The Program (Jack Carpenter series)

by James Swain

  “Why did you post that blog? Do you know something about the case?”

  “Wayne Ladd’s my boyfriend,” Amber said. “I didn’t like the things the police said about him on their web site. They made Wayne out to be a monster. He never hurt anybody in his life.”

  “Wayne Ladd killed his mother’s boyfriend.”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “Did Wayne tell you that?”

  Amber let out a sniffle and nodded. She was wearing cheap mascara, and her tears were giving her racoon eyes. Vick took a Kleenex from her purse and gave it to her. Had Amber not been in love, Vick would have told her about the police report that said Wayne had been covered in her mother’s boyfriend’s blood when the police had arrived at the scene, the bayonet still clutched in his hand. Or about the confession he’d made with a lawyer present. Vick would have told her those things, only love blinded people to the truth, and let them see only the things they wished to see.

  The door to the conference room opened, and DuCharme stuck his head in.

  “She checks out,” he said.

  Vick rose from her chair. She’d just raced across town to confront a pissed-off teenager. It angered her as much as DuCharme’s blasting it over the airwaves. She started to leave, and Amber touched her sleeve.

  “Wayne didn’t do it,” Amber said.

  Vick had had enough of Amber’s denials.

  “Then why did he confess?” Vick asked.

  “He was protecting her.”

  “Who?”

  “His mother.”

  “You’re saying that Wayne confessed to protect his mother.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that what he told you?”

  “Yes. I know it’s true.”

  “How do you know it’s true?”

  “Because Wayne wouldn’t hurt anyone. He’s gentle and kind and likes to write songs on the guitar. He’s the sweetest boy in my school. That’s why I love him.”

  Vick had read Wayne Ladd’s file. It had been clean except for the boyfriend’s killing. That had bothered her. Boys who killed were usually out of control.

  “He’s not a monster,” Amber whispered.

  The tears had dried on Amber’s cheeks. In her beautiful eyes was a look of a much older person, of someone with wisdom beyond her years. It took Vick by surprise, then the slow realization of the situation took hold.

  Amber was telling the truth.

  Chapter 16

  Binoculars in hand, Renaldo stood on the roof of the elevated parking garage across from the library. Six cruisers and two unmarked Crown Vic sedans were parked by the entrance, the officers standing on the sidewalk with their chests puffed out.

  He knew why the police were here. He’d heard the distress call over his scanner. A serial killer named Mr. Clean was inside the library, and every cruiser in the area had been instructed to go there.

  He’d never heard of Mr. Clean. Was there another serial killer in Fort Lauderdale that he didn’t know about? Curious, he’d decided to find out.

  Going to the computer in his study, he’d typed Mr. Clean into the Yahoo search engine. Yahoo had taken him to the web site of a company that sold household cleaning products. Mr. Clean was the company mascot, a muscle-bound cartoon character dressed in white. The cartoon looked like a cross between a black man and a Latino, or what some called a mulatto.

  Then it had hit him. He was Mr. Clean.

  It had scared him. Someone must have seen him abduct Wayne Ladd. The police had done up a profile, and given him a cute nickname. Now, they were hunting for him. This was bad.

  Then, he’d had a strange thought. If he was Mr. Clean, who was the person inside the library? He’d decided he’d better find out.

  As he’d started to leave his house, he’d realized that Wayne needed to be fed. As part of the Program, he cooked three delicious meals a day for Wayne, and fed him tasty snacks whenever the boy was hungry. Wayne needed to be happy, and keeping his stomach full was a good way to do that. He’d prepared a thick roast beef sandwich, which he’d taken to Wayne’s room. He’d untied Wayne, and watched him wolf down the food.

  “I have to go out for a little while,” Renaldo had said. “I will make you a wonderful dinner when I return.”

  “Are you going to leave me tied to the chair?” Wayne had asked.

  Renaldo had nodded solemnly.

  “What about the movies? Can’t you show me something else?”

  The TV was showing a gang rape to the accompaniment of Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

  “What would you like to see?”

  “I don’t know — something normal for a change.”

  Renaldo did not know what normal was. He’d tied Wayne back to the chair and left the house.

  A movement in front of the library caught his eye. Three people were coming down the front steps, the police letting them pass. Renaldo studied them through his binoculars, one at a time.

  The first person was a soft-looking white man wearing a cheap brown suit. Pinned to his lapel was a policeman’s badge.

  The second was a cute little blond wearing a dark pants suit. She appeared to be in charge. Another cop, he guessed.

  The third was a sexy teenage girl.

  The cute blond escorted the teenage girl to a police cruiser. The blond spoke a few words, and the teenager nodded solemnly. The teenager wasn’t wearing handcuffs, and didn’t appear to be in trouble.

  Moments later, the cruiser drove away with the teenage girl.

  Renaldo focused on the cute little blond. She got behind the wheel of a blue Audi that was parked illegally in a bus zone. A decal on the dash said FBI.

  This was really bad.

  He did not want to mess with the FBI. They were smarter than the police, and never quit. The FBI would put him back in a mental hospital, or in prison. They were the enemy.

  He decided to leave.

  “Hey — don’t I know you?” a raspy voice asked.

  Renaldo shivered in the brutal summer heat. No one knew him. He did not have a single friend in the entire world. He turned to find an aging black man standing behind him. The old man’s clothes were odd — dark dress pants, a navy button-down shirt, white necktie, red suspenders, and a porkpie hat titled rakishly to one side. Hanging around his neck was a laminated badge with a blurry photograph.

  “I don’t think so,” Renaldo said.

  “I’ve seen you around town. You drive around at night, picking up hookers.”

  He knows, Renaldo thought.

  “We talked once. About three months ago, thereabouts,” the old man went on. “You were scouting for tail down by the bridge. I was there, and we struck up a conversation. You asked me about my clothes.”

  Renaldo dug deep in his memory. The old man was a professional panhandler. His gimmick was to approach tourists on the street, and gave them a spiel about being in town for a Shriner’s convention, and losing his wallet. That was the reason behind the odd clothes and ID tag.

  “I’m afraid you’ve mistaken me for someone else.” Renaldo bowed his head and attempted to walk around him.

  “Why were you spying on the police?” the old man asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’ve been watching you the whole time. Saw you pull into the garage, and followed you up here.”

  Renaldo’s inner alarm went off. His first thought was to kill the old man, and throw him in the trunk of his car. He could dismember him in the bathtub at the house, and feed him to his neighbor’s dogs. They stayed out at night, and were always hungry.

  He glanced over his shoulder. The police cars had vacated the library. It was doable. If he got a hand around the old man’s throat, no one would hear a thing.

  He reined in the murderous impulse. He needed to be like the shark, and not draw attention to himself. Removing his wallet, he pulled out a crisp twenty dollar bill, and shoved it into the old man’s hands.

  “What’s that for?” The old man sounded indignant.

&
nbsp; “It’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “That’s not enough to shut me up.”

  Renaldo opened his billfold. He had eighty dollars.

  “Take all of it,” Renaldo said.

  “I want more.”

  “That’s all I have.”

  “You’ll pay, when you hear what I have to say.”

  There was an expression for what the old man was trying to pull. It was called a shakedown. Renaldo closed his wallet and headed to his car on the other side of the roof, near the ramp. The old man fell in step behind him. Renaldo noted how he was keeping his distance, staying a few yards back. He knows everything.

  “I’ve been watching you a long time,” the old man said. “You’re a bad one, you are. Trolling the streets at night, picking up hookers. You take them home and kill them, then dispose of their bodies. Tell me I’m right.”

  Renaldo kept his eyes peeled to the ground and kept walking.

  “You wear a uniform sometimes. What are you, a deliveryman?”

  Renaldo kept walking.

  “Or a fireman?”

  Renaldo pulled his keys out of his pocket.

  “I knew some of those girls,” the old man went on. “I kept telling the police they were disappearing, but they didn’t listen.”

  Renaldo jammed his key into the driver’s door and opened his car. The heat bubble inside the vehicle swept over his body, and he staggered back.

  “How many have you killed? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? I bet you don’t even know the number. Poor girls disappear, nobody gives a rat’s ass.”

  Renaldo leaned against the car and tried to catch his breath. As strange as it sounded, he’d been raised Catholic, and believed in heaven and hell. He knew that someday he’d end up in burning in hell for all the killing he’d done. He wondered if this was a preview of eternal damnation.

  “I have a bank account. I’ll give you what’s in it,” he managed to say.

  “Now you’re talking, son. Give me the address, and I’ll meet you there.”

  Renaldo told him the bank’s location. The old man headed for the stairwell. He had a spring to his step, and was already counting the money.

  Renaldo watched him leave. The old man was a con man. He would come back in a few weeks, and shake him down again. Then he’d do it again. It was how these things played out. He would turn Renaldo’s life into a nightmare.

  My life will be hell before I die, he thought.

  A jetliner appeared in the cloudless sky. On an approach pattern for the airport, its engines drowned out all sound. It was the opportunity he’d been waiting for, and Renaldo drew his knife. The old man glanced over his shoulder as the shark descended upon him. “Please,” he begged.

  He dragged the old man into a stairwell and slit his throat, the blood flowing down the stairs. Then he got a small saw he kept in his trunk for situations like this. He went to work on the old man, and cut him up. The pieces he wanted to keep, he wrapped in plastic, and put in his car. The rest he dragged to the other side of the parking garage, and propped up against the wall, using the old man’s porkpie hat to hide his missing head.

  Renaldo appraised his handiwork. The old man looked like he was taking a siesta. The police would freak when they took the hat away, which was exactly what he wanted.

  He decided to put a cherry atop his cake. From his car, he found a slip of paper and a ballpoint pen. On the slip he wrote the words Mr. Clean. He folded the slip into a neat square, and stuck the slip in the rim of the old man’s hat.

  He drove to a 7/11 and locked himself in the restroom. He washed the blood off his hands and splashed cold water on his face. He felt tired. Taking another life no longer brought the same thrill it once did. It was more a matter of habit now. Like eating and sleeping and going to work.

  He appraised his reflection in the mirror. His hair was flecked with gray, and his eyes, so pretty when he was young, had turned listless and old.

  He bought a sixteen-ounce coffee, which he drank in his car. He thought about Wayne. The teenager was seventeen, the same age he’d been when he’d started killing prostitutes in Havana. Wayne’s whole life was spread out before him. It excited Renaldo to think about all the things Wayne might accomplish, if given the right start.

  He drove back to the house, determined to give Wayne that chance.

  Chapter 17

  Nothing died on a computer.

  Deep within every hard drive were trails of a computer’s activity. People who sent and received emails were especially vulnerable. Traces of emails remained on a computer long after the actual messages were erased. Few people knew how to clean away these traces, and hardly anyone ever did.

  Then there was data. Every single document that was created by, or stored on a computer left a history, even if the document was erased from the file it had been created in, and from the computer’s recycle bin. That data was also there, waiting to be found.

  Finally, there was metadata. Every document on a computer was loaded with hidden data. Who created the document, where it had been sent, all the changes and alterations that have been made to it, were all recorded like a giant footprint.

  All of the information was there, and all of it could be found.

  “So find it,” Linderman said.

  The tech out of FBI’s Jacksonville office grinned. His name was Chip Williams, and he was old school, with a starched white shirt, a thin, perfectly knotted necktie, and a military-style buzz cut. Williams sat in front of Alvin Hodges’s computer in the prison’s records department, looking for traces of Crutch’s activity on the hard drive.

  “This could take a while,” Williams said.

  “Take as long as you want,” Linderman replied. “Our suspect isn’t going anywhere.”

  Williams began by downloading a special software program into the computer. Then his fingers danced across the keyboard like a concert pianist. Within seconds, hundreds of domain names scrolled down the screen like movie credits.

  “Looks like your suspect has been spending a lot of time surfing the Internet,” Williams said. “A lot of these domain names are law enforcement web sites. He would have needed a password to enter most of them.”

  “He’s a computer expert. He could have hacked them.”

  “Any idea what he was looking for?”

  “No. Could he have been downloading information from these sites, and storing it in some secret area of the hard drive?”

  “That’s not so easy, even for an expert.”

  “He used to do work for NASA.”

  “Well, then sure. No problem.”

  “Search the hard drive as thoroughly as you can. I’m going upstairs to the warden’s office. Call me if you find anything interesting.”

  “Will do,” Williams said.

  Leaving the records department, Linderman leaned against the cool concrete wall in the hallway outside. He tried not to think about the deck of cold case playing cards in his pocket, or the scribbling he’d seen on Danni’s card. He reminded himself that he’d come to Starke Prison to find the man who’d abducted Wayne Ladd. That was his first priority. Everything else had to wait.

  Only he couldn’t wait.

  This was Danni.

  In college he’d studied philosophy. One discussion had always stood out. A father takes his young daughter and her best friend to the beach. The two girls go swimming, and are pulled out by the tide. The father can only save one child from drowning. Which one does he save?

  The answer was his daughter. The father could always forgive himself for letting another child drown, but he could never forgive himself for letting his daughter perish.

  He took the deck out of his pocket and slipped the cards from the box. Finding Danni’s card, he held it up to the dim overhead light. Writing filled the margins, the letters so faint that he couldn’t make out what they said.

  “Damn it,” he said.

  He put the cards away. Scrutinizing Danni’s card would have to wait.

&nb
sp; He took the stairs to the warden’s office.

  He entered without knocking. Jenkins sat at his desk while Wood hovered beside him, both staring at Jenkin’s computer. Neither man lifted their gaze.

  “Find something good?” Linderman asked.