Revenge is Sweet (A Samantha Church Mystery) (18 page)

Sam moved her cursor over the e-mail message marked ‘
Revenge
’ and clicked. David pushed his ball cap up on his head and leaned closer to the screen, his brow tight as he looked on. After giving him time to read the contents, Sam asked, “Do you think you can tell where it originated?”

“Should be able to,” David spoke in a faraway voice, his concentration directed at the screen. He took the mouse from her hand and began to scroll down the document. “We’ll see here in a minute as so
on as I can…” David’s voice trailed off as he studied the screen before him. The room was quiet before the police scanner barked to life again with the same female dispatcher’s voice relaying a new set of street coordinates. “Okay, here it is,” David said still staring at the screen.

Sam scooted her ch
air in closer as David went on, “The sender’s revealing information is in the section that begins with the word ‘received.’ But it depends, though, because there may be several of these.”

“Depends on what?” Sam asked.

“On the number of computers that the e-mail has traversed,” David answered.

Sam felt her face flush with embarrassment. She couldn’t look David in the eye and averted her attention to her lap. She smoothed out an imaginary wrinkle with her palm and when she spoke, she directed her comments toward it, full of frustration and irritation at her own ignorance. “David, I’m so dumb when it comes to computers. It’s a wonder I even know how to turn one on. The sender’s information has probably been there all along and I was just too stupid to realize it.”

David ignored her comment and continued to study the screen. “You’ll see that the originating computer is in the bottom ‘received.’ That section will have an Internet Protocol, which is also referred to as IP ...” his voice faded as he allowed his thoughts to process. The police scanner squawked to life again with the female dispatcher’s voice providing new information about a domestic disturbance in progress. She spoke in a cool, collected voice that Sam knew would help keep the officers on the street calm.

“Could be an IP number such as,” David took his hand off the mouse and gestured with it. “Something like, 124.213.45.11. The good thing about the IP number, Sam, is that the number can be traced on a number of websites.”

“Which means that the IP number is assigned to the sender’s Internet Service Provider, and not the sender?” Sam asked.

David nodded. “Right. Well, most likely it is, but the Internet Service Provider or ISP, will be able to identify the sender using that number.”

“What if they’ve set up a phony web address?” Sam asked.

David turned to Sam and shrugged indifference. “There’s no doubt they have, but it doesn’t matter.”
He directed his attention back to the computer and covered the mouse with his hand. “Let’s print this baby out and see what we have.”

“I’ll get it,” Sam said and headed for the printer.

She reached the printer and waited, listening to the printer whirr and groan until it spit out a printed copy of the e-mail. She picked it up and began to scan the document looking for the IP number. There was more verbiage contained in the body of the e-mail about sending the e-mail than the entire text written by the kidnappers.

“I’ve never paid attention to any of this stuff before,” Sam said, her head down as she walked back to the desk. “I always thought everything else printed on the page was such a waste of good paper.”

David looked in her direction. “That waste of good paper is going to tell us everything we need to know.”

Sam reached her desk and turned the document in David’s direction so he could have a better look. “Is that the IP number right there?” Sam pointed to a set of numbers located about a quarter way down the page. David followed her finger.

“Yep, that’d be it,” he said and pulled the document from her hand. “Let’s see who this puppy belongs to.”

Sam stood next to David as he studied the e-mail more intently.

“Looks like the kidnapper’s e-mail went through two other paths to get your address,” he said.

The e-mail from Wilson’s kidnappers showed that the MSMail Priority was marked: Urgent. The X-Mailer was Microsoft Outlook Express, 6.0. The ‘To’ was Sam’s e-mail address and the Subject Line contained a single word: Revenge.

Finally, David found what he was looking for. “Here’s the return path,” he said and tapped the piece of paper with his index finger.

Sam leaned in closer. They both saw the contents:

Return-Path:

And that it was received from:

“Who’s jgarcia?” David asked.

Sam straightened and brought a hand to her lips and tapped several times, deep in thought.
“jgarcia?” She repeated the name, her eyes watching the second hand speed around the clock.
Can’t let time get away from me.

Sam snapped her fingers when the thought came to her. “He’s the one who headed up the smuggling operation here,” Sam said, her voice excited and animated. “I’m sure of it. I think his first name is Juan. I remember some of the detectives working on the case saying that he had masterminded everything, but that bastard had managed to elude police capture after the article came out.”

“Obviously,” David said.

They both stared at the e-mail a moment in silence. David shook his head and tossed the document over Sam’s keyboard. He folded his hands over the top of his baseball cap. “I don’t know, Sam, the more I think about it, it more it seems like the guy, this Juan
Garcia guy or whoever it is that’s behind this
wanted
you to see his name.” David shook his head in disbelief. “Personally, I think it’s just a trap to get you back.”

Sam gave him a skeptical look. “David, if they wanted me back, they would’ve never let me go in the first place. In fact, I’m surprised I’m still alive. I don’t think that this Juan realized that we could track his name. Maybe he thought he was being anonymous sending that e-mail. Maybe he is as stupid as I am when it comes to computers and this e-mail thing. He’s a dirty, filthy drug dealer for Christ’s sake, not an IT professional.”

David didn’t seem convinced. “For all we know that’s not even the guy’s real name … do you know how many Juan Garcia’s there are in this world? I think we should call the police.”

Sam shook her head. “No, David, we can’t. I want to call them just as much as you do, but I told you we
can’t
do that now. You read the e-mail.”

David was not convinced. “Sam,
we can do this very quietly, not everyone at the Grandview PD has to know. There’s got to someone there you can still trust.”

Sam shook her head. “Maybe there is, but I just can’t take that chance right now.”

“We should at least try, Sam,” he countered. “If you think they’re going kill him anyway and this is all just for revenge then we may as well go all out. What do we have to lose?”

They studied each other intently in silence, before Sam shook her head again. “David, please, let’s just keep this between us a little while longer.”

Sam closed her eyes. When she opened them David was staring at her intently, his brown eyes a shade darker, his hands still firmly clasped over his head. Waiting for her next move.

“I remember the detectives taking me by a house that the drug dealers had been using to manufacture methamphetamines,” Sam said, her voice a mixture of frustration, irritation and weariness. “It looked like just like a normal house on a normal residential street, but built beneath it, David, was a room probably no more than eight feet by twelve or something small like that. It contained everything you could imagine to make meth, from battery acid to aspirins.”

“I remember you telling me about the smell,” David said and nodded.

The look on Sam’s face soured
as if the scent had returned. “It smelled absolutely awful. Like cat urine. I remember Wilson saying something to me about the smell after we were kidnapped and still being held together.” Sam had a burst of energy and hope that made her want to jump out of her skin. “That’s where Wilson is I’m sure of it. David we’ve got to find him.”

He put a hand over her wrist. “This isn’t something we’re just going to go ahead and do on our own, Sam. Doing something foolish will get everyone killed. We’ve been patient this long
, like you said, so we need to be a little while longer.” David glanced up to the white-faced clock on the wall. “It’s nearly one o’clock. Can we be levelheaded on this, Sam? We lose it now and something could happen to Wilson. You’ve got to be exhausted from your trip and everything that’s happened. Let’s get some sleep and we’ll talk to Nick first thing in the morning.”

Sam shrunk back from David’s touch. She sat down in her chair, resting her hand on top of her desk to steady herself. She didn’t want to admit it, but David was right.
He folded the paper with the kidnapper’s e-mail in half and handed it to Sam. She took it and opened her middle drawer to place it inside. When she did, she let out a shriek and pushed her chair away from the desk so hard that she crashed into David’s chair.

“Sam! What!” he said.

“They … they’ve been in my desk drawer, too! Get it the hell out of there,” Sam said in a halting voice.

David rose hesitantly from his chair and looked cautiously inside Sam’s middle desk drawer. “My God,” he said.

“David, no, I don’t want to look at it,” Sam said and she turned her head away from the desk. She held her breath and didn’t watch as David went to reach inside her desk drawer. He pulled out a Barbie doll made to look like Sam. The doll’s hair was colored the same light ash blonde as Sam’s and shaped in her style. The doll stood erect with only its right arm slightly raised upward. In the neck was a razor blade, blood oozing down the doll’s neck and covering the top she wore. David looked again in the desk for a note that might have accompanied the doll. He found one. Holding the look-alike Barbie in his left hand, he opened the letter folded in half and in half again. The text was written in simple block letters without punctuation:

it will be your turn soon

“Get that thing away from me, David,” Sam said. “I don’t want to ever see it again.”

“No, Sam, we can’t do that. We need to keep it as evidence.” David lowered his hand to hide the doll partially behind his left leg. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Sam rose from her chair and reached for her jacket. The blood in her veins turned to ice as a chill flooded through her. She shivered involuntarily. When Sam lifted her jacket off the desk, the box wrapped in the brown paper stared back at both of them.

Sam and David eyed each other, sharing the same sickening thought. Sam felt like her knees were about to buckle. She grabbed onto the back of her chair for support. David squinted. Neither moved.

“It’s from them,” he said and swallowed hard. “It has to be.”

Sam nodded, keeping her eyes fixed on the box. Anne’s yellow sticky note, placed in the center of the package stood out, taunting them. The room was so quiet that they could hear the sound of the second hand sweeping around the white-faced clock.

“Do you want me to open it?” David asked, looking at Sam.

Sam drew a deep breath and thought for a long moment, wondering as fear churned in her stomach, what could be worse than seeing a Barbie doll in your likeness whose throat had been slit with a razor blade?
“Go ahead,” she muttered.

David took the box in his hand and began to unwrap it nervously. He worked slowly, pulling away one piece of tape at a time until finally the white box was exposed. He placed the wrappings on the desk.

He adjusted his ball cap firmly on his head, the bill covering his eyes. He opened the box, setting the lid over the brown crumpled paper. The contents were folded in white tissue, as if the package had been wrapped in a department store. He looked up and saw that Sam had her attention fixed on him, not the package. As he started to move the tissue, he noticed his hands were shaking. He bit his bottom lip, his gaze adverted slightly as he exposed the contents of the box.

“What is it, David?” Sam asked, a fear welling so great in her she could hardly breathe.

It was a pair of mannequin hands. A left and a right. Each stopped at the wrist.

“Pull it out, David,” Sam said. “I want to see what kind of assholes we’re dealing with.”

David shook his head, feeling slightly nauseous. “You don’t want to know.”

At Sam’s insistence, David reached in the box and pulled out the hands. He raised them to eye level and stared at Sam.

“Oh God,” she said.

“This is what we’re dealing with, Sam,” he said.

Sam squeezed her forehead hard between her fingers. She kept her attention fixed on David, standing on the other side of her desk. The second hand on the white-faced clock made another full sweep. “Is there a note?” she asked finally.

David set the hands on the chair and moved the tissue around in the box. He found an index card. The words had been written as simply as the message that came with the Barbie doll.