by Rick Mofina
“I don’t believe you.” Reed held his tongue. “My story’s done. I’m going home.”
“Reed, if you misled me. If you misrepresented the paper, or spent its money without authorization, it’s a firing offense. So watch what you’re doing.”
“Clyde. You’d better watch what you’re doing.” Reed said, making sure Brader’s attention followed his to the pictures of Brader’s wife and two daughters.
Ann was wearing a black knee-length skirt and a silk top. Reed thought she looked stunning.
“Hi. Can you zip me? How was Nevada?”
Reed dropped his bag on the bed, pulled up her back zipper. “Hot. How’s Zach doing?”
“They’re still working on the list and his tests.” She put pearl studs in her pierced earlobes. “Could be asthma, or allergies. Melody took him to the park. Better hurry. I’ve set out your blue suit.”
In the shower, in the cab downtown, during the small talk over cocktails at the banquet, during the dinner, Reed was haunted by Carla Purcell’s case. When Ann squeezed his hand during the evening’s speeches, it hit him. Full force.
“Ann, I’ve got to go.”
“But why, Tom? Are you ill?”
“No. It’s urgent. Something I just remembered on the story.”
“Call the paper.” She glanced at her watch, well aware of the Star’s deadlines.
“No.” He pushed his chair back. “I have to go.”
“Tom,” she whispered, “do you really have to go, now?”
“Yes, I have to go now.”
“I don’t like this.”
“Ann, I’m sorry.”
“I can feel this story wrapping itself around you.”
Ann turned away from him to applaud the speaker. Reed walked silently on the padded carpet to the hotel’s lobby.
I better be right about this.
He felt his stomach quake, and he began trotting.
FIFTY-ONE
The hotel doorman summoned a taxi for Reed. At the Star, he didn’t have to show his ID to the night security officer who buzzed him in.
“Hey, Tom, you’re working late.”
In the city newsroom the night crew, putting the final touches on the next day’s edition, didn’t even notice Reed at his desk, in his suit, his tie loosened, tearing through the files. He found the lost page, seized it, then punched an extension on his phone.
“Computer room.”
“Sebastian there?”
“One sec.” Reed heard the drone of the Star’s entire computer system as someone shouted.
“Tan here.”
“Sebastian, it’s Reed in the newsroom.”
“What’s up Tom, got a problem?”
“Can you help me with something computer related. Just between you and me?”
“What is it?”
“I’ll have to show you.”
“Sure, come on down. It’s quiet.”
The Star’s computer system was housed on the building’s main floor, three floors down from News and one up from the pressroom. Banks of computers hummed on linoleum floors, used to keep dust and debris to a minimum, in the brightly lit labyrinth of glass-walled sections.
It was the brain and nerve center of the newspaper, its entire system drew its life from here. Every computer terminal in the plant, advertising, the presses, circulation, all editorial departments, every network, every keystroke, were all ensured here from the techs in the control room, who rolled from server to server on wheeled chairs.
Sebastian Tan was the top night tech. He kept the system clicking worry-free at warp speed. Tan, the silent type, had gone to MIT, Stanford, worked in security for several Silicon Valley companies, sold his own Internet firm a few years back, and came to the Star because he was bored. Tan wore khaki shorts, a Crypt Kicker T-shirt, and some acne cream. He was twenty-five.
Late one night when Reed came down to get a laptop fixed, he had befriended Tan. The younger man confided that when he was fifteen, he got into trouble with the FBI for intruding on some national security systems. Tan’s dad had pulled some strings in Washington and managed to keep it quiet. Tan boasted with dead seriousness to Reed that no system existed that was impenetrable, that he secretly ventured into restricted areas to test his skills.
Reed needed those skills tonight.
“Please Sebastian, would you just give it a quick try?”
Tan was looking at the page Reed had given him.
Dear CP:
I just have to know, if you found the right man, could you forgive him the sins of his past life?
Tan and Reed were alone in the computer room office. Tan studied the data atop the message. He chewed on the corners of his plastic security swipe cards, his laminated Star employee ID, which hung on a chain around his neck.
“What are you looking for exactly?”
“I want the sender’s name, current real physical address. Everything you can get me on him.”
Tan tapped his chin with his cards.
“Can you do it, Sebastian?”
“Just between you and me?”
“Absolutely.”
“Come on.”
Tan took Reed into a smaller office. Three of its walls were glass. The other had file cabinets, bookshelves, and a large poster of Superman. The large desk occupying the room had Tan’s computer terminal. “Shut the door, Tom.”
Tan began entering commands on his keyboard. He went on-line, working for over fifteen full minutes in silence, Reed standing behind him, arms folded, watching patiently as Tan tried a number of scenarios. Screen after screen of codes, numbers, swam by. Reed was seeing things he’d never seen before, a world unknown to him of computer language, matrixes, programs. He was lost.
“So what is this, top secret stuff, Tom?”
“Just between you and me, the receiver was murdered in Las Vegas. I suspect the sender is her killer.”
Tan looked at Reed. “Cool.” Tan continued working, his computer beeping, trilling. Tan’s phone rang. He ignored it. “Ned will get it.” Tan blinked thoughtfully, studying his screen, which was frozen. He tried something.
“Odd.”
“What is it?”
“Very strange ML. I’ve heard of some leading edge in development. This is wild, exotic.”
“I’m afraid you lost me, buddy.”
Tan resumed typing. “All right. I’ll try this. Seems I underestimated this system. It’s deceptively sophisticated. Like a work of art, really.” Two lines on his phone rang at once. “Ned!” Tan shouted to the outer office, then got one of the ringing lines. “Tan here. Yes. Correct. Bring them back on-line.”
Reed noticed through the glass a series of red, green, blue and yellow lights began strobing among the banks of big computers in the large computer area. Tan left his computer and went to a keyboard in the outer section, entered a few commands. The blinking lights stopped.
“Presses will start soon,” Tan said, returning to his computer, resuming his attempts to intrude on the system that sent Carla Purcell the short e-mail.
“What makes you think the sender is the killer?”
“A calculated hunch.”
Tan studied his screen. His computer began beeping rapidly.
“Holy cow!” Tan lifted his hands from his keyboard. “How did that happen? I’ve never seen!--”
“What is it?”
Tan started working faster on his keyboard “No. No. Oh no. Stop.” Tan’s worried eyes shot out to the bank of computers. His line began ringing.
“What the hell is this, Reed?”
“What is it?”
Tan punched an extension on his line. “Tell everyone to save and shut down immediately!”
Tan punched a number of commands on his keyboard. His chair spun as he rushed to the large computer room, pressing keypad codes. Two other techs emerged and Tan gave them frantic orders to join him. Reed remained transfixed in the small office, studying Tan’s monitor. It went black, then white, then fuzzy. Strange
things were happening.
“We’re getting error messages. Tell the pressroom to delay. It’s not safe yet!” Tan shouted into a cell phone pressed to his ear.
Reed watched Tan’s monitor act like a TV receiving a strange signal through a snow blizzard while Tan was shouting into his phone.
“Save and shut down immediately! Everything! I think it’s malevolent! Unplug everything. Power down.” Tan shouted to Reed. “Tom, unplug my system now!”
The computer room phones ringing, Reed reached to unplug Tan’s system but he froze, his eyes widened.
“My God!”
Tan’s monitor came alive with a clear image of some kind of home movie. The perspective of someone in a church. The Las Vegas church -- walking toward the Pieta walking slowly, the camera shaking a bit, blurring a bit. The camera turned down, gazing at a sleeping woman -- red paint spilled all over her face -- Reed knew that face -- Carla Purcell -- being carried to the Pieta -- not sleeping not paint -- blood -- now being placed atop the dead Christ in the lap of Mary someone speaking. “Mother of God, pray for us sinners” A hand in a latex glove. A finger extended, dipping into her blood, and touched Mary’s face, making a bloody tear under each eye of the Blessed Virgin. My God, my God. Reed’s gooseflesh rising with the tiny hairs on the back of his neck, not realizing he had been pressing the print screen button -- before the monitor went black.
Reed collapsed in Tan’s chair, thrusting his face in his hands. Swallowing hard, he regained his composure as the printer near him came to life, spitting out grainy frames from the horror he had witnessed. Three pages. Reed grabbed them, folded them, and tucked them into the breast pocket of his suit. Unplugged everything just as Tan returned, talking on his cell phone.
“Yes. I want two minutes. Two, then reboot. We should be okay.”
Tan switched off his phone. “I’ve never seen anything like that Reed. This stays between us.”
“What happened?”
Tan was silent, studying the e-mail, then going through a worn notebook in his back pocket. “Some kind of overwhelming malevolent system. I’ve never encountered anything like it. It launched an attack on us for simply knocking on its door. It went through firewalls, gunning for the mail server, routers, all our internal systems. I’m baffled at how it could do what it was doing. How I caught it just in time. Reed, it would have melted our entire system.”
The line rang. Tan took it. “Up and running. Everything’s saved. Tell everyone to power on, reboot.”
Tan hung up and glared at Reed. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Tom, but don’t ever ask me to do anything like that ever again.”
Reed nodded, then left the building thrusting his hands in his pockets to keep them from shaking.
After several blocks and constantly checking to make sure he had the three printout pictures, he hailed a taxi home.
FIFTY-TWO
Sydowski sat at his desk in homicide polishing his bifocals with his tie, reciting the positives as if they were prayers. Bit by bit they were getting closer.
They had gone from zero leads when he had caught Iris Wood’s case, to a suspect pool of 2,769 names, that shrunk to 600, but they still had a long way to go. They had reduced the pool to some eighty possibles. That was the number of men who met the criteria so far.
Each name on the list had flown on Five Star Skyways between Baltimore and San Francisco in the week before the murder. Each man had rented a car from one of the four rental companies at SFO offering a Ford Taurus or Mercury Sable.
Sydowski slipped on his glasses, thumbing through the files, appreciating that he was working from a premise based on solid trace evidence, the shaky eyewitness account of a street criminal, and his own gut instincts.
Following this line could prove futile. The variables were endless. The killer may not have rented a car in that period, or rented one at all. Or, he may have rented elsewhere. He could have been someone’s passenger. Could have borrowed or stolen a car. Could fit any one of a thousand other scenarios.
Trust the physical facts. The trace evidence linked the killer to BWI, it put him on a Five Star jet, it put him in a late-model rental Ford or Mercury, and it put him at Stern Grove and in the bridal shop.
Sydowski believed in physical evidence.
The car rental agencies cooperated, but it had taken several days to amass all the contracts with applicable names. Security officials had to make priority requests to their respective record-storage sites in cities across the country. In many cases the original records had to be searched manually.
Now they were going hard on the eighty names, running them with police agencies in Maryland, the District of Columbia, Delaware, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Again, they ran them through California databases, parolees, state and federal prison records, cross-checked them with employee, policy holder, and claimant lists of American Federated Insurance. They pumped all the relevant names through NCIC.
Sydowski finally allowed Linda at the VICAP terminal, making general queries for similarities in all unsolved ritual murders in the Bay Area and all of the northern California cases. Intense. She made a series of queries on the region’s unsolved homicides:
all single white females aged 20 to 40
all cases involving mutilation but no sexual assault
all cases involving a suspected police officer
all cases where the victim was publicly displayed
Turgeon would remove the pen clamped in her teeth to make notes. She was familiar with most of the files. Sydowski still refused to make a full submission to VICAP. He was satisfied with their progress. Didn’t see a need for outside help at this point.
As the VICAP keyboard clicked, Sydowski glimpsed the envelope Louise had given him for Reggie Pope. Peeking out of his jacket pocket, reminding him to call personnel for Reggie’s current address in the Tenderloin.
He thought of Wyatt. What the hell was he doing? Sydowski had heard nothing more on Iris Wood’s computer from him. Just as well. The less he saw of Wyatt, the better his life would be.
Turgeon tossed her notebook on her desk and plopped in her chair.
“Walt, we’re spinning our wheels here.” She opened a can of diet soda with a hiss. “I talked to Dee, the VICAP coordinator at Golden Gate. She’s poised for us to submit the entire case to Quantico. A formal priority submission. Put everything out there now. The hold-back. The shoe, BWI, the stun gun, mutilation.”
“Be patient.”
“Walt. Damn it, there has got to be a link.”
“We’re gaining on him my way. Look where we started and look where we are. We can’t risk anything at this point. If it leaks, we lose him.”
“I’ll help complete every one of the ninety-five questions in the submission, Walt.”
“Linda, please. Humor an old man.”
“Excuse me, Inspectors?”
Horace Meeker materialized next to their desks, looking somewhat out of place without his white lab smock. Dressed in a jacket, sky-blue button-down shirt, navy tie loosened, collar button undone, allowing his neck to relax. He had a small valise. Blinking behind his thick lenses. “I think it’s important for us to talk right now.”
They went to an empty homicide interview room and closed the door. Horace extracted a thin file folder from his valise, opened it to another lab report. Sydowski noticed it was written in longhand, as if hurried.
“I just came from the airport. I did some on-site checking with the car rental agencies there, just first-hand inquiries for confirmation.”
“And?” Sydowski said.
“I got it and thought you should know right away.”
“Whaddya got, Horace?” Linda set her soft drink down.
“I am confident you can limit your suspect pool to one car rental agency. The new one, United Coast.”
“How did you do that?”
“Shampoo.”
“Shampoo?” Turgeon said.
“I did more work on the auto carpet fibers, using e
nergy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence.”
“Right, XRF.”
“Also did some optical microscopy and polymer characterization, so I could check elements on individual carpet fibers, you know, like material used in production or added in post-production, treatments, and cleaners.”
Turgeon pulled out her notebook. “Like shampoo.”
“Correct. Like the shampoo used by United Coast to clean its rentals at San Francisco International.” Horace, was studying his pages of notes. “I checked with United Coast’s drums. Called the supplier. UC uses an industrial brand that contains a slightly higher than average level of two-butoxyethanol. According to the NIOSH reviews, two-butoxyethanol is a type of glycol ether, a quick-drying colorless liquid used in organic solvents, for things like household and industrial cleaning solutions.”
“Like a stain remover, stain protector?”
“Sort of. Anyway, it’s a safe bet our fiber comes from a United Coast rental.”
“How safe?” Sydowski said. “How do we know the cleaner is not domestic and could have been used to clean any car anywhere?”
Horace removed his big glasses from his big head and rubbed his tired eyes before replacing the glasses.
“Walt, you must have lucky stars, because it turns out that United Coast, being a new car rental agency, is field-testing a brand-new auto carpet shampoo.”
“That so?”
“And they started two weeks ago in one location in the entire U.S. Their outlet at San Francisco International.”
Turgeon flipped the pages of her notes. “That’s twenty-one names. You brought it down to twenty-one names.”
“Horace.” The gold crown in Sydowski’s grin glinted. “That’s terrific.”
“It started with you, Walt.”
“How?”
“You noticed the road paint was new. Everyone missed it. That’s old-fashioned detective work.” Horace looked at Turgeon. “Don’t ever let this guy fool you. He knows what he’s doing.”
“Some days maybe.” Turgeon smiled.
Later that day, Sydowski and Turgeon talked with United Coast’s director of security, who arranged to provide them all documentation on each of the twenty-one men who fit the criteria.
