Chapter 10: The Honeypot

Chapter 10: The Honeypot

The high-resolution photographs lay on Captain Davies’s desk like playing cards in a game he had already lost. They were stark, brutal, and undeniable. In the sterile light of his office, Marcus Thorne’s face was a mask of pure violence. The license plate was as clear as a fingerprint. David Chen’s crumpled form was a testament to a crime that could no longer be ignored or buried under legal paperwork.

“This arrived in my inbox an hour ago,” Detective Isabella Rossi stated, her voice flat and devoid of the triumph she felt. “From the same anonymous source who gave us Gallo in the first place.”

Davies stared at the images, his jaw working silently. The comfortable deniability he had clung to was gone, incinerated by this new, explosive evidence. This wasn't a ten-year-old assault charge anymore. This was a clear and present danger, a violent felon actively hunting victims on his streets. The lawyers and their threats of lawsuits suddenly seemed very small.

“The victim is David Chen,” Rossi continued, pressing her advantage. “He’s in St. Michael’s, ICU. Multiple fractures, internal bleeding. He’s lucky to be alive. The BOLO on the sedan got a hit twenty minutes ago. It’s registered to a shell corporation under the Croft Innovations umbrella.”

She leaned forward, her hands flat on his desk. “This isn’t a hunch anymore, Captain. This isn't a thread. This is a goddamn rope, and it leads directly back to Marco Gallo. You wanted a citizen who wasn't being harassed? This is what he does in his free time. He’s not just a fugitive; he’s a predator. And my informant’s message was clear: This will happen again.”

Davies finally looked up, his face a grim mixture of frustration and resignation. The political pressure from above was immense, but the visceral reality of the photos on his desk was undeniable. A cop could bend, but this was about to break. If a story leaked that the department had been warned about Gallo and did nothing before he killed someone, heads would roll. His head would be first.

“Alright, Rossi,” he sighed, scrubbing a hand over his tired face. “Bring him in. But I want this one by the book. No hunches, no maverick moves. Use the evidence you have. The assault on Chen is your leverage. Let’s see his high-priced lawyers explain this away.”

It was the victory she needed, but as Rossi walked back to her desk, the adrenaline of the confrontation faded, leaving a cold, clear certainty. Bringing Marcus in was just one move. It was a necessary, important move, but it wasn't the endgame. Marcus was a symptom. The disease was Croft Innovations, and the only person who seemed to have the cure was her ghost.

She sat down, the division’s hum a low thrum in the background, and re-read the informant's last message on her screen. He is hunting people from his past. … You are the only one looking.

The words resonated with a strange intimacy. It wasn't just a tip; it was a plea and a compliment rolled into one. He had chosen her. He was watching her. He knew she was meeting resistance, and he had handed her the exact weapon she needed to break through it. He was more than an informant; he was an invisible, strategic ally. An ally who had likely committed a dozen felonies to get her that evidence.

Catching him was no longer the goal. That felt like arresting the man who called in a fire because he trespassed to see the smoke. She needed to talk to him. She needed his help to dismantle the entire criminal enterprise.

But how do you invite a ghost for a conversation? He was an expert in anonymity. Any attempt to trace him would be detected instantly, and he would vanish for good. She couldn't send out a search party; she had to build a lighthouse. A beacon only he would see, promising a safe harbor.

“Harris,” she called out, flagging down a young, lanky technician from the digital forensics unit. He was a prodigy who saw the internet not as a series of websites but as a fluid, mathematical landscape.

“What’s up, Detective?”

“I need a communication channel,” she began, leaning back in her chair. “But not a normal one. I need a digital dead drop. A one-way street. I want someone to be able to send me information, securely and anonymously, but I don't want any way to reply or trace it. I want them to know, with absolute certainty, that we can't see them on the other side. No IP logs, no packet sniffing, no digital fingerprints. Can you build me a church confessional in cyberspace?”

Harris’s eyes lit up with intellectual curiosity. The challenge was a puzzle he couldn’t resist. “You want a honeypot,” he said, a grin spreading across his face. “But a friendly one. A write-only server, firewalled to hell and back. We can host it on a third-party cloud service outside the country, scrub all access logs in real-time. Anyone who connects to it will be a complete ghost. They can drop a message and disappear without a ripple. It's doable. It’s… elegant.”

“Make it elegant,” Rossi ordered. “And make it fast.”

Two hours later, Harris handed her a slip of paper with a complex alphanumeric string on it. It was the address to a secure portal, a black hole for data. The honeypot was live.

Now came the hardest part: casting the bait. She couldn’t just post the address online; Croft’s people would see it. It had to be a message in a bottle, thrown into the digital ocean for one specific person to find. Her ghost was a hacker, a man who saw the world through a lens of data and code. She needed to speak his language.

She drafted a public press release regarding the ongoing investigation into the assault on David Chen. To the untrained eye, it was standard, boring police jargon. It mentioned the search for a “key digital witness” and urged anyone with information to come forward. But she worked with Harris to embed the honeypot’s address deep within the text, camouflaged in a way that only someone with a deep understanding of cryptography and network protocols would recognize.

She disguised part of the string as a new case file number: Case #DF89-…. The next part was woven into a sentence about “secure data transmission protocols,” making it look like a technical example. The final piece was hidden in the cryptographic signature at the bottom of the press release itself. Separately, they were meaningless numbers. Together, they were a key. An invitation.

It was a long shot, a message aimed at a phantom. She was putting her faith in the idea that her ghost was not just watching Marcus, but was still watching her.

She took a deep breath and clicked the button, releasing the statement to the department’s public affairs officer. It would be on news websites within the hour. The bait was in the water.

Rossi leaned back, staring at the empty, secure portal Harris had set up on a dedicated monitor. It was a blank, black screen with a single, blinking cursor. It felt like the loneliest place on the internet. She had provided a door for a ghost to knock on. Now, all she could do was wait and listen for a sound in the silence.