The Naked Eye

by Iris Johansen

  “Ha. If you dare say that the next time you try to manipulate me, I’ll slap you.”

  He smiled. “I think you would.”

  “Bet on it. FYI, you should probably keep that little rationalization to yourself.”

  “Point taken.”

  Kendra spotted Griffin and several other agents in a large conference room separated from the corridor by floor-to-ceiling glass walls. Griffin waved them in.

  Stacks of file folders, reports, and photos covered the long conference table. Agents were hurriedly sorting through the material and pinning especially relevant items on bulletin boards.

  Kendra went still when they spotted the hundreds of printed photos stacked in the center of the table.

  Photos of her. The same photos she had seen papering ever square inch of Colby’s cell that day she’d visited him in San Quentin.

  They’d made her ill then, and they made her even more so now. Colby had let it be known that he wanted pictures of her, and his numerous correspondents had obliged by sending printed photos from the Web. He’d known that her trail would eventually lead to his cell, and he surmised quite correctly that the collage would creep the hell out of her.

  “Sorry you had to see those again,” Griffin said. “After Colby’s execution, we—”

  “You mean supposed execution,” Kendra said.

  “Yes. Supposed execution.”

  She wished she didn’t take satisfaction from the barely contained anger and frustration that suddenly flashed across his face.

  He continued. “We subpoenaed the contents of his prison cell, along with copies of all call and visitor logs. As you know, there was some thought that he might have been responsible for other victims not yet on our radar, and we wanted to have this stuff just in case we needed it down the road. We had it all brought up from our storage facility in National City.”

  Lynch looked at the stacks of opened mail on the table. “Popular guy for a mass murderer.”

  Griffin shrugged. “The culture of celebrity. He obviously had help with the computer stuff, so we’re still trying to identify as many of his contacts as we can.”

  “Isn’t most of this in the copies and scans you gave me?” Kendra asked.

  “Most, but not all. There are notes scribbled on the backs of some of these photos, and we’ve tracked some more info from the cell phones he was using in prison. We want to make sure we haven’t missed anything.” Griffin picked up a sheaf of papers from the table. “Your friend, Beth Avery, e-mailed me this fairly detailed memo outlining several possibilities for who may be helping Colby in this area. She zeroed in on Joseph Northrup but indicated there were a few more experts who might be suspect. It’s very impressive.”

  “She’s very impressive,” Kendra said.

  “Well, Sims, our computer forensics specialist in Quantico certainly thinks so. I understand he and Zackoff have been in cahoots since I requested help after Stokes’s death. But the director wants him to work more closely with Zackoff, so Sims is flying in this morning. He should be arriving around noon. Sims will drop in here first. He wants to see what both our local people and Beth Avery have come up with. Then he’ll take a look at the documents and have her explain how she sourced them for her memo.”

  “It’s based almost entirely on this material you’ve had in your possession for months,” Kendra said.

  “Okay, I can see you want to rub it in,” Griffin said. “And it’s your right. We’re playing catch-up, I admit that. You’ve been looking for Colby for months, and we’ve only been on this for forty-eight hours.” He gestured to the piled Colby info on the table. “But we’re making progress. You can see we’re trying like hell.”

  “Yes, I can see that.” He wanted her to praise him, exonerate him. But there in the conference room, surrounded by Colby’s mementos, Kendra felt the walls closing in on her. She tried desperately to push the sensation away from her. She’d had the same reaction when she last saw the man himself at San Quentin.

  She drew a deep breath, trying to steady her racing heartbeat.

  Power through it. If she let this rattle her, then the monster wins.

  She couldn’t let that happen.

  Lynch did not glance at her, but he gave her arm an unobtrusive squeeze. She felt a rush of gratitude. He alone could see what she was going through, but he wasn’t about to blow her lack of control in front of this roomful of agents.

  “Fine,” Kendra finally said. She pulled out her phone. “I’ll text Beth and ask her to be here at noon for the meeting and bring her docs and source materials.”

  “Thank you.”

  Lynch quickly turned to Griffin and changed the subject. “Do you know for sure where Stokes was abducted?”

  “We have a pretty good idea.” Griffin jerked his head toward the doorway. “I’ll show you.”

  They followed him to another conference room just a few yards away. It looked positively barren compared to the room they had just left, but the two bulletin boards were filled with photographs of a home and driveway.

  “Stokes never showed up for work that morning, but he’d made a few calls from home between seven thirty and eight.” Griffin pointed to a photo of a silver thermal travel mug lying on the driveway. “It looks like he was taken here as he was getting into his car. Autopsy results show that he had a fast-acting muscle relaxant in his system, so it’s likely he was caught by surprise and injected with it.”

  “Was there anyone else at home?” Kendra asked.

  “No, he lived alone. Divorced. His wife and three kids live with husband number two in La Jolla.”

  “None of the neighbors saw anything?” Kendra pointed to some of the other photographs. “These houses look pretty close together.”

  “Yes, but the driveway at that point has limited visibility. Colby chose his spot well.”

  “He always has.”

  Lynch was staring at a pair of blurry photos of a white van. “What’s this?”

  “Neighbors did report a white van on the street, and one of them even puts it in Stokes’s driveway that morning. Traffic cams captured these between 8:15 and 8:25 that morning, with this van moving away from Stokes’s neighborhood.”

  Lynch’s eyes narrowed on the grainy photos. “Can’t read the license plates, of course.”

  “Of course. I’ll be the first to chip in whenever the hell this city decides to invest in some HD traffic cams. We’re trying to round up some security-camera footage in the area to see if we can get a better look at it. It’s a Ford Transit with fifty/fifty rear cargo doors and a 130-inch wheelbase. Naturally, there are about a million of those around. And Stokes’s neighborhood was just as ordinary. We were lucky that anyone even noticed the van.”

  Kendra fought back a wave of sadness as she turned back to look at Stokes’s modest home. She hadn’t known about his failed marriage, and she realized that she actually knew very little about the man. They had only met a few days before, at the scene of that domestic homicide case. It seemed like so much longer ago that she and Stokes had made their introductions and discussed her work on the Van Buren investigation. She’d never imagined that just a few days later he would—

  The Van Buren case.

  She sharply turned away from the bulletin board.

  He’d been so impressed that her lip-reading abilities had blown the case wide open. Is it possible that he—?

  “I need to see the video of Stokes’s death,” she said abruptly. “Right now, Griffin.”

  Griffin wrinkled his brow. “Once wasn’t enough for you?”

  “Once is too much for anyone. But I need to look at it again in your A/V lab. It may need to be zoomed in and sharpened. Can you arrange that?”

  Griffin still seemed mystified by her request, but he nodded. “Zoomed in, sharpened, forward, backward, or upside down. Any way you want to see it. Do you mind telling me why?”

  “It may be nothing, but there’s a chance Stokes might have been trying to tell me something. I ca
n’t be sure until I look.”

  “We can go downstairs and have one of the A/V techs pull it up on his console. It’s the same guys who are combing security-camera footage for more views of that van. I can pull one of them off for a few minutes.”

  “Thanks, Griffin. It’s worth a shot.”

  * * *

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, KENDRA, LYNCH, and Griffin stood in a small, windowless room looking over the shoulder of a chubby, young A/V tech named Nate Copley. Nate sat at his video console, looking up at a flat-panel monitor as he turned a shuttle-wheel control next to his keyboard.

  Kendra felt a wrenching pang as Stokes’s agonized face appeared on the screen. “It was around five minutes before the end. Please skip as much of this as you can.”

  “Gotcha,” Nate said. “I logged this myself. I hoped I would never have to see it again.”

  Kendra turned around to avoid the Stokes video as it sped past. Behind them, a tech was at another console, scanning through parking-lot security-camera footage that also happened to capture a busy street. He slowed the footage whenever he saw anything that resembled the elusive white van, then resumed the high-speed scan each time it proved to be nothing.

  Nate pointed to his monitor. “Around here?”

  Kendra turned back to the monitor. “I think so … Go a little slower.” She studied the image. “Stop when you see Stokes’s head angle slightly to the right. It happens someplace around … There!” She touched Nate’s shoulder. “Play it at regular speed.”

  She moved in for a closer view of Stokes’s final moments. His face twisted in agony, and his lips moved as if muttering a curse. Yet no sound came out.

  He did it again.

  “See that?” Kendra said. “Still no sound, but I think his lip movements were identical.”

  Seconds later he did it once more, then settled back on the table in a state of collapse.

  Kendra turned back toward Lynch and Griffin. “Stokes knew I broke the Van Buren case by reading the lips of the murderer on the phone at the crime scene. He might have been trying to tell me something.”

  She turned toward Nate. “Can you zoom in on his face and play it again?”

  He turned back the shuttle dial. “Yes, but it’s going to get blurrier. I’ll enhance it as much as I can.”

  He scanned back and used his keyboard controls to zoom in on Stokes’s face. He used another control to adjust the sharpness, finally finishing with a setting that was slightly more defined than where they started.

  She leaned forward, tensely examining the shape and movement of the detective’s mouth.

  What are you saying to me, Stokes?

  I’m here. I’m listening.

  “Play it again, please.”

  Nate punched a key and leaned back in his chair. “It’s now on a loop. It will keep repeating until you tell me to stop it.”

  Lynch leaned closer to the monitor. “Can you even get a read from this angle?”

  “It’s not the easiest, but I…” She was silent, her gaze on the ever-repeating video. Detach. Focus. Take the movements one at a time. Then bring them together. Her eyes narrowed. “Wingate!”

  “What?” Griffin said.

  “Hush.” She stared at the screen for a moment longer. “That’s it. I’m positive.”

  “Wingate?” Griffin repeated.

  “Yes. The ‘g’ is hardest to pick up, but you can see it bouncing on his throat.”

  “You can see it,” Lynch said. “I can only trust you. But what does it mean?”

  “I hope it’s someone’s name,” Kendra said. “How the hell do I know? But whatever it is, it was important enough to Stokes to get it out to me even though he was in agony.”

  “It might be a name,” Griffin said. “Though it could be a street, a building, or a development of some kind. Or it could be the raving of a man out of his head with pain.”

  Lynch shook his head. “Kendra is right, Stokes tried to get it across three times while he was being slowly murdered. And did it in a way that he knew that Kendra could pick up on it yet Colby wouldn’t.”

  Griffin shrugged. “I’ve learned my lesson. I’m not about to overrule Kendra on anything to do with this case.” He picked the phone on the desk next to Nate’s workstation. “I’ll have my team start a search for it.”

  “I want to help,” Kendra said. “Get me a desk and a computer.”

  “Right away.”

  Kendra couldn’t take her eyes off Stokes on the monitor screen, still locked in that loop. He was sweating and bleeding, mere minutes away from death. But there he was, still heroically giving his all.

  Wingate.

  Lynch House

  10:25 A.M.

  “OKAY, LET ME INTO that inner sanctum, Sam,” Beth called through the door. “I’ve got a tray, and I’m not going away.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “I’m not going away,” she repeated. “You very rudely refused to come to breakfast with Lynch and Kendra. Even though I took the trouble to cook. So now you have to eat alone. But you will eat, Sam.”

  “It’s not rude to sacrifice myself to finding that son of a bitch. You have a wrong set of values.”

  “Open the door.”

  She heard him mumbling, but he was coming toward the door. The next moment, he’d thrown it open and stood scowling at her. “I’m not hungry.”

  “Your stomach has probably shrunk in the last few days.” She sailed into the office, deposited the tray on the coffee table and settled in a corner of the couch. “I haven’t been able to get you to eat. Stupid, Sam. Very stupid. I let you get away with it because the pressure was over the top, but now you’re back to a steady pace.” She poured herself a cup of coffee. “Omelet, bacon, and toast. Eat.”

  “Why don’t you go bother Kendra and Lynch?”

  “They went to the FBI office. I just got a text from Kendra. They want me to come in for some kind of forensic computer meeting and bring the research and sources I’ve pulled together on Colby’s possible computer consultants.” She grinned mischievously. “Think maybe Griffin wants me to teach his people a thing or two?” She changed the subject. “But before I go anywhere, I want to see you eat.”

  “So you’re going to stay and watch me?”

  “Yes, because you’ll forget it’s there. Then it will get cold and unappetizing, and you won’t eat it even when you do remember.”

  Sam sat down on the couch. “Nag.”

  “Just doing my job.” She smiled. “I told Kendra that it was a competition thing between you and Griffin’s fair-haired computer guy.”

  “Not true. I’m better than he is.”

  “Without doubt.”

  He nibbled at his bacon. “But Sims is smart, and I wouldn’t want him to think that he can get ahead of me. Just because he’s been up there in Quantico with those FBI directors kowtowing to him all those years is no sign that his thinking is any more innovative than mine. That would be embarrassing.”

  “You’d live through it.” She tilted her head. “And you can’t tell me that you couldn’t get a job there with all that kowtowing if you wanted it.”

  “Yeah, Sims has already mentioned it. I told him when I got as old as him, I’d think about it.”

  “Ouch. How old is he?”

  “Oh, fifty or so.” His smile was brimming with malicious mischief. “I couldn’t resist. He was being patronizing. Can you believe it? Patronizing to me.”

  “Criminal. All I can say is that you’d better come out on top of this horse race.”

  “I will. In the meantime, Sims is being helpful. We’re going at it from two different directions. He’s able to request logs from the Internet service providers for Kendra’s place, my house, and here, and he has a lot of resources at his disposal to analyze the data and try to figure out where Colby’s streams are coming from. I’m actually hacking a lot of those ISPs to find out the same thing. There’s some duplication of effort, but we each come up with stuff that the other can’t
easily find.”

  “I can see that. He has the full weight of the FBI behind him, and you have the freedom to skirt the law. That makes you a good team.”

  He scowled at her. “But it’s not as if I’m with him night and day. For your information, we haven’t been online since yesterday afternoon. We just check in when one of us has had a breakthrough. Then it’s natural that we have to work together.”

  “Perfectly natural,” she said solemnly.

  “Do I detect sarcasm?” He glanced at his watch. “I don’t have time for this.”

  “You do if I say you do. Eat. It’s the quickest way to get rid of me.”

  He took his fork and began cutting his omelet. “I didn’t really say I wanted to get rid of you. I just don’t want you to interfere. I kind of like having you around.”

  “Sam.”

  “Okay, I told you that I have privacy issues when I’m working. It’s true. But lately, you’ve been like Old Dog Tray.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  He chuckled. “You know, the dog that lies in front of the fireplace, and you don’t notice he’s there. But the song says he’s the best friend around.”

  “How flattering … I think.”

  “Look, you’re gorgeous and smart, but you don’t want me to flatter you. I save that for other women. You want the real thing.”

  “Old Dog Tray.”

  “Yeah, because it means something, like the way I feel about Kendra.”

  “Are you saying that she’s Old Dog Tray, too?”

  “In a way. We’ve been together for years, and we know we can count on each other.” He looked at her. “We’re like that now, aren’t we?”

  She nodded, smiling faintly. “I believe we’ve fought our way through to that status.”

  “Except I don’t know how you think sometimes. You know pretty much everything about me, but I don’t know—” He grimaced. “I didn’t ask Kendra much about how you got into that mental hospital. All I know is that you were imprisoned without cause.”

  “But you’re asking now.” She was silent for a moment. “I saw something I shouldn’t have seen, and my grandmother wanted to get rid of me.”

  “Something you shouldn’t have seen?”