The People vs. Alex Cross (11 page)

“I was on my way here and wanted you to see it first. I … I don’t think the FBI can get to the bottom of this without you. Can you make a copy and give the original to them for me? I have to catch a plane to New York right after I leave here. On top of everything else, my mother’s in the hospital.”

Reluctantly, but curious to see what was on the drive, I nodded. With latex gloves on, I took out the drive and plugged it into my laptop. The screen flashed brightly before a video came up that I found sickeningly familiar.

A blond girl in a white nightgown ran through a dim, leafless forest with the camera operator in full pursuit. It was dusk, and when he caught her and knocked her down, you could not make out the girl’s features for the graininess.

“Please don’t,” she begged when the gloved cameraman pulled her up to her knees by her hair.

“No?” the computer-altered voice said. “Then you want it to be the last time? No more cat-and-mouse? No more fun?”

“I just want this to be over,” she whimpered, a vague shadow now in the gathering darkness on my screen.

“Okay, then,” the voice said. “You’ll get your wish.”

I saw a dark slashing motion across her neck. I heard a slick, slicing sound and a disturbing
pah
noise before the screen froze and that icon of the lock appeared above a link that read www.Itsoverblondie.org.co. “Tell me if it’s a fake or not,” Lindel said, crying again. “That’s all I want you to do. Stop this torture before it drives my wife and me mad.”

I didn’t have a private investigator’s license. I was suspended pending trial. I should have expressed my sympathy and turned him down flat.

But I was a father too, and I could see the turmoil the kidnapping and now this possible snuff film were churning up in him.

“You’re sure that’s Gretchen?” I asked.

“I’d know her voice anywhere,” he said, looking at me like I was his last best chance.

“I’ll do what I can,” I said.

His fists clenched, Lindel smiled through his tears and said, “Bless you, Dr. Cross. From the bottom of my heart, bless you.”

FBI AGENT HENNA
Batra crossed her arms and stared furiously at me from behind the main security station at Quantico.

When I cleared security, I said, “I’m sorry, but you weren’t picking up your phone, and I needed to talk to you.”

Agent Batra didn’t answer, just pivoted on her black high-heeled pumps and marched down the hallway. I hurried to keep up. When I was abreast of her, she hissed, “Coming here like this? Are you trying to get me fired, Cross?”

“I said it was critical. And I’m obviously not on a watch list. Sidney let me right through the front gate.”

“Sidney’s known you eighteen years.”

“Well, exactly. We’re on the same team.”

“You don’t get it, Cross. You’re being tried for murder in DC. That puts your case within the Bureau’s purview.”

“Believe me, I get it. But what if analyzing this video can save Gretchen Lindel’s life? Or at least put her parents’ fears to rest?”

She squinted at me. “I’m confused. Why didn’t Lindel give this drive to the agents investigating his daughter’s disappearance?”

“He was in rough shape, hadn’t slept in days when I saw him, and he was on his way to New York. His mother’s been hospitalized.”

Batra walked a few more steps without comment and then stopped. She bit her lip, looked at the ceiling for a moment.

“Video analysis isn’t exactly my thing,” she said at last. “For that we have to go to the basement. And Dr. Cross?”

“Agent Batra?”

She studied me with cold eyes and said, “Before we go downstairs, you need to swear, in writing and in the presence of two witnesses, that you’ll never tell a soul what you see down there.”

Ten minutes later, I got in a secure elevator outside the cybercrimes unit feeling like I’d just signed a little bit of my life away. Agent Batra stepped in beside me, put a digital keycard in the lock, and hit sb2.

“That made me feel quite the criminal,” I said as the doors closed.

“Close enough these days,” Batra said.

“Want to clue me in to the reason for all the secrecy?”

“You’re a bright guy, you’ll figure it out,” Batra said as the elevator passed the first subbasement and began to slow.

I noticed a throbbing and thumping sound that got louder and more distinct when we reached the second subbasement. The elevator doors opened and we were blasted with electronic techno-pop music. It was loud. It was pulsating. It oddly made me want to dance.

The music obviously had the same effect on the guy with
the flaming-red Mohawk twerking and gyrating inside the glass-walled lab directly in front of us. He wore denim shorts, a denim vest over a sleeveless black tee, and nothing else. Barefoot, and in time with the beat, he was shaking his booty, pumping both fists, and slashing the air with his Mohawk.

I broke into a smile. Batra didn’t.

She exited the elevator and crossed the hall to the lab door. I followed her, saying, “Okay, who the hell is that?”

“Keith Karl Rawlins,” she said, sounding pained. “He calls himself KK or Krazy Kat, depending on the occasion.”

SPECIAL AGENT BATRA
stopped at the lab door and looked back at me in real discomfort.

I said, “He works for the Bureau? That’s why the no-disclosure?”

Batra glared at me. “Rawlins is as brilliant as they come if you want to analyze anything digital. Far better than me, as a matter of fact.”

That surprised me. I’d always thought Batra was one with the Internet. Then I realized the reason for Rawlins’s banishment to subbasement two.

“He doesn’t fit the conservative J. Edgar G-man image, does he?”

“No,” Batra said, twisting the doorknob. “KK definitely does not.”

The music was even louder inside the lab. Past benches clogged with electronic test equipment, on the far side of the room, Rawlins danced before an arced array of eight large
computer screens. The screens all showed the same video: people dancing in urban streets, shaking their rear ends to the addictive beat of the music.

Batra got around in front of Rawlins and waved wildly at him.

Rawlins made his hands into pretend guns that he pointed at Batra, and then he punched a key on a control board that looked like it belonged in a recording studio. The lab went quiet. Rawlins stopped dancing.

He waved his fingers playfully at Batra and in a soft voice that reeked of New Orleans, he said, “I’ll forgive you this time for interrupting my daily Diplo fix. I was just about done regenerating my brain cells anyway.”

“My son told me about that,” I said before Batra could reply. “Exercising for brain regeneration.”

Rawlins saw me, studied me, and then smiled. He picked up a hand towel from the chair and came over to us, still smiling and patting his sweating skull on either side of the Mohawk. He had a gold hoop through his left nostril, and his earlobes featured stretched piercings. In shiny sequins across the chest of his T-shirt were the words
GODDESS DANCES
.

“You’re bigger in person, I must say,” Rawlins said coyly. “And your son must have read the same article. What are the odds of that, Dr. Cross?”

“I don’t know.”

“I do,” Rawlins said. “Two in one-point-six-four billion, unless you look at it from a string-theory perspective, in which case the chance of brain waves vibrating out and crossing others rises exponentially with every person who reads that article.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

“That’s a pity,” Rawlins said with a pout. “I so enjoy fiery brains and rippling brawn in a single package.”

I CHUCKLED.
“
YOU’RE
out of luck on both counts, Special Agent Rawlins, which is why I came to see you.”

Rawlins glanced at Batra and laughed. “No
special
this or
agent
that, Dr. Cross. It’s just KK or Krazy Kat. I’m a contractor. The Federal Bureau of Investigation could never make me a sworn agent. Am I right, Big Baby B.?”

Batra rolled her eyes, said, “We’re here to work, Kat, not wallow.”

“I think I’d be quite a badass crime fighter.” Rawlins sniffed. “Despite appearances, I’m honest to a fault and expect the same from those with whom I work. Tell me, Dr. Cross, did you murder those Soneji followers for sport?”

“No.”

“Or to right some wrong?”

“It was self-defense.”

He studied me for tics and tells but saw none. “How can I help you?”

“First, a little context.”

I gave him a synopsis of the story the cyberpimp Neal Parks had told Sampson and me. Parks claimed he had been in Newport News, Virginia, several weeks before, scoping out the military town for an expansion of his business. Partying in a strip club there, the pimp met two men in their early thirties who went by Billy Ray and Carver.

The three men hit it off and drank and snorted too much late into the night. Billy Ray, who was more a talker than Carver, told Neal Parks they were trolling for blondes to use in movies they produced for several profitable sites on the dark web. One of the most recent, and most successful, Billy Ray said, featured two young blond lesbians from Pennsylvania. He gave Parks the URL of one of the websites: www.Itsoverblondie.org.co. I dug in my pocket and came up with the Ziploc containing the Toshiba flash drive. “The same URL is featured on the video on this drive. I want to know if the video’s real or not.”

Rawlins became all business at that point. He took the bag and asked where I’d gotten the drive, and I told him about Gretchen Lindel’s father.

“He should have brought this directly to the agents on his daughter’s case,” Rawlins said, moving toward one of his workbenches.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“You’ve watched what’s on the drive?”

“If it’s real, it’s the first actual snuff film I’ve ever seen.”

“You just want to know if it’s fake?”

“He wants to know everything and anything,” Batra said. “So do I.”

Rawlins said, “You make a copy?”

“On my laptop at home,” I said.

“No crashes?”

“Worked fine.”

“I’ll check it anyway,” he said, sitting down at a computer. He donned latex gloves, got out the drive, and inserted it into a USB port.

A few moments later, I watched a scanning icon count down the minute and forty-five seconds it took to do a full inspection of the flash drive. At the end of the scan, a message appeared:
No known anomaly detected.

“Well, all righty, then,” Rawlins said.

He disconnected the flash, took it to the larger control board below the eight big screens, and plugged it into a server linked to the internal FBI network.

A digital index of the drive popped up on the large center screen; it showed the icon of the single MPEG movie file. Rawlins clicked on it. There was a brilliant flash, and then the clip played—the grainy video of the hysterical blonde running through the forest with the cameraman in hot pursuit.

“What was that?” Batra asked. “That flash at the beginning there?”

“I don’t know,” Rawlins said, freezing the video.

I said, “You know, come to think of it, when I hit the icon on my laptop, it did the same thing, only my screen’s much smaller and older, so it wasn’t as bright as that.”

Rawlins grunted and gave his computer orders to list all running processes and applications. The directory opened and showed them in a stack sorted by the time each was launched, beginning with the most recent app.

“That’s what just flashed there?” Batra said with an arched eyebrow. “Porngrinder?”

RAWLINS LAUGHED AND
said blithely, “Oh, no, Porngrinder is on me. What can I say? It’s a lonely life in the basement at times.”

“My God,” Batra said, disgusted. “The Bureau frowns on that kind of thing.”

“Have them sue me, won’t you?” Rawlins said.

“What was the flash?” Batra said.

“I don’t know. A blip, a screen hiccup. They happen, you know.”

“Or a bug in the plug-in that drives the video player?” Batra said.

Rawlins held up a finger. “A momentous occasion. Special Agent Henna B. and I might agree.”

Batra rolled her eyes. “Tell us about the video.”

I won’t bore anyone with the details of Rawlins’s technological savvy and instincts, but they were shrewd and his results conclusive. At first, he used ordinary software to try to access the video file’s so-called dark data. No luck. The video had
been run through an onion system similar to the one used to create the Killingblondechicks4fun website. The dark data had been stripped away.

“Not surprising.” Rawlins sniffed. “But I’ve still got the dust rag.”

The “dust rag” was software Rawlins had designed and coded himself to raise the faintest trace of old dark and metadata. He compared the software to the Hubble Space Telescope looking for cosmic debris a thousand miles behind a comet’s long tail.

Sure enough, his screen was soon filled with fragments of code that played out in sync with the video. By focusing on the moments where the lighting was dimmest and the noise of the alleged killing most pronounced, Rawlins found evidence in the data dust that suggested an audio splice in the sound track roughly six seconds long. Those six seconds included the knife-across-the-throat slitting noise and the
pah
that sounded like air bursting out of a frightened and dying chest.

“She’s alive,” Rawlins said barely fifteen minutes after starting his examination. “Or at least, those weren’t the sounds of
her
murder.”

I sighed with relief. I wouldn’t have to give Alden Lindel or his wife more heartbreaking news. “Explain how you know. The parents will ask.”

Rawlins said, “The sound patch itself is fairly sophisticated CGA. Computer-generated audio. So someone’s had advanced training in sound effects. You’re looking for a film-school grad or someone who worked in a special-effects company out in Hollywood, not a coder.”