by Lee Goldberg, Scott Nicholson, J A Konrath, J Carson Black,
“Freddy, enough.”
“Fine, if that’s what you want." Freddy whisked around them, clearing plates and brushing away crumbs from the tablecloth.
Jay had invited Laura to breakfast. She was happy to get out here early, anxious as she was to get Jay on the Internet and see him work the magic Galaz had promised her, but here they sat. She kept thinking about Alison Burns lying on the bed in the abandoned motel room. And Jessica Parris, posed like a doll in the City Park band shell.
She had to admit, it was pleasant here—lush plants and deep shade. Misters on the porch roof cooled the terrace. Across the lane stood the high hedge lining the tennis court where Jay Ramsey used to play. Laura, a kid, a horse groom, walking by, hoping she’d catch his eye.
Now she had his full attention. Strange how wants and hopes changed over the years.
Freddy was back from the kitchen. He nodded at the thermometer tacked to the pepper tree near the pool. “It’s eighty-seven degrees. You’ve been out here well over an hour.”
“I’m fine.”
“You won’t be so cocky if your bladder lets go in front of company.”
Jay saw Laura’s discomfort and grinned. “Freddy’s afraid I’ll get overheated. That can lead to dysreflexia, which—“
“Could send his blood pressure sky-high,” Freddy said.
Jay leaned toward Laura, his voice conspiratorial.
“You know what you have to do if you start to get overheated? Piss your pants.” He laughed. “When quads get overheated, sometimes their bladders can back up. You don’t want that to happen, so you have a little accident. Relieves the pressure. You have to train yourself to do it—it’s amazing how stubborn the mind can be, all that potty training you have to overcome.”
Freddy took his stack of still-intact dishes and retreated into the house with a martyr’s sigh.
Jay said, “The minute I saw you on the news, I knew I had to meet you. Maybe because we never did.” Saw her confusion and added, “Never met.”
The Ramseys had been clear from the beginning: They didn’t want any visitors. “I understood that. Your parents were looking out for—”
“She was never going to let that happen,” Jay said. “Even though you saved my life, she didn’t want a relationship." He sipped his mimosa. “That’s why she paid you off.”
Told to her this way, it made her angry all over again.
“You should see your face. I don’t blame you for being mad. I would be livid. Especially when she took the horse back. A couple of years down the line, when she saw just how much my condition changed my life—her life—she wasn’t so thankful anymore.”
He shifted in his chair, yawned. Laura wondered if the yawning helped him in some way. “If you want to put it in a charitable light, she was impulsive. Giving you the horse on an impulse and taking it back the same way. Your good deed had outlived its usefulness.” No self-pity, just a statement of fact. “But I’ve never forgotten, and now I’m in a position to help you. I know how important this is to you. It would be important to anyone, but considering what you’ve been through in your own life …" He let it hover, the vague reference to the home invasion.
Laura didn’t like this. He knew too much about her life.
“I want to apologize for my mother. It’s too bad Calliope is gone—I’d give her back to you if I could. Mother sold her foals. For all I know, one of them might be in town.”
“It doesn’t matter now."
He changed the subject. “Did Mikey tell you about my background?”
“Mikey?”
“Lieutenant Galaz.”
“He told me Dynever is an Internet security company.”
“We’ve worked with the FBI on cases just like this. One in New York, a pedophile ring. One of my people pretended he was a fourteen-year-old girl.”
He wiped his forehead. His complexion looked blotchy, and he was sweating. Laura looked around, but Freddy was still inside the house.
“These guys—they build their wholes lives around getting little girls. They marry women so they can get to their children. Go into occupations where they can be around them. It’s the fantasy. They can’t resist it—they don’t want to.”
“It’s sick,” she said. She knew that technically the guy she was after wasn’t sick. He was a sociopath—perfectly sane. But calling him “sick” relieved the pressure in her head, made her feel better.
“You’d be surprised at how many people—doctors, lawyers, beggermen, chiefs—think that doing a twelve-year-old girl is acceptable. The evidence is there, staring you in the face. On the ‘net.” He set his glass down on the table, spilling orange juice and champagne over his long, elegant fingers. He didn’t seem to notice. “The web has changed everything. People used to hide the way they felt, but now there are so many of them and they’re all connected, they have strength in numbers. Now they’re legitimate. They can rationalize it.
“So my question to you, Laura, is this: If more and more people believe something, might there not be some value to it?”
Before Laura could answer Jay called out, “You win, Freddy. I’m coming in." He backed his motorized wheelchair and deftly sped up the ramp and through the French doors into the house, leaving her to follow.
Freddy insisted that Laura wait in the living room while they “took care of some essentials.”
She waited, feeling uncomfortable. Wondering if he was being cleaned up because he had overheated, wondering if he had, indeed, pissed his pants. Wondering, too, if he thought that just because a majority of people thought something was right, there was an excuse for cruelty. Did he really think that, or was he just playing devil’s advocate?
Forty minutes later, Jay Ramsey reappeared, his hair combed nicely and his color better. “Let’s get down to it, babe,” he said.
Jay situated himself in front of the computer and connected to the Internet. Laura noticed that even with his limited hand motions, he was fast with his two index fingers; they seemed to fly over the keyboard like ten digits.
Laura watched as he pulled up a no-frills site, devoid of graphics.
Ramsey said, “Welcome to WiNX. This is the quintessential Internet relay chat program.”
Laura tried to remember what Buddy Holland had told her. “Does it have something to do with Instant Messaging?”
“That’s the currency. People talking to each other in real time. You’ve probably done something like it on Facebook or Yahoo.”
“Uh no.”
He twisted in his chair a little, smiled. “The principle is really simple. You put yourself out there and pretty soon someone wants to talk to you.”
He hit a couple of keys and brought up a screen that reminded Laura of her first experience with a computer, back in the covered wagon days. “That looks like DOS.”
“See? You know more than you think. WiNX is a DOS-based system. See these?” He keyed down through several lines of old-fashioned courier print and pointed with a thumb. “These are channels—rooms where people with like tastes can meet. There’re probably 20,000 channels on WiNX right now." He flinched again, moved in his seat. Looked at her. “Am I confusing you?”
She remembered how Buddy had thrown technical terms at her without telling her what they meant. Enjoying her discomfort. She hesitated to make a fool of herself, but couldn’t help asking, “Are they kind of like TV channels?”
He grinned lopsidedly. “That’s as good a description as any. Imagine a station with unlimited channels on everything you can imagine." He clicked on another page. “WiNX has been around forever. The thing you’ve got to know is that this is the real underground. There are no controls. Nobody’s watching you to see that you don’t go over the line. There’s nothing to stop you from doing anything you want to do. It’s a no-man’s land.”
Laura felt a kinetic snap in her spine. A no-man’s land. She got the feeling that she was on the brink of knowing something she’d rather not.
He scrolled down what
seemed like miles of print. “Ah, here we are.” He clicked on something called Warezoutpost, and a list of titles came up, all after the word “warez”.
“Warez is ‘wares’,” Jay explained. “As in ‘let me show you my wares.’ See? Software for games. Movies, music. This is where the kids are at because they can download stuff for free.”
He showed her how to locate what he wanted, a movie called Ghost Recon. “This is what draws the kids. Free music, movies. I’m next in line if I want it.”
With a few clicks to the keyboard, he moved on.
“The kids are always the first to know. You can get anything you want off these boards. They cater to every taste. This one is general, but there are channels where kids talk to each other.” He pulled up another window. “Let’s see what we’ve got in the Girls’ Room.”
“The Girls’ Room?”
“I call it that. It’s used by lots preteen girls.”
He pointed out the list of names on the sidebar to the right. “Those are the people in the room now. What I’m going to do is …” He hit a key and then typed in a name, erased it, and typed in another. “Gotta have a nick.” He added helpfully, “Nickname.” He typed in “nick1amber/." This was accepted, and then he typed: “hi.”
It showed up like this:
Amber: hi
Laura heard a chime and a message box popped up. Jay pointed to the status bar and Laura saw the name Gitmo.
Gitmo: how old r u?
Amber: 2
Gitmo: pic?
“He wants a picture.”
Amber: ok were you fro?????????
Amber: from
Gitmo: CA u?
Laura heard a chime. Another person wanting to talk to Amber. Jay hit a key and another instant message box popped up.
Podunk89: a/s
“He’s asking her age and sex.”
Amber: alost 13
Jay nodded to the status bar at the top of the screen. Podunk’s name changed from red to black. He was gone. “Wrong age,” Jay said, going back to Gitmo.
Gitmo: where you been?
Amber: My mom calledm e
Gitmo: send me a pic
A flurry of chimes. Four new names lit up the board.
Amber: well see how old r you?
Gitmo: you ever had sex?
Amber: I had a bf last year
“Bf?” asked Laura.
“Boyfriend.”
Gitmo: Did bf getta bj?
Amber: You sonud mean!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Gitmo: can’t handle a joke LOL
More chimes, the board lighting up with suitors. Jay opened another instant message box.
Smooth Talk: Amber u a little girl?
Amber: im thrteen how old r u???????????????
Smooth Talk: let me see a pic
Amber: I have 1 at shchol school – not here
Smooth Talk: where d you live
Amber: I live in az
Smooth Talk dropped out. Back to Gitmo:
Gitmo: I want a pic
Amber: not fair if u don send me pic toO
Gitmo: you playing games little girl
Amber: fairs fair my pic for yours
Gitmo: if you don’t want to fuck your wasting m time
Gitmo’s name went from red to black.
Jay sat up straighter, twisted, adjusted himself against the back of the chair. “That’s what you’re dealing with. These creeps are on these boards all day, trolling for kids.”
Laura was about to say that she didn’t think any child would fall for that, and then shut her mouth.
Children would fall for it. Teenagers would fall for it. Because they had not yet developed that distrust life ground into you over the years, like grime into clothing.
“We did a survey,” Jay said. “Among parents. They think of computers as just another appliance, like a TV set. They don’t realize it’s like leaving the back door to your house open. Anybody can come in, and some of these guys are really smart. They know how to push the buttons.”
“How do you find someone like this? Can you find his ISP?”
“Doubtful. Guy like that, he’d use one of the big servers, like earthlink, hotmail—it’s easy to be anonymous. There are search engines that you can look on, but I’m pretty sure this guy wouldn’t have a local ISP.”
“Oh.”
“But there’s an easier way. That’s what’s so interesting about technology. Sometimes the best things are simple. You know the photo you have of him? We can probably trace him through that." He hit a couple of keys and a beach scene came up on the screen.
“This is why you need me.” Sounding cocky. “Not many people can get their hands on this kind of software.”
He explained that there was something called image recognition software, which could break up every photograph into its elements, then run each element against all kinds of databases, looking for a match. He zoomed in on a man on the beach. “See this guy’s T-shirt? With the software I’m going to use, I can run a search for exact matches. It’s like a search engine, instead of searching for like words, it searches for images. I’m going to need the original photo, though.”
“From what Endicott said, it was a digital photo, and the only thing we have is an inkjet picture.” She nodded to the black-and-white photocopy. “It’s not all that much better than that.”
Jay looked troubled. “It might be harder, but we can still do it. Where is the original?”
“Endicott’s FedExing it—I should get it today.”
“What we’ll do,” Jay said, “is re-scan the picture using high resolution. Then I’ll compare it to the databases. It might take a few days, though.”
“You sure you can’t find him with the ISP?”
“I’ll try that, too. I’m warning you, though, this guy isn’t your average Internet user. I think you know that.”
“But this image recognition software, it’ll take a few days? That’s a long time.”
“How many days has it been so far?”
Too many, she thought.
27
“This is what CloneImage came up with,” Jay Ramsey said, rolling his chair to the computer monitor.
It turned out that Jay Ramsey’s image recognition program had been quicker than expected; Laura had gotten the call this morning, not twenty-four hours after she last saw him. Jay had already found two matches to the man in the picture.
Ramsey pulled up a site called TalentFish.com. “For a small fee, actors and models can put their pictures online. Kind of like a rogues’ gallery. Lucky for us that young Petey is up on the latest technology.”
“Petey?”
“Peter Dorrance. Actor, model, pretty boy around town. This was a virtual cakewalk.” He laughed at his own joke—virtual.
The TalentFish home page opened up. There were several headings at the top of the page: Actors, Portraits, Head Shots, Actor and Model Composites. Jay pulled up Peter Dorrance’s page under “Actor and Model Composites”.
“CloneImage got this hit pretty quick, since one of these is the same picture he sent that little girl.”
And there it was. The photo of the young man, the house behind him. This was a three-quarters shot, showing his excellent physique, but there were others, including two headshots.
Laura looked at the other photographs, the ones she’d never seen before. Dorrance had three photos taken in front of the house. Two in black and white and one in color. In the color photo, he leaned against a blue sportscar, arms folded over his chest. He wore a cable-knit sweater and looked like a print ad from Land’s End. The house behind him was yellow with white trim.
“Nice wheels,” Laura said.
“Hard to get into,” Jay said, “Unless you’re his age. I also found the house, if you’re interested.”
“In a minute.”
She looked at his resume. Age twenty-two. Six foot three and a half. 40-Regular. Several acting roles in plays Laura did not recognize (she wasn’t a big patron of the t
heater). Print ads: Hair and Now; Leslie’s Department Store; Eat at Joes. Television ads: Ralph’s Car Sales and Gulf Chiropractic. Not a lot there, but he had gotten a crack at the big time, a cameo as a corpse on CSI: Miami.
“Eat at Joes is in Panama City,” Freddy said.
“Take a bow, Freddy,” Jay said. “The Florida panhandle—just like you said it would be. Prince Charming here lives on the Forgotten Coast, the Redneck Riviera, or—if you’re thinking red and blue states—Bush country.”
Freddy pointed to the bottom of the page. “There’s the address of the Talent Agency.” The Strand Talent Agency, Panama City Beach, Florida.
“So there’s good reason to believe he lives in Panama City,” Laura said.
“Thereabouts. I got another match, though.” Jay clicked through to another site, the Franklin County Home Buyers Guide.
Laura found herself staring at the house. “St. George Island?”
“Down the coast, east of Panama City,” Freddy explained.
“An old listing,” Jay said. “This site hasn’t been updated since 2002.” He zoomed in on a pale plaque near the top of the steps. It was blurry and hard to read, but Laura was able to make an educated guess: “Gull Cottage?”
“Shouldn’t be hard to find. St. George Island isn’t all that big.” He clicked on MapQuest. The barrier island looked like a narrow boomerang, bisected by one main road paralleled by a few ancillary streets. “Twenty-nine miles in length and no more than a mile across at any one place.”
He clicked onto some photographs of St. George Island.
“It doesn’t look like a place Peter Dorrance could afford,” Laura said. “Unless he’s independently wealthy.” Considering the sports car he leaned so casually against, that was a possibility.
“I did a few searches on him. The only times he comes up is in regards to acting jobs—and not very many of them. But at least you’ve got a place to start.”
Laura stared at Dorrance’s headshot. Was this her killer? If she went strictly by the FBI profile, he skewed young for this kind of crime. Usually, it took time to build up to precise ritual-like dressing up of the girl and posing her that way. It took time to develop that kind of self-confidence, time to become a full-fledged sexual predator.