by Paul Heald
The first half of the plan went easily. The hijacking worked as predicted, and with the help of a colleague in the computer science department at Belle Meade College, he found himself in control of the website in less than three weeks. His friend explained how easy it was to disable the website so that those searching for it would get nothing but an error message.
It took less than twenty-four hours to hear from William Simmons. Stanley received a panicked email and then a hostile phone message on his machine at Belle Meade. Simmons had evidently checked the Whois database and tracked him down. Stanley had registered his work address and hoped his home address in Los Angeles would be obscured among the seven other men with his name in the phone book. The professor responded immediately to the email, with a suggestion that they meet and discuss the terms of the retransfer of the website. Stanley chose a café in Silver Lake that had caught his eye when he had visited Simmons’s last-known residence there, and he asked the bikini czar to bring his laptop and all of his business records. Stanley made it clear that he needed information, something other than money, in return for the domain name. Simmons agreed via email within minutes.
Stanley arrived at Café Intermezzo an hour before the scheduled meeting. He wanted to make sure that the Wi-Fi connection was adequate for his purposes, and he wanted to run through the instructions provided by his friend for putting Mygirlfriendsbikini.com back online if Simmons cooperated. When he was satisfied with his preparations, he ordered a large slice of blueberry coffee cake and a latte with a shot of caramel syrup. He then sat down behind his laptop watching the door for the “nice young man” who used to rent a garage apartment a short walk away.
Stanley hoped to intimidate Simmons by signaling that he had done his research thoroughly, right down to choosing a meeting spot close to his old home.
About five minutes after the appointed time, a well-dressed young man with a Patagonia computer case and a perfectly groomed soul patch burst into the café and immediately trained his glare on its half-dozen patrons. When his eyes met Stanley’s, the professor invited him over to his table with a solemn nod. Simmons stormed across the café and unceremoniously slapped his briefcase down and jolted Stanley’s laptop six inches closer to his chest.
“Do you realize that you’re costing me $1,000 a day?” Despite his scowl, the soft-core mini-mogul sounded more peevish than threatening. A phone rang from the interior of his brushed-corduroy jacket, but he silenced it with a squeeze of his hand through the fabric.
“Sorry to inconvenience you, Mr. Simmons,” the professor responded with the inevitable shrug of a French kiosk owner announcing that he had just run out of Gauloises, “but it couldn’t be helped.”
“What the fuck?” the confused entrepreneur inquired. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve been trying to find you for weeks, but you registered your website with a false address, some hotel in Beverly Hills.” Stanley sipped his coffee. “This was the only way to get your attention.”
“Well, you’ve got it now,” Simmons said. He leaned forward and whispered in a voice that was as agitated as a shout. “What the hell do you want, anyway, and when are you giving me my site back?”
“You can have everything you want this afternoon by giving me a single address.” He flipped open his computer as if to ready the website for activation.
“That’s all you want?” The young man straightened up and scooted his chair back a few inches. “Are you kidding me?”
“Nope.” He then handed the webmaster a series of pictures of Diana Cavendish with the URL of each image highlighted at the top of each printout. “I need you to look at your records and tell me who sold these pictures to you.”
“My records are confidential.” He pushed the pictures across the table and one of them fell to the floor. Stanley calmly picked it up before replying.
“Too bad. Then I guess we won’t be doing business.” Stanley shut his laptop and started to put it back in his satchel. With losses at $1,000 per day, he doubted Simmons would call his bluff.
“Just wait a minute!” Simmons made an unconvincing attempt to add some menace to his tone. “I’ve talked to my lawyers … We can sue you and get the site back. If you’ll just transfer it to me now, you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble.”
Stanley laughed: this little turd had no idea what trouble really was. “Yeah?” he responded scornfully. “And at $1,000 a day, how much are you going to lose while you fire up the lawyers? And how much do they cost a day? Just give me the contact information for those photos and you can have your domain name back right now for free.” He opened up his computer. “Is the photographer your friend or something? You trying to hide him?”
The young man picked up the pictures again and scrutinized them more closely. He shook his head. “I have no idea who sent these to me.”
“But you could find out, right?”
Simmons did not immediately answer, but he opened up his briefcase and pulled out his computer, setting it on the table directly across from Stanley, like an electronic gunfighter facing off at the O.K. Corral Café. The professor noticed that the webmaster had a brand-new Apache Pro laptop; the soft-core porn business must indeed be profitable. After a couple of minutes punctuated by staccato keystrokes, the entrepreneur announced that he had found the address of the person who had sold him the photos. “You promise that you’ll transfer the domain to me if I give this to you?”
“Absolutely, I’m all ready to go, and I’ll fix you up as soon as I have the address, but first I want to make sure you’re not fucking with me. Show me how you traced the address from the picture.”
Simmons flushed but he mastered himself and tapped his mouse a couple of times, before spinning his device around and moving his chair next to Stanley’s. “Okay, here are the pictures.” Diana Cavendish looked like she was ready to walk right out of the high-definition monitor.
“In the web page meta tags,” he continued, clicking on View and then Source to reveal the HTML version of the web page they were looking at, “I bury an alphanumeric that identifies who sent me the picture.” He pointed at a number that appeared on the bottom of the page. “All I need to do is query that number in my payment records.” He minimized the screen and brought up his accounting software. “Voilà. I paid twenty-five dollars two months ago to [email protected].”
“That’s it?” Stanley cried out in despair. “Just an email address?”
“What did you expect?” The businessman frowned. “You think that I cut these people checks? Everything gets done through PayPal. All I need is the email address of someone with an account and I can pay them instantly anywhere around the world.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Stanley said bitterly, “I see how it works.” He looked hard at the webmaster but could see no trace of a lie. The email address was most likely the only relevant information Simmons maintained. If he were running an X-rated porn site, he would have to keep records of the ages of the girls depicted there, but he avoided that regulatory requirement by accepting swimsuit photos only. Unless the professor got really lucky when he googled the email address, he had hit another dead end.
In theory, if they could prove reasonable suspicion, the feds could get a court order forcing PayPal to reveal the photographer’s bank account information, but that wasn’t going to happen. He slumped back in his chair. He had wanted to be the one to bring the identity of the photographer back to US attorney Melanie Wilkerson in Atlanta. He had even fantasized about flying to the Southeast to personally deliver the good news. He briefly questioned whether his impulse to fly across the country to meet an unknown woman was consistent with his intense mourning for his wife. But those two parts of his brain were on tracks that had not yet intersected.
“Are you still there, dude?” The impatient blackmail victim waved his hand in front of Stanley’s face. “Are you gonna transfer my property back to me or not?”
Stanley nodded and maximized a screen that had been wa
iting patiently at the bottom of his computer desktop. “Here’s the transfer request with everything filled out except your real address, which I still don’t know.” After the information was reluctantly provided, he clicked on the Submit button and initiated the reregistration in Simmons’s name.
The professor then pulled up another screen and followed the instructions on how to bring the domain name back online. “That’s it,” he said without much enthusiasm.
Simmons typed the web address into his computer and the home page of Mygirlfriendsbikini.com instantly appeared on his screen. He flipped his laptop shut and returned it to his briefcase. “I could say that it was a pleasure doing business with you, but it wasn’t. I’m still out a couple thousand bucks.” He gave Stanley a disgusted look. “And for what? A single fucking email address?”
“Well,” the professor replied as he packed up his own bag, “if it makes you feel better, I’m getting this information for the Justice Department.” He decided to tie up a final loose end with a thinly veiled threat. “So don’t even think about alerting this guy. Just keep quiet and consider yourself a patriot in the war on terror.”
XVIII.
ROADTRIP
Melanie got on the road by six thirty Saturday morning, and in less than three hours she was driving past a sign proudly declaring Highlands, North Carolina, at 4,118 feet, to be the city with the highest elevation east of the Mississippi. The dashboard thermometer confirmed that she was now far above the muggy Georgia Piedmont; it was almost fifteen degrees cooler than when she started, and some of the elderly women toddling down the sidewalk of the resort town were clutching knitwear they had stopped wearing in Atlanta two months earlier. The elevation made the village a popular summer getaway, and Melanie was glad to see that James Murphy had arrived early and grabbed a table at the Pioneer Inn before the gray-haired mob snapped up the remaining seats. She slid into a booth across from him and ordered a coffee from the waitress.
“Thanks for coming up to help me with Diana’s parents,” he said, shoving a newspaper to the corner of the table. “By the way, the hash browns here are awesome.”
“Better than Waffle House?” she asked doubtfully.
He responded with a surprised laugh. “I said awesome, not transcendent.” He pushed the bowl of creamers over to her as she got her coffee. “The blueberry pancakes are great too.”
“Do you come up here a lot?”
“Not so much.” He handed the menus back to the waitress. “I grew up about ten miles from here, and even though Highlands has only got a couple thousand people and one grocery store, this used to be the big city to me.”
She was surprised. The village was isolated and the mountains contained mostly small cabins and trailers. Perhaps his parents had retired early and bought a home nearby. “What brought your family here?”
He layered a bit more mountain twang to his voice. “They always lived in one holler or another up here.” He poured some sugar into his coffee and added, “My dad was a pulpwooder in the summer and a drinker in the winter. My mom had us kids, tried to keep a tidy house, and defended us with a big iron skillet when she had to.”
Melanie couldn’t tell whether he was serious or not. He seemed awfully sophisticated to have grown up in the hardscrabble tangle of the Carolina mountains. “Are they still here?”
“Mom’s dead. My dad and brother live together. The old place is falling apart, so it’s not really a very fun visit.” He shrugged and gave her a warm smile. “I wouldn’t mind having one of those vacation homes on the edge of town, though.”
She imagined him in a flannel shirt, sitting on his porch and banging out stories about his childhood on his laptop. He was relaxed in his native element, and she figured his wife must be a complete idiot to let him go. “I left home as soon as I could, too. It was great to escape, but I took awhile to get used to the east coast. And now it’s been pretty weird coming back.”
He gave her a pensive look that tossed a little butterfly into her stomach when it turned mischievous. “I hear you, but the journey down the mountain to Clarkeston was plenty strange, too, maybe even more eye-opening than the trek from Atlanta to Yale. And I’ll tell you what: there’s zero chance of a return move back to Walnut Gap.”
She studied him while he went back to work on his pancakes. He made a nice contrast to the cookie-cutter lawyers and bureaucrats that filled her life whether she was in Atlanta or Washington, DC.
“Did you ever track down the Arkansas number?”
“Not yet. My friend in the FBI did some digging but was warned off before he found out. He thought the source of the interference might be someone on the congressional intelligence oversight committee, but he wouldn’t say who.” She frowned and speared a pancake. “You remember that list of Arkansas politicians Jacob Granville’s parents gave us? I did a little checking online and found that two members of the delegation are on the committee that oversees the FBI: senator Elbert Randolph and representative Rebecca Kesan. Maybe one of them is keeping tabs on Granville.”
“I think I’ve seen Randolph on television,” he shrugged, “but that’s not much to go on.”
“Nope. And the number I called is not listed on either one of their websites.” She took a sip of her coffee and poured in a bit more cream. “Did you have time to look at the links I sent you to the two videos?”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “God, that was depressing. An African farmer struggling unsuccessfully to keep his family alive and a woman raped along with her daughter. I had to watch about ten episodes of The Daily Show to wash that out of my head. I can’t figure out what Granville was up to.”
“Was he working on any stories that might be relevant?”
“He was just a photographer. The paper would tell him to go out and shoot a car accident or a PTA fund-raiser. I think the editor in chief might have given him some graphic-design work to do, too, but he wasn’t a reporter.”
“Was he just some sort of sick voyeur?”
“I don’t know,” James said. “He was really ambitious and maybe he was trying to come up with his own stories, but I don’t know what to make of the videos … except that they punched me in the gut. I keep seeing the eyes of the African guy just staring at me from the screen.”
She nodded and then noticed their waitress approaching with the check. “So how far away are the Cavendishes?”
“Not too far. Maybe five minutes. I did a little checking. Dr. Cavendish used to be a urologist in Nashville, but he retired shortly after the disappearances.”
* * *
The short drive from the village shops to the Cavendish home was a steep and windy foray through the temperate rain forest that blankets western North Carolina. Murphy explained that many locales averaged more than eighty inches of rain per year and the result was vast expanses of fir and cedar, ash and maple, rhododendron and dogwood that stretched as far as the eye could see, once one broke above the arboreal canopy. And the Cavendish residence did exactly that, jutting out from a rocky outcrop over the first valley north of the town. As they got out of the car, they were treated to a magnificent leafy vista, complete with patches of the wraith-like fog that gave the Smoky Mountains their name.
A young woman opened the door and introduced herself as Jessica Cavendish. At first, Melanie thought she was looking at Diana’s sister. The thin woman looked barely older than the pictures of Diana, and the attorney wondered whether she was a second or third (or fourth?) wife, for she could not possibly be Diana’s birth mother. The woman led her guests to a richly paneled library off the foyer, where she introduced them to her husband, who sat on a sofa with a computer in his lap. He stood up, shook their hands, and invited them to sit down in a pair of wingback chairs separated from the sofa by a massive coffee table crafted from the polished slice of a tree trunk, the only rustic element in a room that was otherwise quite modern.
Julius Cavendish looked like he was working hard to keep up with his pretty young wife. His clothes
were Patagonia and North Face, meant to suggest that mounting a hiking expedition was the next thing on his agenda. The impression of youthful vigor was, however, belied by a face a little too stretched and hair a little too dark not to be the result of discreet visits to the plastic surgeon and color salon. He looked at them suspiciously before asking them why they had come.
“Mr. Cavendish,” the reporter ran his fingers through his hair as he cautiously broached the subject of Diana’s disappearance, “I recently became aware of some pictures of your daughter that were posted on the Internet. I have reason to believe that they were taken shortly before her abduction, so I immediately called Ms. Wilkerson of the Justice Department for some help in tracking down who posted them.” He talked straight to Cavendish, his voice serious and concerned, as if it pained him to bring up the subject. Melanie would have taken the same considerate tone with the retired doctor, but Murphy sounded as though he really felt the father’s pain. He wasn’t just acting; he really empathized. As a prosecutor, Melanie had cauterized most of those nerve endings years ago. Her version of compassion was more circumscribed and distant.
She nodded. “We’re tracing the photos, but we haven’t yet found the individual who posted them.”
James continued. “I’m revisiting my stories and have started to interview folks, some of whom were never fully questioned by the police.” He waved his hand, as if to caution Cavendish not to overreact to his next statement. “I must say that we’ve found quite a few loose ends, and I was hoping that you might be able to shed some additional light on your daughter’s disappearance.”