“See Jane Run,” Chavez said.
Carver turned to look at her, as if noticing her for the first time. She picked up on his vibe.
“Mr. McGinnis just asked me to check it,” she explained. “That’s the name of the company.”
Well, he thought, at least she was good for something besides giving tours of the plant while the boss was away. He turned to the agents, making sure his back was to her and physically cutting her out of the discussion.
“Okay, we’ll get this done,” he said.
“How long are we talking about?” Bantam asked.
“Why don’t you go to our wonderful cafeteria and get yourselves a cup of coffee. I’ll be back with you before it’s cool enough to drink.”
McGinnis chuckled.
“He means that we don’t have a cafeteria. We have machines that overheat the coffee.”
“Well,” Bantam said, “we appreciate the offer but we need to witness the execution of the warrant.”
Carver nodded.
“Then stick with me and we’ll go get the information you need. But there is still going to be an issue.”
“What issue?” Bantam asked.
“You want all information pertaining to this website but you don’t want to involve D and H. That’s not going to work. I can vouch for Danny O’Connor. He’s not a terrorist. I think we need to bring him in if we want to be thorough and get you everything you need.”
Bantam nodded and took the suggestion under advisement.
“Let’s move one step at a time. We’ll bring Mr. O’Connor in when we need to.”
Carver was silent as he acted like he was expecting more, then he nodded.
“Suit yourself, Agent Bantam.”
“Thank you.”
“Should we head down to the bunker, then?”
“Absolutely.”
The two agents stood up, as did Chavez.
“Good luck, gentlemen,” McGinnis offered. “I hope you catch the bad guys. We’re willing to help in any way we can.”
“Thank you, sir,” Agent Richmond said.
As they left administration, Carver noticed that Chavez was tagging along behind the agents. Carver was holding the door but when it was her turn to go through, he cut her off.
“We’ll take it from here, thank you,” he said.
He stepped through the doorway in front of her and pulled the door closed behind him.
EIGHT: Home Sweet Home
On Saturday morning I was in my room at the Kyoto reading Larry Bernard’s front-page story about the release of Alonzo Winslow from juvenile custody when one of the detectives from Hollywood Division called me. Her name was Bynum. She told me my house had been cleared as a crime scene and returned to my custody.
“I can just go back?”
“That’s right. You can go home now.”
“Does that mean the investigation is complete? I mean, pending the arrest of the guy, of course.”
“No, we still have a few loose ends we’re trying to figure out.”
“Loose ends?”
“I can’t discuss the case with you.”
“Well, can I ask you about Angela?”
“What about her?”
“I was wondering if she had been… you know, tortured or anything.”
There was a pause while the detective decided how much to tell me.
“I’m sorry but the answer is yes. There was evidence of rape with a foreign object and the same pattern of slow suffocation as in the other cases. Multiple ligature marks on the neck. He repeatedly choked her out and revived her. Whether this was a means of getting her to talk about the story you two were working on, or just his way of getting off, is unclear at this time. I guess we will have to ask the man himself when we get him.”
I was silent as I thought about the horror Angela had faced.
“Anything else, Jack? It’s Saturday. I’m hoping to salvage half a day off with my daughter.”
“Uh, no, sorry.”
“Well, you can go home now. Have a nice day.”
Bynum hung up and I sat there, thinking. Calling it “home” seemed wrong. I wasn’t sure I wanted the house back, because I wasn’t sure it was home any longer. My sleep—what little there was of it—had been invaded the last two nights by images of Angela Cook’s face in the darkness under the bed and the muffled coughing sound so expertly implanted in my mind by her killer. Only in my dream, everything was underwater. Her wrists were not bound and she reached up to me as she sank. Her last cry for help came out in a bubble and when it broke with the sound the Unsub had made, I came awake.
To now live and try to sleep in the same place seemed impossible to me. I spread the curtains and looked out the single window of my small room. I had a view of the civic center. The beautiful and ageless City Hall rose in front of me. Next to it was the criminal courts building, as ugly as the prison most of its customers were headed to. The sidewalks and green lawns were empty. It was Saturday and nobody came downtown on the weekend. I pulled the curtains closed.
I decided I would keep the room as long as the paper was paying. I would go to the house but only to get fresh clothes and other things I needed. In the afternoon I would call a Realtor and see about getting rid of the place. If I could. For Sale: Nicely kept and restored Hollywood bungalow where serial killer struck. Bring all offers.
My cell phone rang, jarring me out of the reverie. My real cell phone. I had finally gotten it turned back on with full function the day before. The caller ID said private number and I had learned not to let those go unanswered.
It was Rachel.
“Hey,” I said.
“You sound down. What’s wrong?”
What a profiler. She had read me with one word. I decided not to bring up what Detective Bynum had said about Angela’s torturous end.
“Nothing. I’m just… nothing. What’s going on with you? Are you working?”
“Yeah.”
“Want to take a break and get some coffee or something? I’m downtown.”
“No, I can’t.”
I had not seen her since we had been split apart by the detectives after we’d found and reported Angela’s body. As with everything else, the separation, though only forty-eight hours, was not going well for me. I stood up and started pacing in the small confines of the room.
“Well, when will I get to see you?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Jack. Have some patience with me. I’m under the gun here.”
I felt embarrassed and changed the subject.
“Speaking of under the gun, I could use an armed escort.”
“For what?”
“The LAPD says I have access to my house again. They said I could go home but I don’t think I can stay there. I just want to get some clothes but it’s going to be sort of creepy being in there by myself.”
“I’m sorry, Jack, I can’t take you. If you are truly worried, though, I can make a call.”
I was beginning to get the picture. This had happened to me with her once before. I had to resign myself to the fact that Rachel was like a feral cat. She was intrigued by what could be and hovered close to the touch of another, but ultimately she jumped back and away from it. If you pushed it, her claws came out.
“Never mind, Rachel, I was just trying to get you to come out.”
“I am really sorry, Jack, but I can’t do it.”
“Why did you call?”
There was a silence before she answered.
“To check in and to update you on a few things. If you wanted to hear them.”
“Down to business. Sure, go ahead.”
I sat back down on the bed and opened a notebook to write in.
“Yesterday they confirmed that the trunk murder website Angela visited was indeed the trip wire she stepped on,” Rachel said. “But so far it’s a dead end.”
“A dead end? I thought everything can be traced on the Internet.”
“The physical location of the site is
a web-hosting facility in Mesa, Arizona, called Western Data Consultants. Agents went there with a warrant and were able to pull the details about the site setup and operation. It was registered through a company in Seattle called See Jane Run, which registers, designs and maintains numerous sites through Western Data. It’s kind of a go-between company. It doesn’t have the physical plant where websites are hosted on servers. That’s what Western Data does. See Jane Run builds and maintains websites for clients and pays a company like Western Data to host them. Kind of a middle man.”
“So did they go to Seattle?”
“Agents from the Seattle field office are handling it.”
“And?”
“The trunk murder site was set up and paid for entirely over the Internet. No one at See Jane Run ever met the man who paid for it. The physical address given two years ago when the sites were set up was a mail drop near SeaTac that is no longer valid. We’re trying to trace that but that will be a dead end, too. This guy is good.”
“You just said ‘sites’—plural. Were there more than one?”
“You noticed that. Yes, two sites. Trunk murder dot com was the first site and the second is called Denslow Data. That was the name he used in setting these up. Bill Denslow. Both sites are on a five-year plan that he paid for in advance. He used a money order—untraceable except back to the point of purchase. Another dead end.”
I took a couple moments to write some notes down.
“Okay,” I finally said. “So is Denslow the Unsub?”
“The man posing as Denslow is the Unsub but we’re not dumb enough to think he would put his real name on a website.”
“Then what does it mean? D-E-N-slow. Is it like half an acronym or something?”
“It could be. We’re working on it. So far we haven’t found the connection. We’re working on the possible acronym and the name itself. But we haven’t come up with a Bill Denslow with any sort of criminal record that would approach this.”
“Maybe it’s just a guy the Unsub hated, growing up. Like a neighbor or a teacher.”
“Could be.”
“So why the two websites?”
“One was the capture site and one was the OP site.”
“OP?”
“Observation point.”
“You’re completely losing me.”
“Okay, the trunk murder site was set up to collect the IP—the computer address—of anybody who visited the site. This is what happened with Angela. You understand?”
“Right. She did a search and it brought her to the site.”
“Right. The site collected IPs but was built so that those addresses were automatically forwarded to another dot com site. This one was called Denslow Data. This is a common practice. You go to a site and your ID is captured and sent on for marketing use elsewhere. It’s essentially the origin of spam.”
“Okay. So now Denslow Data has Angela’s ID. What happened to it there?”
“Nothing. It stayed there.”
“Then how did—”
“Look, here’s the trick. Denslow Data was built with a function that was completely the opposite of the trunk murder site. It captures no data of visitors. You see what I’m getting at?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, look at it from the Unsub’s point of view. He has set up trunk murder dot com to capture the computer ID of anybody who might be onto him and looking for him. The only problem with that is if he went to the site to check it, then his own ID would be captured. And sure he could use somebody else’s computer to run the check, but it would still help fix location. He could be tracked to a high degree through his own site.”
I nodded as I finally understood the setup.
“I see,” I said. “So he has the captured IP address forwarded to another site where there is no capture mechanism and he can check it without fear of being tracked.”
“Exactly.”
“So after Angela hit on the trunk murder site he went to the Denslow site and got her IP. He traced it back to the Times and figured this might be more than a morbid curiosity about trunk murders. He breaches the Times system and that leads him to me and Angela and our stories. He reads my e-mails and he knows that we are onto something. That I’m onto something and heading to Vegas.”
“That’s right. So he concocted the scheme to take you both out in a murder-suicide.”
I was silent for a moment as I spun it once more. It added up, even though I didn’t like the total.
“It was my e-mail that got her killed.”
“No, Jack. You can’t look at it that way. If anything, her fate was sealed when she checked out trunk murder dot com. You can’t blame yourself for an e-mail you sent to an editor.”
I didn’t respond. I tried to put the question of guilt out of my head for a while and to concentrate on the Unsub.
“Jack, you there?”
“I’m just thinking. So this is all completely untraceable?”
“From this angle. Once we get this guy and grab his computer, we’ll be able to tear it apart and trace his visits to Denslow. That will be solid evidence.”
“You mean if he used his own computer.”
“Yes.”
“Seems unlikely, given the skill he’s already shown.”
“Maybe. It will depend on how often he checked his trap. It appears he was onto Angela less than twenty-four hours after her visit to the trunk murder site. That would indicate a routine, a daily trap check, and that might indicate he was using his own computer or one in close proximity.”
I thought about all of this for a moment and leaned back on the pillow, closing my eyes. What I knew about the world was depressing.
“There’s something else I want to tell you,” Rachel said.
“What?”
I opened my eyes.
“We figured out how he drew Angela to your house.”
“How?”
“You did it.”
“What are you talking about? I was—”
“I know, I know. I am just saying that is how it was meant to look. We found her laptop in her apartment. In her e-mail account is an e-mail from you. It was sent Tuesday night. You said you had picked up some interesting information on the Winslow case. The Unsub, as you, said it was very important and invited her over to show it to her.”
“Jesus!”
“She returned the e-mail, saying she was on her way. She came to your house and he was waiting for her. It was after you’d left for Vegas.”
“He must’ve been watching my house. He watched me leave.”
“You leave, he gets in and uses your home computer to send the message. Then he waits for her. And once he is through with her, he follows you out to Vegas to complete the setup by killing you and making it look like a suicide.”
“But what about my gun? He gets in the house and finds it easily enough. He could then drive it to Vegas to follow me. But it still doesn’t explain how I supposedly got it there. I flew and I didn’t check a bag. That’s a big hole, isn’t it?”
“We think we’ve got that filled in, too.”
I squeezed my eyes shut again.
“Tell me.”
“After he baited Angela he used your computer to print out a GO! cargo shipping form.”
“Go? I’ve never heard of Go.”
“It’s a small competitor to FedEx and the others. G-O with an exclamation mark. Stands for Guaranteed Overnight. It’s airport-to-airport shipping. A growing business now that airlines limit luggage and charge for it. You can download shipping forms off the Internet, and someone did just that on your computer. It was for a package sent first overnight to yourself. It was held for pickup at the cargo facility at McCarran International. No signature required. Just show your copy of the shipping form. You can drop packages off at LAX as late as eleven o’clock.”
I could only shake my head.
“This is how we think he did it,” Rachel said. “He baits Angela and then goes to work on the shipment. A
ngela shows up and he does his thing with her. He leaves her—whether she is dead or not at this point we don’t know. He then goes to the airport and drops the package with the gun. They don’t X-ray domestic packages at GO! He then either drives to Vegas or flies, quite possibly even on the same plane as you. Either way, once he’s there, he picks up the package and has the gun. He then follows you to Ely to complete the plan.”
“It seems so tight. Are you sure he could have pulled this off?”
“It is tight and we’re not sure, but the scenario works.”
“What about Schifino?”
“He’s been briefed but doesn’t feel he’s in danger now, if he ever was. He declined protection but we’re watching him anyway.”
I wondered if the Las Vegas lawyer would ever realize how close he may have been to being the worst kind of victim. Rachel continued.
“I take it you would have called me by now if there had been any further contact from the Unsub.”
“No, no contact. Besides, you have the phone. Has he tried calling it again?”
“No.”
“What happened with the trace?”
“We traced his call to you to a cell tower at McCarran. The US Airways terminal. Within two hours of the call to you, there were flights from that terminal to twenty-four different American cities. He could have been going just about anywhere with connections from those twenty-four.”
“What about Seattle?”
“It wasn’t a direct flight but he could have flown to a connection city and gone from there. We are executing a search warrant today that will give us the passenger manifests from all the flights. We’ll run the names through the computer and see what we get. This is our guy’s first mistake and, hopefully, we’ll make him pay for it.”
“A mistake? How so?”
“He should never have called you. He should never have made contact. He gave us information and a location. It’s very unlike what we’ve seen before from him.”
“But you were the one who wanted to bet me that he would make contact. Why is it so shocking? You were right.”
“Yes, but I said that before I knew all I know now. I think, based on what we now have in the profile of this man, that it was out of character for him to call you.”