Of the twenty-five, twenty were summer students from abroad. Chris found another website, a blog by a student journalist at the University of Naples. This student had posted a list of the missing. He scanned through it and saw the names of two who could only be sisters: Claire and Elaine Rochelle, who had come for the summer from Montreal.
There was really only one thing left to check. He went to Facebook, that giant yellowpages of the world, and typed in their names. It didn’t take him long to find them. They were twins. They were beautiful. They were redheads. And, though their Facebook pictures showed them alive with all of their flesh and skin intact, fully clothed and without gags, they were surely the dead girls in the photograph.
Chris closed the computer and went to find Julissa.
He found her at a table under a cluster of coconut trees, facing the ocean. There were storm clouds on the horizon. A young girl in dirty shorts and a white T-shirt was holding a handful of white seashells for Julissa’s inspection. He watched Julissa take a coin from her purse and hand it to the girl, who left the shells on the table and scampered down the beach looking for more.
“How’s it going?”
Julissa turned to him. The wind coming off the turquoise waves blew her hair around her face. She tossed her head and gathered her hair behind her, taking a tie off of her wrist and making a ponytail. Chris saw how white her neck was, saw how the thin gold chain she wore sparkled in the stormy sunlight. She was wearing a simple cotton dress she’d bought at the outdoor mall they’d found that morning. It was wet six inches up the hem of the skirt; he supposed she had taken a break from her work and walked down to the water. He imagined her gathering the dress above her knees and walking into the water, watching sailing canoes transit the horizon, her brow furrowed as she thought through a problem. Her computer was on the table and showed lines of code on a white screen. It would be easy to forget how dangerous she was. Her beauty could eclipse her other qualities. He remembered the casual way she’d held the gun on him in his motel room in Galveston.
“It’s going like I thought it would. I got into Special Agent Barton’s computer—she accepted the e-vite I disguised as coming from her son’s fiancée. Once I could use her computer, it only took an hour to find her VICAP login and password. It took me awhile to figure out how to navigate their system. They’ve got an information structure that’s kind of dated. Looks like they’ve just been adding to it since they first started the network. It’s not very secure. In fact, it violates about half the security protocols we’ve set up since 2001.”
“Can you find out anything about how the data has been altered on all the redhead murders?”
“Have a seat and I’ll show you.”
She took her feet off the other chair and pulled it out for him. He sat next to her and looked at the screen. He could make no sense of the code.
“The system keeps a chronological index of all changes to the data. So I’ve been going through and checking all the entries within a week of each killing.” She pulled up a list of dates and names. Chris recognized it immediately as the long string of murders. “Three days before a new killing there is always a large-scale deletion.”
She touched the screen on the entry that read July 4, 2010 — Allison Clayborn (Galveston, Texas, USA). Then she pulled up another table she had created, which showed killings in one column and deletions in a parallel column. On July 1, 2010, someone penetrated VICAP and deleted the information for Jill Moyers. She had been killed on November 12, 2009, dismembered aboard a sailboat docked near Granville Street in Vancouver.
“The information on Jill Moyers is still on VICAP,” Julissa said. “Whoever did this didn’t delete the files. He just deleted the table entry, so when someone runs a search for victims, Jill won’t show up. As far as the search program is concerned, it’s deleted, because he deleted the file path.”
“But you can find it?”
“Yeah. Because of that chronological index I told you about. It logged the change. Basically it’s like a trash can, and I can open it up and see the file path he threw away.”
“Can any of this help us?”
“Maybe not directly. But there’s more.”
She opened another window, another screen of incomprehensible code.
“What’s this?”
“A log of who’s on the system and when. And you see these long number strings broken up by periods?”
“Yeah.”
“Those are router addresses and this one’s a unique device ID number. The VICAP server detects and blocks proxy servers. That’s no surprise. But what is a surprise is that they’re recording device ID numbers. Most servers don’t do that, and this one does it so subtly a person logged in doesn’t even know it happens.”
“Can you single out just the IDs that were logged onto VICAP when the deletions were made?”
“That’s what I just finished doing when you walked up. I think I’ve got him. For the first eight deletions I found, up to 2006, this was the number.”
She pointed at a 128-bit number on the screen.
“But from 2006 to 2010, it was different?” Chris asked.
“Yeah. This one.” She pointed at a different number on the screen. “I guess he bought a new computer.”
“What now?”
“I download some geo-location software, modify it a bit to make it better, and track down the routers he used. Then we go find the son of a bitch.”
“How long will that take?”
“If I had all the stuff the NSA’s got, it’d take about a minute. But I’ll just be using this cheap laptop and modified software, so figure a day or two. The hard part will be after we find the routers.”
“Okay.”
Chris looked at the screen again and felt a shiver when he realized how much closer they were. Having the device ID number was like having the cell phone number of the person who’d been hacking into the FBI. As long as he was still using the computer, it would be possible to physically track him down. Maybe not easily or quickly, but that was fine. And this person, whoever he was, would know more about the killer than anyone else on the planet.
“There’s just one problem,” Julissa said.
“What’s that?”
“I told you before every new killing, this person hacks VICAP and erases the most recent victim of the redhead killings.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, we know he just killed those two girls in the photograph, but I checked, and Allison’s VICAP entry is still on the system. He didn’t erase it.”
Chris nodded. That made sense to him, considering what he’d just figured out about the sisters murdered in Naples.
“I think maybe he’s moved into a new phase,” Chris said. “Maybe now, instead of leaving the victims out in the open to be found, and covering his tracks by altering data on VICAP, he’s doing something else.”
He told her what he’d found in the photograph, and how it had led him to the story about the dormitory fire and the names of the girls. When he finished telling it, they sat in silence for a while. The little girl in the stained white T-shirt came back from the water’s edge, carrying another handful of shells. She set them on the table and looked at Chris without speaking. The shells were light purple cowries, polished by tumbling at the surf line. Chris dug in his pocket and gave the girl a ten peso coin.
Finally, Julissa spoke. She was not whispering, but her voice was quiet. “You thought through what this means?”
“Yes.”
“Unless he does us a favor and sends an email every time he kills, it’ll be almost impossible to track him.”
“I know.”
“We can keep scouring the Internet for news stories, but what are we looking for? Every house fire, every train wreck or factory explosion? If we’re looking at the whole world, there are probably hundreds of arsons every day.”
“I know,” Chris said. “And there are thousands of other ways he could hide the bodies, or destroy them so we w
ouldn’t know it was him. We can’t keep tabs on every redhead on the planet.”
They were quiet again for a while. There was intermittent lightning on the horizon, violet-white streaks between the clouds and the dark green sea. They would have to retreat to their rooms soon to stay out of the coming thunderstorm.
“He was taunting us even more than we realized,” Julissa said. “He wasn’t just showing us the bodies. He was telling us he’s going to keep on killing and we won’t be able to keep track of it.”
Chris thought about that.
“Did you think of a way to reach Westfield?” he asked.
She nodded. “I set up a Skype account and emailed him a clue to the account.”
“Skype’s secure?”
“The NSA would ban it if it could. It’s been trying to set up backdoors but hasn’t been able to.”
“What’s the clue to the account?”
“I told him it’s the last name of the man who first told us about the swimmer. Backwards.”
“Hutchinson reversed?”
“Yeah.”
“Good idea. Even if the killer is reading our email he won’t get that.”
“Yeah—except Aaron hasn’t answered.”
“Are you worried?”
“Aren’t you?
Chris nodded.
A few drops of rain blew in with the next gust of wind. Julissa closed her laptop and put it into her purse. They didn’t get up from the table, but sat watching the waves. Chris thought of the creature, and of chess. They were in the early stages of the game now, exploring each other’s defense lines, making cautious moves to see how the other responded. Were they seeing the truth from its actions, or only what it chose to show them? A skillful chess player might sacrifice a few pieces for the right purpose. Maybe their gains were not so great after all.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
In the moonlight, the desert was silvery gray, cut down the middle by the highway, a black strip winding through the rocky hills and arroyos. The van was one of two cars in the motel lot. The other, an old Ford truck, belonged to the night manager. The light in Westfield’s room was the only one shining. In the rifle scope, he could see the TV through a crack in the curtains. It looked like a war movie. He’d left the sound up, but of course from over a hundred yards away, he couldn’t hear it.
He’d been in his hunting blind since sundown, having made it as comfortable as he could. He ripped the ratty blue carpet from the back of his van and spread it on the hardpan between the two biggest boulders at the top of the hill. Then he’d moved smaller rocks into the gap between the boulders, both as a shield and as a balance for the rifle. From the parking lot, the nest was invisible, just a tumble of boulders amongst the creosote at the top of the hill. He’d lugged up a gallon jug of water, a couple of gas station burritos, and his laptop. It was a clear line of sight from the hilltop to the motel, and he could get a weak wireless signal. The reception was poor, but would serve his purpose: the viral email would ping out his presence and draw them in.
How could he be sure they would come? That was his main worry. Maybe they would wait and watch from afar, monitoring his laptop’s signals from some distant country and studying their chances. Meanwhile he’d be drying out on the hilltop, getting nowhere. He resolved to wait through the night and then through the next day. If they hadn’t come by then, he would ditch the laptop and move on. He drank some of the water and wondered why he hadn’t thought to bring any coffee.
He sighted through the rifle scope and activated the laser sight, projecting a tiny red dot on the door knob to his room. He checked the rifle again to be sure a round was chambered and the safety was off. Then he rested the butt of the rifle on the ground and leaned its stock against the boulder. He listened to the night noises: wind moving through the giant open spaces, a pack of coyotes miles away, something small scurrying close by.
The sound of the wind brought up a long-forgotten memory, which lay on his chest like a heavy stone. On a week’s leave during his first overseas deployment, he and Tara had hiked along a lagoon and pitched a tent in the coconut trees somewhere in the Marshall Islands.
He tried to remember the name of the atoll and couldn’t.
Instead, when he closed his eyes, he remembered the propeller-driven cargo plane landing on the crushed coral strip, Tara squeezing his hand until all three sets of gear were on the ground. Getting out in the hot sun and walking over the too-bright white gravel, blinking in the blazing light, and buying cold Coca-Cola in returnable glass bottles from a man whose house was across the dirt path from the landing strip. He remembered making love on a straw mat on the beach one morning after bathing in the ocean. Her inner thighs were salty, and when he kissed her there, and higher, tasting the clean ocean water that clung to her in tiny beads, she had cried out and said his name, her hands on the back of his head.
Now he crouched on the hilltop with the rifle next to him and remembered it bitterly. It was the beach of Maloelap Atoll, September of 1976.
From that day, she had no more than eighteen months left. He’d spent most of it at sea.
He lifted his head above the rocks and looked down on the parking lot again. Still the same: just his van and the old truck, and the crack in the curtains letting out the light of the television. He saw headlights in the distance, winding toward him. He watched to see how close the car had to be before he could hear it. At what he judged to be a thousand yards, he first heard the tires on the asphalt and the low purr of the engine. But he was downwind of this one. If they came from the other direction, he wouldn’t hear so quickly. The car passed the motel without slowing and he watched its taillights, marking the spot when he could no longer hear it. He thought he’d have twenty seconds warning from one direction, and maybe only ten seconds if the car came from downwind. He shifted on the carpet and found a good position for his back against the boulder and closed his eyes.
When he woke, it was darker than before. A thundercloud in the west covered the moon. The only light came from the stars overhead. The hands of his watch, glowing dull green, showed 3:55 a.m. Some sound had woken him but he couldn’t remember what. He was dazed with sleep, and cold. He picked up the rifle and rose to look over the low rocks. There was a black SUV in the motel lot. Its headlights were off but its brake lights and backing lights were on. The door to his room was ajar. The TV was dark but there was a light coming from the back of the room. Westfield crouched behind the rocks and watched, not through the rifle scope, but with just his naked eyes so that he could take in the whole scene. Then he shouldered the rifle and looked through the scope at the door. He could see the splintered wood next to the deadbolt slot and there was a rough boot print on the face of the door next to the knob. He pulled his face away from the scope and looked at the whole parking lot again. The SUV hadn’t moved, but its brake lights were still on.
He looked through the scope again in time to see a shadow move behind the curtains. So there were at least two of them. A driver and the guy who’d kicked in the door to his room. That must have been the sound that woke him. He wished he had a silencer. If he did, he could shoot the man in the room and maybe the driver wouldn’t know. Eventually he’d get tired of waiting and would get out of the SUV for his own bullet.
Instead it would have to be more complicated. There was no guessing what the driver would do when he heard the gunshots. He might get out and try to help his partner; he might drive around to the back side of the motel for cover and then try to flush Westfield on foot. He might just drive off, or try.
Westfield sighted through the scope again and watched the doorway to his room. A thought came out of nowhere like a jolt of electricity. What if, instead of coming after him themselves, they had simply called the police? It’d be so easy. He looked through the scope again at the inside of the hotel room. If they were cops, and if they’d made a call to the Galveston Police Department, there’d be a crowd of them by now. There wouldn’t be just one shadow in the motel
room and one SUV in the parking lot. They’d have backup, and backup for the backup. Every light in his motel room would be on, and the curtains would be open.
Then he had a second thought. If they weren’t police, and if they tracked him here with his computer, by now they knew this was a setup. His van was outside his room and the TV had been left on. But he wasn’t in the room and neither was his computer. If they didn’t see the trap now, then they weren’t very good at what they did for a living. And either way, they weren’t going to live very long. Through the scope, he saw a shadow walk in front of the curtains, and then, suddenly, a man stood in the doorway. He was dressed in black combat pants and a black T-shirt, and if there was any further doubt about whether he was a cop or not, Westfield saw that in his right hand he was carrying an Uzi.
Westfield aimed at the center of the man’s chest. Through the scope, he could see the laser sight’s tiny red dot just over the man’s heart. There wasn’t time for anything else. As the man stepped over the threshold and onto the sidewalk, Westfield pulled the trigger. The bullet traveled faster than sound and the man never looked up. The shot was high and caught the man squarely at the base of his throat. He fell backwards into the room and lay bleeding on the carpet with his boots sticking out the open door. Westfield looked up from the scope and watched the scene below. He half expected to see ten men rush from his motel room, but none did. No lights came on anywhere in the motel. The SUV hadn’t moved. All four of its doors were still closed. The man he’d shot lay absolutely still.
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