Last Breath (12 page)

Then the ride to a condemned house in Silver Lake, a musty old place shrouded by trees, offering a fine basement, where he could hold her for the requisite four hours.

At the appointed time would come the strangulation, slow and sensual like lovemaking, and then the tattoo and his calling card, and the disposal of the body in a place where it was unlikely to be found for weeks.

Pulling onto the Pomona Freeway, speeding west, Treat breathed the heady wine of his intentions and found them sweet.

It was the last night of the month, the last night of Caitlin Jean Osborn’s life.

Steven Gader’s house lay on a tree-shaded street a few blocks from the University of Baltimore. Rawls guided his bureau-issue sedan to a stop at the curb.

“This is it,” Brand said unnecessarily from the passenger seat.

They got out of the car, stepping over piles of slush, and walked up the slate path. Snow lay half-melted on a brown lawn. Lamplight glowed through windows protected by iron security bars. Rawls wondered fleetingly if the bars were hinged from the inside to allow escape in case of fire.

At the front door Rawls listened. He heard no sounds from inside. He rang the bell, holding his finger on the button for a long time. When there was no response, he rang again.

“Not home,” Brand said, clapping his gloved hands against the cold.

Rawls tried once more, and this time he heard a clatter of footsteps and a muffled male voice saying, “Hold on. Christ, I’m coming.”

Rawls saw Brand unbutton his overcoat for easier access to his Glock 10.

The door opened, and a man stood there in a terry-cloth bathrobe, his hair uncombed and dripping wet. He was short and pale, mid to late thirties, with a glaze of stubble on his cheeks and an earring in his left earlobe. He gazed at them with dark, suspicious eyes.

“What’s this?” he snapped. “Jehovah’s Witnesses?”

“No, Mr. Gader,” Rawls said politely. “FBI. Agents Rawls and Brand.” He allowed the man a glimpse of his FBI badge.

There were two things to watch now—his eyes and his hands. The eyes might betray guilt. The hands might pose a threat.

“FBI?” the man echoed. “Well ... what do you want with me?”

“You are Mr. Steven Gader, correct?”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“We’d like to speak with you, sir.”

Gader realized he was being asked to invite the agents inside. “Can I have another look at that badge?”

Rawls held out the badge and allowed him time to scrutinize it thoroughly.

“I don’t have to let you in,” Gader said finally. “I don’t have to talk to you at all.”

“That’s true, sir,” Rawls acknowledged, the words coming out in a jet of frosted breath.

“I could say you have to talk to my lawyer. I’d be within my rights if I did that.”

“Yes, you would. But we have only a few simple questions. Talking to us could help us out a lot.”

“Help you out. Why should I help a couple of feds?” Gader ran a hand through his wet hair. “You got me out of the damn bathtub, you know.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sure you are.” His gaze flicked to Brand’s face. “What are you smiling at? So I was taking a bath. It doesn’t make me some kind of faggot. My radiator’s pumping out too much heat, and I can’t fix the damn thermostat, so I figured I would cool off in the tub. Okay?”

Rawls let him ramble, then said quietly, “It’s just a few questions. We’d like to clear things up tonight.”

“Shit.” Gader wavered in the doorway. “All right, I’m gonna catch goddamn pneumonia with the door open, so come the hell in. But I reserve the right to call a lawyer and order you out of my home at any time.”

“Fair enough.”

Gader led them into his living room, a small space with a low ceiling and dirty windows and a sooty fireplace that looked long unused. The carpet was worn, and there were soil marks on the sofa and armchairs. Gader hadn’t lied about the thermostat. The place felt like an oven.

Gader plopped down in a chair and gestured to the sofa, where Rawls and Brand planted themselves, Brand positioning his body to have a view of the stairway in case there was anyone else in the house.

“So what’s this all about?” Gader asked combatively.

“Can I ask what’s your line of work?” Rawls began as he pulled off his gloves.

“I design Web sites.”

“Well, that’s what we’re here to ask you about.”

“Go ahead, ask. I’ve created sites for lots of local businesses, mostly mom-and-pop operations that want to go online, expand their market. I can give you my brochure—”

“We’re more interested in a noncommercial site.” Rawls recited the URL, pronouncing the string of slang terms with distaste. “What can you tell us about that one?”

Gader showed no expression, but Rawls could see his tongue moving around in the hollow of his cheek as he thought of a way to answer.

“You do maintain that site, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Gader said slowly.

“A password-protected site. The password being Fatima, as in Bluebeard’s seventh wife.”

“How do you know that?”

Rawls smiled. “The password or the story?”

“The password.”

“We guessed.”

“You guessed.” Gader looked from Rawls to Brand. “How about the name Bluebeard? You guess that too?”

“We got hold of it. Is Bluebeard one of your customers?”

“I don’t have customers. It’s a noncommercial site. You said so yourself.”

“All right. One of your visitors then?”

“You could say that.”

“Bluebeard—that’s an odd name, isn’t it? How do you suppose it was chosen?”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“Ask Bluebeard? So who is he?”

“Beats me. I don’t know.”

Rawls let a beat of silence pass. Then he said, “You’re Bluebeard, aren’t you, Mr. Gader?”

“Me?” Gader laughed. “Shit, no.”

His reaction seemed genuine. Even so, Rawls pursued the idea. “The password for the site is Fatima. You run the site. You selected the password. Isn’t it logical to assume that you’re Bluebeard?”

“No.”

“Where did I go wrong, Mr. Gader? Are you claiming you don’t run the site after all? Because if I had to guess, I would say that you run it off a personal computer, probably right here in this house.”

“Are you going to search the house? Is that it? Because you can’t search without a warrant. You can’t do shit without a warrant.”

“The man knows his rights,” Brand said mildly. It was the first time he had spoken.

“I sure as hell do. And I don’t appreciate two feds barging in here and, you know—”

“Getting you out of your bubble bath?” Brand smiled.

“It wasn’t a
bubble
bath, and it’s none of your goddamn business anyway. Get out of here.”

“Mr. Gader,” Rawls said, “you can make us leave, but we’ll only come back with a warrant—the item you’re so concerned about.” He leaned forward, speaking slowly and reasonably, the way he used to speak to his son Philip when he was a toddler. Philip was a senior at U. Penn now. “Of course, you might think that if we go away for an hour or two, you’ll have time to wipe the contents of your computer. Then you’ll be home free, you might believe. But you’d be wrong. We’ve already downloaded your site onto a Zip disk. We have all the evidence we need. Besides, we can recover almost any data from a drive, no matter what you do to it. Any attempt at erasure would only make things worse for you in the long run.”

“Bullshit.”

“You don’t think we know how to preserve and recover evidence?”

“I don’t think you’ve got anything a judge would call evidence.”

“We have a Web site that displays streaming video of a young woman in her home.”

“So?”

“It looks like a serious privacy-rights violation.”

“Not if, say, she’s my girlfriend. In that case, well, she gets a kick out of letting me see her naked. The site’s password-protected because we want visitors on an invitation-only basis. It’s kinky, sure, but she’s over the age of consent, and we get a kick out of it, so leave me alone.”

“How about Miss December and Miss November? They your girlfriends too?”

“Maybe.”

“Can you produce any of these women to back up your claims?”

Gader squirmed in his chair. “Let’s say I can. But I won’t. Not without a court order or whatever it takes.”

“Then we’ll get a court order—or whatever it takes.”

“No, you won’t. No way. A judge won’t listen to you with what you’ve got now. What you need is my cooperation, and I’m not offering it. So get lost.”

“What makes you think we would be deterred by your lack of cooperation, Mr. Gader?”

“Because this whole thing is too small-time and too much hassle.” Gader seemed to gain confidence from his own words. “You’ve got too many other things to run down, higher priorities. You don’t have time to screw around with this piece-of-shit case. Even if you want to, your higher-ups won’t let you. They don’t give a damn about some private Web site that might or might not be doing something skuzzy. They won’t give you the go-ahead to waste the Bureau’s resources.”

He seemed cooler now. He had convinced himself.

Rawls glanced at Brand, who wore a tight, fixed expression on his face. Rawls knew that look. It meant
He’s got us, Noah.

“So that’s how it is, Mr. Gader?” Rawls asked evenly.

“Yeah, that’s how it is.”

“Well, you’re right.” Rawls surprised both Brand and Gader by saying this. “Our superiors won’t let us pursue this case on the clock. They want us handling other, higher priority cases, just as you said.”

“Great. I’m right. I win. You lose. Get lost.”

“It’s not quite that simple.”

“Why not?”

“Because, Mr. Gader, we don’t require any go-ahead from our supervisor if we choose to work this case on our own time. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re not on the clock, are we, Agent Brand?”

“Wish we were,” Brand said cheerfully.

“We’re here, even though we’re not getting paid. And we’ll pursue this matter, whether or not our colleagues want us to do so. Isn’t that right, Agent Brand?”

“Damn straight.” Brand might or might not have believed this, but he was playing along.

“We’ll pursue it as long as it takes. We’re not going to drop this investigation. Not now, not tomorrow, not a week from now, not ever.”

“We’ve signed on for the duration,” Brand volunteered, getting into the flow. “We’ll miss a lot of meals if we have to. But we’re gonna get to the bottom of this mess.”

Gader looked from one to the other. “You’re shittin’ me,” he said.

Rawls steepled his hands in his lap. “Mr. Gader, let me tell you a story. I have a daughter at Georgetown right now.”

“I don’t have to hear this—”

“Just listen,” Rawls said patiently. “Last year, when my daughter was a freshman, she found out that somebody had installed a camcorder in the dormitory bathroom. The camera was shooting eight-millimeter videotape of the women as they showered. This seems to have been going on for some time—weeks, months. And it would still be going on if my daughter hadn’t dropped her shampoo bottle and seen the camera inside a watertight bag under the drain grate. See, it was pointed up, Mr. Gader. You know the kind of footage it was taking.

“She called me, quite hysterical. I went up there on my day off, and I interviewed the men in the dorm—it’s a coed dormitory hall. I talked to them one at a time. Nobody confessed, but one young gentleman seemed nervous. I staked out his room. After midnight he threw something away. I dug it out of the trash. A bagful of videotapes. He’d gotten rattled, and he was disposing of the evidence. That fine young man isn’t a student at Georgetown anymore. Do you see the point of this story?”

Gader was trying hard not to look flustered. “I think so.”

“I’m a persistent man,” Rawls said. “Especially when it comes to privacy violations of this particular kind. When I look at that woman undressing and taking a shower on your Web site for the benefit of masturbating voyeurs, it strikes home to me in a rather personal way. It makes me think of my daughter. Now do you honestly believe I’m going to let this case go?”

“Maybe not.”

“Definitely not. So don’t play games. Don’t use delaying tactics. Don’t be clever. Just tell us what we need to know.”

Gader seemed very small inside his bathrobe. His chin was down, his eyes half-closed, his hands gripping the armrests, fingertips squeezed white with pressure. Down the street a dog started to bark. It was the only sound for a while.

“I’ll cooperate,” Gader said finally. “No problem.”

Rawls smiled. “That’s what we like to hear. Is the computer here in the house?”

“Yeah.” Gader rose, tightening the belt of his robe. “It’s upstairs.”

He led them to the second floor. Climbing the staircase, Brand hung back a few steps with Rawls.

“Great story,” Brand whispered.

“Thanks.”

“Funny thing, though. I’ve met your family. And you haven’t got a daughter.”

Rawls smiled. “Well, let’s keep that between ourselves.”

C.J. was putting her dinner dishes in the sink when something drew her gaze to the kitchen window. She looked past her pale reflection in the glass, studying the darkness of her backyard.

Amid the shadows of the jacaranda trees, she saw a light.

For a moment she just stood there, transfixed by an emotion too deeply rooted to be immediately identified. Then she understood that what she felt was fear—not an adult’s fear, but the stark, uncomplicated terror of a child.

It was him. The boogeyman.

She remembered how she had glimpsed his flashlight in the darkness outside her parents’ house, and now he was back.

The light wavered, drifting like a will-o’-the-wisp, then winked out, and she returned to herself.

This was no monster from her childhood. It was a prowler, hardly unheard of in this neighborhood or in any part of this city. And she wasn’t some terrorized schoolgirl, she was a cop. She could take care of herself. She could—

A noise.

Very soft, almost inaudible. Halfway between a creak and a squeal.