“We got hold of it. Is Bluebeard one of your customers?”
“I don’t have customers. It’s a noncommercial site. You said so yourself.”
“All right. One of your visitors then?”
“You could say that.”
“Bluebeard—that’s an odd name, isn’t it? How do you suppose it was chosen?”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Ask Bluebeard? So who is he?”
“Beats me. I don’t know.”
Rawls let a beat of silence pass. Then he said, “You’re Bluebeard, aren’t you, Mr. Gader?”
“Me?” Gader laughed. “Shit, no.”
His reaction seemed genuine. Even so, Rawls pursued the idea. “The password for the site is Fatima. You run the site. You selected the password. Isn’t it logical to assume that you’re Bluebeard?”
“No.”
“Where did I go wrong, Mr. Gader? Are you claiming you don’t run the site after all? Because if I had to guess, I would say that you run it off a personal computer, probably right here in this house.”
“Are you going to search the house? Is that it? Because you can’t search without a warrant. You can’t do shit without a warrant.”
“The man knows his rights,” Brand said mildly. It was the first time he had spoken.
“I sure as hell do. And I don’t appreciate two feds barging in here and, you know—”
“Getting you out of your bubble bath?” Brand smiled.
“It wasn’t a bubble bath, and it’s none of your goddamn business anyway. Get out of here.”
“Mr. Gader,” Rawls said, “you can make us leave, but we’ll only come back with a warrant—the item you’re so concerned about.” He leaned forward, speaking slowly and reasonably, the way he used to speak to his son Philip when he was a toddler. Philip was a senior at U. Penn now. “Of course, you might think that if we go away for an hour or two, you’ll have time to wipe the contents of your computer. Then you’ll be home free, you might believe. But you’d be wrong. We’ve already downloaded your site onto a Zip disk. We have all the evidence we need. Besides, we can recover almost any data from a drive, no matter what you do to it. Any attempt at erasure would only make things worse for you in the long run.”
“Bullshit.”
“You don’t think we know how to preserve and recover evidence?”
“I don’t think you’ve got anything a judge would call evidence.”
“We have a Web site that displays streaming video of a young woman in her home.”
“So?”
“It looks like a serious privacy-rights violation.”
“Not if, say, she’s my girlfriend. In that case, well, she gets a kick out of letting me see her naked. The site’s password-protected because we want visitors on an invitation-only basis. It’s kinky, sure, but she’s over the age of consent, and we get a kick out of it, so leave me alone.”
“How about Miss December and Miss November? They your girlfriends too?”
“Maybe.”
“Can you produce any of these women to back up your claims?”
Gader squirmed in his chair. “Let’s say I can. But I won’t. Not without a court order or whatever it takes.”
“Then we’ll get a court order—or whatever it takes.”
“No, you won’t. No way. A judge won’t listen to you with what you’ve got now. What you need is my cooperation, and I’m not offering it. So get lost.”
“What makes you think we would be deterred by your lack of cooperation, Mr. Gader?”
“Because this whole thing is too small-time and too much hassle.” Gader seemed to gain confidence from his own words. “You’ve got too many other things to run down, higher priorities. You don’t have time to screw around with this piece-of-shit case. Even if you want to, your higher-ups won’t let you. They don’t give a damn about some private Web site that might or might not be doing something skuzzy. They won’t give you the go-ahead to waste the Bureau’s resources.”
He seemed cooler now. He had convinced himself.
Rawls glanced at Brand, who wore a tight, fixed expression on his face. Rawls knew that look. It meant He’s got us, Noah.
“So that’s how it is, Mr. Gader?” Rawls asked evenly.
“Yeah, that’s how it is.”
“Well, you’re right.” Rawls surprised both Brand and Gader by saying this. “Our superiors won’t let us pursue this case on the clock. They want us handling other, higher priority cases, just as you said.”
“Great. I’m right. I win. You lose. Get lost.”
“It’s not quite that simple.”
“Why not?”
“Because, Mr. Gader, we don’t require any go-ahead from our supervisor if we choose to work this case on our own time. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re not on the clock, are we, Agent Brand?”
“Wish we were,” Brand said cheerfully.
“We’re here, even though we’re not getting paid. And we’ll pursue this matter, whether or not our colleagues want us to do so. Isn’t that right, Agent Brand?”
“Damn straight.” Brand might or might not have believed this, but he was playing along.
“We’ll pursue it as long as it takes. We’re not going to drop this investigation. Not now, not tomorrow, not a week from now, not ever.”
“We’ve signed on for the duration,” Brand volunteered, getting into the flow. “We’ll miss a lot of meals if we have to. But we’re gonna get to the bottom of this mess.”
Gader looked from one to the other. “You’re shittin’ me,” he said.
Rawls steepled his hands in his lap. “Mr. Gader, let me tell you a story. I have a daughter at Georgetown right now.”
“I don’t have to hear this—”
“Just listen,” Rawls said patiently. “Last year, when my daughter was a freshman, she found out that somebody had installed a camcorder in the dormitory bathroom. The camera was shooting eight-millimeter videotape of the women as they showered. This seems to have been going on for some time—weeks, months. And it would still be going on if my daughter hadn’t dropped her shampoo bottle and seen the camera inside a watertight bag under the drain grate. See, it was pointed up, Mr. Gader. You know the kind of footage it was taking.
“She called me, quite hysterical. I went up there on my day off, and I interviewed the men in the dorm—it’s a coed dormitory hall. I talked to them one at a time. Nobody confessed, but one young gentleman seemed nervous. I staked out his room. After midnight he threw something away. I dug it out of the trash. A bagful of videotapes. He’d gotten rattled, and he was disposing of the evidence. That fine young man isn’t a student at Georgetown anymore. Do you see the point of this story?”
Gader was trying hard not to look flustered. “I think so.”
“I’m a persistent man,” Rawls said. “Especially when it comes to privacy violations of this particular kind. When I look at that woman undressing and taking a shower on your Web site for the benefit of masturbating voyeurs, it strikes home to me in a rather personal way. It makes me think of my daughter. Now do you honestly believe I’m going to let this case go?”
“Maybe not.”
“Definitely not. So don’t play games. Don’t use delaying tactics. Don’t be clever. Just tell us what we need to know.”
Gader seemed very small inside his bathrobe. His chin was down, his eyes half-closed, his hands gripping the armrests, fingertips squeezed white with pressure. Down the street a dog started to bark. It was the only sound for a while.
“I’ll cooperate,” Gader said finally. “No problem.”
Rawls smiled. “That’s what we like to hear. Is the computer here in the house?”
“Yeah.” Gader rose, tightening the belt of his robe. “It’s upstairs.”
He led them to the second floor. Climbing the staircase, Brand hung back a few steps with Rawls.
“Great story,” Brand whispered.
“Thanks.”
“Fun
ny thing, though. I’ve met your family. And you haven’t got a daughter.”
Rawls smiled. “Well, let’s keep that between ourselves.”
20
C.J. was putting her dinner dishes in the sink when something drew her gaze to the kitchen window. She looked past her pale reflection in the glass, studying the darkness of her backyard.
Amid the shadows of the jacaranda trees, she saw a light.
For a moment she just stood there, transfixed by an emotion too deeply rooted to be immediately identified. Then she understood that what she felt was fear—not an adult’s fear, but the stark, uncomplicated terror of a child.
It was him. The boogeyman.
She remembered how she had glimpsed his flashlight in the darkness outside her parents’ house, and now he was back.
The light wavered, drifting like a will-o’-the-wisp, then winked out, and she returned to herself.
This was no monster from her childhood. It was a prowler, hardly unheard of in this neighborhood or in any part of this city. And she wasn’t some terrorized schoolgirl, she was a cop. She could take care of herself. She could—
A noise.
Very soft, almost inaudible. Halfway between a creak and a squeal.
It might have been nothing, just the old house settling.
Or a door, opening. The back door.
Her gun. She needed her off-duty Smith. She looked around the kitchen before remembering that the gun was in her handbag, and her handbag, damn it, was in her bedroom at the rear of the bungalow.
The prudent course of action was to leave the house, drive to Wilshire Station, come back with a patrol unit.
But she wasn’t going to do that. Wasn’t going to be chased out of her home by a glimpse of light and a barely audible creak.
No gun? Then make do with another weapon.
She opened the cutlery drawer and pulled out a carving knife. Part of her recalled the knife she’d grabbed from another kitchen before descending into the crawl space. But she refused to think about that.
She studied the knife. It was long and wickedly sharp and felt heavy in her hand. She liked its weight, the gleam of its blade. But she would have liked her .38 Smith better.
Knife in hand, she advanced toward the rear of the house.
No lights burned in this part of the bungalow. She had turned off the light on her nightstand before leaving the bedroom. Now she wished she hadn’t.
She reached the rear hall. It was empty.
Drawing back against the wall, she scanned the hallway. The back door appeared closed, but possibly the intruder had shut it behind him.
She looked for footprint impressions or tracks of dirt on the carpet. None were visible in the dim glow from the living room, but she could see only halfway down the hall.
The hallway opened onto three rooms. On the left were the guest lavatory and the laundry room. On the right, farthest down, was her bedroom.
If someone had gotten inside, he could have concealed himself in any one of those rooms. She would have to check each one in turn.
She advanced, the knife’s wooden hasp cold against her palm.
The door to the guest lavatory stood open. She didn’t think the intruder could have progressed that far without leaving some marks on the carpet. Even so, she took the precaution of pivoting into the bathroom doorway, knife raised.
No one there.
Emerging into the hall, she looked to her right, then left, then right again, like a child looking both ways before crossing the street.
The laundry room was next. That door was closed. She wasn’t looking forward to opening it, so she did it fast, throwing the door wide and darting in.
This room, too, was unoccupied. Maybe there was no intruder. Maybe she had imagined the whole thing.
This thought, dangerously seductive, was instantly dismissed. With one room still to go, she couldn’t afford to drop her guard.
She stepped to the laundry-room doorway, peering to her right, her left—
Sudden pressure on her face.
Gloved hand, wet cloth.
Couldn’t see him in the darkness, could only lash out blindly with the knife.
Her thrust missed, and then his other hand clamped on her wrist, holding the knife at bay.
He pressed the cloth harder against her nose and mouth. Instinctively she knew she must not take a breath.
She flailed at him with her left hand. If she could find his throat, pinch the carotid artery—
He sensed her strategy and jammed himself closer to her, wedging her against the door frame of the laundry room, restricting her range of movement.
She struggled against him. His face was masked, invisible. His body was pure darkness.
Her lungs demanded air. With a last effort she drew up one knee and pistoned out her leg, connecting with his gut. He loosened his grip on her face. The cloth came away. She sucked in a deep draft of oxygen, and then the cloth was over her nose again, and before she could stop herself she had breathed its fumes.
Cold.
A shiver of cold in her nasal passages, in her throat.
The fumes were sweet-swelling, intoxicating. They made her head spin. The world blurred, everything going double, no clarity anywhere, and she was tired, sleepy. Her fingers losing purchase on the knife, letting it fall, and though she knew that she was defenseless, she didn’t care.
Far away, his chuckle of triumph. Then his words, low, spoken close to her ear.
“Got you now, C.J.”
That voice.
She knew that voice.
Her last thought was a question, echoing unanswered.
... Adam?
21
Something nagged at Rawls. He knew there was more here than a voyeuristic Web site.
That name, Bluebeard ... three women under surveillance ... one for each month ...
The connection was close but continued to elude him.
He and Brand followed Gader into the guest bedroom on the second floor. The room had been made into a work space cluttered with computers, printers, cables, surge suppressors, and battery backup units. The shades were down, the room lit only by a pair of gooseneck lamps, bulbs angled away from the equipment to minimize screen glare. The cold wind beat against the windowpanes.
It occurred to Rawls that computer people, himself and Brand included, spent far too much time behind closed windows in rooms like this.
The machine they wanted was easy to find. Rawls spotted it even before Gader led them to it. It was a Compaq Proliant server with a twenty-inch monitor and a standard keyboard. Superficially the setup resembled any other personal computer with a tower design, but because it was a server, it had capabilities that an ordinary PC did not.
“What OS are you running?” Brand asked.
“Windows 2000 Server edition.”
“Log on. And, Mr. Gader, there better not be a format bomb or any other funny business.” A format bomb would erase the contents of the drive when an incorrect log-in was attempted.
“There’s no funny business.” Gader sat at the computer and turned on the monitor, which had been powered down to save energy. The server itself had been left on. It would be active twenty-four hours a day, allowing visitors to access the site whenever they wished.
Rawls watched Gader type in the screen name Nasty Boy and the Fatima password.
“NastyBoy,” Rawls muttered. “Seems appropriate.”
“Hey, get off my case, okay? You’ve got me all wrong.”
Rawls ignored him. “How’d you pick the password anyway?”
“I didn’t. He did.”
“Bluebeard?”
“Yeah.”
“You let a visitor pick the password to the whole site?”
“He’s more than a visitor. He runs it with me. Well, the truth is, he pretty much runs it, period.”
“From a remote location?”
“Yeah.”
“You turned over your sysop duties to a remote admin
istrator?”
“That’s right. He wanted to do it, and I let him. I have other things to do. And he was contributing the most interesting content anyway.”
“The content being the videos of these women?”
“Yeah,” Gader said in a smaller voice.
“Once he took control, he changed the password to Fatima?”
“Right. That was his idea. Of course, you’re supposed to change a site’s password periodically. It’s a standard security measure.”
“Standard,” Rawls echoed, but there was nothing standard about a name like Bluebeard. “Didn’t you wonder why he chose that particular alias?”
“What, you’re saying he’s some kind of murderer or something?” Gader laughed. “I guess if he called himself Napoleon you’d figure he was a world conqueror. People pick crazy nicknames online. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“So it never worried you?”
“No.”
“Well,” Rawls said, “it worries me. What made you cede control of the site to a stranger?”
“He’s not exactly a stranger.”
“You’ve met him?”
“Not face-to-face, but we’ve corresponded—e-mail, I mean. We had similar interests. He liked my site, but he thought we could do more with it. Back then there was no video, just vidcaps from adult movies—stuff on Showtime at two A.M. I would pull some frames and put them on the site. Frontal nudity, bondage, babes in hot tubs—that kind of crap. It was nonprofit, just for kicks.”
“Was the site kept secret?” Rawls asked.
“Pretty much. I had it password-protected, because I was a little worried about copyright-infringement issues. I’d heard of other sites being shut down for using pirated stills, so I kept a low profile. I gave out the site address and the password in e-mails to people I met in chat rooms. Bluebeard was one of them.”
“And you two hit it off?”
“I guess you could say that. He checked out the site, then told me he had a way to spice it up. He sent me some footage as an e-mail attachment—an .avi file.”
“A woman in her bedroom?”
“Right.”
“And you had no qualms about putting that kind of material on your site?”
Last Breath Page 10