by Leif Wright
“Of course,” Aaron said, as if talking to a child. His attitude toward Russell was markedly different than toward Bain. “I’ll have to clone it in emacs and view it in hexadecimal, but it should translate to English without much of a hitch.”
If he thought he was speaking Greek, Russell was content to let him continue believing that, especially if feeling superior led him to coughing up more information than his boss would be comfortable with.
It was Greek to Bain, but she knew Russell was following along.
“It says ‘no hitch’,” Aaron said after a few seconds. “That’s all.”
“Let’s be sure to get that,” Bain said. “Can we look in his sent mail, outboxes, that kind of thing?”
“Absolutely,” Aaron said. “Even if he deleted them, there’s a pretty good chance we can get at least part of what he sent and trashed. The server keeps track of as much as it can until it needs the space for something else. We should be able to get most of it.”
“IP address?” Russell chimed in, eliciting an impatient face from Aaron.
“Hold your horses, dude,” he said. “The server records what IP he’s using every time he logs in, so it may take a while to go through all of them if his ISP is using dynamic IPs.”
Russell knew ISP meant Internet Service Provider—the company that connected the suspect’s computer to the Internet, and dynamic IPs meant that the company assigned a new address to the suspect every time he logged in. Most companies did that these days, so no matter what they got here, they’d have to go to the company and see who was assigned the IP address when the email account was accessed. It would be more legwork, but they were one step closer to identifying whoever it was who hired Chris Jackson.
“Well, there’s good news and bad news,” Aaron said after a lengthy pause. “The good news is I have solid IP addresses for the account holder. The bad news is they appear to all belong to proxy servers.”
“What’s that?” Bain blurted out.
“A proxy server is a way to anonymize Internet traffic,” Aaron said absently. “Sorry. What that means is he was using a service that lets him mask his true identity because the server assigns him a fake IP address, which means any activity he does on the Internet leaves that fake IP address, not the real one he was actually assigned by his ISP. Most proxy servers are overseas, so good luck getting a warrant for that information.”
Bain thought for a moment. “I think I’d still like the IP addresses,” she said finally. “Also, he sent emails with image attachments. Can we recover any of those?”
“Oooh,” Aaron said. “Tricky. Depends on the file type. Some image files will show a partial image even if you don’t have the entire file. Some won’t show anything at all unless you have the whole thing. The good news is the most common file type—jpeg—will show partial files. I’ll see what I can do.” His fingers started flying.
As secretively as he could, Russell pulled out his phone and texted Bain: “New boyfriend! Good job! I think if you flash some titty, he might contact his friends at the proxy server companies for us.”
Bain smiled and texted back: “Maybe I’ll just give him a handjob.”
Russell replied: “He gets one of those solo every night, I’m sure.”
“Gross.”
Russell smiled. Aaron was making frustrated noises. But his hands started flying faster over the keys, so whatever was confounding him might not have the final answer. Russell knew the type: system administrators often referred to themselves as “God” because they had complete control over every aspect of whatever computer they were administering. When one approach to solve a problem didn’t work, they had entire bags of other tricks to try. The computer didn’t care; it was, at its core, a collection of zeroes and ones, and how those binary numbers looked to people wasn’t at all their concern. The answer was always there; the human simply had to know the right question to ask—and how to ask it. Computers didn’t speak English, despite clever illusions to the contrary, so a true system administrator had to understand arcane commands that the computer would also understand. If they were good enough, they could go low-level, beneath even the file system understood by most administrators.
He was betting Aaron was that good. A picture file was simply another collection of zeroes and ones. The trick was understanding how those zeroes and ones fit together absent any sort of context. Aaron, he thought from his short time with him, could coax information out of the zeroes and ones even if he lacked the context.
“Ah ha!” Aaron interrupted Russell’s train of thought. “Got one! I’m not sure what email this was attached to, but it definitely went through his account. It’s not a complete image, but you can see a face.”
He turned a monitor around. On it, the angelic face of a young Mexican boy sitting on Santa’s lap stared at Bain and Russell, who looked at each other and smiled. According to Chris Jackson, this was the image he had shown to the bishop. The image that made the bishop stop resisting. The image that may be at the root of the bishop’s refusal to talk. The image that may cause the bishop to help them identify who had hired Chris Jackson.
30
BAIN AND RUSSELL WERE SO EXCITED BY THE INFORMATION THEY HAD gotten at the email provider that they both stayed awake on the trip home, and Russell didn’t even try to get any more details about Bain’s exploits. The Santa photo was just the beginning. Aaron had also recovered a photo of a little boy, but just from the chest down. The boy was wearing ’70s-style corduroy brown overalls over a red long-sleeved shirt. It appeared to be a studio photo. It wasn’t much. Still, it was something. He had recovered all of the text from the emails to Jackson, but they were straight to the point: names and addresses of the victims. The first email, however, was different. It was still terse, but it contained more instructions:
“Do not kill. Hit them in the head. Hard. But be sure to show them the pictures first. They’ll understand, and that’s all you need to know. Your payment is in the mail.”
The “do not kill” admonition might make it hard to make murder charges stick, but they could certainly get the guy on conspiracy to commit a felony and probably dozens of other charges.
It seemed Chris Jackson was still their best lead, but the bishop might cough up some information when they showed him the Santa photo. It seemed to have had an effect on him when Chris had shown him the same photo.
They knew Chris had received a total of three thousand dollars in cash—one thousand for each victim. The cash had come in twenties crammed into a standard Post Office brown envelope and adorned with Forever stamps enough to cover the weight of the package. The packages had been mailed from public mailboxes, a different one each time. No return address.
The first order of business was to ask Chris if the photos were the same ones he had been emailed, and if so, which person did he show the picture of the little boy to? Bain had a hunch that the photo they were missing—the boy in the wheelchair—was a photo of Robby Turner, but without the photo, she had no way of knowing if that was the case or simply a coincidence. Her guess also was that the wheelchair photo had been shown to Turner’s dad. It just made sense. Which meant that Pearl Edwards, who had been a teacher, was possibly the recipient of the chest-down shot of the little boy.
But if her piecing of the puzzle together was accurate, how did all those pieces fit together? What was the common theme? She and Russell had both been trying to work that one out, but to no avail.
“The Santa thing is creeping me out,” Russell said on the drive back to the station. “I mean, Santa has always creeped me out, but how does this tie in with the bishop?”
“Hell if I know,” she replied, flicking the blinker as she turned off the highway. “I think we have to be careful, though. All those stories about priests raping little boys can taint our viewpoint. We need to be careful to not assume anything, or it could get really ugly for us very fast.”
“That is what I was thinking,” Russell said. “Maybe the bishop covered
up for Santa Claus molesting little boys and somehow our perp found out about it and decided to turn vigilante. I’ll try to stop walking down that road until after we talk to the bishop.”
“Me too,” she said, smiling. “Great minds.”
“Great mind,” he said, pointing to himself, then, pointing to her, “and sidekick.”
“Aww, it’s so cute when you get all cocky,” she said, turning into the station garage. “It’s like a puppy sticking its butt in the air and growling. Good for you.”
Russell smiled and undid his seatbelt. “Time to get to work,” he said.
“Get anything from the warrant?” They hadn’t expected Chief Dreadfulwater to be in the garage, so both uttered a little noise when he spoke.
“A lot of stuff,” Bain said after a pause. “We still don’t have an ID on our perp, but we have a few good leads. We’re about to get into our cop gear and go chase them down.”
“Good,” he replied. “This case is starting to get some attention from the muckety mucks upstairs, so let’s keep chugging along.”
“God, you sound like a TV police chief,” Russell said. “Could you yell at us and tell us to stop thinking the rules don’t apply to us?”
“Decaf, shorten your dog’s leash,” Dreadfulwater said, smiling. “He’s pissing on my leg.”
They all laughed and went their separate ways, the chief to lunch, and Bain and Russell to her office to get their information straight before they went to see the bishop.
“You want to do good-cop-bad-cop with the bishop?” Russell asked as he drove. “I mean, if he’s into the Bible, he already knows the good-cop-bad-cop routine; all he has to do is look at the old and the new testaments for that one.”
Bain laughed. “I think we play it straight forward,” she replied. “Something in that photo is significant to him; if it caused him to let Chris Jackson beat him unconscious, surely it will prompt him to talk to us.”
“Yeah,” Russell said. “But let’s pretend that we know what it is about the picture that is significant. Maybe that will get him to loosen up a bit.”
“We’ll have to finesse it,” she said. “This guy isn’t dumb. If we push too far, he’ll catch on pretty quick.”
As they pulled up to Saint Phillip’s Cathedral, both unconsciously got their “game faces” on, turning from a pair of friends into authoritative police. It was a transformation Bishop Sean Brien would recognize—the same one he went through weekly when he donned the robes of his office and mounted the pulpit to deliver the Sunday Mass. Today, however, as he watched the black Dodge drive up to the rectory, he felt a sense of foreboding—the cops were back because they knew.
Ever since the little man with the tire thumper had appeared, Brien had known it was only a matter of time before everything came out. For years, he had hoped The Incident had been an aberration, something that had slipped into the mists of the past, an anomaly to be forgotten and prayed through. He sighed. Those things done in darkness were bound to be shouted from the rooftops, the blessed Lord had said, and who was Sean Brien to dispute the word of the Lord?
He sighed again.
Putting on his bishop’s collar, he went downstairs to let the police in. He would face the consequences of his actions, even though he believed he had done his penance and the Lord had forgiven him. Actions often had implications beyond the spiritual, and now he had to face that.
Bain had just lifted her hand to knock when the big oak door was opened and the bishop was staring her in the face.
“How can I help you, officers?”
Bain, startled by the door opening to a bishop with a bandage on his head, cleared her throat.
“Bishop Brien, we’d like to speak with you briefly,” she said finally. “Can we come in?”
“Certainly,” he said warmly. It was almost a relief to finally have it come to a head. “Come right into my office.”
Russell was decidedly non-religious, but he was always struck by the intricate woodwork inside Catholic churches. Of course, he thought whenever he saw it, the money spent on artisans to create that woodwork could have fed, clothed, and housed a lot of poor people.
They sat down across a desk from Brien, and Bain jumped right in.
“We’ve been doing a lot of work on your case,” she said, pulling the partial photo of the Mexican boy and Santa Claus from her folder. “We’d like you to tell us about this photo.” As she pulled it, she realized the Santa in the photo looked a lot like a younger Brien. Brien himself didn’t even look at the photo.
“I guess you’ve figured out what that little man figured out,” he said. “I don’t know why this is all coming back now, but here it is. I’m guilty, I’m afraid. I thought I had done my penance, but the Lord obviously has other ideas.”
Russell blinked. “Just to be clear, tell us what you’re guilty of.”
“Not going to read me my rights first?”
“Let’s just get through this first,” Bain said. “We can do all that later.”
She shot Russell a look that only he would recognize. Had they stumbled onto something here? Russell shot the look back.
“I’m ashamed to admit I don’t even remember that little boy’s name,” he said. “It was so long ago. I was the priest of the Hispanic congregation, and I had a moment of weakness.”
Bain shifted in her seat. She had a bazillion questions, but she sensed that asking them might shut the bishop up.
“I was charged with watching this particular little boy while his parents worked on a ranch out west of town,” he continued. “I have spent years wondering what came over me, and today, I still have no answers. I have never before or since done anything even remotely similar. But that day, I took advantage of that little boy, and I have been paying for it since then. I deserve whatever punishment comes my way.”
“What can you tell us about where this photo came from?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “It was a standard Santa photo. The Incident happened about a week after it was taken.”
“Do you have any idea how your assailant came to be in possession of this photo?”
“No,” he said. His voice was even, as if he had been expecting this situation. “I just knew when he showed it to me why he was here. I think that’s why I didn’t try to fight him off. I deserved the beating he delivered.”
“Let’s be clear,” Bain said. “You’re saying you molested this little boy.”
“The word ‘molesting’ sounds so horrible,” the bishop responded. “But I guess that’s what it was. I never penetrated him. But masturbating him is still molesting.”
“Officer Russell is going to place you under arrest, Bishop,” she said. “After he has read your rights, we are going to request that you write and sign a statement. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“Will you help us track this boy down so he can get some closure?”
“I will do whatever I need to do to make some sort of amends,” he said. “Of course I will help.”
Russell stood up, cuffed the bishop, and read his rights to him, then escorted him to the back seat of Bain’s car.
31
MIGUEL MOLINERO STARED AT THE IDIOT SITTING ON THE COUCH ACROSS the room. He looked so comfortable that there was no other possible explanation than he was a complete retraso.
“Cabron,” Miguel said calmly, in measured tones. “Your problem with policia is not my problem. In fact, I distinctly remember telling you to check your car like a pilot checks his plane before you started driving around. Check the lights, I said. Check the brakes. Check the brake lights. Check the turn signals. Check the tire inflation. Check the registration. Check the inspection. Check everything. And then make sure you never try to drive if you’ve been drinking or smoking anything. Do you not remember that conversation?”
“I—”
“Shut the fuck up, pendejo. I wasn’t asking you an actual question. When I want you to talk, I’ll tell you. Comprende, gringo?”
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br /> The idiot on the couch didn’t respond.
“Good,” Miguel said. “So you can be taught. Good.” He looked at the man sitting next to the idiot. The man smiled. “I guess that means you get to live a little longer.”
The idiot on the couch squirmed a little, but kept silent.
“The policia leave me alone, cabron, because I don’t mess with hillbilly heroin. They got a duro for that shit, man, so smart people stay away from it. So you can imagine my surprise when I get a call from my amigo that you got popped with five kilos of yellow cake heroin. My yellow cake heroin.”
The idiot on the couch shifted his weight a little.
“I’m not going to kill you, pendejo,” Miguel continued, watching with satisfaction as relief flooded the idiot’s face. He pointed to the man sitting next to the idiot. “Have you met Raul?”
The idiot looked at Raul and shook his head. Raul, a mountain of a man, smiled.
“I pay Raul a lot of money to make sure people like you don’t lose my drugs to the cops,” he said. “He is the Beethoven of making sure idiotas like you don’t lose my drugs to the cops. I call him shrinkage prevention. Do you know what shrinkage is?”
The idiot looked at Miguel, eyes wide.
“Shrinkage is what you call it when products disappear between manufacturing and point of sale. In America, shrinkage averages one and a half percent of total inventory in retail. One and a half percent. Do you know what percentage of the product you were supposed to be moving ended up being lost to shrinkage?”
The idiot knew, but didn’t respond.
“One hundred percent,” Miguel answered his own question. “That’s ninety-eight-and-a-half percent higher than the national average. If this was Walmart, I would fire you as a manager for such a massive shrinkage report. And I’d probably have you arrested, because the level of incompetence required to have one hundred percent shrinkage boggles the mind. It’s truly monumental. One could argue that any reasonably intelligent person could be expected to have shrinkage higher than the national average once in a while, but you beat it by FUCKING NINETY-NINE PERCENT!”