“C’mon, Batra,” I said. “Any luck unlocking those videos?”
“Can a pickpocket pick?” Batra said, heading toward the Vietnam Memorial.
“What did you find?”
“Nothing,” she said. “The videos all end a second or two past the locking point. I suspect if a user has the correct passcode, the two extra seconds are revealed and a secret onion router message is sent to the webmaster. At that point, the webmaster would send back an onion router message with the complete encrypted film attached.”
“Hold up,” I said. “Most of that went right over my head. Start with onion.”
The cybercrimes specialist took a sip of her coffee and said an onion was a digital message or order that left a computer surrounded by layers and layers of encryption and code, almost like an onion. “When you send out an e-mail or look at a website,” she said, “you’re leaving digital tracks all over the so-called clear web. But when an onion message or order is sent, the surrounding codes direct it through dozens of routers on the deep, or unorganized, web. Each router peels away layers of encryption and metadata that would identify the original sender.
“Onions guarantee anonymity,” Batra said. “We can’t look at them. The NSA can’t even look at them. Why? Because we won’t even know they exist. Done right, they leave virtually zero trace.”
“You’re kidding,” I said, disappointed.
“I’m not kidding,” Batra said, her face clouding as we entered the Vietnam Memorial. “This is serious black-net stuff you’ve gotten yourself into, Cross. Almost everything having to do with that website was done through onions, so I have no idea who built it or who maintains it.”
“Can’t you hack it?”
“What’s to hack?” Batra said. “The website is anonymously built and self-sustaining. I can shut down whatever the hosting URL is, but I’d imagine there are dozens of mirroring sites with the content on them already.”
I thought about that. “You said almost everything having to do with the website was done through onion routers.”
Batra arched an eyebrow and said, “You’re smarter than you look, Cross.”
“One of my redeeming qualities. What was not done through an onion?”
“Those posts on the hackers’ bulletin board. Those I could track. And I did.”
“All of the posters?” I said, impressed.
“Just the high-volume ones so far,” Batra said.
“What do we know about them?”
“Creeps,” the FBI agent said, taking another sip of coffee.
I was getting chilled, so I untied the hoodie around my waist and put it on as she continued.
“On the clear net, they troll porn,” Batra said. “In the darknet areas where I can track them, they’re into lots of the sicker stuff. I wrote it all down.”
“Where are they?”
“You mean physical location? All over the world, though one of the regular creeps posting is definitely local.”
“How local?” I said, stopping.
“Right here,” she said, waving her coffee cup. “DC.”
“You have a name? Address?”
Batra studied me several beats, calculating what to tell me, no doubt, and then said, “Close enough.”
CHAPTER
13
LEAVING THE BROOKLAND-CUA Metro stop later in the day, I knew damn well I shouldn’t have been walking up John McCormack Drive. I could hear Bree in my head saying I had no authority here and that my time would be better spent working on my defense for trial.
But I was back in the game, and who was going to tell Bree or anyone?
The creep?
Not a chance. The creep would want to avoid any contact with legitimate law enforcement. And I just might learn something useful about Gretchen Lindel and the other missing blondes, which would more than justify my actions as a concerned citizen.
With that firmly in mind, I went to the security guard at the main entrance to the Catholic University of America and asked how to find the alumni office. The guard gave me a map. I thanked him and started in that direction until I was around a corner and out of sight.
Then I made my way to Flather Hall, a brick-faced dormitory for male freshmen. Classes were over that Friday. Rap and heavy-metal music pulsed and dueled from inside open dorm rooms. I spotted a few underage drinkers and smelled hemp burning as I made my way to the second floor and down a long hallway that reeked of too many young men living on their own for the first time.
The door I sought, number 278, was ajar. I stood there, listening, hearing nothing, and then knocked. No response.
I pushed open the door, saw bunk beds to my right and a single twin bed across the room. Two white males in their late teens sat on a love seat between the single bed and me, wearing Beats headphones and holding video-game controllers. They were absorbed in a violent game playing on a screen on the wall, oblivious to my presence.
Beyond them, at a desk tucked in the corner, there was a third white male, small, scrawny, oily brown hair, lots of acne. Three computer screens dominated the small desk where he sat, and he had headphones on as well, engrossed in the screens.
I reached over and flicked the dorm room light off and on twice.
As if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers, all three of them came up out of their virtual trances and looked around groggily. The closest kid, a chubby towhead named Fred Vertze, spotted me first. His double chin retreated, and he tugged off his headphones.
“Who are you?” he said. “What are you doing in here?”
I waited until the other two removed their headphones before making a show of shutting the door behind me and locking it. They were alarmed when my cold attention swept over them.
“Who are you?” Vertze demanded again.
“Who I am is irrelevant,” I said.
“Hell it is,” said Juan Cyr, the other young man who’d been playing the video game. Cyr was built like a fullback and stood up to show me he was no one to be trifled with.
Brian Stetson, the kid with the acne and the three computer screens, said, “Don’t do anything el stupid-o, Juan. I’m calling campus security.”
“Do that and I’ll have to tell campus security what I know about what goes on in this dorm room,” I said.
They glanced at one another uncertainly.
Vertze, who could have used a shower or two, said, “We don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”
“Okay, let’s cut right to it, then, before I alert the NSA, the FBI, and six other law enforcement agencies. Gentlemen, which one of you is Lone Star Blondes Must Die?”
CHAPTER
14
VERTZE’S EYELIDS DRIFTED almost shut. Stetson frowned, as if he’d heard a foreign phrase spoken at a distance. Cyr acted like I’d punched him in the gut.
Then the burly teen’s expression shifted from shock to anger. He twisted his shoulders and hissed at Stetson, “I told you messing around with that kind of crap was mind poison.”
“Shut up, Juan,” Stetson said, studying me calmly. “Who are you?”
“The worst kind of poison, unless you come clean,” I said, feeling like I’d identified the leader of this crew. “How old are you, Brian?”
“Eighteen,” he said. “How do you know my name?”
“I know all your names. I know you get your kicks exploring the dark web. Pushing the boundaries. Looking into nasty places.”
“Free world,” Stetson said.
“Dogfights?” I said. “Explicit war clips? Hardcore S-and-M fantasy sites?”
“There some law against watching I don’t know about?” Stetson said.
“No, but there are several against abetting the kidnap and advocating the murder of five women.”
That seemed to rock the kid, who looked less certain as he said, “I know what that means, abetting, and no one in this room abetted anything.”
“Didn’t you post a comment on a bulletin board about the Killingblondechicks website?
Quote: ‘I want in to that site. I can contribute. Help. Break some skulls, even.’”
He looked at me dumbly, then at his computer. “You hacked me?”
“FBI hacked you, Stetson. You screwed up. Forgot to use onion routers. Which means that I should go to the dean’s office and tell him what you’ve been up to, which means you most certainly will be expelled, which means your parents will be called, which means you’ll be escorted out of here in complete disgrace and humiliation.”
I let that sink in before saying, “Or you can talk to me.”
After several tense beats, Vertze said, “I’ll talk.”
“Fred,” Stetson said. “Don’t.”
“Brian, my old man will skin me alive if I get expelled,” Vertze said sharply.
“I’ll talk too,” Cyr said.
Stetson’s face flushed. He glared at me, caught in a fierce internal argument, and then finally said sullenly, “What do you want to know?”
Over the next twenty minutes or so, the story came out.
Stetson was a math and computer genius who should have gone to Caltech, but his father was a trustee and fervent supporter of Catholic University. His first night at the school, Stetson had introduced Cyr and Vertze to the dark web. They’d found the Killingblondechicks website and started posting about it for fun.
“Fun?” I said.
“C’mon,” Stetson said. “No one thinks those videos are real.”
“Have you unlocked the videos?”
“You can’t. I tried. The locked world, the unknown, it’s just part of the fantasy of virtual reality, man, a place to safely experience and vent frustrations without consequences.”
I reappraised the eighteen-year-old, thinking that he was entirely too smart for his own good. “You boys experience frustration with blondes?”
“Hasn’t every guy on the face of the earth?” Vertze said.
Cyr and Stetson both started laughing. I had to admit it was a funny line, and I fought not to smile.
Finally, I said, “If I look around in your pasts, am I going to find a blonde one of you disliked so much that she ended up kidnapped? Or dead?”
Cyr said, “My first girlfriend was a blonde. Caught her messing around with my best friend’s older brother. They’re married now. Not kidnapped. Not dead. Just miserable.”
Vertze said, “My anti-blondeness stems from a severe German teacher junior year who had zero sense of humor. I thought about sticking a pin in her ass but refrained—at least, long enough to get an A.”
Stetson and Cyr laughed again. I couldn’t help it and smiled.
“What about you, Brian?” I said, looking at Stetson.
Stetson sobered and said, “My blonde story is like all blonde stories. They’re all about the princess complex that’s sold to them each and every day.”
CHAPTER
15
AFTER DINNER, ONCE Jannie had gone upstairs to do homework and Ali had settled in to watch Meru, an excellent documentary about extreme mountain climbers, I told Bree and Nana Mama about Brian Stetson, disguising him as a client and not revealing his name.
“The princess complex?” Bree said. “And how exactly did he define that?”
“He said it starts at birth with blond girls,” I said. “They’re dressed as princesses in the crib. Then they’re sold the princess story in movies, in advertising, all around them, until they believe that if they can just be beautiful enough, they’ll attract Prince Charming and live happily ever after.”
Nana Mama said, “An eighteen-year-old told you all that?”
“A sharp one. He had the root theory of blonde stories figured out.”
Bree said, “I knew a blonde who was just like that, treated like a princess her whole childhood. Leanne Long. She was an honest-to-God nice person, and she became a nurse and married a really nice guy, so it doesn’t always work according to that kid’s theory.”
“This old lady needs her sleep,” my grandmother said, taking her cane and getting up.
“We’re right behind you,” I promised. “We’ll make sure the place is spotless for you in the morning.”
“Bless you, dear,” she said, and she kissed my forehead.
When Nana Mama was out of earshot, Bree turned serious and said, “Alex, how long did you think you could be involved in the Gretchen Lindel investigation without me knowing?”
“The client story didn’t work?”
“Uh, no.”
I told her the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
When I was done, Bree was spitting mad.
“What were you thinking, going onto campus like that?” she demanded. “Entering a dorm room without a warrant? Threatening possible witnesses without authority and while on suspension due to pending homicide charges?”
I’d known most of that was coming, but it still hurt. I’d let her down.
“I wanted to be useful, Bree,” I said. “It felt like I was back in the game.”
“Your clients and practice are your game now. Have nothing to do? Work on your defense. Help Anita and Naomi make your case ironclad. And the next time you feel the need to lie or hide things from me, Alex? Please don’t.”
I had a hollow feeling in my stomach and said, “You’re right. I just … you’re right. It will never happen again.”
I hoped she’d forgive me. I hated going to sleep when one of us was mad at the other.
After several moments, Bree sighed and said, “So you don’t think those college boys are involved?”
My shoulders relaxed. I felt like we were getting back to level ground.
“Beyond the posts, no, not as far as I could tell.”
“You don’t think we should get a warrant for their computers?”
“And get them all expelled for being smart, nosy, teenage male nerds with blonde chips on their shoulders?”
“Well, when you put it like that,” Bree said, getting up and extending her hand to me.
I took it, kissed the back of her hand, and said, “Princess?”
She started laughing, said, “Charming?”
I got up, grinning. “That’s me.”
CHAPTER
16
JOHN SAMPSON HAD never heard a collective grief quite like this. The crying, wailing, and whimpering seemed to come from every room he passed.
Innocence destroyed, Sampson thought. Up until now, their lives have been one shooting star after another, and that’s gone.
Looking shell-shocked, Wally Christian, Georgetown University’s security chief, walked beside Sampson and Detective Ainsley Fox down a hall on the first floor of Village C West, a residential building for freshmen. A DCMP patrol officer stood aside so they could go through the double doors into the common area.
Sampson paused just beyond the doors and took in the carnage with one long, sweeping glance.
A young brunette in a Hoyas sweatshirt was sprawled on a couch, dead, a gunshot to her neck. A second young woman with short brown hair lay facedown and dead on the carpet. EMTs rushed out of the room with a gurney carrying a very large Samoan American male with two chest wounds.
“How many saw it?” Sampson asked.
“Seven,” Wally Christian said. “We’ve moved them to the common room upstairs. The chaplains are with them.”
“Who’s the missing girl?” Fox asked. “The blonde?”
“Patsy Mansfield,” Christian said. “A sophomore. Real star.”
“As in, people knew who she was?” Sampson said.
“On campus, you bet. She plays lacrosse, all-American as a freshman, and, well, you’ve seen the picture of her I put out with the Amber Alert. She’s quite the looker.”
As all of them took the stairs to the second floor of the dorm, Sampson thought of what Alex had told him over the phone about the three freshmen at Catholic University with bad attitudes about blondes. He wondered if they were involved here and made a note to check on their whereabouts at the time of the incident.
&nb
sp; The seven witnesses to the homicides of the brunettes and the kidnapping of Patsy Mansfield all told much the same story. Eleven students were hanging out in the lounge around seven that Saturday evening when two men came in from outside. They wore black balaclavas and olive-green workman’s coveralls with Georgetown University written on the back. They drew pistols with silencers and ordered everyone to the floor except Patsy Mansfield.
“Wait,” Detective Fox said. “They used her name?”
“Definitely,” said Tina Hall, a freshman. “They knew who she was.”
Hall and the others said the two men told Mansfield that things would go easier if she just went with them. But then Keoni Latupa, a linebacker on the football team and a good friend of Patsy’s, grabbed one of the men and threw him to the ground so hard that his gun clattered away. Latupa scrambled for it, but the other man shot and wounded him before he could get to it.
The loose gun came to a stop at the feet of Macy Jones, the brunette in the Hoyas sweatshirt. She went for it and was shot too. At that point, Denise O’Toole, Jones’s roommate, went to help her friend. She was shot in the leg.
“Then the first guy got up and retrieved his pistol,” said Tina Hall. “He went over to Keoni and shot him again. Then he went to Denise, who pleaded with him not to shoot her, just to take her but not shoot her.”
Hall paused, tears welling in her eyes and then dripping down her cheeks. She went on, “Know what he said before he killed Denise? He said, ‘Why would we take you? Nobody pays for brunettes anymore.’”
CHAPTER
17
THE DC POLICE union had referred my latest client to me. She knocked on my basement door shortly after nine Monday morning.
I opened the door and found a dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties standing there, her shoulders slumped. I knew her, but she was so haggard I almost didn’t recognize her.
“Tess?” I said, holding out my hand. “It’s good to see you.”
Detective Tess Aaliyah lifted her head, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’m embarrassed and uncomfortable to be here, Dr. Cross, but my union rep said you were the only counselor available on short notice.”