Last Breath (5 page)

Rawls had suggested the chamber pot option to Brand on several previous occasions, and it never failed to rouse him from his chair. There was something in Tomlinson’s dogged determination to continue entering code string after code string, for days on end, that came a little too close to the reality of the agents’ own lives.

“Whassup, bro?” Brand asked, leaning over Rawls’s shoulder. Adopting an urban black patois was one of Brand’s quirks, which he exercised even though he was not black and had been brought up as far from the mean streets as possible, in the very affluent, very white enclave of Stamford, Connecticut.

Rawls, on the other hand, was black, and moreover was a product of the urban hell of East St. Louis, rescued from a hopeless future by the nuns at the local parochial school, who had taught him self-discipline, the only lesson that really mattered. They had also taught him grammar. Rawls would never say
whassup
. Such an undignified expression was beneath him.

“This is what’s up,” Rawls said. He tapped his monitor, which displayed a dialogue box requesting authentication information—user name and password. The user name Rawls had typed was
Bluebeard
. The password line was blank.

“Bluebeard?” Brand asked.

“I’m pretty sure that’s the user ID, but I don’t have the password.”

“You lost me, buddy. Where’d the name Bluebeard come from?”

Rawls pulled a sheet of paper out of his printer and showed it to Brand. “This arrived in my Inbox a few minutes ago.”

The printout was the text of an e-mail message.

Agent Rawlz,

Something phunny going on. Do you like to watch? Say you’re Bluebeard. You have to phind the key.

A Web site’s URL had been listed below—a “www” prefix followed by several crude slang terms for the female genitalia, and ending in “.net.”

“Huh.” Brand’s grunt, as always, signified new interest on his part. “Wish these hackers would learn how to spell.”

This was a joke. Hackers had their own rules of spelling. F became ph. The plural s became z. The rules were elastic and meaningless, rebellion for its own sake.

Of course, a great many of the hackers really
couldn’t
spell.

Anyway, it wasn’t the spelling that had caught Brand’s interest. Both he and Rawls had read hundreds of e-mailed tips. Hackers were not known for their loyalty to others who practiced their art. They frequently turned in rivals merely to settle a grudge. But when they sent these tips to the Baltimore field office, they used the general e-mail address listed on the office’s Web site. They never sent e-mail directly to Agent Rawls or Agent Brand, for the simple reason that neither agent’s personal e-mail address was public knowledge.

“This came right to you,” Brand said, looking at the routing information on the printout.

“Yup.”

“And it’s anonymous, of course.”

Rawls nodded. “Sent via a remailer. No log trail.”

“Somebody went to a fair amount of trouble to get this to you without being traced. But they didn’t give you the password.”

“Guess they want me to show a little ingenuity.”

“Could just be a prank.”

“Yeah. But there’s something about it I don’t like. That name Bluebeard—it’s got me worried. You know the story?”

“Vaguely. French guy, kills his wives. Right?”

“Right. I’m assuming the password has to be connected with the story somehow. Otherwise the tipster wouldn’t have expected me to figure it out.”

“We need more information.”

“Way ahead of you.” Rawls opened a new browser window and entered the address of an online encyclopedia, then searched for
Bluebeard
and found the article.

The story of Bluebeard,
Le Barbe Bleu
, was first published by a compiler of French folk tales named Charles Perrault. In Perrault’s telling, Bluebeard was a handsome lord whose six wives had died of a variety of common diseases—or so Bluebeard claimed. But when his seventh wife opened a locked room in the castle, she stumbled on the six corpses of the women, victims of Bluebeard’s psychopathy. He had strangled them, so the story went, “with his own hands.” The seventh wife was saved from the same fate by the providential appearance of rescuers.

Brand, reading over his partner’s shoulder, grunted again. “The message says you’ll have to find the key. As in the key to a lock.”

Rawls nodded. “And in the story, who opens the locked room? The seventh wife.”

He entered various passwords that came to mind—
wife7
,
wife#7
,
wifeseven
,
7thwife
, and others. All were rejected.

“No good,” he said. “Unless it’s her name.”

“Which is?”

Rawls scanned the encyclopedia article again. “Not mentioned here.” He guided the browser to a search engine and entered the terms
Bluebeard
and
wife
. The search results took him to an online glossary of folklore, where he found the relevant listing.

“Fatima,” he said.

He returned to the original window and typed
Fatima
into the password space. When he hit the Enter key, the screen reported authorization accepted.

“Bingo.” That was Brand. He was always saying things like that, just like a TV cop.

The home page of the mystery site appeared. It consisted solely of text links against a white background, as plain-vanilla as any site could be. Rawls scanned the rows of print. “Chat room ... bulletin boards ... vidcaps ... Here we go.” Rawls guided his mouse pointer to a hypertext link that read.
Do you like to watch?
The words from the e-mail message.

He clicked the link, and a new page came up, empty except for the small, blurred image of a bedroom. There were no windows in view, only a pair of abstract paintings on the walls. An unmade bed, flanked by twin nightstands, took up one corner of the room. A doorway framed a bathroom with a stall shower.

The room was unoccupied, and only the flicker of sunlight on the walls from an unseen window indicated that the image was a moving picture and not a still. Bright sunlight, Rawls noted, yet at 4:30 it was already nearly dark on the East Coast.

“Webcam in a bedroom,” Brand said, “oriented with a view of the bed and the shower.”

“Probably a woman’s bedroom.” Rawls tapped the screen. “That bedspread has a floral pattern. Not the kind of thing most men would own.”

“So she’s a nice girl who just happens to enjoy sharing her bedroom activities with online voyeurs. Kinky but not criminal. Lots of weirdos put their private lives on the Web for bored lookie-loos to watch. There are a thousand sites like that.”

“If this
is
a site like that.”

“You think it’s a little more serious? Maybe somebody’s spying on this lady?”

Rawls nodded. “Like that creep who was running pee-cam sites in Virginia.” He and Brand hadn’t handled the case personally, but they’d heard about it—a perv who’d installed hidden cameras in ladies’ toilets and uploaded the resulting footage to the Web.

“It’s possible,” Brand conceded. “But there’s an equal chance that she set it up herself. She gets off on people watching her.”

“Then why keep the site password-protected?”

“She might want to perform in front of a select audience. Or it could be a subscription-based service. Or maybe she and her boyfriend set this up so they can have a little cyber-nookie. They don’t want strangers looking in.”

“Could be.”

“But you don’t think so,” Brand commented.

“No. I don’t.”

“Any particular reason?”

“Just one. That name—Bluebeard.”

Brand had no answer to that.

At 3:30 P.M., in the women’s locker room at Newton Station, C.J. changed out of her uniform. She stowed her boots, belt, gun, PR24 side-handle baton, and other accessories inside the locker, then donned civilian clothes—Nikes and a blue jumpsuit, along with a handbag that concealed her off-duty weapon, a J-frame Smith & Wesson .38.

She clanged shut the door of her locker, then leaned against the cold metal, her eyes closed. Again she saw it—the gun in her face, Ramon Sanchez’s angry glare.

She hadn’t told Walt Brasco or any other cop about that part of her adventure. The way she’d related the story, she had disarmed Sanchez without incident. Sanchez, of course, would say nothing to contradict her version of events. Pointing a gun at a police officer was a felony charge he could live without.

Her reason for hiding the truth was simple enough. She didn’t want to be pushed into therapy for posttraumatic stress. Let a shrink get hold of a thing like that, and she would be on a couch for six months spilling her guts about every little thing ... and eventually about things that were not so little.

Things like the boogeyman.

No one in the department knew about that. And no one would ever know.

Every cop had a private reason for wearing the uniform, she supposed. Hers was probably no weirder than anyone else’s. Even so, she didn’t intend to share it. Sharing would be too much like reliving the experience—not that she didn’t relive it anyway, in bad dreams and memory flashes and every close call on the street.

She detoured into the bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. A shower would have been better, but she preferred to shower at home.

Drying her face with a paper towel, she looked at herself in the mirror. She wondered if anybody could see how scared she was. Not just today, but all the time. It was a fear that never left her, a fear that had dared her into defying it. She had challenged that fear by enrolling in the LAPD Academy, by earning a badge, by riding patrol in one of the city’s roughest divisions.

People said that confronting your fears was the way to banish them. People were wrong.

She had been facing death and danger for the past three years, first as a rookie with a training officer, and now as a full-fledged patrolwoman with the rank of Police Officer 2 ... and still the fear hadn’t left her. She doubted that it ever would.

Was it fear that had goaded her into entering the Sanchez residence this afternoon? Was she still trying to prove something to herself, and if so, how long would she continue? Until she ended up getting killed?

She studied her reflection. Green eyes, pale skin, and a bob of chestnut hair that could be tucked neatly under her cap when she was on duty, or unclipped to fall loosely to her shoulders when she felt free to relax. A woman’s face, not a child’s. So why did she feel like a child so much of the time? She was twenty-six years old. She had been working patrol since she was twenty-three. She had seen more, faced more, than most men or women twice her age. But she hadn’t seen enough, apparently.

“Well, screw it,” she said aloud.

This was a mood. It would pass.

She headed out through the station, swinging her handbag over her shoulder. The place was busy in mid-afternoon, but not as busy as it would be after dark. Phones rang, voices shouted, and a news update droned on the TV in the patrol squad room.

She navigated the maze of hallways, past bulletin boards cluttered with departmental memos and the divisional softball team’s scores. Some of the night-watch cops said hi, others said nothing. But they all looked at her, following her with their gaze.

She was used to it. They never stopped watching, just as they never stopped with the ribbing and the moronic jokes and that stupid nickname that had dogged her everywhere since her second month on the job. Sometimes they smiled at her and sometimes they didn’t, but always they watched.

Their eyes studied her from every angle, memorizing the clean lines of her body, the suntanned curve of her neck, the dusting of freckles on her sinewy forearms. They watched her as she clipped back her long chestnut hair to hide it under her cap, as she twisted in the seat of her patrol car to grab the daily log, as she jogged up to the first officer at the scene to get a recap of what she’d missed.

She was crossing the squad room, wondering if she ought to get a cup of coffee before heading out, when she noticed a blondish man in the uniform of a Sheriff’s deputy standing by the coffee machine, filling a foam cup.

What was
he
doing here?

He saw her too. “Hey, Killer,” he called, drawing a laugh from some of the night-watch guys who had come on duty at 2:15. “Waste anybody today?”

“That’s funny, Tanner.” She detoured across the room to face him, for no reason other than to prove she wasn’t running from a fight. “Why’re you crashing our turf?”

He held up his hands in mock surrender. As always, he was wearing shades. The thought crossed her mind that she had never seen him without sunglasses. He probably wore them at night.

“Hey,” he said in a quieter voice, “chill, okay? We’re all on the same team, Killer.”

“I don’t want you on my team, and stop calling me that.”

“It’s what everybody calls you.”

“Doesn’t mean I have to like it. You never answered my question.”

“Why am I here? Well, it’s real simple. First call on my watch, we get involved in a hot pursuit in Vernon. Suspect crosses Central.” Central Avenue divided the Newton Area division from Vernon, which was patrolled by the Sheriff’s Department. “One of your squads joins up with us, and we corral the jerk a few blocks from here. I came in to expedite the booking, fill in a few details on the report. See, Sheriff’s does all the work, and LAPD gets all the glory.”

“And all the paperwork. What’d you book him on?”

“Grand theft auto.”

“Nice car?”

Tanner shrugged disdainfully. “Minivan. Why the hell would somebody steal a set of wheels like that?”

“Maybe he’s a family man.” She started to move off. He stopped her with a question.

“How about you, C.J.? What’ve you been up to?”

“Nothing special,” she said, not meeting the gaze behind the dark glasses.

“You look a little frazzled.”

“Long day.”

“Nights are longer in this part of town. Me, I’m working the late shift these days—and loving every minute of it.”