Last Breath

by Michael Prescott

  Gader swiveled his desk chair to face Rawls. “Look, he told me she knew about it. He assured me she knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That she was on the Web. He said it was her idea.”

  “And when a second woman showed up on the site?” Brand asked. “Didn’t that make you wonder?”

  “Yeah, but again, he assured me. I mean, he gave me his assurance ...”

  He seemed to like that word assure, but Rawls was tired of hearing it. “Mr. Gader, stop trying to cover your ass and just tell us what happened.”

  “Okay, okay. Well, like I said, Bluebeard wanted to supply streaming video. I thought it was cool—way better than the stuff I was uploading. So I gave him my log-on info to let him access my site’s file manager. That’s when he started sending the video feed. Real-time video—at least I’m pretty sure it was. The first woman became Miss November. Next month, he sent video of Miss December, and now Miss January. I guess this is her last night—probably there’ll be a Miss February tomorrow. And so on. It was Bluebeard’s idea to have people vote for their favorites. Eventually he assumed so many responsibilities that I just let him administer the whole site. It’s still physically on my server, but he’s controlling it through the network.”

  “So he could be anywhere?” Rawls asked.

  “I guess.”

  “You don’t know where he lives, or where these women live?”

  “No. Well, I assume they live near him, wherever that is. He must have access to them.”

  “You can’t tell me you were never curious as to this Bluebeard’s identity.”

  “I was curious. Sure.”

  “Well, you’re not exactly naive about computers. You know how to trace a visitor to your Web site.”

  Gader shook his head. “Tried that. No good. He sends the video feed through a proxy server. I can trace it back that far and no farther.”

  “With a court order,” Brand said, “we could force the proxy’s administrator to surrender their logs.”

  “If they keep the logs in the first place,” Rawls mused. Some of those outfits routinely destroyed all information to defeat any possible subpoenas. He looked at Gader. “How about the e-mails he sent you? Were those untraceable too?”

  “Sent through a remailer. Scrubbed.”

  “You didn’t find that suspicious?”

  “Hell, a lot of people use anonymizer services on the Web. Big Brother’s out there. As I guess you two ought to know, seeing as how you work for him.”

  Rawls brushed aside the jibe. “Bluebeard shut off the other video streams? He keeps only one going at a time?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you capture the other streams, or parts of them? You know, highlight reels?”

  “No, never did.”

  Rawls leaned on Gader’s desk and made eye contact. “Don’t play games with me. You’ve got footage of naked women streaming into your computer, and you make no effort to save any of it for a rainy day?”

  “Well ... maybe some stills.”

  “Maybe?”

  Gader shrugged. “Stills. A few.”

  “Where are they? On the site?”

  “No, I posted a few of Miss November after she was off the site, but Bluebeard took ’em down. Guess he wanted to stay current. Funny, though. He seemed really upset about it—kind of flamed me. Said he wanted only that month’s playmate on display.”

  “Playmate?” Brand asked with a smirk.

  Gader was embarrassed. “That’s what he calls them. You know, playmate of the month.”

  “He’s a real charmer, this friend of yours,” Brand said.

  “Where are the stills?” Rawls asked.

  “On the hard drive of my PC.”

  “Show us.”

  Gader kicked his swivel chair away from the server and rolled across the room to a Hewlett-Packard desktop system. He booted it up and activated a picture editing program, then loaded three .jpeg stills.

  “Here’s a sample,” he said, waving his hand over the tiled images. “Miss November, December, January.”

  The photos caught the women in medium shot or close-up. All were Caucasians, but otherwise they differed in appearance. Two were blondes, while Miss January, as Rawls had already noted, was a brunette. Their ages varied from early twenties to perhaps late thirties. All of them had been videotaped in their bedrooms.

  “Are these the clearest facial shots you’ve got?” Rawls asked.

  “I guess so. I don’t always concentrate on the faces, if you know what I mean.”

  “Print them out. One photo per page, full sheet.”

  Gader obeyed. His inkjet printer buzzed and whirred until all three sheets had been deposited in the tray. Rawls picked them up and shared them with Brand, farming out the pages like a hand of cards.

  “What are we looking for, exactly?” Brand asked.

  “I’m not sure. You know how something is on the tip of your tongue and you can’t quite remember?”

  “You saying you may have seen these women before?”

  “The first two, yes.”

  “Where?”

  “I’m not sure,” Rawls said again. He stared at the faces, ignoring Miss January, focusing on Miss November and Miss December. Two women with nothing obviously in common except the color of their hair.

  They had been spied on, each for a separate month. When the month was over, the spying had stopped, and they had not been seen on the site again. Bluebeard had been very vocal about keeping them off the site. Why?

  Because someone would recognize them? Someone who might have seen them?

  Seen them where?

  On TV. In the newspapers.

  Crime stories.

  Victims.

  “Damn,” Rawls breathed, his voice so low and hoarse that both Gader and Brand turned to stare at him.

  “Noah, you got something?” Brand asked.

  “I’ve got him.” Rawls didn’t know if he was speaking to Brand or to himself. “I’ve got Bluebeard. That’s who he is, all right, Bluebeard—and this site is his locked room.”

  22

  It was odd. She was far away and yet very close. She was floating, weightless, yet she felt the limp heaviness of her body and the cold rigidity of the floor. She was not herself, but who else could she be?

  There was no way of making sense of this. She concentrated on little things, single moments that were at least roughly comprehensible.

  The hands moving over her. Gloved hands, she thought. Hands of leather.

  They turned her on her stomach, pulled her arms behind her. She felt the brief, distant protest of the muscles in her shoulders—pops of pain that flared and vanished, unimportant.

  Her wrists were pressed together in the small of her back, and something was wound around them. Rope, she thought, until she sensed its stickiness pulling at the soft down of her arms. Then she knew it was adhesive tape, thick and strong. Duct tape, probably.

  For a moment she was a child again, laughing as her dad mended a sofa cushion with tape. She thought he called it “duck” tape, and the idea of duck tape was funny to her. She was five years old.

  It was long before the boogeyman had come into her life, long before she had learned to be afraid.

  The boogeyman—why think of him now? There seemed to be some relevance to the thought, some connection she could not grasp between the leather hands binding her wrists and the skinny, shadowy figure that had groped for her in the crawl space.

  Her wrists were immobilized now. They twisted helplessly behind her back.

  “No use, C.J.,” his voice breathed.

  Whose voice? She ought to know it. She had recognized it before.

  Next the leather hands moved to her ankles, applying tape to the bare skin above her sneakers.

  He’s got me trussed like a turkey, she thought.

  First ducks, now turkeys. Her mind was filled with birds. She liked birds, except for the mockingbirds that lived in the trees
outside her bedroom window and kept her awake at night with their variety of songs.

  Birds ... She wondered if she could fly out of her body and be a bird in the sky, or a birdlike spirit, a thing no tape could bind, no leather hands could hold.

  “This is the way I always wanted you,” he whispered. “Did you know that? Did you ever suspect?”

  She didn’t understand, couldn’t think straight. He was talking as if he knew her, as if they had a history.

  Well, of course they did. He was the boogeyman, wasn’t he? The terror of her childhood, come back to haunt her again ...

  His hands were on her mouth now, opening her lips, her jaws. She was in a dentist’s chair and he was saying, “Wider, wider.” No, she wasn’t. She was on the floor in the hallway of her house, and the man with leather gloves was putting something into her mouth. It tasted like rubber. It was spongy yet hard, like a tennis ball—firm but hollow, squeezable. It filled her mouth and cut off her breath.

  He’s suffocating me, she thought, but then she drew air through her nostrils, and felt her lungs expand. She could breathe. Only her mouth was blocked.

  “I got so sick of your yackety-yak,” he said. “Should’ve done this years ago.”

  Now there was pressure on her cheeks and against the back of her head. The pressure increased as a strap was drawn taut and secured with a buckle or a Velcro fastener.

  She knew what this was. She had seen it used on mentally ill arrestees who tried to bite the cops who restrained them. It was called a throttle. In plainer language, a gag.

  He’s got me bound and gagged, she realized, and those words—bound and gagged—registered with her in a way that her previous thoughts had not.

  She was helpless. Couldn’t fight, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. He could do whatever he liked with her. Could kill her in her own house, and she couldn’t scream for help.

  Fear flashed through her, and she flopped on the floor, arching her back, fighting against the tape and the gag, and trying to see what she was up against, but she couldn’t see, there was only darkness.

  Open your eyes! she yelled inwardly, and then with a worse shock of fear she understood that they were open and had been open all along.

  Blind? Was she blind? Or—

  He slapped her. She felt the hard sting of his hand on her cheek.

  “Why are you fighting me, you stupid bitch? This is only what you agreed to. You took a vow, remember? I guess it didn’t mean anything to you, but it meant something to me. Remember, C.J.?”

  She didn’t remember. She didn’t know who he was or what he was talking about.

  “Till death do us part,” he whispered. “That’s what you swore. Remember?”

  He was laughing, and the laughter, even more than his words, brought the memories back. The judge, the ceremony, the small handful of guests, the party afterward at a restaurant in Westwood. No honeymoon—they’d both been too busy for that.

  Adam.

  It was Adam.

  His voice, his hands, his body next to hers.

  Adam, not the boogeyman. Adam, not a random stranger.

  A scream of anguished confusion welled in her throat and tried to force its way past the throttle in her mouth, but only a muffled squeal came out, overridden by his laughter, then silenced by his gloved hand on her face.

  “Want another whiff, you bitch?”

  The damp cloth, pushed into her face. She refused to inhale.

  “Go on, breathe it in, C.J. We’ve got places to go.”

  Past his voice, past the hammering of her heart, a new sound.

  Her phone was ringing.

  For some insane reason she caught herself thinking that calls always came at the most inconvenient times.

  23

  Tanner and Chang were the first officers on the scene of the 187—California Penal Code parlance for homicide. There were three victims, only one of whom was deceased. The other two lay on the sidewalk, bleeding out, while a pair of paramedics waited at a cautious distance. They wouldn’t move in until cops secured the scene.

  “Come on, tube these guys. Give ’em plasma or something,” Tanner yelled.

  While the EMTs did their work, Tanner and Chang cordoned off the dead body with a length of crime-scene ribbon strung from a utility pole to a fire hydrant.

  “Another lovely evening in the City of Angels,” Chang observed.

  Tanner just shook his head. Working this part of town had made him something of an expert in the unending rivalry between the Crips and the Bloods—or more precisely, between the ever-proliferating gang cliques, called “sets,” that allied themselves loosely with one gang or another.

  This stretch of turf was controlled by a set named the Neighborhood Crips. The three gunshot victims were part of that set, an allegiance they advertised by wearing the Crips’ color—blue baseball caps, blue nylon jackets, blue T-shirts underneath. One of them, the dead one, even had blue socks and sneakers.

  Tanner knew the dead kid’s name, or at least his gang alias—Peep. He wasn’t sure how the boy had gotten stuck with that nickname. Now he supposed he would never know.

  The other two, the survivors, were unknown to him. Chang thought one guy, who looked like the oldest of the three, might have been a banger called Jarhead, but he wasn’t sure. The guy hadn’t been carrying any ID, and his face had been messed up so badly that his own mother would have had trouble identifying him.

  There were plenty of witnesses, at least. While Chang guarded Peep’s body, Tanner got busy interviewing them. Mainly he just needed their names, phone numbers, and addresses; the homicide detectives could follow up. But he asked enough ancillary questions to get the picture.

  The three vics had been walking out of a video store with a couple of rented tapes, which turned out, unsurprisingly, to be pornographic movies of no evident socially redeeming value. They were strolling south on Hooper Avenue and had almost reached the corner when the gunshots started. It was a drive-by, but descriptions of the shooters’ vehicle varied widely. All anyone could agree on was that it was dark in color.

  Multiple rounds were fired at the three teenagers, who went down without returning fire. The shooters flashed gang signs identifying themselves as members of the Shotgun Pirus, a local Blood set. Then their car veered around the corner and disappeared. Somebody called 911, and that was that.

  As Chang said, it was just another evening in LA.

  Homicide detectives normally took their time about getting to a crime scene, but tonight the wait wasn’t long. It was 6:30 when an unmarked Chevy Caprice wheeled up to the cordon and two plainclothes officers got out. Tanner knew them. Their names were Hyannis and James, and they worked Homicide out of the East LA Sheriff’s station.

  Hyannis was the friendlier of the two, and the better cop, as well. Tanner gave him the rundown on what had happened, which was hardly necessary, since Hyannis’s pale olive eyes had seen it all before.

  “No tag number on the shooters’ vehicle?” the detective asked.

  “Not even a definite make and model. One guy thought it might be a jacked-up Monte Carlo, but someone else said an El Camino.”

  “Okay, Tanner. Thanks for holding down the fort. We can take it from here.” Hyannis looked at the body on the sidewalk. “You know this asshole?”

  “Yeah. Peep, they called him. I don’t know his real name.”

  “Randall Washington.” Hyannis sighed. “I ran him in a few times. Sent him to Kilpatrick once.” Camp Kilpatrick was a county juvenile facility in Calabasas. “Know how old he was?”

  “No driver’s license in his wallet. I’m guessing fifteen.”

  “Fourteen,” Hyannis said.

  Tanner looked away. “Shit.”

  “That’s one way to put it.” Hyannis shook his head wearily, having long ago resigned himself to the city’s ugliness. “Have a nice night.”

  “Thanks. Hey, Frank?” Distantly it occurred to Tanner that he had never used the detective’s first name bef
ore.

  Hyannis turned. “Yeah?”

  “Got a question for you. Out of left field, kind of. It’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “Okay.”

  “You ever hear of anything called the Four-H Club? I mean, not the actual club, but ...” Tanner let his words trail off. He could see from Hyannis’s face that the man had heard of it, and what he’d heard, he didn’t like.

  “Walk with me,” Hyannis said. Without waiting for a reply, he stepped away from the cordon, putting distance between himself and the small crowd of spectators.

  Hyannis stopped near Tanner’s squad car. The light bar threw flashes of red and blue on the detective’s gaunt face.

  “Where’d you pick up that expression?” Hyannis asked.

  “Friend of mine.”

  “Another cop?”

  “Well, yeah. Not Sheriff’s. LAPD.”

  “Your friend is in trouble,” Hyannis said. “He’s not supposed to be mouthing off about that. We’re trying to keep it contained within the task force. Tell him to shut the hell up.”

  “It’s not a him, and she wasn’t mouthing off about any task force. She got an e-mail.”

  “What?”

  “She got an e-mail message that said something like, ‘Welcome to the Four-H Club.’ She thought it was weird—”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ. She on duty now?”

  “No, she’s home, I think—”

  “You know her home number?”

  “Sure, I called her twenty minutes ago.”

  “Call her again. Right now. Tell her to wait in her home. Don’t let her go outside. Then call him.”

  Hyannis thrust a business card into Tanner’s hand. In the pulsing light Tanner read “MORRIS WALSH, DETECTIVE III, LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT.” Below it was a phone number with a Parker Center prefix.

  “Tell Walsh what you told me,” Hyannis said. “But call the woman first. Go on, do it.”

  “All right, but what’s going on, anyway?”

  “Maybe nothing—a prank. I hope so. Call.”

  Tanner had a cell phone in his car. He was digging it out of the glove compartment when Chang asked him what Hyannis was so worked up about.