One by One

by Chris Carter

  ‘Who was the celebrity?’ Hunter asked.

  Before Garcia could answer, Mike Brindle poked his head through the living-room door. ‘Robert, Carlos, you better come have a look at this.’

  Forty-Five

  The atmosphere inside the FBI Cybercrime Division was one of triumph. Smiles and congratulations were going around the room like a carousel. Even the FBI director in charge of the Los Angeles field office had called Michelle Kelly to express his satisfaction. He had two small daughters of his own and he couldn’t even begin to imagine what he would do if either of them ever fell victim to an Internet pedophile.

  Sitting at her computer, Michelle brought up Bobby’s case file. On its front page she right-clicked on the empty square in the top right-hand corner that said ‘‘photo file’’, and selected ‘add’ from the pop-up menu. Harry Mills had already transferred a series of mugshots taken after Bobby’s arrest into the FBI’s mainframe computer. Michelle selected one, and clicked ‘add’.

  She then placed the cursor over the ‘Name’ field and typed in Bobby’s real name – Gregory Burke.

  Bobby was no longer a faceless, nameless threat to young kids anymore.

  Michelle moved the cursor over to the Investigation Status field, deleted the word ‘open’, and as she typed in ‘closed – subject arrested’, she felt enormous satisfaction run through her. But she knew that that feeling wouldn’t last long.

  Unfortunately there were way too many ‘Bobbys’ out there, stalking social network sites, chat rooms, games websites or wherever kids would gather to socialize in cyberspace. Michelle and the FBI CCD were doing the best they could, but the simple truth was that they were hugely outnumbered, and the ratio grew the wrong way year after year. She knew that putting Bobby away was only a small victory in a war they’d been losing since the early days of the Internet, but even so it was days like today that made the fight worthwhile.

  ‘You OK?’ Harry asked, coming up behind her.

  ‘I’m great.’ She clicked the ‘save’ button.

  ‘How’s the lip?’

  Michelle brought her fingertips to her swollen bottom lip. ‘It hurts a little, but I’ll live. A small price to pay for sending one more scumbag to prison.’

  ‘And I hope he rots in there.’

  Michelle chuckled, more out of relief than amusement. ‘With what we have on him, I’m sure he will.’

  It had taken the FBI less than two hours to discover the small hotel Bobby had booked for the day. It was only three blocks away from Venice Beach, where he was arrested. Inside the room they had found personal documents, credit cards, money, sex paraphernalia, pills, alcohol and a small, medicine-sized bottle containing some clear liquid. The bottle was already with the FBI forensics lab, and everyone had their money on the liquid testing positive for some sort of homemade date-rape drug, like gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. But the real finding came from a small black case by the bed. Inside it they’d found Bobby’s personal laptop computer with hundreds of images and video clips, together with a digital video camera.

  To Michelle’s delight, Bobby hadn’t had a chance to transfer the contents of the camera’s memory card to his laptop – an unedited, twelve-minute video clip filmed only two days ago. The clip clearly showed Bobby with a girl who looked no older than eleven.

  ‘So,’ Harry said. ‘You’re coming out to celebrate, right? We’re all going to Baja for a few drinks, and maybe some food.’

  Baja was a Mexican grill-restaurant and bar just two blocks away from the FBI building.

  Michelle glanced at her watch. ‘Sure, but why don’t you guys go ahead and I’ll meet you there in about forty minutes or so. I just want to have another look at that crazy footage we recorded on Friday. You know, that woman inside that glass coffin . . . that whole voting thing.’

  Harry gave her a feeble smile. He knew they had thrown everything they had at that transmission while the stream was live, but they’d gotten nowhere. Every path had led to a dead end. The FBI CCD was rarely blocked out of an Internet transmission so professionally, and their “failure” to find a way in had pissed Michelle off in a way Harry had only seen once before. She simply didn’t know how to accept defeat.

  ‘What are you hoping to find, Michelle?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing.’ She avoided eye contact. ‘Maybe the killer is that much cleverer than we are.’

  ‘It’s not a competition, you know?’

  ‘Yes, it is, Harry.’ She finally looked at him with something burning in her eyes. ‘Because if he’s better than we are . . . if he wins and we lose, people die . . . in a very grotesque way.’

  Harry lifted both hands in a surrender gesture, but he knew Michelle wasn’t angry with him. ‘Would you like some help?’

  Michelle smiled. ‘I’ll be OK. You know me. Go celebrate with everyone, and I’ll be down in a little while. And don’t get too drunk before I get there.’

  ‘Oh, I can’t promise you that.’ He started moving toward the door.

  ‘Harry,’ she called. ‘Order me a Caipirinha, will you? Extra lime.’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  Harry turned away from Michelle and smiled at himself. ‘Yeah, I bet you won’t,’ he muttered.

  Forty-Six

  After everyone had left, Michelle dimmed the lights around her desk, poured herself a large cup of coffee and started going over the footage they had recorded from the Internet three days ago. She had never forgotten those images, but watching that woman locked inside that glass coffin again, while a nest of tarantula hawks slowly stung the life out of her, made every hair on Michelle’s neck stand on end. Her swollen bottom lip started throbbing again, as her heartbeat accelerated. For an instant, right at the end of the footage, when one of the large black wasps exited through the woman’s nasal cavity, Michelle had to fight the urge to be sick, a sensation, she remembered, not that much different from the day four FBI agents blasted through her door in the early hours of the morning to arrest her.

  From a very early age, Michelle had always been great with computers, something that not even she could explain. It was like her brain was wired differently, patched up to make even the most complicated lines of machine code read like a nursery rhyme.

  Michelle Kelly was born in Doyle, northern California. Her father passed away when she was only fourteen years old. A smoker since his early teens and with a weak immune system, he had contracted pneumonia while he struggled to get over a very bad cold. Her mother, a timid and submissive woman, who had always dreaded being alone, remarried a year later.

  Michelle’s stepfather was a violent drunk, who very soon transformed her low-self-esteem mother into a drug-taking, alcohol-drinking zombie. Despite trying hard, Michelle was powerless to stop her mother from becoming a wreck.

  Late one night, six months after her stepfather moved in, he carefully pushed open the door to Michelle’s bedroom and stepped inside. Her mother was passed out in the living room, after consuming three-quarters of a bottle of vodka.

  Michelle jerked awake as her stepfather threw his large, sweaty and naked body on top of her, her heart racing in her chest, her breath rasping in her throat, confusion and terror lighting her eyes. He cupped his meaty hand over her mouth, pushed her head hard into the pillow and whispered in her ear,‘Shhhh, don’t fight it, babe. You gonna like this. I promise you. I’m gonna school you on what a real man feels like. And very soon you’ll be begging me for more.’

  He had managed to partially rip her clothes off, and as he prepared to enter her he relaxed his grip over her lips. Michelle opened her mouth wide, but instead of screaming, she bit down hard with all the strength she had in her. Her young teeth cut through flesh and bone as if she was biting into a slab of butter, severing his pinky finger clean off. She spat it back into his face while he screamed in agony, blood cascading down his hand and arm. Before running out of the house and into the night, she grabbed a baseball bat and swung it right
between his opened legs so hard and with such precision that it made him vomit. She never went back.

  Three days later, after hitching four different rides, Michelle arrived in Los Angeles. She lived on the streets for several days, eating out of trashcans, sleeping under cardboard boxes and using the shower and facilities at Santa Monica Beach.

  It was at that same beach that she met Trixxy and her boyfriend, two heavily tattooed surfers who told her that she could crash at their house if she wanted to. ‘A lot of people do,’ they explained.

  It was true. Their house was always full of people coming and going.

  Michelle soon found out that Trixxy and her boyfriend weren’t only surf lovers. They were part of one of the first generations of Internet hackers. Back then the Internet was still taking its initial baby steps into the commercial world. Everything was new, and security was flawed.

  It didn’t take Trixxy and her boyfriend long to find out that Michelle was a natural with computers. No, ‘natural’ wasn’t really the right word. Michelle was an absolute genius. She was able, in minutes, to work out and write the correct code procedures to overcome problems that would take Trixxy and her boyfriend hours to do, if not days. In no time she was hacking into all sorts of web servers and online databases – universities, hospitals, public and private organizations, financial institutions, federal agencies, international enterprises . . . Nothing was off limits. The more secure they were supposed to be, the bigger the challenge, and the better Michelle became. She even broke into the FBI and the NSA databanks twice in the same week.

  Like every hacker in cyberspace, Michelle gave herself an alias – Thrasos, the Greek mythological spirit of boldness. Very becoming, she thought.

  In cyberspace the possibilities were endless, and Michelle was just starting to have fun. That was when she found out that her mother had passed away after ingesting half a box of sleeping pills and washing them down with a bottle of bourbon.

  Michelle cried for three whole days, a combination of sadness and anger. She soon learned that only a few months before, her stepfather had convinced her mother to make a will, leaving the house that they lived in, which had been bought by her real father, and everything of any value she still had to him. With that, Michelle’s anger mutated. Her stepfather had transformed her mother into a drunken junkie, and then stolen everything she had. When Michelle checked, she found out that he had already put the house up for sale. That was when the angry monster inside her started screaming – REVENGE.

  Within a week her stepfather’s life had taken a turn for the very worst. Through the Internet, Michelle started wrecking his life. All the money in his bank account went mysteriously missing, seemingly due to some internal computer error that no one could track down. She ran up absurd gambling debts in his name, maxed out his credit cards, suspended his driver’s license, and modified his internal revenue tax declaration in such a way that it would be only a matter of time before the IRS came asking questions. She left him broke, unemployed, homeless and alone.

  Three months later he stepped in front of a train.

  Michelle never lost a second of sleep over what she did.

  It was an ex-boyfriend, after being arrested for possession of drugs with intent to distribute, who, in exchange for a deal, tipped the cops about Michelle. The cops, in turn, escalated the tip to the FBI Cybercrime Division, who’d already been looking for Thrasos for some time. With the information the ex-boyfriend had given them, it took the FBI less than a week to set up a monitoring operation. The arrest came a few days later. Four agents blasted through her front door, just as Michelle had broken into the WSCC database – the interconnected power grid that distributes electric energy to the entire west coast of the United States. She had just restructured their rates system, giving everyone, from Montana down to New Mexico and across to California, electric energy at dirt-cheap prices.

  By then, cybercrime and cyber terrorism had already become a major threat to America and its way of life. The government of the United States understood that someone with the kind of expertise Michelle Kelly possessed had the potential to become a tremendous asset and an ally in their new fight, rather than an enemy. With that in mind, the FBI offered her a deal – carry on hacking, but on this side of the law, or a very, very long stint in prison.

  Michelle took the deal.

  She soon realized that she didn’t really miss her old life. She wasn’t a hacker because she liked to break the law, or for monetary gain. She was a hacker because she enjoyed the challenge and the thrill, and she was brilliant at it. The deal she was offered took none of that away; it just made it all legal.

  Not surprisingly, the FBI played its cards perfectly. Knowing that the reason why Michelle had run away from home had been her abusive stepfather, they acclimatized her to her new role by making sure that every case she dealt with throughout her first year with the Bureau involved a cyber-sex crime – more precisely, pedophilia. Michelle’s anger and disgust toward such offenders were so intense, she buried herself in work, making every case a personal issue.

  She was so good at what she did that within four years she was heading the Los Angeles FBI Cybercrime Division.

  Michelle shook the memory out of her head now before turning her attention back to the footage of the woman locked inside the glass coffin again. She watched the recording one more time from the beginning, her eyes searching for any sort of missed detail, but once again she failed to pick up anything.

  ‘What the hell are you looking for, Michelle? There’s nothing here,’ she said to herself, while rubbing the palm of her hand against her forehead.

  She took a bathroom break, refilled her coffee cup and returned to her desk. She wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

  Her next step was to slow the footage down 2.5 times, and, with the help of a ‘color and contrast’ application, to enhance the images using a color saturation method. The over-saturation tended to heighten small details, things people wouldn’t pick up on otherwise.

  Michelle sat forward on her chair, placed her elbows on her desk, rested her chin on her knuckles and started from the top again.

  The reduced speed made watching the footage almost mind numbing. The color and contrast saturation tired the eyes faster, straining the ocular globes. Michelle found herself taking short breaks every three to four minutes. To relax her eyes, she would refocus them on something at the opposite end of the room for a moment, while massaging her temples, but she could already feel a headache gaining momentum right behind her eyeballs.

  ‘Maybe I should’ve accepted Harry’s help,’ she murmured to herself. ‘Or better yet, maybe I should’ve just gone with them, because right about now I sure as hell could do with a drink.’

  She had another sip of her coffee before letting the footage play again, and checked the time counter in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen. She had just over a minute to go.

  As her eyes returned to the screen, Michelle swore she saw something flash past.

  Not a tarantula hawk.

  ‘What the hell?’

  She paused the recording, rewound the images back just a couple of seconds and hit ‘play’.

  Zoom.

  She saw it go past again.

  Adrenaline rushed through her body.

  Once more Michelle rewound the images, but this time she zoomed in on a specific section of the screen and shut down the color and contrast saturation program. Instead of allowing the footage to play, she manually advanced it frame by frame.

  And there it was.

  Forty-Seven

  Hunter and Garcia followed Brindle down the short corridor that led deeper into the house and back into Christina Stevenson’s bedroom.

  ‘We ran a UV test against the bed sheets, the bed covers and the pillowcases,’ Brindle announced, guiding both detectives toward the bed. ‘No traces of semen anywhere, but there are tiny bloodstains, mainly on this corner of the bed covers. The lab will tell us if the blood belongs t
o the victim or not.’ He indicated the location before turning the UV light back on. ‘Have a look.’

  One simple and quick way to detect bloodstains on dark or red surfaces was to use an ultraviolet light. It provides enough contrast between the background and the stain to allow the stain to be visualized.

  As soon as the UV light came on, four small, smeared bloodstains became clearly noticeable on the dark blue bed cover. But they were minimal, and totally inconclusive. A small razor nick from shaving her legs in the shower could’ve produced them.

  Brindle knew that too, but he wasn’t finished yet. He turned off the UV light and handed Hunter and Garcia a small clear plastic evidence bag. Inside it was a woman’s diamond Tag Heuer watch.

  ‘I found that under the bed, near the wall.’

  Still neither detective looked impressed. The room was an absolute mess. Objects of all shapes and sizes had been knocked over and kicked across the floor in all directions. The watch could have been on the dresser to start with, but ended up under the bed.

  ‘That’s not all,’ Brindle said, noticing the skepticism on both detectives’ faces. He showed them a second clear plastic evidence bag. It contained three tiny items. ‘I also found these under the bed. Here, use this.’ He handed them an illuminated magnifying glass.

  Hunter and Garcia studied the items in the bag for several seconds.

  ‘Fingernail chips,’ Hunter said.

  ‘Torn fingernail chips,’ Brindle clarified. ‘They were stuck to the floorboard grooves.’ He paused, giving Hunter and Garcia a chance to digest what he was saying. ‘It looks like the victim was hiding under the bed. The perpetrator found her, and I’d say he pulled her out by the legs. The dislodged dust from under the bed created a smeared pattern, which is consistent with something heavy . . . like a person, being dragged from under it.’