XO (25 page)

“Yeah. Thanks, Mom. Just need to think about this a little.”

“You get some sleep now. The kids are happy. We had a fun dinner. They love camp.” She tried to be light. “And more important, can you believe it? They’re looking forward to school. We’re going book bag shopping tomorrow.”

“Thanks. ’Night.”

“I’m sorry, Katie. ’Night.”

A moment later Dance found she was still holding her phone, disconnected, in front of her face. She lowered it.

The loss of her husband was like a digital event to Kathryn Dance, as Jon Boling the computer genius would describe it. On or off. Yes or no. Alive or dead.

But Jon Boling’s leaving? It was analog. It was maybe. It was partly. Was he now in her life or not?

The big problem, though, was that he’d made this decision without her. It didn’t matter that the job had probably happened quickly and he’d had to move fast.

Dammit, she was a part of his life. He should have said something.

She recalled that Edwin Sharp had referred to a song of Kayleigh’s at the restaurant yesterday. “Mr. Tomorrow.” It was about an abusive, straying man who swears he’ll get his act together and mend his ways. He promises he’ll change. Of course, the listener knows he never will.

As Dance lay in bed now, the lights out, she stared at the ceiling and that song looped through her mind until she fell asleep.

You know me by now, you’ve got to believe

You’re the number-one girl in the world for me.

I’ve sent her the papers and she’s promised to sign

It’ll just be a while, these things take some time….

And his words are so smooth and his eyes look so sad.

Can’t she be patient, it won’t be so bad?

But sometimes she thinks, falling under his sway,

She got Mr. Tomorrow; she wants Mr. Today.

DANCE WAS IN
the sheriff’s office with P. K. Madigan and Dennis Harutyun.

There was another law enforcement jurisdiction present too: Monterey County.

Via Skype, Michael O’Neil’s calm eyes looked back at them from 150 miles away. He was the person she’d tapped to look into the Salinas partner of Frederick Blanton, the murdered file sharer. She might have sent the request to TJ Scanlon in her own office. But on a whim she’d decided to contact O’Neil instead.

Madigan was briefing the Monterey deputy. “Edwin never went home last night. Kayleigh said that about ten-thirty she heard a car start somewhere in the park out in front of her house. Her bodyguard said he thought he heard it too.”

The invisible snake …

“Kathryn and I want to interview him but he’s not answering his phone. We don’t even know where he is. This morning a deputy spotted his car on Forty-one, a pretty major road here. He tried to follow but Edwin must’ve seen him and wove around in traffic and got away.”

O’Neil said, “Tough to follow with just one car.”

“And I haven’t got a lot of people to spare, what with protecting witnesses and Kayleigh,” Madigan muttered. “We cover more than six thousand square miles. Grand total of about four hundred and sixty patrol deputies.”

O’Neil winced. Monterey wasn’t small but that county didn’t embrace nearly as much territory with such little manpower. He asked, “Kathryn told me he’d picked up Kayleigh’s sister and niece at the airport. Any charges possible there?”

“Kathryn’s going to interview them some more,” Madigan said, “but
doesn’t look like it. Edwin was the boy-next-door, didn’t do a thing wrong. The little girl loved him and the sister thought he was—get this—the nicest of Kayleigh’s
boyfriends
in recent years.”

Dance regarded the man on the screen—strong and solid but not heavy. O’Neil was wearing his typical outfit. Light blue shirt, no tie and a dark sport coat. Most detectives in the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office, like here, wore uniforms but O’Neil didn’t. He thought casual clothing got you further in investigations than khaki and pointed metal stars.

Dance briefed them about the interview with Sally Docking, Edwin’s former girlfriend. “I have to tell you that his behavior with her doesn’t fall into a stalker’s profile.” She explained that it had actually been Edwin who broke up with the woman.

“Still don’t trust him,” Madigan said.

“No. It’s just odd.”

O’Neil continued, “I paid a visit to Josh Eberhardt.”

The file-sharing partner in Salinas.

“How polite a visit?” Dance asked.

“I talked Amy into going with me.”

Amy Grabe, the FBI’s special agent in charge in San Francisco.

“They decided there’d been enough federal copyright violations to justify a raid. Joint task force.”

Which meant it wasn’t very polite. “Feet apart, spread ’em” had probably been involved. Dance and O’Neil shared a smile. It was hard to say, given the optical mechanics of Skype, but it seemed to Dance that he winked at her.

Of course, he hadn’t.

Then she admonished herself again: Concentrate.

“Good job, sir,” Madigan said and enjoyed a bite of what Dance believed to be pistachio ice cream. She’d missed breakfast and was thinking of asking for a cup of her own.

The Monterey detective continued, “They did find some file sharing going on out of his house but Eberhardt was more of a researcher. He keeps track of hundreds of above- and underground fan sites for musicians. Looks like he’d comb through them and get potential customers for illegal downloads. It really wasn’t all file sharing—it was file
stealing
and
selling
too. They charged a fee for the songs. They’d ripped off albums of about a thousand artists.

“There’s this really … dark underground of websites out there. They have to do with cultural things, mostly: books, movies, TV shows, music. A lot of them are about stealing the artists’ work—bootlegs, for instance. But most of them are about the celebrities themselves: Stephen King, Lindsey Lohan, George Clooney, Carrie Underwood, Justin Bieber … and Kayleigh Towne.

“And it’s all off the radar. The people posting use proxies and portals … and anonymous accounts. None of this shows up on Google. They’ve worked around that.” O’Neil gave them the list of websites whose addresses were only numbers or letters: 299ek333.com was typical. Once inside them, there were various pages that seemed nonsensical—“The Seventh Level,” for instance. Or “Lessons Learned.”

But navigating through the links, he explained, you got to the true substance of the sites: the world of celebrities. TJ Scanlon had found none of these.

O’Neil said, “It looks like that’s where Edwin’s getting a lot of his information. In fact, he posted plenty about the file sharer who got killed—the vic in Fresno.”

Madigan asked, “Anything that’d implicate Edwin in the killing?”

“No. He just urged people not to use file sharing.”

Of course, he wouldn’t slip up. Not clever Mr. Edwin Sharp.

O’Neil turned away for a moment and typed. Dance received an email containing several URLs. Harutyun took her phone when she offered it to him and he set to work typing them into a computer nearby.

O’Neil asked the room, “You’re monitoring all her calls?”

“That’s right but we’re trying to buy some time, make it harder for him to contact her with another verse,” Harutyun said. “We’ve given her and her family new phones, all unlisted. He’ll probably find the numbers eventually but by then we hope we’ll nail him on the evidence or witnesses.”

“I’d dig through those sites,” O’Neil advised. “You should be able to get some good information about him. Looks like he spends a lot of time online.”

O’Neil took a brief call and turned back to the screen. He said he had to leave, an interrogation was on the schedule. His eyes crinkled with a smile and though Skype didn’t allow for a clear image of where he cast his gaze, Dance believed it was to her. “You need anything else, just let me know.”

Madigan thanked him and the screen went dark.

They turned to the second monitor, on which Miguel Lopez had called up one of the underground sites O’Neil had found.

“Lookit that,” Crystal Stanning said.

The site, which boasted more than 125,000 fans, was a stalker’s paradise. It had pages for several hundred celebrities in all areas of entertainment and politics. Kayleigh’s was one of the most popular, it seemed. Within her pages was one headed “Kayleigh Spotting,” and was a real-time hotline bulletin board about where she was at the moment. “She Can’t Fool Us!” contained pictures of Kayleigh in various outfits—disguises, almost—so fans could recognize her when she was trying to remain anonymous. Other pages contained extensive bios of the crew and band members, fans’ stories about concerts they’d attended, discussions of which venues were good and bad acoustically, who’d tried to scalp tickets.

Other pages gave details of Kayleigh’s personal life, down to her preferences about food and clothing.

The page “WWLK, We Who Love Kayleigh” offered information about famous fans—people who had commented in the press about their affection for her music. As Dance scrolled through she found Congressman Davis’s name mentioned. He’d been quoted at a campaign rally about how much he appreciated Kayleigh’s talent, and her stance on immigration in her song “Leaving Home.” Dance followed a hyperlink to his own page and noted that he had reproduced the lyrics in full—with Kayleigh’s permission. Dance remembered he’d thanked Kayleigh for this earlier at her house.

“In the Know” offered press information, thousands of photographs, announcements from Kayleigh’s record company and Barry Zeigler, her producer. There was also a feed from her official site, giving updates—for instance, about upcoming events, like Friday’s concert and the luncheon today at a local country club for the Fan of the Month. Dance read the press release, written by Kayleigh’s stepmother, Sheri, noting to her relief that Edwin was not the winner.

Other links led to even more troubling pages, which offered bootleg albums, recorded illegally at concerts, and links to file sharing services. One page gave gossip about disputes within celebrities’ families, Kayleigh’s included, though aside from tepid public spats with Bishop, Sheri
and a few musicians, like the man who’d interrupted the award ceremony, her gossip page was pretty sparse.

She’s a good girl …

Another page offered for sale items of Kayleigh’s clothing, including undergarments, undoubtedly not really hers. There were risqué pictures of her too, though it was obvious they’d been manipulated with Photoshop.

This explained Edwin’s innocuous and infrequent online activity that TJ Scanlon had found earlier. That was the public side of Edwin Sharp;
this
was the stalker’s real internet life. Though they couldn’t tell for certain, a number of the posts with initials ES or ESS in the username were probably his. Dance assessed that the grammar, syntax and construction of many of these posts were reminiscent of the ones they knew he had done.

Dance hoped they could find even a hint of a threat to Kayleigh Towne, so they could invoke the stalking statute But, no, this trove of Edwin-related activity wasn’t much more helpful than the other. As with the more public sites, most of the posts that were or might be his didn’t appear threatening in the least; if anything, he staunchly defended Kayleigh. Nor were they able to identify particular potential victims. Other fans were far more insulting than he was, some viciously so. Edwin came across as nothing more than a loyal, if strident, fan. Dance reflected that it was likely Edwin Sharp was not the only obsessed fan Kayleigh Towne had. Indeed, reading the posts suggested that he might be among the more innocuous.

There wasn’t a single aspect of these celebrities’ lives that was private. Kathryn Dance leaned away from the computer screen. She actually felt unclean from the imperious, invasive attitude of the posters—as if the entertainers and celebrities that were the objects of their interest were simply fodder for amusement and self-gratification.