The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 6) (14 page)

Ryan went over to the DVDs, opened up a few of the
cases, and read the printing on the disks. Then he stepped around to the side
of the TV and looked at the tangle of wires coming out of the back. “There a
room behind this wall?”

“Laundry room. Two washers, two dryers.”

“Mind if we take a look?”

“About that search warrant …”

“Really, Martin? You don’t want us to see the two
washers, two dryers?”

“Search warrant.”

I walked up close to Martin Hunt. “I’m going to
count to five. If you don’t let us into that room, we’ll go back to
headquarters and get that search warrant. While we’re waiting for it, we’ll get
the sniffer dogs to go over every inch of this shithole looking for illegal
drugs. We’ll contact the newspaper and the networks first, of course, because
the public has a right to know how their tax dollars are spent. We’ll meet with
the university, see if you’re right about not having to card people. We’ll get
in touch with the national, tell them about your party last night and our visit
today. Then we’ll see where it goes from there.” I put my finger in his face.
“You want me to start counting to five, Marty?”

Grim-faced, he led us out of the room, down a
little hall, and into the laundry room. An old computer sat on a small table
against the wall. Wires led into some kind of box hanging on the wall.

“Mind if we borrow the computer, Marty?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Of course,” I said. “You can say no. That’s why
I’m asking.”

Ryan had the computer box under his arm as we
headed back out to the street.

“Just a second,” I said. “I want to take a look in
that alley.” We walked over to the alley that led behind the house, where a
dozen cars were parked. Seven kegs sat on pallets next to a green dumpster. I
walked over to it, lifted the lid, and looked inside.

I took out my phone and called in to headquarters.
“Robin, this is Seagate. I’m at Alpha Phi Sigma.” I gave her the address.
“There’s a dumpster here. It says Montana Trash. I need you to arrange to have
it brought in to headquarters. Have it catalogued. Send a uniform here right
now to make sure nobody tampers with it.”

“Cool,” Robin said. “What are we looking for?”

“There was a party here last night. Theme was
‘Bye, Bye Virginia.’”

“The professor?”

“Yeah, that Virginia. I want to take the
fraternity down. Find me something.”

Chapter 16

A little less than an hour
later, I was at my desk when Ryan called and asked me to come down to Jorge’s
office. Jorge is our IT guy. He’s got two rooms in the basement. One is a
climate-controlled closet filled with racks of computer gear—all the servers
and stuff we use. The other is an office with a small desk in the corner and a
long bench that runs along two of the walls. This is where Jorge fixes all our
gear when it goes
down.

I hurried down to the office. Jorge was seated at
his desk, which was stacked with papers and computer guts. He wore his usual
outfit of Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, and flip flops. Ryan was seated a few
feet away.

“What you got, guys?”

Jorge hit a key on a laptop. The projector hanging
from the ceiling threw an image onto the beige wall. It showed the Windows
desktop. “This is a mirror of the computer from the fraternity.”

Ryan said, “I logged the computer into Evidence.”

“Okay,” I said. That meant we were going to be
keeping it for a while, maybe that we were going to press charges of some sort.

Ryan said to Jorge, “Show us a few seconds from
the Mattress Room folder.”

Jorge navigated to the directory. “There’s
forty-eight files here.”

“I don’t like the sound of this,” I said.

Ryan’s expression was unusually somber as he
turned off the lights and pointed to the wall. “Show one, Jorge.”

Jorge opened the video player. The video was
low-quality and dimly lit but steady. The angle suggested it was shot from a
camera mounted up near the ceiling. The room was maybe ten by fifteen feet,
empty. Nothing on the walls, no furniture. Except for a narrow pathway down the
middle of the room, the floor was covered with mattresses.

After a moment, the door opened and three people
entered: two girls and a guy. They looked about twenty years old, dressed in
jeans, long-sleeved shirts. Holding large plastic beer cups, they moved
unsteadily, like they were pretty far gone. As they undressed, they were
laughing, speaking in slurred voices that I couldn’t understand. Once they were
nude, they got down on the mattresses. The guy lay on his back on a mattress;
one girl straddled him and lowered herself onto his crotch while the other girl
crawled on her hands and knees toward his head.

“Okay,” I said. “Stop it. I get the point. Hit the
lights, will
ya
, Ryan?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I wanted you to get a
sense of what we’re dealing with here.”

I turned to Jorge. “You said there’s
forty-something of these?”

“Forty-eight in this folder.”

“And they’re all like this?”

Ryan nodded. “They’re all explicit. One-on-one,
two women and one guy, two guys and one woman, some one-on-one lesbian. Same
location. There are about fifteen different guys over and over, but the women
are mostly different.”

“Do the women know they’re being filmed? I didn’t
see either of these two look at the camera.”

“I haven’t studied them all.” Ryan’s voice was
soft. “But I didn’t see anybody looking at the camera.

“Is our boy Martin Hunt in any of these?”

“I didn’t recognize him, but that could just be
the lighting.”

Jorge said, “If you need to ID anybody—for
forensics, I mean—we’re gonna need to go to a specialized place that does video
analysis. We don’t have the top-tier software.”

“Or the FBI,” Ryan said. “If we have an open
case.”

“Are there any more homemade videos?” I said.

“There might be,” Ryan said. “There’s hundreds of
gigs of stuff. A lot of it is commercial videos they copied onto the disk, but
there could be more homemade files.”

“We’re gonna want to talk with the chief, maybe
bring in Larry, see how to proceed.” Larry Klein is the prosecutor. “Did you
see anything yet about the case?”

Ryan turned off the lights again. He spoke to
Jorge. “Go to the browsing history.” Jorge opened the browser and pulled down
the history. “That third one down. Called ‘Two Hot Lesbos Find Their Secret
Spots.’”

In a second, a video started. This video was
handheld, low-res. “What are we watching here?”

Ryan said, “It’s a porn site called
CollegeGirlsXXX
.”

It looked like a typical girl’s bedroom in a cheap
apartment. The camera operator focused on an unmade bed, rumpled. Two pillows.
Into the frame came a young woman wearing a white T-shirt and panties. With her
back to the camera, she took off her shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra. She
turned to face the camera, but it was focused on her breasts, cutting off her
head. The camera panned down to show her removing her panties and lying down on
the bed. She began to caress her own breasts.

“Why are we watching this?”

“Give it a second.” Ryan’s tone was weary,
resigned.

The camera swiveled back toward the door. Another
woman entered the room. She was a little bigger than the first girl. More
muscular. She had blond hair, straight and short, cut longer on one side than
the other. She wore a bra and panties, which she removed slowly and
theatrically. She lay on the bed next to the first girl. They kissed and giggled.

“Is that …?”

“Pause it, Jorge.” The video stopped. “The first
woman is Krista.”

“Holy shit.” I leaned in. It was. “Who’s the other
one?”

Ryan hit the lights in Jorge’s small office. He
pulled a folder from his briefcase, opened it, and removed a photograph. He
passed it to me. It was a headshot of a college girl.

“It’s Abby Demarest,” he said.

The name rang a faint bell. “How do I know her?”

“From the meeting in the sociology department
yesterday. She’s one of the students from Virginia Rinaldi’s course.”

We thanked Jorge and headed up the stairs to the
detectives’ bullpen to get our coats. I said to Ryan, “Any point in asking the
chief if we can put a detail on Richard Albright?”

“For threatening the student in a porn video?”
Ryan took two steps at a time. At his age, I did, too.

“Yeah.” My voice echoed in the stairwell.

“No. He didn’t make a specific threat to harm
her.”

“‘Removing her like a cancer’ isn’t specific
enough.”

“I don’t think so. Maybe Larry can tell us.”

We got our coats and rushed out to the Charger.
Ryan told me Abby’s address and navigated me there. It was in a two-story frame
apartment complex four blocks from campus. Unit 3 was on the ground floor. Ryan
knocked. I put my shield around my neck.

A girl answered. It wasn’t Abby. I introduced me
and Ryan and asked if we could come in for a minute. She let us in and told us
her name: Jennifer Taylor.

“Sorry to bother you, Jennifer. When was the last
time you saw Abby?”

She ran a hand through her long dark hair. “It’s
been … I don’t know. Two days. Maybe three?”

“You two don’t hang out?”

Jennifer shook her head. “Just roommates. I moved
in in January.”

I glanced over at the refrigerator. Hanging on the
door was a little whiteboard with a handwritten list of chores for each of them
to do. “Do you know if Abby has a boyfriend?”

She took a moment to think. “Yeah, I think so.
There’s this one guy comes around to pick her up sometimes.”

“You know his name?”

She scrunched up her nose. “Sorry.”

“Could you pick him out if we showed you a
picture?”

She shook her head. “I’m in my room. I hear him
knock. Then she shouts out to me that she’s leaving and she’ll see me
tomorrow.”

Ryan said, “Do you know if this guy’s in a
fraternity?”

“I think Abby told me once he is.”

“Did she say which one?”

Jennifer’s eyes were locked onto Ryan’s. “She
might have. I can’t remember. I’m not in that crowd.”

He said, “Do you mind if I stick my head into her
bedroom real quick?”

She smiled. “Go ahead.” She pointed to the hall.
“Second door.”

Ryan left. I said to Jennifer, “Here’s my card.
Would you mind giving me a call if you hear from Abby. It’s important.”

“Is she in some kind of trouble?”

“Not, not at all. We just need to talk to her
about a case.”

“Is it that professor?”

Ryan came back and flashed her a big smile. “Thanks
a lot, Jennifer.” She brushed a hand through her hair and returned his smile.

Ryan and I left and got in the Charger.

“That’s where she and Krista did the video.”

“Any idea where Abby might be now?”

He swiveled the laptop toward him and logged on to
the university system. He hit a few keys, waited, then hit some more. “She
doesn’t have any classes this afternoon. Want to head over to Alpha Phi Sigma?”

I shook my head. “There’s nine fraternities. Could
be any one of them. Besides, I want to let Martin Hunt worry a little more
about what we found on the computer. I want him to think we’re trying to get
his fraternity outlawed or whatever it’s called.”

“Isn’t that what you’re trying to do?”

“Hell, yeah. I think they’re a bunch of shits.” I
looked at Ryan. “You don’t think so?”

“I absolutely do. I just want to make sure we do
it right. If we charge someone, I want it to stick.”

“Okay, good. We need to find Abby. If Richard
Albright’s gonna come after her for being a skank, I want to get there first.”

“She could be a million places,” Ryan said.

“Let’s go talk to Mary Dawson, tell her we know
the identity of the girl in the video, see if she knows where she is.”

We drove over to campus and went to the Dean of
Students’ office. The receptionist said she was in an important meeting but
should be back in a minute. We waited.

Ryan said in a low voice, “You want to tell her
about the videos we found on the computer?”

I thought a second. “No. We don’t know that
there’s anything illegal there. Plus, I’d like to keep that in my pocket in
case we need it later.”

In a few minutes, Mary Dawson walked into the
reception area. She stopped when she saw us. “Detectives, did I miss an
appointment with you?”

Ryan and I stood. “No, not at all, Dean Dawson,” I
said. “But we’d appreciate a minute if you can spare it.”

She waved us into her office, and the three of us
sat down.

“Bad day?” I said.

She frowned. “Trying to think if I’ve had a worse
one.”

“We’ve learned some things we want you to know
about.”

“Yes.” She sighed. “I have, too. You go first.”

“We went over to Alpha Phi Sigma, talked to their
president, a student named Martin Hunt. He confirmed they held a ‘Bye, Bye
Virginia’ party last night. He didn’t see anything wrong with that. At this
point, we don’t have any evidence a crime was committed, but we’re gonna keep
looking.”

“Fine. Good.”

“And remember we told you earlier this afternoon
about a student in a porn video on the Internet? And how Richard Albright told
us he was gonna get rid of her?”

Mary Dawson closed her eyes slowly, then opened
them. “Abby Demarest.”

I didn’t see that coming. “How’d you get her
name?”

“I just came from a meeting with the university
counsel. Abby contacted the university, reported that she’s getting harassing
calls and emails and texts. Some threats.”

“From Richard Albright?”

“From a number of people.”

“She didn’t mention any names?”

Mary Dawson shook her head.

“And this is from the video on the porn site?”

“I assume so.”

“Our first priority is to ensure the student’s
safety,” I said. “You’ll help us with that, right?”

Mary Dawson rubbed at her temples. “You’re not
going to like this. That meeting I just came from? The university counsel told
me not to divulge her whereabouts. Under any circumstances.”

“You know where she is?”

Mary Dawson nodded.

“This attorney—what’s his name?”

“Arthur Vines.”

“He understands we can do a better job keeping her
under wraps than you can, doesn’t he?”

“His position is that if we bring you in, we’ve
lost control of the information. If it gets out, and anything happens to the
girl, it’s on us.”

“Way I look at it, if you bring us in, nothing’s
gonna happen to her. It’ll give us time to figure out if Richard Albright is
behind any of the threats—put a detail on him. And see if we can track anyone
else who’s threatened her. That’s the best way to keep her safe.”

Mary Dawson put up her palms. “I have to do what
the administration orders me to do. Mr. Vines has assured me he has taken all
prudent measures.”

Ryan and I stood. “Will you get in touch with
me—any time, day or night—if you learn about more
threats
to Abby? Or if the lawyer changes his mind?”

Mary Dawson stood. “Of course, Detective. I’m
sorry, my hands are tied.”

On the drive back to headquarters, I said to Ryan,
“Does the university have a right to withhold that information?”

“My guess is, if there is no reason to believe the
student is in imminent danger, they probably do.”

“And if they’re wrong?”

“If they’re wrong, they could end up looking
irresponsible.”

“And Abby Demarest could end up dead.”

“That, too.”

Back at headquarters, I checked my watch: 4:48.
“Let’s see if we can catch the chief before he leaves.”

We rushed to his office. He was straightening
things on his desk before leaving for the day.

“Chief, we need to get you up to speed on Virginia
Rinaldi.”

“Okay.” He sat in his desk chair and gestured for
us to sit.

“When we interviewed Richard Albright this
afternoon, he made a vague threat against an unnamed student who he said was in
a porn video on the web.”

“I remember.”

“We got her name: Abby Demarest. She was a student
in Virginia’s course. She’s in a video with Krista, Virginia’s girlfriend.”