Abandoned: A Thriller (28 page)

“How secure would that be for him?” I ask.

“If you do it right? Very. If we’re watching and waiting and the ISP is cooperative, maybe we could trace something like that
—maybe.
But you have to understand, most providers don’t keep any logs of chats at all. Privacy is a huge issue, and you can’t be competitive if you’re not
providing it. Many providers who have instant-messaging services, for example, have option settings for full encryption, and these days, full usually means full, as in government grade.”

“But we can wiretap if we need to, right?” Alan asks.

“Not necessarily. There are two different services out right now in the instant-messaging arena that are essentially impossible to, quote, ‘wiretap.’ They use a combination of encryption and peer-to-peer architecture—” He waves his hands in a gesture of dismissal. “I don’t need to get too technical. Suffice it to say that in those two cases, even if the company wanted to cooperate with us, they wouldn’t be able to.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “Those two are the most popular.”

He nods. “Anonymity is everything. Most of it isn’t illicit. People just like their privacy. They want to talk and not worry about Big Brother—us—listening in on them. The problem is, the pedophiles and terrorists support it too.”

“What about before the Internet?” James says.

Leo shrugs. “Not my area, sorry. But he could have been using the Net for a long time, anyway. Chat rooms have been around for a while, and BBS’s—electronic bulletin board systems—were already popular in the late seventies. He could have been operating on a primitive version of what we’re talking about for the last twenty-five years if he was really tech-savvy. A little longer, even.”

Monsters, casting nets into the information sea. Pulling the nets back in, filled with their catch of the hate-filled and the hungry.

“Good, Leo,” I say. “Now I need you to follow up on this hypothesis of yours.”

“Shoot.”

“The LAPD Computer Crimes Unit has taken Douglas Hollister’s computer. I want you there, peeking over their shoulders. Fill them in on your theory and scour his computer for evidence to back it up. I want the name of the website he used to visit.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem. LAPD CCU is a good unit. They know what they’re doing, and I’m on good terms with them. Geeks are competitive but not all that territorial.”

“We also have three other abduction victims who were … returned. We’re pretty sure it’s the same perp. We’re going to be liaising with the departments involved, and this may lead us to other Douglas Hollisters. If so, we’ll need to fine-tooth their systems too.”

“Just let me know. Is that it?”

“We work here,” Callie chides. “Real work. We don’t get to sit around all day parked on our posteriors, sipping coffee and perusing Internet porn. Chop chop.”

Leo gives her a sympathetic smile. “Envy is tough.”

“So I was thinking,” Alan says.

Leo has left, and we are back to the whiteboard, back to our list, scrawls in black and blue marker that look disconnected, maybe a little bit deranged, like puzzle pieces cast onto a coffee table. We stare at them and talk about them and fumble to find and add new pieces. A finished puzzle is always the same: a face, with a name written below it.

“Our perp keeps things simple. He searches for men who want their significant others taken out of the way,” he says.

“What about unsatisfied wives who want their husbands gone?” Callie interjects.

“Possible,” I allow, “but not really pragmatic. Roughly sixty percent of spousal murders are committed by men, so they’re the largest demographic.” I smile at Alan. “Skewed target group acknowledged, no man-hating intended.”

“No problem. Back to my thinking. He finds guys who want to take that extra step. A divorce won’t do it either, because they don’t want to split the money, or they don’t want to share the kids, or just because they hate the wife so much. He cuts a deal with the husbands: Take out life insurance on her, if you haven’t already, and I’ll grab her and hold her. No one will ever find a body because there’s no body to be found, and seven years later, you declare her dead, collect the insurance money, and give me my split.”

“That sounds right,” I agree.

“So what does he do with them after the seven year period is up?”

James’s sigh is both dismissive and derisive. “He kills them, of course. He kills them and disposes of the bodies in a decisive way, so they’ll never be found. Maybe he cremates them, or cuts them up and feeds them to pigs, but whatever he does, it’s not a productive line of questioning.”

“Really, smart-ass? Then what is?”

“The same as before: methodology. We have an idea now of how he
selects his victims. We know from Heather Hollister’s interview how he treats them. The next logical question is: Where would he keep them?”

“Well …” I say, thinking. “We have three mutilated victims in three different states: California, Nevada, and Oregon. Do we think he has different holding houses in each state?”

“Absolutely,” James says.

“Why?”

“Because it’s the most pragmatic solution. The longer he travels with his victims, the greater the risk of getting caught. Much easier and much safer to house them locally.”

“I agree with the princess,” Callie says.

“These would be places that he’d own,” I say. “Rentals would be risky too. No good having to take an ax to the landlord because he dropped in for a surprise cup of coffee.”

“Agreed,” James says.

“So what kind of properties would we be talking about?” I ask.

“Remote,” Alan says. “Either because it’s literally remote, like out in the boonies, or figuratively remote, as in no one’s around or no one gives a shit.”

“Warehouses?” I ask.

“I don’t think so,” Callie replies. “There are too many variables in a warehouse district. Squatters, or fires, or drug busts because someone is growing the wrong kind of nursery. He’d want something dedicated, something no one else could interfere with.”

“I can think of all kinds of things to fit that bill,” Alan says, “but if I were him I’d probably just have it built. Concrete building on private land, add the custom stuff—steel cots and eye rings for the shackles—myself.”

“How would he keep an eye on them when he travels?” I ask.

“Video surveillance is something you can watch over an Internet connection now,” Callie says. “I know because Sam has been installing a number of them at our house. They transmit an image to your computer, and you can access the feed from anywhere in the world as long as you have a connection to the Net.”

“Sam’s a little paranoid, huh?” Alan asks.

“Careful. I think of it as careful.”

“We’re cutting too wide a swath here,” I say. “Even if Alan is right, so what? I’m not sure how we’d go about doing a statewide search for
concrete structures built by individuals and, if we did, what it would net us. We don’t know where he’s located.”

“Geographic profiling might help,” James says. “He’s a commuter, but it can’t hurt.”

Geographic profiling is essentially a mathematical process that attempts to predict the most likely location of a serial offender, and it’s based on the same bedrock as the rest of what we do: Behavior is everything.

One suggestion is that there are basically two types of offenders: the commuter and the marauder. The marauder is a localized offender. He commits his crimes in a geographically stable area. The marauder is the best candidate for geographic profiling.

The commuter is mobile or transient and commits his crimes over large distances. He tends to be a complex hunter who can cross cultural and psychological boundaries. He’s the hardest to pin down with geographic profiling. Son of Sam was a marauder; he was caught because of parking tickets. Bundy was a commuter; he was caught because he wouldn’t stop killing and the evidence and his own decompensation caught up with him.

Geographic profiling is relatively new but has been steadily building its own database of interesting behavior tidbits. When lost, for example, men will go downhill while females will go up. I didn’t believe it when I heard it but am assured it’s true. Another: A right-handed criminal who has to scram in a hurry will run to the right and discard weapons to the left. Geographic profiling is a controversial, complicated, but sometimes useful tool.

“I’m not sure how useful it will be in this case,” I say. “Four victims only, in three different states? Not too many variables to plug in there.”

James shrugs. “We should do it anyway.”

“You have someone in mind?” I ask.

“Dr. Earl Cooper. He’s a little annoying, but he knows his science.”

I stare at the whiteboard. It stares back, mocking me with silence and incompleteness. I wonder about the other Heathers, women stuffed into darkness and kept there until they can no longer see the light. I stand up and grab my purse.

“Let’s go see the man.”

Motion is motion. Stillness is death.

Dana Hollister listens to a loud hum that never goes away. It’s as if someone picked a single note and is singing it with forty mouths. It’s taken over her world, that hum.

Most of the time it runs over her like water, and she is submerged. There is light and there is the hum and there is no thought.

But every now and then, the hum stutters.

These are millisecond flashes. Once, the hum stuttered and she thought a single word:
I
, she thought.

Then the hum returned, drowning out even the idea of the rest. A stutter comes now, longer than the others. She swims up inside herself, from the bottom of a lake filled with syrup.
The man
, she thinks.

The man bending over, a needle in my eye. Something is seen.

The humming is coming, a roar in the distance.

Something is seen that’s important. Something about the man.

I should tell them.

Who is them?

Who am I?

I—

The hum covers her, and she is nothing again.

Earl Cooper, as it turned out, came to see us. He’s standing in our office, something from another time.

He’s wearing a cowboy hat and boots and a flannel shirt and a pair of battered blue jeans. He’s a short man, about five-seven, and he’s broad in the chest but thin in the waist. He’s sixty-two years old and looks every minute of it. He has a craggy face, a huge nose, and, to top it all off, a handlebar mustache that’s been waxed at the ends. It’s a good face, unique, made by its wearer rather than the other way around.

The eyes sparkle with intelligence and have a depth of distance that tells me he’s seen things, done things, gotten dirty in the living of life.

Once you get past all of the exterior apparel, it’s the eyes that reveal the most: This is a vital, intelligent man with a touch of the maverick and a dash of the sad.

“Pleased to meet you,” he says to me, with a bare smile as he shakes my hand. “Heard about your work. Sorry about your family and your face.”

It’s so brief and so genuine that I can take no offense from it. “Thank you, sir.”

Earl Cooper seems like a “sir” to me, the way some older men just
naturally are. He’s an elder, a teacher with experience to be listened to, and it’s draped all around him like a cloak of quiet certainty.

“Young James has a quick tongue, but he’s pretty sharp. That’s why I put up with his back-talking. He came to a forensics symposium I was speaking at.”

“Where are you from, sir?” Alan asks.

“Texas. Place near Dallas. But I come out here three months of the year to consult and lecture. Pays the bills and keeps me occupied.”

“Are you a cowboy, Earl?” Callie teases.

He grins at her, and it lights up his face. “Me? Naw. I’m just an academic who wears cowboy boots. I do some shooting, though.”

“What kind?” I ask, interested.

“Handgun,” he says. “Nine mil is my gun of choice.” He rolls his eyes. “Some of my contemporaries think that’s sacrilegious, but I don’t give a hoot. I looked for a gun I liked and that was the one.”