by Lee Goldberg
"I'm only going where the evidence takes me," Steve said.
"That's just it," Mark replied. "You're being taken."
* * *
"She was this cute little furball," the woman said, wincing. "Just sitting outside the Starbucks this morning, waiting for her master to return with a latte."
Jesse's patient was a plus-sized woman in her forties. From the numerous bloodstains on her blouse, she looked at first to be far more injured than she actually was. Her only wound was a mild dog bite to her left hand. She got blood all over herself trying to shake her hand free from the dog's jaws, waving the beast around until he finally let go.
"Didn't your parents ever tell you not to pet strange dogs?" Jesse said, examining her wound.
"The dog didn't look strange to me," the woman said.
"Well, you must have looked strange to him," Jesse said. "Do you know if the dog had a rabies shot?"
"You can call the vet and find out," she said, handing him a slip of paper with her good hand. "I wrote the number down. They might still be there."
"The dog got hurt, too?" Jesse asked.
"He wouldn't let go until I whacked him against the wall a couple of times," the woman said, then noticed the way Jesse was looking at her. "I had no choice. It was self- defense."
"I'll call the vet. You're going to need a tetanus shot and some antibiotics." Jesse pocketed the note. "I'll be back to clean and dress the wound in a few minutes."
"Are the shots really necessary?" the woman asked. "The dog seemed clean to me."
"You also thought he was friendly," Jesse said. "Besides, think about where even the friendliest dogs like to lick themselves."
Jesse left the exam room and was on his way to the phone at the nurses' station when Susan caught up with him. She handed him a piece of paper.
"Take a look at this," she said.
He glanced at it, bewildered. "This looks like your resume."
"I've spent the last few years in the nursing field, but I worked a little in the food-service industry when I was in college," Susan said. "As a nurse, I'm told I have a comforting and supportive bedside manner, so I'm sure my table-side manners are good, too. I've had to work very fast in the ER, taking doctors' orders, treating patients. Add that all up, and it's obvious I could be the fastest, friendliest, hardest-working waitress you've ever hired."
Jesse set the paper side and looked at her with concern. "Susan, what are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about a job." She ran a hand across her cheek, wiping away a tear. "I'm suddenly in the market."
"You've been fired?" Jesse asked incredulously.
"It's part of a new 'austerity program' to cut hospital spending. One nurse from every department is being cut, based on seniority," Susan said. "And since I have the least seniority of any of the ER nurses, I'm the one who has to go."
"Dent can't fire you—we've got too few nurses as it is," Jesse said.
"And still more than the hospital can afford," Susan said, "at least that's what Dent said as he gave us our severance checks. I have to clean out my locker and turn in my ID at the end of my shift."
"This isn't about the budget," Jesse said. "This is about Dent trying to get at Mark."
"I'm not that close to Mark, and neither are the fifteen other nurses who got fired," Susan said. "This is about corporate greed and the bottom line."
"Dent knows how close you are to me, and how close I am to Mark, that's the bottom line," Jesse said. "You said it yourself, he's been gunning for us. Dent knew he couldn't just single you out and get away with it. Next he'll find a way to get rid of me, and then Amanda."
"I'm not so sure," Susan said.
"I am," Jesse said, "and I'm going to do something about it."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Mark was the lone figure strolling on the beach in the early-morning fog. There was an eerie, unreal quality to the light, the mist, and the long, broad expanse of empty sand. It seemed appropriate. His thoughts were on the killings, and the atmosphere matched the isolation he felt as the one person who still believed Lacey McClure was guilty.
The facts were on Lacey's side. Mark simply doubted the facts. Everything fit together too neatly, the revelations unfolding in an almost choreographed way.
Like a movie.
Lacey McClure was using the techniques of her profession to commit the perfect murder. Careful plotting of the story. Actors performing their scenes according to a detailed script. Forced perspective to fool the audience into seeing what she wanted them to see. Revelations of characters and plot timed for maximum dramatic impact.
But it was more than a double murder produced like a feature film. It was also a carefully orchestrated promotional campaign for Lacey McClure's new movie.
Her press conference, in which she accused the Mob of killing her husband, and the very public attempt on Mark's life just happened to coincide with the release of her new movie, a story about a woman pitted against organized crime.
It was all so clear to Mark. Unfortunately, there wasn't any evidence to prove it.
So why was he so certain? Why was he the only person unwilling to accept the facts?
It was a feeling—the kind that had never failed him in the past—the kind he had learned never to ignore when investigating a homicide. Although he didn't ignore his instincts, he wasn't beyond questioning them. Often the questions would reveal new paths of inquiry he hadn't considered be fore.
He asked himself what Lacey McClure had said or done that had convinced him on some deep level that she was guilty. The answer came to him almost immediately. It was how she'd described her deteriorating marriage to Cleve, and the reasons for keeping their supposed separation a secret.
She'd said they agreed to hide their marital separation, and the reasons for it, because the publicity would overshadow the premiere of their movie. Her explanation gave Mark a clear picture of her mind-set. It revealed her priorities, the importance she placed on marketing, and the amount of premeditation that went into her actions. More importantly, it revealed her unabashed desire to manipulate the media to her own advantage.
News about her marital difficulties might have trumped the coverage of her movie if it had been revealed before the murders. But now, with her husband dead and herself cast as both victim and heroine, it was a marketing dream.
It was too good to be true.
And it made his feelings about Lacey's guilt even stronger. Despite the evidence. Despite logic. Despite it all.
To others, he might be seen as arrogant, defiant, and stubborn in his refusal to let go of his belief in her guilt. Maybe even to his own son. But Mark wasn't going to give up. He couldn't. It was beyond his control now.
Which was, perhaps, why he found himself standing out side Lacey and Cleve's beach. house, where the mystery began for him. The yellow police tape that surrounded the house fluttered in the breeze like decorative streamers for a party. He was alone on the beach. The media flotilla in the bay was long gone; the story wasn't here anymore.
But it was for Mark.
When all else fails, he thought, go back to the beginning. He strode up to the house, looking around to see if anyone was watching him. There was no one. He lifted up the tape, stepped under it, and tripped over a boulder in the dune grass.
Mark staggered, regaining his balance and managing not to fall. He glared back at the rock resentfully, as if it was a person playing a prank on him.
The rock was granite, barely peeking out of the wavy dune grass that delineated the property lines of the house. But as he studied it, he realized it wasn't a rock at all. It was a stereo speaker designed to look like a boulder.
He turned and looked at the other side of the property and saw a matching speaker. In fact, there were several hidden amidst the sparse plantings.
The sight was like a key slipped into a deadbolt. Mark could almost feel the tumblers falling in his mind, unlocking a memory and, with it, a revelation.
He h
urried up the stairs to the deck and tried the French doors. They were locked. He took another quick look around, smashed one of the panes with his sleeve-covered elbow, then reached in and opened the door.
Mark slipped inside, closed the door behind him, then glanced around the living room. The champagne glasses, the bucket of melted ice, and the woman's shoes were gone. But one thing was exactly as it had been the first time he'd come through the door on the day of the shooting.
The power lights on the entertainment system were on.
He examined the elaborate components which, combined, looked like something from the cockpit of a jetliner. But he saw a button with a right-pointing arrow on it, the universal symbol for PLAY, and pressed it. There was a whirring sound as the disc in the CD player began to spin. A counter appeared on the CD player display, ticking off the number of tracks, the seconds as they passed, and the total running time remaining on the disc. There was only one track and sixty minutes of running time.
Using the toggle control, Mark advanced the CD to the last two minutes of the track, then went to the front door and opened it, leaving it slightly ajar.
Two gunshots rang out, startling Mark even though he was expecting them. Almost immediately, two more shots cracked the silence.
Mark glanced at his watch, sat down on the arm of the couch, faced the door, and waited.
It didn't take long.
Three minutes later, almost to the second, a shirtless Steve Sloan burst through the half-open door and sprang into the room, his gun leveled at Mark.
"Convincing, isn't it?" Mark said, smiling at his son, who was in his bare feet, wearing only a pair of gym shorts.
Steve lowered his gun, gave his father a furious look, and went straight to the phone. He dialed the emergency operator, identified himself, and told her to cancel the patrol cars responding to the scene. It was a false alarm, and they could ignore the dozens of other calls they were bound to get re porting gunfire. When he hung up, he turned angrily to his father.
"You were asleep, but you still beat my time getting here," Mark said. "You must have been running, which couldn't have been easy barefoot."
"You want to explain to me what the hell it is you're doing here?" Steve said irritably, holding his gun at his side. There was no other place to put it.
"Answering one of the unanswered questions that's been nagging at me about the murders."
Mark went to the entertainment center and ejected a CD. There was no label on the disc, but it was obviously a CD-R, the kind used in computer drives to copy data, music, and video files. He took the disc out, holding it carefully by the edges.
"This is a recording of sixty minutes of silence and then four gunshots," Mark explained. "Lacey shot her husband and his lover with a silenced gun, then on her way out put the CD in the stereo, cranked up the volume and hit PLAY, so everybody would think the murder happened an hour later than it did."
"How do you' know it was Lacey McClure?"
Mark held up the disc. "Does this seem like the kind of thing that Albert 'Fresh' Frescetti, a guy who shot at me from a truck in broad daylight on the Pacific Coast High way, would think of doing?"
"No, but that doesn't mean it's Lacey McClure, nor does it explain how she could have been in two places at once."
"Let's get this CD analyzed first," Mark said, handing Steve the disc, "and we'll worry about the rest later."
"I have to worry about it now."
"If I were you," Mark said. "I'd be worrying about walking home in your underwear."
Steve glared at his father. "When, exactly, did it occur to you that the killer might have used this CD ploy?"
"While I was walking on the beach."
"You could have come home and told me what your hunch was. Then I could have gone to the police station, picked up the key to this house, and returned here to recover the CD," Steve said. "Instead, you thought it was a better idea to break in and play the CD at the highest possible volume, waking up the entire beach and getting me to run down here in my shorts to point a gun at you."
"Yes, but it proved my theory far more effectively than simply explaining it would have," Mark smiled, walking past Steve to the door. "And besides, it was a lot more fun."
Special Agent Larry Bedard slipped the CD from Cleve's entertainment center into his computer and played the gun shot at low volume. He didn't want a hundred FBI agents rushing down to the Federal Building basement and drawing their guns on him and Steve.
The sound of the gunshot was represented by an EKG like display on his computer screen, much like the voices Bedard recorded on his wiretaps.
"Okay, that's one of the gunshots from the CD-R you found," Bedard said. "What kind of gun was the murder weapon?"
"A .45 ACP," Steve said. An Automatic Colt Pistol.
Bedard typed furiously on his keyboard. The screen with the readouts of the gunshots was reduced to a smaller window, and another, identical window opened, only without a soundtrack displayed.
He did some more typing, and a third window opened up, this one with a program Steve recognized. It was Internet Explorer.
"Checking your e-mail?" Steve asked.
"Snagging a recording off the web of a .45 being fired," Bedard said as a website came up, offering thousands of sounds in hundreds of categories.
"You can do that?" Steve asked.
"You can do anything on the web," Bedard said. "Buy your groceries, get a medical exam, talk to friends, do your taxes, read a book, spy on your neighbor, watch a movie, have sex with a stranger. . ."
Steve wondered how much of that Bedard knew from personal experience, working alone down here in this cave. It was an unsettling thought.
With a few key clicks of his mouse, Bedard found a .wav file of a .45-caliber gunshot and downloaded it in seconds.
"Okay," Bedard said. "Let's see how they match up."
Again, keeping the volume low, Bedard played the gun shot, the sound depicted as a series of sharp peaks and valleys on the graphical display.
Mark was right: There was a difference in pitch between the gunshots. Steve heard it himself. Then again, he'd heard the other shot only seconds ago, so the comparison was easier for him to make. What stunned Steve was that his father could remember a detail like that after a number of days.
Bedard highlighted the .45 readout with his cursor, then moved it across the screen to the other window, laying it on top of the readout from the CD-R. Sure enough, the two didn't match.
"I'm not a ballistics or audio expert, but my guess is that the recording on the CD-R is a rifle shot, which has a higher frequency than a bullet fired from a handgun," Bedard said. "The guy probably didn't know the difference. To most civilians, a gunshot is a gunshot—they all go bang. He probably snagged this file off the web someplace, just like I did."
"So it's a dead end I can't trace," Steve said. "What about the disc?"
"It's a recordable CD," Bedard said. "You can buy them anywhere and burn them in any computer."
"Is there any way to identify the computer that burned this CD?"
"Yes and no," Bedard said, beginning to type again. A different window opened up, strings of commands and responses that made no sense at all to Steve. "The studios and music companies are all pissed off about people copying songs and swapping them on the Internet, so they've come up with some sneaky ways of tracking these pirates down. You know the biggest weakness all criminals share, right?"
"They like anything they can get for free," Steve said.
The LAPD had mounted several contest cons, luring wanted criminals out of hiding by tricking them into thinking they'd won free trips, cars, and cell phones. It amazed Steve that a guy on the run from a $700,000 jewelry heist would come in from hiding for a free weekend in Lake Tahoe.
"Same goes for your basic pimply-faced teenager who wants to burn CDs of songs he's ripped off from file-swapping services," Bedard said, still typing and clicking away. "So the studios and record companies have started of
fering CD- burning software for free on the web."
Steve smiled, already seeing the genius of the plan. "The software leaves a trail that leads right back to the copyright violator."
Bedard nodded. "Anybody on a network, or using high-speed Internet services, has an Ethernet card or adapter in their computer. Each adapter has a unique, twelve-byte, hexadecimal serial number hardwired into it that can't be changed. It's known as the MAC-address, short for media access control. The free CD-burning software scribbles that MAC address onto every disc it formats and every file it rips."
"What if our guy didn't use one of these programs?"
"That's something you don't have to worry about," Bedard said. "Because he did. The MAC address of his net work card is 00-A0-B7-A9-C8-4C."
Steve wrote the number down on his notepad. "Okay, now what does that mean?"
"It identifies the manufacturer and the serial number of the specific card."
"This is terrific," Steve said excitedly, a smile on his face. Finally, a real break in the case. "All I have to do is contact the manufacturer, he'll tell me which computer this card is in, and a few phone calls from now, I'll be knocking on the killer's door."
"I don't think so," Bedard said.
"Why not?" Steve said, his smile evaporating.
"Remember when you asked me if you could trace the CD-R and I said yes and no?" Bedard said. "Well, here comes the no part. There are literally tens of millions of these cards out there in tens of millions of desktop and lap top computers. I'm not even counting tiny Ethernet cards you can carry in your shirt pocket and use in any computer that's handy."
"So what good is this MAC address to me?"
"If you find the right computer, you can match it to this CD-R."
"If I knew where the right computer was," Steve said, "I wouldn't need to trace the CD-R."
Bedard shrugged. "Nobody said this job was easy."
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jesse was armed for war. His weapons were a computer, a high-speed Internet connection, a bowl of Nacho Cheese Doritos, and a huge bottle of Coca-Cola.
