Darkness on the Edge of Town (Laura Cardinal Series)

by J. Carson Black

  Six chapters on Julie Marr’s disappearance, then nothing. Laura didn’t know if her mom had quit at Chapter Seven or if she’d died in the midst of writing the book, a homicide victim herself.

  Laura decided she didn’t want to look at her mother’s book right now. She put the unfinished book to the side and looked through the clippings of the Julie Marr abduction. Two articles. The first declared, “CITY-WIDE SEARCH FOR MISSING SAN PEDRO MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENT” and was accompanied by a school picture of Julie Marr. Two days later, the front page headline said, “CAR USED IN ABDUCTION OF LOCAL GIRL FOUND”. A black and white photo of the 1955 Chevy Bel Air, all four doors open, a detective squatting near the driver’s side.

  She skimmed the article, jotting down the facts of the case on the inside cover of the manila folder.

  The car had been stolen from A & B Auto Wrecking on South Park Avenue. The Bel Air had been in an accident but was still driveable.

  Blood-typing indicated that the blood in the back seat belonged to Julie Marr. From the amount, the detectives were sure she was either gravely injured or dead. The lead detective on the case was Barry Fruchtendler of TPD.

  Corroborating her mother’s account, the article detailed the discovery of the car off Redington Pass Road in the Tanque Verde Mountains east of town. It had been pushed off the road at a curve. The way the road was banked made it impossible for it to be seen from a vehicle driving up or down the mountain.

  The search had been concentrated there, but no body, no grave, had been found.

  Because Julie Marr’s body could be anywhere in rugged, almost inaccessible country, the search was called off the next day.

  Julie Marr’s parents, George and Natalie Marr, were quoted as saying that if the police had taken her disappearance more seriously, Julie might be alive today.

  Laura put the suitcase away but took the file, including her mother’s chapters, with her. She dropped it on the kitchen table. An interesting trip down memory lane, but she didn’t see any relevance to Jessica’s case.

  It was possible the killer could have lived here in Tucson all those years ago, and killed both Julie Marr and Jessica Parris. But that seemed unlikely, given the number of years that had gone by and the fact that Jessica was strangled, while Julie Marr had been killed even more violently. It pointed to a different kind of killer; one organized, the other out of control.

  Laura called the Tucson Police Department and asked to speak with Detective Barry Fruchtendler. No one there by that name.

  Probably retired.

  She looked for his name in the phone book and was stymied again. That didn’t mean much; cops usually had unlisted numbers. She’d call one of her friends at TPD tomorrow and see if he was still around.

  But not now.

  She put on a fresh blouse, locked up, and took the path over the hill to Tom’s house.

  26

  Jay Ramsey had almost managed to pull his plate onto his lap when it slipped out of his hands and crashed to the flagstones.

  “You see?” Freddy said primly as he picked up the pieces of bone china, “You’ve been out here too long.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “This was your mother’s favorite pattern. You know when you start dropping things—“

  “Freddy, enough.”

  “Fine, if that’s what you want.” Freddy whisked around them, clearing plates and brushing away crumbs from the tablecloth.

  Jay had invited Laura to breakfast. She was happy to get out here early, anxious as she was to get Jay on the Internet and see him work the magic Galaz had promised her, but here they sat. She kept thinking about Alison Burns lying on the bed in the abandoned motel room. And Jessica Parris, posed like a doll in the City Park bandshell.

  She had to admit it was pleasant here--lush plants and deep shade. Misters on the porch roof cooled the terrace. Across the lane stood the high hedge lining the tennis court, where Jay Ramsey used to play. Laura, a kid, a horse groom, walking by, hoping she’d catch his eye.

  Now she had his full attention. Strange how wants and hopes changed over the years.

  Freddy was back from the kitchen. He nodded at the thermometer tacked to the pepper tree near the pool. “It’s eighty-seven degrees. You’ve been out here well over an hour.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You won’t be so cocky if your bladder lets go in front of company.”

  Jay saw Laura’s discomfort and grinned. “Freddy’s afraid I’ll get overheated. That can lead to dysreflexia, which—“

  “Could send his blood pressure sky-high,” Freddy said.

  Jay leaned toward Laura, his voice conspiratorial.

  “You know what you have to do if you start to get overheated? Piss your pants.” He laughed. “When quads get overheated, sometimes their bladders can back up. You don’t want that to happen, so you have a little accident. Relieves the pressure. You have to train yourself to do it—it’s amazing how stubborn the mind can be, all that potty training you have to overcome.”

  Freddy took his stack of still-intact dishes and retreated into the house with a martyr’s sigh.

  Jay said, “The minute I saw you on the news, I knew I had to meet you. Maybe because we never did.” Saw her confusion and added, “Never met.”

  The Ramseys had been clear from the beginning: They didn’t want any visitors. “I understood that. Your parents were looking out for—“

  “She was never going to let that happen,” Jay said. “Even though you saved my life, she didn’t want a relationship.” He sipped his mimosa. “That’s why she paid you off.”

  Told to her this way, it made her angry all over again.

  “You should see your face. I don’t blame you for being mad. I would be livid. Especially when she took the horse back. A couple of years down the line, when she saw just how much my condition changed my life—her life—she wasn’t so thankful anymore.”

  He shifted in his chair, yawned. Laura wondered if the yawning helped him in some way. “If you want to put it in a charitable light, she was impulsive. Giving you the horse on an impulse and taking it back the same way. Your good deed had outlived its usefulness.” No self-pity, just a statement of fact. “But I’ve never forgotten, and now I’m in a position to help you. I know how important this is to you. It would be important to anyone, but considering what you’ve been through in your own life…” He let it hover, the vague reference to the home invasion.

  Laura didn’t like this. He knew too much about her life.

  “I want to apologize for my mother. It’s too bad Calliope is gone—I’d give her back to you if I could. Mother sold her foals. For all I know one of them might be in town.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  He changed the subject. “Did Mikey tell you about my background?”

  “Mikey?”

  “Lieutenant Galaz.”

  “He told me Dynever is an Internet security company.”

  “We’ve worked with the FBI on cases just like this. One in New York, a pedophile ring. One of my people pretended he was a fourteen-year-old girl.”

  He wiped his forehead. His complexion looked blotchy and he was sweating. Laura looked around, but Freddy was still inside the house.

  “These guys--they build their wholes lives around getting little girls. They marry women so they can get to their children. Go into occupations where they can be around them. It’s the fantasy. They can’t resist it—they don’t want to.”

  “It’s sick,” she said. She knew that technically the guy she was after wasn’t sick. He was a sociopath--perfectly sane. But calling him “sick” relieved the pressure in her head, made her feel better.

  “You’d be surprised at how many people—doctors, lawyers, beggerman, chiefs—think that doing a twelve-year-old girl is acceptable. The evidence is there, staring you in the face. On the Net.” He set his glass down on the table, spilling orange juice and champagne over his long, elegant fingers. He didn’t seem to n
otice. “The Web has changed everything. People used to hide the way they felt, but now there are so many of them and they’re all connected, they have strength in numbers. Now they’re legitimate. They can rationalize it.

  “So my question to you, Laura, is this: If more and more people believe something, might there not be some value to it?”

  Before Laura could answer Jay called out, “You win, Freddy. I’m coming in.” He backed his motorized wheelchair and deftly sped up the ramp and through the French doors into the house, leaving her to follow.

  Freddy insisted that Laura wait in the living room while they “took care of some essentials.”

  She waited, feeling uncomfortable. Wondering if he was being cleaned up because he had over-heated, wondering if he had, indeed, pissed his pants. Wondering, too, if he thought that just because a majority of people thought something was right, there was an excuse for cruelty. Did he really think that, or was he just playing devil’s advocate?

  Forty minutes later, Jay Ramsey reappeared, his hair combed nicely and his color better. “Let’s get down to it, babe,” he said.

  Jay situated himself in front of the computer and connected to the Internet. Laura noticed that even with his limited hand motions, he was fast with his two index fingers; they seemed to fly over the keyboard like ten digits.

  Laura watched as he pulled up a no-frills site, devoid of graphics.

  Ramsey said, “Welcome to WiNX. This is the quintessential Internet relay chat program.”

  Laura tried to remember what Buddy Holland had told her. “Does it have something to do with Instant Messaging?”

  “That’s the currency. People talking to each other in real time. You’ve probably done something like it on MSN or Yahoo.”

  “Uh, no.”

  He twisted in his chair a little, smiled. “The principle is really simple. You put yourself out there and pretty soon someone wants to talk to you.”

  He hit a couple of keys and brought up a screen that reminded Laura of her first experience with a computer, back in the covered wagon days. “That looks like DOS.”

  “See? You know more than you think. WiNX is a DOS-based system. See these?” He keyed down through several lines of old-fashioned courier print and pointed with a thumb. “These are channels--rooms where people with like tastes can meet. There’re probably 20,000 channels on WiNX right now.” He flinched again, moved in his seat. Looked at her. “Am I confusing you?”

  She remembered how Buddy had thrown technical terms at her without telling her what they meant. Enjoying her discomfort. She hesitated to make a fool of herself, but couldn’t help asking, “Are they kind of like TV channels?”

  He grinned lopsidedly. “That’s as good a description as any. Imagine a station with unlimited channels on everything you can imagine.” He clicked on another page. “WiNX has been around forever. The thing you’ve got to know is that this is the real underground. There are no controls. Nobody’s watching you to see that you don’t go over the line. There’s nothing to stop you from doing anything you want to do. It’s a no-man’s land.”

  Laura felt a kinetic snap in her spine. A no-man’s land. She got the feeling that she was on the brink of knowing something she’d rather not.

  He scrolled down what seemed like miles of print. “Ah, here we are.” He clicked on something called Warezoutpost, and a list of titles came up, all after the word “warez”.

  “Warez is ‘wares’,” Jay explained. “As in ‘let me show you my wares’. See? Software for games. Movies, music. This is where the kids are at because they can download stuff for free.”

  He showed her how to locate what he wanted, a movie called Ghost Recon. “This is what draws the kids. Free music, movies. I’m next in line if I want it.”

  With a few clicks to the keyboard he moved on.

  “The kids are always the first to know. You can get anything you want off these boards. They cater to every taste. This one is general, but there are channels where kids talk to each other.” He pulled up another window. “Let’s see what we’ve got in the Girls’ Room.”

  “The Girls’ Room?”

  “I call it that. It’s used by lots pre-teen girls.”

  He pointed out the list of names on the sidebar to the right. “Those are the people in the room now. What I’m going to do is…” He hit a key and then typed in a name, erased it, and typed in another. “Gotta have a nick.” He added helpfully, “Nickname.” He typed in “nick1amber/.” This was accepted, and then he typed: “hi.”

  It showed up like this:

  Amber: hi

  Laura heard a chime and a message box popped up. Jay pointed to the status bar and Laura saw the name Gitmo.

  Gitmo: how old r u?

  Amber: 12

  Gitmo: pic?

  “He wants a picture.”

  Amber: ok were you fro?????????

  Amber: from

  Gitmo: CA u?

  Laura heard a chime. Another person wanting to talk to Amber. Jay hit a key and another instant message box popped up.

  Podunk89: a/s

  “He’s asking her age and sex.”

  Amber: alost 13

  Jay nodded to the status bar at the top of the screen. Podunk’s name changed from red to black. He was gone. “Wrong age,” Jay said, going back to Gitmo.

  Gitmo: where you been?

  Amber: My mom calledm e

  Gitmo: send me a pic

  A flurry of chimes. Four new names lit up the board.

  Amber: well see how old r you?

  Gitmo: you ever had sex?

  Amber: I had a bf last year

  “Bf?” asked Laura.

  “Boyfriend.”

  Gitmo: Did bf getta bj?

  Amber: You sonud mean!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Gitmo: can’t handle a joke LOL

  More chimes, the board lighting up with suitors. Jay opened another instant message box.

  Smooth Talk: Amber u a little girl?

  Amber: im thrteen how old r u???????????????

  Smooth Talk: let me see a pic

  Amber: I have 1 at shchol school – not here

  Smooth Talk: where d you live

  Amber: I live in az

  Smooth Talk dropped out. Back to Gitmo:

  Gitmo: I want a pic

  Amber: not fair if u don send me pic toO

  Gitmo: you playing games little girl

  Amber: fairs fair my pic for yours

  Gitmo: if you don’t want to fuck your wasting m time

  Gitmo’s name went from red to black.

  Jay sat up straighter, twisted, adjusted himself against the back of the chair. “That’s what you’re dealing with. These creeps are on these boards all day, trolling for kids.”

  Laura was about to say that she didn’t think any child would fall for that, and then shut her mouth.

  Children would fall for it. Teenagers would fall for it. Because they had not yet developed that distrust that life ground into you over the years, like grime into clothing.

  “We did a survey,” Jay said. “Among parents. They think of computers as just another appliance, like a TV set. They don’t realize it’s like leaving the back door to your house open. Anybody can come in, and some of these guys are really smart. They know how to push the buttons.”

  “How do you find someone like this? Can you find his ISP?”

  “Doubtful. Guy like that, he’d use one of the big servers, like earthlink, hotmail—it’s easy to be anonymous. There are search engines that you can look on, but I’m pretty sure this guy wouldn’t have a local ISP.”

  “Oh.”

  “But there’s an easier way. That’s what’s so interesting about technology. Sometimes the best things are simple. You know the photo you have of him? We can probably trace him through that.” He hit a couple of keys and a beach scene came up on the screen.

  “This is why you need me.” Sounding cocky. “Not many people can get their hands on this kind of software.”

>   He explained that there was something called image recognition, software that could break up every photograph into its elements, then run each element against all kinds of data bases, looking for a match. He zoomed in on a man on the beach. “See this guy’s t-shirt? With the software I’m going to use, I can run a search for exact matches. It’s like a search engine, instead of searching for like words, it searches for images. I’m going to need the original photo, though.”

  “From what Endicott said, it was a digital photo, and the only thing we have is an inkjet picture.” She nodded to the black and white photocopy. “It’s not all that much better than that.”

  Jay looked troubled. “It might be harder, but we can still do it. Where is the original?”

  “Endicott’s FedExing it—I should get it today.”

  “What we’ll do,” Jay said, “Is rescan the picture, using high resolution. Then I’ll compare it to the data bases. It might take a few days, though.”

  “You sure you can’t find him with the ISP?”

  “I’ll try that, too. I’m warning you, though, this guy isn’t your average Internet user. I think you know that.”

  “But this image recognition software, it’ll take a few days? That’s a long time.”

  “How many days has it been so far?”

  Too many, she thought.

  27

  “This is what CloneImage came up with,” Jay Ramsey said, rolling his chair to the computer monitor.

  It turned out that Jay Ramsey’s image recognition program had been quicker than expected; Laura had gotten the call this morning, not twenty-four hours after she last saw him. Jay had already found two matches to the man in the picture.

  Ramsey pulled up a site called TalentFish.com. “For a small fee, actors and models can put their pictures online. Kind of like a rogues’ gallery. Lucky for us that young Petey is up on the latest technology.”