Chapter 14 — The Signal

The question of how Marcus Hale had left a voicemail after his death was answered, eventually, by a thirty-four-year-old technology consultant named Pete Okafor, who had been Marcus's neighbor and friend and whom Marcus had apparently trusted with the technical implementation of the entire system.Pete appeared at Nora's office — she was technically on administrative leave pending review of the Briar case, which was standard and fair and not something she was arguing about — with a laptop and the expression of someone who had been told he could now explain what he'd been sworn to secrecy about."He came to me about three weeks before he died," Pete said. "He said he had sensitive information that needed to survive if something happened to him, and he needed it delivered in a specific way because the people who might want to stop it had access to standard channels." He opened the laptop. "He knew about delayed text and voicemail services — they exist, people use them for estate planning and dead man's switches. But he needed something more sophisticated. Something that could respond to queries in limited ways, handle multiple delivery points, and most importantly — sound like him.""The conditional recordings," Nora said."He recorded over forty hours of material over three days. Scripts for different scenarios, different levels of case progress, different questions you might ask. He had a pretty good model of how you work, from nine years of working with you. He couldn't cover everything — the restaurant question caught the system, which was the right design — but he covered the case material comprehensively.""And the voice. It was exactly him.""He recorded it, so it was." Pete paused. "The number — Unknown Number — was a VoIP service he'd set up specifically. The system called you from that number when the conditional triggers were met. He had it set to monitor his phone's status — when his phone went offline and stayed offline past a certain point, the first delivery triggered.""His phone going offline was the dead man's switch.""Yes." Pete looked at the laptop. "He was very methodical about the whole thing. He tested every branch. He was—" A pause. "He was genuinely good at it. I told him he'd missed a career in tech and he said thirty years in homicide was enough career for any reasonable person."Nora looked at the laptop. Forty hours of Marcus, recorded in the full knowledge that he might not be there to deliver it himself."Is there anything left?" she said. "Any recordings I haven't heard?""He built a final delivery. Triggered once everything was resolved — I set it for when his name appeared in the formal case filing as a victim in the Whitmore prosecution. That just happened two days ago." Pete looked at her. "He wanted you to decide whether to listen. It's yours if you want it."She looked at the laptop."Leave me the number," she said. "I'll decide later."Pete nodded. He wrote the number on a card and put it on her desk. He picked up his laptop.At the door he stopped. "Detective Voss. He said something when he was setting this up. He said: 'She'll figure it out. She always figures it out. I just need to give her enough signal.'" He paused. "I thought you should know he said that."She sat at her desk for a while after he left.Enough signal.She picked up the card and put it in her coat pocket, with the letter.