Angels Flight

by Michael Connelly

  Bosch studied her as she spoke. Her eyes moved from the coffee table to the view and then to her hands clasped in front of her. She didn’t look at her questioner. Bosch had been reading people in interviews and interrogations for most of his adult life. In that moment he knew she had sent Elias the anonymous note. He just couldn’t figure out why. He glanced up again at Richter and saw that the security man was also closely studying the woman. Bosch wondered if he was reading the same thing. He decided to move on.

  ‘The house where this crime took place. The one in Brentwood. Who owns that now?’

  ‘We still own it,’ Sam Kincaid said. ‘We’re not sure what we’re going to do with it. Part of us wants to get rid of it and never think of it again. But the other part ... Stacey was there. She lived half of her life there ...’

  ‘I understand. What I’d like — ’

  Bosch’s pager went off. He cut it off and continued.

  ‘I’d like to take a look at it, at her room. Tomorrow, if possible. We’ll have a search warrant by then. I know you’re a busy man, Mr Kincaid. Maybe, Mrs Kincaid, you could meet me there, show me around. Show me Stacey’s room. If that won’t be too difficult.’

  Kate Kincaid looked as if she dreaded the possibility of returning to the Brentwood house. But she nodded her head yes in a disengaged sort of way.

  ‘I’ll have D.C. drive her,’ Sam Kincaid announced. ‘And you can have the run of the place. And you won’t need a search warrant. We give you our permission. We have nothing to hide.’

  ‘Sir, I didn’t mean to imply that you did. The search warrant will be necessary so there will be no questions later. It is more a protection for us. If something new in the house is found and leads to the real killer, we don’t want that person to be able to challenge the evidence on any legal grounds.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘And we appreciate you offering the help of Mr Richter but that won’t be necessary.’ Bosch looked at Kate Kincaid. ‘I would prefer it if just you came, Mrs Kincaid. What time would be good?’

  While she thought about this Bosch looked down at his pager. The number on it was one of the homicide lines. But there was a 9II added after the phone number. It was code from Kiz Rider: Call immediately.

  ‘Uh, excuse me,’ Bosch said. ‘It looks like this call is important. Do you have a phone I could use? I have a cell phone in the car but in these hills I’m not sure I’ll be able to get — ’

  ‘Of course,’ Sam Kincaid said. ‘Use my office. Go back out to the entry hall and go left. The second door on the left. You’ll have privacy. We’ll wait here with Detective Edwards.’

  Bosch stood.

  ‘It’s Edgar,’ Edgar said.

  ‘I’m sorry. Detective Edgar.’

  As Bosch headed to the entry hall another pager sounded. This time it was Edgar’s. He knew it was Rider sending the same message. Edgar looked down at his pager and then at the Kincaids.

  ‘I better go with Detective Bosch.’

  ‘Sounds like something big,’ Sam Kincaid offered. ‘Hope it’s not a riot.’

  ‘Me, too,’ Edgar said.

  Kincaid’s home office would have been able to accommodate the entire Hollywood homicide squad. It was a huge room with towering ceilings and bookcases along two walls that went all the way up to the ceiling. The centerpiece of the room was a desk that would have dwarfed Howard Elias’s. It looked as if you could build a nice-sized office inside it.

  Bosch came around behind it and picked up the phone. Edgar came into the room behind him.

  ‘You get one from Kiz?’ Bosch asked.

  ‘Yeah. Something’s happening.’

  Bosch punched in the number and waited. He noticed that on the desk was a gold-framed photo of Kincaid holding his stepdaughter on his lap. The girl was indeed beautiful. He thought about what Frankie Sheehan had said about her looking like an angel, even in death. He looked away and noticed the computer set up on a worktable to the right of the desk. There was a screen saver on the tube. It showed a variety of different cars racing back and forth across the screen. Edgar noticed it, too.

  ‘The car czar,’ Edgar whispered. ‘More like the smog wog.’

  Rider answered before the first ring was finished.

  ‘It’s Bosch.’

  ‘Harry, did you talk to the Kincaids yet?’

  ‘We’re here now. We’re in the middle of it. What’s going — ’

  ‘Did you advise them?’

  Bosch was silent a moment. When he spoke again his voice was very low.

  ‘Advise them? No. What for, Kiz?’

  ‘Harry, back out of there and come back to the station.’

  Bosch had never heard Rider’s voice with such a serious tone. He looked at Edgar, who just raised his eyebrows. He was in the dark.

  ‘Okay, Kiz, we’re on our way. You want to tell me why?’

  ‘No. I have to show you. I found Stacey Kincaid in afterlife.’

  26

  Bosch couldn’t put his finger on the look he saw on Kizmin Rider’s face when he and Edgar returned to the squad room. She sat alone at the homicide table, her laptop in front of her, the glow of the screen reflecting slightly on her dark face. She looked both horrified and energized. Bosch knew the look but didn’t have the words for it. She had seen something horrible but at the same time she knew she was going to be able to do something about it.

  ‘Kiz,’ Bosch said.

  ‘Sit down. I hope you didn’t leave hair on the cake with the Kincaids.’

  Bosch pulled out his seat and sat down. Edgar did likewise. The phrase Rider had used referred to making a miscue that tainted a case with constitutional or procedural error. If a suspect asks for a lawyer but then confesses to a crime before the lawyer arrives, there is hair on the cake. The confession is tainted. Likewise, if a suspect is not advised of his rights before questioning, it is unlikely anything he says in that conversation can be used against him later in court.

  ‘Look, neither one was a suspect when we walked in there,’ Bosch said. ‘There was no reason to advise. We told them the case was open again and asked a few basic questions. Nothing came out of any. consequence anyway. We told them Harris has been cleared and that’s it. What do you have, Kiz? Maybe you should just show us.’

  ‘Okay, bring your chairs around here. I’ll school you.’

  They moved their chairs to positions on either side of her. Bosch checked her computer and saw the Mistress Regina web page was on the screen.

  ‘First off, either of you guys know Lisa or Stacey O’Connor in Major Fraud downtown?’

  Bosch and Edgar shook their heads.

  ‘They’re not sisters. They just have the same last name. They work with Sloane Inglert. You know who she is, right?’

  Now they nodded. Inglert was a member of a new computer fraud unit working out of Parker Center. The team, and Inglert in particular, had gotten a lot of play in the media earlier that year when they bagged Brian Fielder, a hacker of international reputation who headed a crew of hackers known as the ‘Merry Pranksters.’ Fielder’s exploits and Inglert’s chase of her quarry across the Internet had played in the paper for weeks and were now destined to be filmed by Hollywood.

  ‘All right,’ Rider said. ‘Well, they’re friends of mine from when I worked Fraud. I called them and they were happy to come in to work this because otherwise they’d have to put on uniforms and work twelve hours tonight.’

  ‘They came here?’ Bosch asked.

  ‘No, their office at Parker. Where the real computers are. Anyway, we talked over the phone once they got there. I told. them what we had — this web address that we knew was important but at the same time didn’t make any sense. I told them about going to Mistress Regina’s place and I think I pretty much creeped them out. Anyway, they told me there was a good chance that what we were looking for had nothing to do with Regina herself, just her web page. They said the page could have been hijacked and that we should be looking for a hidden hypert
ext link somewhere in the image.’

  Bosch raised his hands palms up but before he could say anything Rider kept going.

  ‘I know, I know, talk English. I will. I just wanted to take you step by step. Do either of you know anything at all about web pages? Am I making even any basic sense here?’

  ‘Nope,’ said Bosch.

  ‘Nada,’ said Edgar.

  ‘Okay, then I’ll try to keep this simple. We start with the Internet. The Internet is the so-called information superhighway, okay? Thousands and thousands of computer systems all connected by a Telnet system. It is worldwide. On that highway are millions of turnoffs, places to go. These are whole computer networks, web sites, so on and so forth.’

  She pointed to Mistress Regina on her computer screen.

  ‘This is an individual web page that is on a web site where there are many other pages. You see this on my computer here but its home, so to speak, is on the larger web site. And that web site resides in an actual, physical piece of equipment—a computer we call the web server. Do you follow me?’

  Bosch and Edgar nodded.

  ‘So far,’ Bosch said. ‘I think.’

  ‘Good. Now the web server may have many, many web sites that it manages and maintains. See, if you wanted to have a Harry Bosch web page you would go to a web server and say put my page on one of your web sites. Do you have one that features morose detectives who never say much of anything to anybody?’

  That got a smile from Bosch.

  ‘That’s how it works. Often you have like-minded businesses or interests bundled on one site. That’s why when you look at this site it’s like Sodom and Gomorrah on the Internet. Because like-minded advertisers seek the same sites.’

  ‘Okay,’ Bosch said.

  ‘The one thing the web server should provide is security. By that I mean security from anyone hacking in and compromising your page — altering it or crashing it. The problem is, there isn’t a whole lot of security out there on these web servers. And if someone can hack into a server they can then assume site-administrator capabilities for a web site and hijack any page on the site.’

  ‘What do you mean, hijack?’ Edgar said.

  ‘They can go to a page on the site and use it as a front for their own intentions. Think of it as it is on my screen here. They can come up behind the image you see here and add all kinds of hidden doors and commands, whatever they want. They can then use the page as a gateway to anything they want.’

  ‘And that’s what they did with her page?’ Bosch asked.

  ‘Exactly. I had O’Connor/O’Connor run a uniform resource locator. In effect they traced this page back to the web server. They checked it out. There are indeed some firewalls—security blocks — but the default passwords are still valid. They, in effect, render the firewalls invalid.’

  ‘You lost me,’ Bosch said.

  ‘When a web server is first set up, there are default passwords necessary for first getting inside. In other words, standard log-on names and passwords. Guest/ guest, for example. Or administrator/administrator. Once the server is up and running these should be eliminated to prevent compromise but quite often it is forgotten about and these become back doors, ways to sneak in. It was forgotten here. Lisa got in using administrator/administrator. And if she was able to do it, then any hacker worth his salt could have gotten in and then hijacked the Mistress Regina page. And somebody did.’

  ‘What did they do?’ Bosch asked.

  ‘They put in a hidden hypertext link. A hot button. When located and pushed, it will take the user to another web site all together.’

  ‘In English,’ Edgar said.

  Rider thought for a moment.

  ‘Think of it as a tall building—the Empire State building. You are on one floor. The Mistress Regina floor. And you find a hidden button on the wall. You push it and an elevator door you didn’t even see before opens and you get on. The elevator takes you to another floor and opens. You step out. You are someplace completely new. But you couldn’t have gotten there if you hadn’t been on Mistress Regina’s floor and stumbled onto that hidden button.’

  ‘Or been told where it was,’ Bosch said.

  ‘Exactly,’ Rider said. ‘Those in the know can go.’

  Bosch nodded at her computer.

  ‘Show us.’

  ‘Well, remember, the first note to Elias was the web page address and the image of Regina. The second one said, “dot the i humbert humbert.” The mystery writer was simply telling Elias what to do with the web page.’

  ‘Dot the i in Regina?’ Edgar asked. ‘Click the mouse on the dot?’

  ‘That’s what I thought but O’Connor/O’Connor said a hot button can only be hidden behind an image. Something about pixel redefinition that I don’t need to get into.’

  ‘So you dot the eye?’ Bosch said, pointing to his eye.

  ‘Right.’

  She turned to her laptop to which she had attached a mouse. She now moved it with her hand and Bosch watched the arrow on the screen move to Mistress Regina’s left eye. Rider double-clicked the mouse button and the screen went blank.

  ‘Okay, we’re on that elevator.’

  After a few seconds a field of blue sky and clouds appeared on the screen. Then tiny angels with wings and halos appeared sitting on the clouds. Then a password template appeared.

  ‘Humbert humbert,’ Bosch said.

  ‘See, Harry, you get this stuff. You’re just acting like you don’t.’

  She typed in the name humbert in the user name and password slots and the screen went blank once again. A few seconds later there was a welcome message.

  WELCOME TO CHARLOTTE’S WEB SITE

  Below the message a moving cartoon image formed. A spider crawled along the bottom of the page and then began weaving a web across the screen, shooting back and forth until the web was formed. Then tiny photographic images of young girls’ faces appeared in the web, as if caught there. When the image of the web and its captives was complete, the spider took a position at the top of the web.

  ‘This is sick,’ Edgar said. ‘I’m getting a bad feeling here.’

  ‘It’s a pedophile site,’ Rider said. With a fingernail she tapped the screen below one of the photos in the web. ‘And that is Stacey Kincaid. You click on the photo you like and you get a full spread of photos and videos. It is truly, truly horrible stuff. That poor little angel, she might be better off dead.’

  Rider moved the arrow to the photo of the blond girl. It was too small for Bosch to identify the girl as Stacey Kincaid. He wished he could just take Rider’s word for it.

  ‘Are you ready for this?’ Rider asked. ‘I can’t run videos on my laptop but the photos give you the idea.’

  She didn’t wait for a reply and she didn’t get one. She double-clicked the mouse and a new screen appeared. A photo appeared on the screen. It was a young girl standing naked in front of a hedge. She was smiling in a forced, seemingly unnatural way. Despite the smile she still had a lost-in-the-woods look on her face. Her hands were on her hips. Bosch could tell it was Stacey Kincaid. He. tried to breathe but it felt like his lungs were collapsing. He folded his arms across his chest.

  Rider started scrolling the screen and a series of photos came up featuring the girl in several poses by herself and then finally with a man. Only the man’s naked torso was shown, never his face. The last photos were the girl and the man engaged in various sex acts. Finally, they came to the final photo. It showed Stacey Kincaid in a white dress with little semaphore flags on it. She was waving at the camera. The photo seemed somehow to be the worst one even though it was the most innocent.

  ‘Okay, go back or forward or whatever you do to get that off there,’ Bosch said.

  He watched Rider move the cursor to a button below the final photo that said HOME on it. It seemed sadly ironic to Bosch that clicking HOME was the way out. Rider clicked the mouse and the screen went back to the spider’s web. Bosch pulled his chair back to his spot and dropped down in
to it. Fatigue and depression suddenly hit him. He wanted to go home and go to sleep and forget everything he knew.

  ‘People are the worst animals,’ Rider said. ‘They will do anything to each other. Just to indulge their fantasies.’

  Bosch got up and walked over to one of the other nearby desks. It belonged to a burglary detective named McGrath. He opened the drawers and started looking through them.

  ‘Harry,’ Rider said, ‘what are you looking for?’

  ‘A cigarette. I thought Paul kept his smokes in his desk.’

  ‘He used to. I told him to start taking them home with him.’

  Bosch looked over at her, his hand still holding one of the drawers.

  ‘You told him that?’

  ‘I didn’t want you slipping, Harry.’

  Bosch shoved the drawer closed and came back to his chair.

  ‘Thanks a lot, Kizmin. You saved me.’

  There wasn’t a drop of thanks in the tone he had used.

  ‘You’ll get through this, Harry.’

  Bosch gave her a look.

  ‘You probably haven’t smoked an entire cigarette in your entire life and you’re going to tell me about quitting and how I’ll get through it?’

  ‘Sorry. I’m just trying to help.’

  ‘Like I said, thanks.’

  He looked over at her computer and nodded.

  ‘What else? What are you thinking about? How does that tie in Sam and Kate Kincaid to the point we should’ve advised them?’

  ‘They had to know about this,’ Rider said, amazed that Bosch didn’t see what she saw. ‘The man in the photos, that’s got to be Kincaid.’

  ‘Whoah!’ Edgar said. ‘How can you say that? You couldn’t see the guy’s face. We were just talking to the guy and he and his wife are still righteously fucked-up over this.’

  It hit Bosch then. When he had first seen the photos on the computer he had thought they were taken by the girl’s abductor.

  ‘You’re saying these photos are old,’ he said. ‘That she was abused before she was abducted.’