Jessie Black Legal Thrillers Box Set 1

by Larry A Winters

  Graham didn’t sit. She prowled around the kitchen, staring at the top-of-the-line fixtures. “Nice house.” Graham managed to make it sound like an insult.

  “Yes, I’m going to miss it.”

  “You’re planning to move?” Graham said.

  He nodded. His expression seemed to say, What else can I do? Jessie supposed it wouldn’t be easy to stay here after what had happened. Even if the constant reminders of his son didn’t destroy him, the resentment of his neighbors probably would. Being the parent of a mass murderer tended to decrease a person’s popularity.

  Graham made her way to the granite countertop. She lifted a photograph from a pile of papers and held it up. “Your wife?”

  In the photo, Lanford stood with his arm around the waist of an elegant-looking blonde woman. He wore a tux and the woman was in a black gown. Tables in the background—a formal event of some kind.

  Lanford finished spooning coffee grounds into a stainless steel Cuisinart coffee maker before turning to look. “That’s Tanya. We’re not married.”

  He flipped on the coffee maker. A gurgling sound filled the kitchen, along with the rich aroma of coffee.

  “Is Tanya Russell’s mother?” Jessie said.

  “No.” Lanford looked uncomfortable now. Clearly he hadn’t been expecting to talk to them about this subject. “His mother—Caroline—left about ten years ago.”

  “She left?” Graham said. “Or you left her? Tanya’s what? Ten years younger than you?”

  “No,” Lanford said. “I mean she left. Just walked out one day, while I was at work and Russell was at school. She called us that night, from a motel in Ohio. Said she was sorry but she didn’t like her life with us anymore and wanted a new one. I filed for divorce later, when it became clear she wasn’t coming back.”

  “That must have been hard for Russell,” Jessie said.

  Lanford nodded. “Hard for both of us. But we got through it. Or—I guess I thought we did.” He carried two mugs to the table and put one in front of her, the other in front of Novak. “Cream or sugar?”

  Jessie added half-and-half to her coffee. Novak drank his black. Graham declined and continued to move around the kitchen even after Lanford joined Jessie and Novak at the table.

  “Russell used your guns when he shot those people,” Graham said.

  Lanford looked at her with an expression of defeat. “Yes. I kept them in a safe. I don’t know how he got the code.”

  “You have a lot of guns.”

  “I’m a collector.”

  “Nice hobby. Did Russell take all of them, or do you have even more?”

  “Is that relevant?” Lanford said.

  “Maybe,” Graham said evenly.

  “He left one. Maybe he couldn’t fit in his bag. A Browning X-Bolt SSA Predator, bolt action. Good for hunting.”

  “Good for hunting,” Graham repeated flatly.

  Lanford’s eyes flashed. “I own my guns legally. I’ve fully complied with the law.”

  Jessie sipped her coffee. She waited to see if Graham would pursue the topic, but the detective seemed satisfied for the moment.

  “Why don’t you tell us about the message board?” Jessie said.

  Lanford rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I think I better just show you.”

  He stood up and led them through the house. Carrying her coffee, Jessie followed him up a wide, spiral stairway to the second floor. Passing open doorways offering glimpses of large, well-appointed rooms, Jessie couldn’t help comparing Russell Lanford’s home to the two-bedroom ranch in south Jersey where her father had struggled to raise her brother and her with as many creature comforts as his factory job afforded. She and Alex had cheered when their dad brought home their first VCR—an unimaginable luxury. By comparison, Russell had grown up in a palace. How could a kid with so much to be thankful for turn into a twisted killer?

  “This is—I mean was—Russell’s bedroom,” Lanford said. Jessie braced herself—she’d visited killers’ lairs before, and had the nightmares to prove it—but when she entered the room, all she felt was deeper confusion about Russell. Other than exhibiting the same luxury as the rest of the house, his room was utterly normal. A double bed (unmade), a small desk with a MacBook on it and an open math textbook, a pair of jeans tossed over the back of a chair, movie posters on the walls (one corner of an Avengers poster coming loose where the tape had unstuck from the wall). Somehow, the ordinariness of the room was more chilling than pentagrams or animal bones or a bag full of hair and nail clippings—all of which she had seen, and found plenty disturbing at the time.

  Lanford stepped past her and opened the MacBook. The screen lit up and he touched the trackpad, opening the Safari web browser.

  “Do you use adult filters to keep him off the porn sites?” Novak asked. It seemed like an odd question, and Jessie wondered if he was looking for facts about Russell or advice for his own grandkid.

  “We used to.” Lanford leaned over the desk and typed a web address into the address bar. “Russell always found ways around them. I don’t think the filters would have blocked this website, anyway. It’s just a message board, a forum where people post messages and respond to each other. Here.” He drew the chair out from the desk. “Why don’t you sit down?”

  Jessie sat. Lanford had navigated the web browser to a website called Manpower. The layout was minimalist. A banner at the top read “MANPOWER: Men’s Rights.” Below the header was a list of forum threads, organized in order of the date of the most recent response. She knew from her own experience on other message boards that clicking on a thread would lead her to a page displaying the messages posted by the users—basically a public conversation. She didn’t see any real names—the users all used handles like Redpill2 and FightTheFemale.

  Her eyes scanned down the list of thread topics: Bitch cop sues police department after failing physical fitness test. Blatant man-shaming by radical feminist whore group at University of Michigan. Another false rape allegation—let’s dox this cunt. It went on and on, the anger and vitriol practically pulsating from the screen.

  “Detective, you want to take a look at this?” she said.

  Graham had been surveying the room, an expression of impatient boredom on her face. At Jessie’s question, she sighed and came over to the desk. With Graham hovering at her shoulder, Jessie scrolled down to show more threads. “What am I looking at here?” Graham said.

  “Anger,” Jessie said.

  One thread caught her eye: Coverage of Stevens Academy shooting shows typical anti-male bias. She clicked on it and found huge blocks of text, diatribes against the media’s supposedly unbalanced coverage of the shooting. Why no mention of the poisonous cheerleader culture? Because the feminist agenda seeks to maintain its sexual leverage that begins in our schools!

  Graham shook her head dismissively. “Anger on the internet?” she said dryly. “We must re-open the case immediately.”

  “I think you should take this more seriously,” Jessie said, trying to hide her annoyance.

  “Thanks for the tip.”

  Jessie’s stomach felt nauseated. The coffee she’d enjoyed moments before now felt heavy, and a sour taste filled her mouth. Still, she couldn’t fully dismiss Graham’s sarcasm. The Manpower message board was certainly disturbing, but exposure to fringe people usually was. If Russell had been a frequent participant on this board, then Jessie could believe he’d been influenced by its nasty propaganda. But that didn’t rise to a level impacting the case. It didn’t justify further investigation, especially when their shooter was already deceased. She sighed. Time to extricate herself from this situation, get out of here, and flush this toxic language from her memory.

  And then what? Book a flight somewhere sunny and lose herself with a Michael Connelly novel in one hand and a mojito in the other?

  “Mr. Lanford, we appreciate your bringing this to our attention.” She started to get up from the chair. “If we have any follow-up questions, we’ll call you—�
�

  “Wait,” he said. “There’s more I need to show you.” He leaned over, put his finger on the trackpad, and navigated to a bookmarked page.

  It was another page from the Manpower boards. The dates on the messages indicated that they had been posted the previous week. The thread topic was So Disgusted. The user who’d started the thread went by the name Betaloser. “Betaloser is—was—Russell,” Lanford said.

  “He told you his user name?” Jessie said.

  “I wish he had. I wish he’d talked to me about any of this stuff. I would have set him straight. But no, he kept all of this a secret from me. I only learned about the website and his user name when someone sent me an anonymous tip.”

  “A tip?” Graham gave Jessie a pointed look. Her voice sounded dubious, and Jessie knew why. A witness or suspect claiming knowledge from an anonymous source was the police investigation equivalent of a person asking for sex advice on behalf of a “friend.”

  “I received an e-mail about an hour after Russell was arrested. At first I thought it was some kind of cruel prank. But then I read the posts on the website. I know my son’s writing, his voice. These posts—it’s him. It’s Russell.”

  “Who sent you the email?” Jessie said.

  “It came from a Yahoo Mail account. Whoever sent it didn’t sign their name. It just said ‘Tipster.’”

  “Betaloser,” Jessie said, looking at the laptop screen.

  “Beta is one of the terms these people use,” Lanford said, “You know the old chestnut that women are only attracted to jerks? People were saying that back when I was a teenager—it’s nothing new. Now apparently they call those jerks ‘alphas.’ According to this Manpower nonsense, women are only attracted to alpha men. And betas are the opposite, the nice guys who get walked all over. Russell apparently felt that he was a beta and a loser. I wish I’d known before it was too late to help him, to show him how great he was and how much he had to look forward to in life.” Lanford’s voice cracked on the last word.

  Jessie read the first post by Betaloser: “I’ve been a lurker on the forum for a few weeks, and I’ve learned so much from you guys. All this time I’ve been lonely and unhappy and frustrated, and I didn’t know why. But now I do. Thanks to all of you, I finally see through the illusion. I see what women have done to us. What they continue to do to us. And I’m mad. Fuck that. I’m disgusted.”

  There were a handful of sympathetic responses: “Welcome to the club, Beta!” and “We’re all furious. How else can we feel?” and “Lots of good reading on the site. Check out the FAQ if you haven’t already. Written by VT himself.”

  “VT?” Jessie said.

  “Vaughn Truman,” Lanford explained. “I looked him up. He’s the founder of Manpower. He got rich off this website, believe it or not. You see all these Google ads around the side? This site generates a ton of ad revenue.”

  The next response in the thread was posted by a user calling himself True_Man. She pointed at the screen. “True_Man, with an underscore,” she said. “Do you think that’s him?”

  “I did at first,” Lanford said. “But not once I read True_Man’s posts. The real Truman is too smart to post crap like that. I think True_Man with an underscore is just a disciple. A dangerous one. Look at his post.”

  Jessie read True_Man’s response to Betaloser: “If you’re so disgusted, why don’t you stop being a pussy and do something about it?”

  Jessie leaned forward. From this point on, although other users added their comments from time to time, the rest of the page was a conversation between Betaloser and True_Man.

  Betaloser: “Do something like what?”

  True_Man: “Send a message.”

  Betaloser: “That’s what I’m doing right now.”

  True_Man: “Not to us. To them. To the bitches at your school. Do you have access to guns?”

  Betaloser: “You’re joking, right?”

  True_Man: “Think how good it would feel. How right. To get some revenge on those bitches. You could do it, Beta. You could knock them off their pedestals. Put them in their place, finally. You’d be a hero to us.”

  Betaloser: “I think you’re joking.”

  True_Man: “PM me.”

  That’s where the conversation ended. Jessie stared at the screen for a moment. “That’s it?”

  “PM means private message,” Graham said. She was staring at the screen over Jessie’s shoulder. The boredom seemed to have left her voice.

  “You’d need to sign in as Russell to access his private messages,” Lanford said, “and I don’t have his password. But now you see why I needed to show you this, right? This guy, True_Man or whatever his real name is, he must have convinced my son to kill those girls. I know my son was the shooter. I know that. But this … creature … pushed him.”

  Jessie glanced at Graham. There was a crease of frustration above the bridge of her nose. Jessie thought she knew what the detective was thinking. That all of this was awful, a hideous example of the worst impulses of human beings, but there wasn’t enough here for them to act on. There was no case.

  “We need to see the rest of the conversation,” Jessie said. “The private messages.”

  Lanford grimaced. “I must have tried a hundred words trying to guess his password.”

  “You looked for a piece of paper he might have written it down on?” Graham said. “Or a document file on his computer or phone where he might have recorded it?”

  “I looked everywhere,” Lanford said.

  Jessie stood from the chair. She said, “Maybe there’s another way.”

  8

  Warren looked up from his desk as Jessie entered his office. The room seemed even more crowded than usual. In addition to the stacks of documents that always made a labyrinth of the floor, there was also a large box to step around.

  He watched her maneuver around it. “Jessie, this isn’t really a good time. I have a meeting in five minutes—”

  “I need to talk to you about the Lanford case.”

  “You mean the one I told you was closed?”

  “I spoke with the father again, Wesley Lanford, and he showed Detectives Graham and Novak and I Russell’s computer—” Her voice cut off as Warren’s body bobbed up and down. “Did you just bounce?”

  He looked at her sheepishly. His body rose and fell again. She heard a quiet, rubbery squeak.

  “It’s just something new I’m trying.”

  She came around his desk. His office chair was gone. In its place was a giant blue exercise ball.

  “You’re sitting on an exercise ball,” she said.

  “It’s a stability ball. That’s what it says on the box.” He pointed to the box she’d had to walk around to get into his office.

  “Is there a difference?”

  “I’m not sure.” There was another squeak. His thighs seemed to flex in their suit pants, and his body rose and fell.

  “Is that comfortable?” she said.

  “Not really. Listen, like I said, I have a meeting in five minutes—”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just….” Jessie couldn’t suppress a smile. In her years as a homicide prosecutor, she’d seen Warren pursue various initiatives to get into better shape. Generally these initiatives didn’t last long. “You’d have to see yourself to understand.”

  “You’re saying I look ridiculous.” It was a statement, not a question.

  Jessie shrugged. “Kinda.”

  Warren’s face reddened. “Laugh all you want, but this is the best idea I’ve had yet. I’m improving my health by doing something I’m already good at—sitting. I’m going to build my core strength, exercise my abdominal muscles, and burn calories, all just by sitting on this ball all day instead of a chair.”

  “Sounds like you’ve done some research on this.”

  Warren’s gaze shifted, a tell-tale sign that he had not. “I read a few Amazon reviews.” He looked at his watch. “I told you—”

  “I know. Meeting in five minutes. I’ll m
ake it quick, okay?”

  He sighed and gestured for her to continue.

  “I want to stick with Lanford. There’s more to the shooting than we originally thought. There were other people involved, and especially one of those people, who goes by the online handle True_Man, appears to have pushed Russell Lanford to commit the crime. But most of their communication was in the form of private messages, and we don’t have the password to access them.”

  “I really hope this is not going where I think it’s going.”

  “I want to seek a warrant requiring the company that owns the website to hand over the private messages and the real identity of True_Man.”

  Warren sighed. “That’s where I thought it was going.”

  “There could be something more here, Warren. More than a typical school shooting. We may only be seeing the tip of a big, deep iceberg.”

  “Jessie.” Warren raised a hand to stop her. The movement unbalanced him and his torso dipped to the right. His hand shot out and clutched the side of his desk just in time to avoid a fall.

  “You still have your real chair, right? You didn’t throw it away?”

  “You realize you’re talking about compelling a tech company to undermine the privacy of its users. When the government does that, tech companies tend to resist. Do I need to point you to recent cases involving Facebook, Google, Apple—”

  “Manpower isn’t Facebook,” Jessie said. “And besides, Facebook lost that case.”

  “Until their next appeal. Do you really want to tie up our office in endless appeals just because the shooter’s father showed you some disturbing posts on an internet message board?”

  “Our warrant will be narrowly tailored, directed at specific posts and a specific user’s ID. I’ll cross every T and dot every I to make sure it holds up on appeal.”

  Warren rolled his eyes. “You don’t hear what I’m saying.”

  “It’s a little hard to hear anything over all that squeaking.”

  He bounced. He looked at his watch.

  “Russell Lanford is dead. The city is hosting a memorial service for the victims, and then the public will move on. I don’t see an upside to keeping this case open.”