Chapter 48
FOUR PAIRS OF eyes looked up in dismay, and maybe even shock, when Del Rio and I entered the war room.
“No one died,” I said.
“Because there were too many witnesses,” Del Rio added as a charming note.
Colleen came in to take orders for lunch as I was winding up my theory of the Shelby Cushman–Noccia family connection. She looked at me, wide-eyed and stunned. My jaw was bruised pretty badly. I had a nice laceration on my cheekbone. And those were just the injuries she could see.
“We were outnumbered,” I said.
“The usual?” she asked me.
“Extra fries,” I said. “Extra ice.”
When Colleen left, I turned the floor over to Dr. Sci.
“Jack, I’ve been over this with Mo. We agree. If the Schoolgirl killer is baiting his victims with fake messages, he has to have wireless access to their mobile phones in real time.”
Mo-bot piped up. She was sleeveless, showing off a colorful mess of tattoos. It was hard to imagine her at Harvard, where she’d gone through her PhD. She took off her bifocals and said, “What Sci is implying is that we think the scum is waiting at a location, probably in a vehicle that won’t call attention. We’d say a van.
“Scum grabs the signal out of the air and accesses the target’s mobile unit and basically clones it. That’s how he’s able to send his own messages using a screen name from one of the victim’s friends.”
“If he can do that,” Sci said, “he can block all other messages, incoming and outbound. As far as I know, there’s no program that can hijack cell phone content wirelessly,” Sci said.
“But it’s imaginable. If you can imagine it, it can be done,” added Mo-bot.