, but there were only the usual five and no tattoos past the wrist.

"I hear you were a Ranger," said Ky. "Hooah."

"Actually, we don't say that much anymore."

"No?"

"No."

"Well, what do you say then?"

"Whatever the fuck we please," said Tim, then grinned for his joke and Ky grinned back.

"What happened to 'hooah'?"

"It got a little overdone."

"That's what I tell Jack about the Outlaw slogan – 'God forgives, Outlaws don't.'" Ky dropped a mitt on Jack's shoulder. "It's kinda old."

Brushing Ky's hand off, Jack said, "So's 'Don't fuck with me', but it still does the job."

"He's a bit touchy about it."

Jack cuffed Ky on the head, good-natured enough. "Take Marshal Tim here, kid, and get the fuck out of my face before I beat you stupid. Show him what you showed me."

"No problem. You got a computer I can use, Jo?"

"Not…here." Jack spoke the words with a commanding bit of space between them, unsmiling.

Ky directed a shrug at Tim.

"I got Tor loaded on my computer," said Tim. "Let's do this at my place," and he led the way out, Ky clumping behind him.

"Why would you be using Tor, Marshal?" Ky spoke as his fingers clacked expertly and quickly over the keyboard, typing in a long URL from a piece of paper he pulled from his pocket.

"It's the safest platform for mucking around down there."

"Yeah, doesn't answer my question."

"Military and law enforcement." Tim pointed to himself, then at Ky. "You assholes hi-jacked the whole deep web from us. It was ours first."

"Yeah, but we've made it colorful."

"If you want to call child porn colorful."

"Okay, so there's some sick shit down here. Stay away from 'PD' links and 'CP' links and definitely stay clear of anything that has 'CANDY' in it and…"

"Thanks, I know."

Ky twisted in the chair to look at Tim. "What do you use it for though, really?"

"What do you use it for?"

The deep web was slow, even on Tim's high-speed connection, routing intricacy to provide anonymity. The page Ky was searching for popped up while they eyed each other. Tim answered when the site loaded, Ky distracted again.

"Maybe I got connections that want to remain anonymous."

"Contract killers?" Ky looked a bit excited about the prospect.

"Maybe just some Ranger buddies who know they have enemies in the world. It's nice to be able to talk freely."

"You have a Ranger forum or something? Can I get the URL?"

"No. Not unless you give me the Outlaws' info."

"Heh."

"Heh."

"How did you ever hook up with Jack's daughter?"

"She's next door."

"Convenience?"

"Hooking up with the daughter of an Outlaw when you're a US Marshal is hardly convenient."

"I suppose not." Ky tapped the screen. "I found this by accident. Look familiar?"

Tim leaned in, recognized the scene immediately. "You can't trace who posted that, can you?"

"I can't, but I've heard the Feds have done it, and some hackers to prove a point using end node grabs. Got any friends in the FBI, Marshal?"


Alone again in his house later, Tim leaned back in the old office chair that Ky had recently vacated, the one he used at his desk in the room that would be labeled 'dining area' on a real estate floor plan, but served him as an office and gaming room instead. A dining room table just wasn't on his 'useful things to own' list; missing also were good dishes, wine glasses, serving bowls, guest towels, and a welcome mat. There were comfortable chairs and a couch in the living room for watching television though, and plenty of beer in the fridge unless work got in the way of grocery runs. Everything was simple at his house, the way Tim preferred it, and anyone who might visit him likely preferred it that way too.

Blues was seeping through the adjoining walls from Jo's living room, loud enough to give a welcome backdrop for Tim's mood. Ky had left, the clacking of Tim's front screen on the frame followed by a repeat at Jo's, then voices next door. He had given Tim something to gnaw on, this dot onion site. Violence wasn't new to Tim, or to Ky or Jack or Isabelle, but this level of depravity tweaked something in each of them. Someone was playing truth or dare and the dare was murder and no one was choosing the truth except Tim and he was working under a heavy handicap in this game. He reached a hand over to the mouse and with a click backed out of the page he was on, one of the murder pictures that first caught Ky's attention, and back to the main forum page, then he picked his phone up off the desk and called Isabelle.

He provided her with all the information he had on the website that hosted the homeless homicide challenge. Isabelle promised to try and do something with the new trail, a very twisted trail without signs or a starting point or a destination, no clear footprints to follow, no nothing except that it was there. She had a whole squad of computer geeks working with her though, and no doubt at least one wrapped tightly around her finger, and they would scrape at the clues and maybe find something helpful. He hoped. Anyway, as she pointed out, it was more than they had yesterday.

When he heard the Harleys starting up, Tim stood and walked to the door and out and up to Jack sitting on his bike. He thanked him and Jack nodded.

"Jo tells me you hunt," he said.

The statement confused Tim – was Jack referring to this hunt, the one for the murderers, or hunting targets in Afghanistan, or hunting Heywood Humphrey on a warrant, or…? "It's my job. I hunt down fugitives, among other things."

"She said you hunt hunt…game."

"Oh." Tim's reply was a mirthless grin acknowledging the truth. "I thought she didn't know. I thought she'd hate that so..."

"Her mother hated hunting, hated guns, hated bikes – both kinds. She hated men, hated tattoos, hated television, hated alcohol, hated blues, hated dirt, hated germs, hated gays, hated Chinese food and Indian food and anything that wasn't familiar, hated fucking damn near everything."

"So how'd you end up with her?"

"She was wild in bed."

Tim's grin was less mirthless this time, the eyebrows up and the eyes laughing. "One of those," he said.

"Yep."

Jack backed his bike out onto the street, nodded. Tim nodded back and watched them till they rounded the corner, then he turned and went inside. He shut down his computer and locked his door and walked over to the neighbor's house.

She waited until she had her clothes off, and he had most of his mind shut off except for thoughts about one thing, then she said, "You should take Daddy hunting. I think he'd like that. He gave it up as part of Mama's crazy demands so he could see me when I was little – visitation rights, you know – sold his rifles. How many do you have? Could he borrow one?"

"Jesus fucking Christ."

"What?"

"You want me and him to go hunting together? Loaded rifles? Seriously?"

"Marshal, you have some very big trust issues."

"It's part of my job to have very big trust issues."

"I wouldn't want your job then."

"Yeah, you'd probably suck at it. You'd probably trust your way into some serious trouble. And can't you call me something other than Marshal?"

"It's affectionate." She smiled and pulled him onto the bed. "You'd rather I call you 'baby'?"

"Marshal's fine," he mumbled, his lips on her neck.

From Jack's description, Tim concluded that Jo was very different from her mother – Jo loved her bike and her blues and her beer, and she ate anything, and she wore her tattoos and jeans proudly, and she apparently didn't object to hunting. But after a vigorous hour between the sheets with the lights on, he decided she was like her mother in one way, and he figured he might be the only one who knew about that particular similarity.

"What does Ky mean by 'onion'?"

"It just refers to layers of encryption, someone being clever with the name."

"Ogres have layers," she said.

"Marshals have layers too."

"I'm discovering that."

"I'm heading back down to Atlanta this weekend," he said, "look for Max again. You wanna come?"

"I can't." Her voice tickled his ear. "I have to finish that mosaic. They want to open the café before spring warms up and starts bringing people out on the sidewalk again."

The disappointment was a surprise. "Okay. Um, I'll try to be back early on Sunday."

"I'll be here."


"The vicious, fucking moron is using Windows and he still has JavaScript enabled and he hasn't updated his Tor browser. Does the idiot not read the fucking newspaper?"

Tim put a little distance between the phone and his ear, blinked away the text of the file he was scanning through, looking for a name connected with a name connected to Boyd Crowder, swiveled his chair so he was facing the window behind his desk, his back to the bullpen, before he replied, "What?"

"He's a complete computer fucking imbecile. He's left himself wide open – relatively speaking – for some FBI tracking. We already had him on the system from the Freedom Hosting bust."

Isabelle was back on her cigarettes again, a loud out-breath of smoke that Tim could smell all the way from Virginia to Kentucky. It was years past and he still couldn't walk by someone on a smoke-break outside the court house without the aroma of tobacco bringing pictures of her up in his head. Once you knew her, she stuck.

"Isabelle, what the fuck does all that mean?"

"That means I have an IP address for you. And stick to your guns."

"Hilarious pun. You have an IP address for me? What about BSU? Won't they be interested in this now? I mean we've got a trail."

"Tim, we have a vague link. We need something incriminating in the guy's hand, and you know that. BSU isn't going to do anything more than add it to the thick fucking file that I gave them and deposit the lot back at the bottom of their pile. It's still not a priority for them to investigate. They might get to it in a year or so. And the nerd crime guys, well they're still sifting through what they got when they shut down that guy in Ireland, more interested in child porn than adults killing adults. But if you want me to pass it on…"

"Shit."

"I think it's up to us to go on that hunt."

"Where?"

"Detroit."

Rachel walked out of Art's office at that exact moment, phone pressed against her hip to block her voice as she called to the bullpen, "Who wants to make a trip to Detroit?" The look on her face and her tone advertised her thoughts about her request, resigned to the fact that it was unlikely she'd get a volunteer, and it was likely she'd end up having to order someone to go.

Tim swiveled around and shot his hand up in the air.

She looked at him, surprised. "Okay. Can you leave in the morning?"

He nodded.

"Thank you." She gestured at his phone. "Come in and see me when you're done."

He nodded again and swiveled back to the window and said to Isabelle, "Does anyone else know about this? Anyone but you?"

"Just me and my buddy in internet crime."

"Do you trust him?"

"Implicitly."

"Then let's go hunting," he said. "Get me an address."

"Sure thing."

"I love you."

"No you don't, and you never did. But it was fun."

"Yeah, it was fun."

Tim hung up and set his phone on the desk and it rang again as soon as it touched. The number was a Virginia area code so he answered.

"What now? You forget something?"

There was a pause. "…only how fucking rude you can be. Makes me wonder why I call you." It was a man's voice.

"Hey," said Tim, grinning, swiveling back to the window a third time. "What's up, asshole? Are the unicorns organizing in Virginia now?"

"I wish. I am so fucking bored, dude. I'm coming to visit. I'm hoping you got some more fun for me."

Ryan's timing was as brilliant as Rachel's, the pieces falling into place without any prompting. Tim stood up and peered between the slats of the blinds, looking for a blood sun or a blue moon or owls out in the daylight. "Buddy, I can promise you an interesting few days. How soon can you get here?"

"Wait up for me. And make sure you leave a light on and you got some fucking beer in the fridge."

"I always have beer in the fridge."

"That's why I chose to come see you and not my mother."


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Author's note: Sorry for the delay, folks. Crazy, busy month.