Before Cain Strikes (13 page)

Why couldn’t there be a more palatable option C?

Meanwhile, Carlyle was entering some keywords from the website into various search engines. So far there weren’t any hits. This was good news. It weighed the argument in favor of fabrication.

But there had to be ways to hide websites from search engines. When she had served on the task force, she had been privy to any number of websites that must have been hidden due to their confidentiality. Even the websites for ordinary companies had information online that they needed to keep internal.

Deputy Carlyle must have been reading her mind. “Just because it’s, um, not showing up in these search engines doesn’t, you know, mean anything one way or the other. All he, or whoever, would need to do is insert some code in the server root and it will be like the website’s invisible.”

“Then no one could find it,” replied Nunez. “Which means this 2,037 number has to be fake.”

Tom’s frown deepened.

“What is it?” Esme asked him.

“Just because no one can find you,” he said, “doesn’t mean you can’t find them.”

“How? How would this kid find all these people who just happened to share his interests?”

Sheriff Shuster stepped in. “Nunez, you know how many fucked-up websites there are? We’ve seen them. These days, whatever your fetish, all it takes is a couple of clicks to find a comrade.”

“And then you go from there,” Esme added. “You sift through enough crime junkies and you eventually find some hard-core fans. There’s a whole floor in the Keeney Building in D.C. dedicated to tracking this kind of crap.”

“CCIPS. Cybercrime squad. See, Nunez. Big Brother is, in fact, watching you.”

“Isn’t that, you know, unconstitutional?”

“In a post-9/11 world, liberty takes a backseat to security. For better or worse.”

“Usually worse,” mumbled Tom.

Esme agreed…mostly. As with most Big Subjects, her feelings on the matter were complicated. But high debate would have to wait, because at that moment her phone rang. The ring tone was Bauhaus’s macabre goth track “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”

“Hello, Karl,” she said.

“Mrs. Stuart, I just wanted to let you know that we have your guy Grover Kirk in custody. If you want to have a chat with him, you’ve got twelve hours. Then I’m releasing him.”

Karl didn’t seem impatient or upset or in any way put out, and that was what raised a red flag. He had done as she’d asked, but he was gunning for her now. And it wasn’t a good idea to have the assistant director in charge of the New York regional office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation gunning for you.

But Grover Kirk shouldn’t have gone after her daughter. It was that simple.

“Tom and I will be there in a little bit, Karl,” she replied. “And round up some folks from CCIPS and tell them to drink their Red Bull, because we’re bringing them a nightmare.”

“H
ello, Grover.”

Esme sat on the table, cross-legged, and stared down this penis-headed exploitation artist. His wrists were chained to a metal chair. His brown cotton slacks were dark along the crotch and the inside of his thighs. The irony was lovely—this man who had intimidated her seven-year-old child had pissed himself. This otherwise antiseptic room now smelled like urine. Once Karl Ziegler, famously germaphobic, found out what Grover had done to one of his interview rooms, he would go apoplectic. Lovelier and lovelier.

“Want a glass of water?” she asked. “You look dehydrated.”

He remained silent.

“Come on, Grover. A person really needs to replenish their fluids.”

She reached out a hand to him and he instinctively flinched. She had him scared. Like Sophie had been scared. Good.

“Tell me, Grover, what did you think would happen? Did you expect that you could just walk up to my daughter
and intimidate her and there wouldn’t be repercussions? Did you think I wouldn’t react?”

His bald head oozed perspiration. It ran in streams down his eyebrows, cheeks, jowls. Soon there would be enough to add another human odor to this room.

“What do you have to say for yourself, Grover? Huh? Now that you’ve seen what happens when you shove someone and they shove you back. Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”

His gaze lifted and matched hers. Then he answered her question in a soft, measured tone.

“Thank you.”

Thank you? What the hell did that mean? Christ, had they already pushed him past his saturation point? Had Grover Kirk already lost his mind?

“What are you thanking me for, Grover? Is it the steel chair you’re bolted to? How about the invasion of your privacy, the way you invaded my family’s privacy? Huh? What are you thanking me for?”

To which his lips curled a bit, almost in a grin.

“For finally meeting with me.”

Her fingernails scratched against the grain of the wooden table. It took all her willpower to keep from smacking the prick in the jaw.

He knew all along she was going to react like this, coming at him aggressively and, more important, personally. He’d planned on it, hoped for it. She’d been played, and had now given him exactly what he needed for his goddamn book: her.

The laptop was handed over to the care of Mineola Wu, a statuesque Amerasian who was one of the DOJ’s top young experts on violent-crime websites. Mineola happened to be at the Javits Center in Manhattan,
attending an exposition on Web 2.0, when she got the call from her superiors to pay a visit to the Federal Building in neighboring TriBeCa. She walked all thirty something blocks, experiencing the sun dipping below the city’s skyscraped skyline. Mineola loved to walk.

“Yeah, this is bad,” she said, after a ten-minute perusal of Timothy’s C: drive. A silver cow dangled at the end of a necklace she wore, and it hopped up and down with her every syllable. She still wore her casual black dress and high heels from the exposition. Or maybe that was just her regular attire.

She had walked all thirtysomething blocks in those high heels.

“So it’s a real website?” asked Tom. He sat in a chair by the empty cubicle she’d been temporarily assigned. Agents passing through this maze of tiny offices had to make an effort to avoid bumping into him. “It’s not just something Timothy Hammond whipped up in his spare time?”

“No, it’s real, and Hammond was one of its members.”

She brought up his cache of saved emails. Many of them were from a Cain42 to a Mothman, both of whom had web addresses linked to the serial killer handbook domain name.

“Mothman,” Tom echoed. As in the legendary monster that haunted Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Timothy “Mothman” Hammond. “So who’s Cain42?”

“That is the million-dollar question.”

She quickly brought up several violent-crime websites on Timothy’s laptop, including an image-heavy shrine to mutilation.

“Most of these have message boards so the denizens can gab among themselves,” explained Agent Wu.
“We’ve been infiltrating them for years now, posing as hobbyists, whatever. Over the years, the nicknames, especially the active contributors, become familiar. Notice anyone you recognize?”

For Tom’s benefit, she scrolled through one of the message boards, which was mainly dedicated to rants against local police, state police, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the DEA, the Secret Service, the U.S. Marshals and the Department of Homeland Security. It didn’t take Tom long to see her point. Some of the lengthier, more scholarly responses belonged to one poster.

“Cain42.”

“So this is what you wanted, Grover?” Esme hopped off the table and eyeballed the winemaker/journalist/dickhead. “To be chained to a chair, sitting in a pool of your own urine?”

“All knowledge comes with a price. You should know that as well as anyone.”

“And why’s that?”

Grover shrugged, or did the best shrugging he could with his wrists fixed to the chair’s arms. “You needed to return to the FBI where you belonged. The price you paid was Galileo.”

“Funny. I seem to recall it was Henry Booth who paid the price with two bullets to his chest.”

“You were there.”

“Yes.”

“And you must have been so happy to see him put down. I’ll bet you even wish you’d been the one to pull the trigger.”

Esme swallowed a breath. “Yes.”

“Which is ironic, considering that of everyone else he encountered, he singled you out for mercy.”

Again there it was—the shadow of a grin on his lips. As if Grover Kirk were so arrogant he didn’t even have to smirk in order to smirk.

“You know what I’m talking about, of course,” he continued. “He had you in his sights in Amarillo and he purposefully let you go. He killed everyone else he ran into, but he let you go. According to my sources, it’s because he knew how good he was—and how bad he was—and he wanted to be stopped. He wanted there to be someone in the world to put an end to his crime spree, because he knew divine intervention was out of the question. So he chose you. And while bodies fell all around you, people you knew, people you’d known for years, you remained alive. He even shot your old boss, Tom Piper.”

Esme didn’t remember crossing toward him, but suddenly she had her hand around his throat. And was squeezing. Still, he stared at her, dispassionately.

What a perfectly circular ending to his book this would make.

She released his throat and stepped away. He was breathing hard now and coughing. She shook the tension of her hands. Damn this son of a bitch. The longer she stayed in here, the more she was playing his game. She had to leave this room.

She left the room.

Karl Ziegler stood there, clattering a breath mint against his teeth. He clicked the sound off on the speakers that allowed outsiders to eavesdrop on the interview room.

“Mrs. Stuart, you know you’re not finished yet,” he told her.

She knew.

She took a moment, exhaled her anxiety and reentered the room.

Karl Ziegler flicked the speakers back on and continued his observation through the one-way glass.

Mineola Wu studied the thumbnail photographs for a full five minutes. One of them in particular, near the bottom of the page, seemed to draw her attention. Finally, Tom couldn’t take it anymore, and asked her what she recognized.

“About six months ago,” she replied, “one of our deep covers received an email inviting him to join an ‘exclusive website.’ The email was sent by Cain42.”

She switched over to the cubicle’s desktop computer. She was soon on to the CCIPS’s own database.

“So you’ve already infiltrated it,” he said. “What I brought you today is old news.”

“The email stipulated that, for security purposes, a background check needed to be performed in order for our cover to be allowed access. If those terms were agreeable, our cover was to email back with his name and his address. No social security number, no driver’s license ID. Just his name and his address. So he provided the name and address that had been fabricated for his cover and waited.”

Mineola punched a key and the dossier of a DOJ operative named Evan Muller appeared on the screen.

“One week later, while having dinner with his wife at their real address, Agent Muller responded to a knock at their front door. She opened the door. We assume this because her body was found by the door in a position that suggested she had opened it. Someone had punched a three-inch hole in her throat and let her bleed to death right there on the floor. Agent Muller’s body was not
found at all. The next morning, his cover finally received a response from Cain42.”

She punched another key, and the email appeared.

Dear Sir:

We regret to inform you that the background check that you authorized raised several red flags with our organization and as a result your application for membership has been denied.

Sincerely,

Cain42

“How did Agent Muller get exposed?”

Mineola shook her head. “We don’t know. But he wasn’t our only active infiltration. Several weeks later, another one of our covers received the exact same invitation to join. She accepted. You see, we’d heard enough chatter about your serial killer website to know that it was real and that we needed someone on the inside, and if this was how people got in, so be it. While we waited for Cain42 to conduct his background check, we had our operative hide out in a safe house under protective duty. Her name was Heidi Osborne. The DOJ recruited the both of us out of MIT. I knew her. Anyway, a week passed. No response. Another week. So Heidi sent him an email, asking about the status of her application. The very next day, cockroaches began to appear in the safe house, coming out of the vents. Thousands and thousands of cockroaches.”

“Someone had dumped a vat of roaches into the air ducts?”

“Apparently,” she replied. “Well, they had to move. They didn’t have a choice. The security detail booked a room at a nearby motel and they transferred Heidi there and…we don’t know what happened next. We do know that the two gentlemen on her security detail were both found dead, shot at point-blank range by a .38 pistol.”

Mineola clicked on the thumbnail that had so captured her attention. It displayed a bone-thin woman in her mid twenties, dangling from a noose made of barbed wire. Most of her white tank top was soaked in her own blood.

“That’s Heidi Osborne. And I’ll bet on another one of these pages of photographs, one of the ones we can’t access offline, we’ll find a picture of Agent Evan Muller.”

Tom shook his head, disgusted.

“By the way,” she added, “Agent Muller was living in Maryland at the time of his disappearance. Heidi was being secluded in a safe house in Oregon.”

“He somehow traced her email and was able to get to her with an army of cockroaches the next day?”

“Our theory, Special Agent Piper, is that Cain42 didn’t do it at all.”

Tom frowned, and then he realized her implication. “He’s got a pool of over two thousand psychopaths to draw from.”

Esme leaned against the antiseptic wall of the interview room, crossed her arms and waited for Grover to open his mouth. But he just stared back at her. His whole point in all this, after all, was to get
her
to open up.

Maybe it was time to give him what he wanted.

“You’re right. Henry Booth murdered many people, and I knew some of them. Some of them were friends
of mine. And I miss them. But what you want to know is if I have survivor’s guilt.”

“Do you?”

Esme pushed herself off the wall and closer to the bald pseudo-journalist. She could see the hunger in his eyes.

“Yes, Grover, I do. But not in the way that you think. You see, I know that even though Henry Booth is dead, there’s still a target on me, and maybe on my family. It’s faded a bit, with time, but it’s still there. And people like you are attracted to it. You think you can piggyback off it. You came at us with, what, with a pen? Someone else might come at me or my family with a knife. To take down the woman who took down Galileo.”

She watched that hunger fade a bit, replaced by something else, something more vaguely human.

She persisted. “The FBI—you may not know this—the FBI recommended after Henry Booth’s death that we go into protective custody. They knew that the infamy surrounding the case would attract crazies and they were concerned for our well-being. They wanted us to move, change our identities and start a new life. My husband considered it. We do, as you know, have the welfare of a daughter to consider. In the end, he decided it was a good idea. He was willing to sacrifice his tenure and his friendships for the safety of his family. But I wouldn’t do it. I said no. I wouldn’t be intimidated by some looming
what if
. I wouldn’t let my family become the last casualties of Henry Booth’s terrorism. I said no. And it’s driven a rift between myself and my husband that probably can’t ever be repaired. So you want to know, for your book, if I have survivor’s guilt? Yes, I do. Every day. But not in the way that you think.”

She sat down on the table and leaned forward, inches
from his face. He tried to flinch away, but she just angled her head to catch his gaze.

“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you, Grover? You may be a hack of outrageous fucking proportions, but you’ve interviewed a lot of people for your book, haven’t you? And not just witnesses and family members. You’ve interviewed people who view Henry Booth as some kind of a folk hero, am I right?”

“Yes,” he replied, quietly, abashedly.

“How did you find them? Or did they hear about your project and come to you, to make sure you told the ‘whole story’?”

Grover, visibly uncomfortable, tried to shift in his seat. It was futile. “A little bit of both.”

“Online mostly?”

“Yes.”

“You started posting on some message boards and newsgroups, telling people about your project, asking for their points of view, and you got them.”

“Yes.”

“Charismatic guy like yourself, I’ll bet you have a pretty high profile right now in this community. Lots of fans of your own, championing your tell-all about their latest idol. After all is said and done and your book comes out, and maybe you say a few negative things about Henry Booth, did you ever stop to think that you’re going to have a target on your head, too? That these new friends of yours are going to come after
you?
”