Chat (15 page)

Joe nodded. “Okay. That’s all I was wondering.”

Rob was smiling broadly. “There’s more, of course. Other deals, other dealers, other pictures. I doubt our office’ll get to play with any of it for long. Maybe the drug task force will want it, or even the feds—I’ll let the sheriff duke that out—but it’s a cool start, and I love that we’re the ones who got it going.”

He returned to the keyboard. Given Rob’s high spirits, Joe felt bad that he was, by contrast, mostly disappointed. Nothing mentioned so far tied Dan Griffis or the garage to what had put Leo in the hospital.

“No connections to my brother’s accident?” he almost murmured.

“Not yet,” Rob admitted, his voice upbeat. “I did take advantage of all this to do a search for your mom’s name, and Leo’s—just to see.”

Once more the cursor was leaping about, and text blocks of chat dialogue cut in and out across the screen, making Joe slightly dizzy.

“Like I said,” Rob continued, “there’s a huge amount of material here, and I doubt what I found’ll be the last of anything illegal. I mean, even the porno stuff is likely to get us something. But I didn’t hit on any of your names—except in the billing and service documents, of course.”

Joe suddenly sat straighter in his seat. “Go back.”

Barrows froze his hand. “Where?”

“Maybe one click. I saw something. One of the handles, or whatever you call them.”

“Screen names?” Rob asked, moving back.

“Yeah,” Joe said, pointing at the screen. “What’s going on here?”

Rob paused to study the document before them. “It’s a general chat room. Bunch of people all talking at once. You do this sometimes, like at a party, when you’re looking for someone special. When you do, you can ask that person to kind of step away for a private chat, like you were going into another room, just the two of you.”

“What’s the topic here? Drugs again?” Joe asked.

“Nope, it’s the other favorite. Sex.”

Joe tapped the screen with his index finger. “What about this one? What’s he after?”

Rob leaned forward and began studying the exchange, scrolling through the short and, to Joe, virtually incomprehensible one-liners where almost every word was reduced to its purely phonetic root, if not merely replaced by initials—for example, “LOL” for “laughing out loud.” The dialogue before him now might just as well have been written in a foreign language.

“Ugh,” Rob finally said, sitting back.

“What?”

“Well, it’s sex, all right, but what that guy’s looking for is young girls. There’s a load of that shit on the Web. You see it everywhere. CarGuy’s not biting, though, doesn’t even address your man—different interests.” He twisted around to face Gunther. “Why?”

“It’s the name,” Joe admitted.

Rob returned to the screen. “Rockwell? Where’d you run into that?”

“I don’t know for sure if I did. I’ve got a John Doe case we’re working on where all we’ve got for ID is the motel registration—N. Rockwell. I laughed when I saw it, because it reminded me of the painter.” He pointed at the computer again. “Probably a big stretch. It’s not that unusual a name.”

Barrows was already typing, moving to another display. “Everybody has to register a profile with the chat room. It’s a legal thing. They all lie, of course, but you’re supposed to be able to check each other out if you connect. Most pedophiles pretend they’re nineteen, or something.” He laughed shortly and added, “Course, we lie, too, when we’re trying to catch ’em. But the format is basically name, age, where you’re from, what your hobbies are, and so on.”

He paused so Joe could see what was before them. “Of course,” he then added, pointing out a warning message, “there’s always the flip side, too. They put a lock on their profile. We’d have to get a subpoena to open it, and, for that, a good reason to request one. Slim chance, given the innocuous language I saw.”

Joe nodded, his enthusiasm undaunted. Despite what he’d just said, he actually didn’t think that the name Rockwell surfacing twice in odd circumstances was too likely. They had to be connected. “Going back to the chat where CarGuy was, too, can you tell if Rockwell does hook up with anyone?”

“Maybe” was the answer, as Barrows went back to work.

“Yeah,” he said a few minutes later. “Looks like Mandi144 and he hit it off. They certainly go off together.”

“And Mandi is . . . ?” Joe asked leadingly.

Rob broke away from the computer to give him a sour look. “Well, let’s put it this way: She says right up front that she’s fourteen in the general chat. I’m guessing your Mr. Rocky wasn’t.”

Joe nodded slightly. “My Mr. Rocky is also dead.”

JMAN:
U hav a pic or cam?

Mandi144:
cams broke - howz this?

JMAN:
wow. Hot

Mandi144:
U have a pic?

JMAN:
no. Im 6-1, tho. 170

Mandi144:
no pic? How cum?

JMAN:
I can get 1. Id lik u 2 see me

Mandi144:
me 2

JMAN:
Id lik u 2 do mor than that

Mandi144:
me 2

JMAN:
how old r u again?

Mandi144:
14. problem?

JMAN:
not a cop?

Mandi144:
lol. I look lik a cop?

Chapter 14

J
oe reluctantly turned away from the view outside. It had started snowing again, after too many dry days. He was of a mind that if you lived where snowfall was the norm, then it should come about regularly and heavily, satisfying everyone’s worst fears. People were going to complain about it anyway—they should, therefore, have good cause.

He surveyed the small VBI office. Sam, Willy, and Lester were all at their desks, each occupied according to character—Lester on the computer, Sam sorting through case files, and Willy harassing them both.

“What handle do you use when you’re chasing little girls online, Les?” he asked his colleague.

“Willy,” was Lester’s immediate response, to Sammie’s appreciative laughter.

“Anything yet?” Joe asked Lester, who was in fact checking the BOLs they’d issued on both unidentified bodies.

Spinney sat back in his chair and shook his head. “Nothing. Guess we still get to call ’em Bald Rocky and Hairy Fred.”

“It’ll take all the fun out of it when we can’t,” Willy agreed.

“All right,” Joe said, getting them back on track. “You all read my notes?”

There were a couple of nods and a muttered assent, none of them from Willy, of course.

“Well, in addition, I got a call this morning from Rob Barrows,” Joe continued. “No big surprise; his boss is as excited about the possible drug dealing by Dan Griffis as he is totally uninterested about the possibility that Les’s Bald Rocky is a sexual predator.”

“Typical,” Willy growled.

“I probably would’ve done the same,” Joe conceded. “Predator cases are a bitch to sell, and this one’s not even in his county. The drug case is a gimme. To be honest, I’m just as happy, given my personal connections to the Griffis family.”

“That mean you’re handing everything over to the sheriff?” Willy challenged him incredulously.

Joe tilted his head to one side noncommittally. “On the record? Sure. Off the record? I have Rob Barrows on speed dial. By the way, since we’re talking about it, there’s been no evidence yet connecting Steve’s Garage to my family’s accident. Regular service records only, and nothing about tie rods. Looks like they had several layers of books, though, so it’s still early.”

He looked at Sam. “In the interests of full disclosure, I should also mention that I asked Sam to look a little beyond that interview the two of you did with Dave Snyder at P and P.”

Willy let out a small bark of surprise as he stared at his girlfriend. “No shit? You didn’t tell me that.”

“Add it to the list,” she tossed back at him.

“Now that a part of what happened to my family has become a formal case,” Joe said, cutting off Willy’s response, “I’d just as soon have everything out in the open. So, Sam, why don’t you tell us what you found out.”

“Not too complicated,” she reported. “I chased down Beth Ann Agostini—we learned about her through Snyder—and she told me that Andy Griffis hanged himself because he’d been raped in prison. At least that’s what it boiled down to. Pretty good reason for his family to be pissed at you,” she added.

Joe considered that, not for the first time, and suggested, “If he told any of them.”

Sam had no comeback, not having considered the possibility.

“I’m guessing nobody in law enforcement knew about the rape at the time, much less who did it?” he asked.

She shook her head. “I checked six ways toward the middle on that. Nobody knows who should know, and nobody’s talking who might.”

Joe squared his shoulders abruptly, as if shaking off a weight. “Okay. Let’s put all that on the shelf for the time being. The other thing Rob Barrows gave me this morning was the name of a guy I’d like you, Lester, to contact directly.” He quickly consulted a note lying on his desk. “John Leppman. A psychologist and computer geek out of Burlington—been working with the PD there and the state police, profiling Internet predators and making it easier to flush them out. Burlington’s chief said Leppman was their go-to guy on this topic. I have his contact info here. Since it looks like we’ve stumbled into the middle of something having to do with the subject—at least for the time being—we’ll be needing all the help we can get.”

He glanced at the notes he’d scribbled down to help keep him on track. “Speaking of just that, let’s look at what we’ve got so far. Two men without identity or background”—he eyed Lester and added—“Bald Rocky and Hairy Fred—both appear in town, both rent motel rooms, apparently to meet up with someone else, and both end up dead. We’re pretty confident that one, at least, was immobilized with a Taser before being dumped into the water. The other, we don’t know.” He looked up at them to explain further. “After we found a small Taser dart hole in Bald Rocky’s back, Hillstrom went over Fred, inch by inch. She found nothing similar. She now knows that Tasers don’t necessarily need to pierce the skin in order to work, but they usually do, and it’s pretty unlikely that you’d get two people in a row with minimal to no markings. My gut tells me that the Taser was used only once.”

“He probably only had the one cartridge,” Lester suggested, “since it looks like it was stolen.”

“I got a question,” Willy stated. “You still need a gun to shoot the cartridge. You can get both online. Why buy one and not the other?”

“Too early to know,” Joe answered, “but it seems like we’re dealing with a very careful guy. We’ve got to assume that both Fred and Rocky were acting on instructions when they checked into their motels. Too big a coincidence otherwise. And, you’ve got to admit, every detail was thought out, right down to the extra key being attached outside the room door.”

“Plus, the fact that they both came on foot,” Sammie commented.

Everyone in the room looked at her, drawn less by her words and more by the leading tone of her voice.

“What’re you thinking?” Lester asked first.

“I’m not sure, but when you’re talking about coincidence, that seems pretty big to me. Everybody drives around here.”

“Bald Rocky’s room looked like it might belong to a guy who rode a bus,” Willy mused.

“Right,” Joe agreed. “If maybe just recently. From his clothes and appearance, he seemed like a man heading down the social ladder, but not like he’d been that way for long.” He recalled Hillstrom’s appraisal of the man’s toenails, but kept it to himself. “Hairy Fred’s room was middle-class fare. Did you circulate both head shot pictures to the bus people?”

Sam nodded, adding, “Not to all the drivers, though. That’ll take longer.” As she spoke, she was pawing through the photographs they’d printed of both crime scenes. She held up a picture of the man who had identified himself as R. Frederick—the body found in the more upscale motel. “Look at the back of his right shoe,” she suggested, displaying it for all to see. “Just above the heel, on the leather.”

Like trained pets, they all leaned forward in their chairs, including Willy. Lester was the first to notice what she was talking about. “It’s worn from where he rests his heel on the floor of a car when he’s pushing the accelerator. He drove a lot.”

“Nice,” Joe said. “Okay. Let’s back up a bit. What you just said, Sam, about both of them arriving on foot. Why have them leave their cars behind?”

They knew what he was after—he’d been using this Socratic method for years.

“Identity,” Lester chimed in first, just as Willy muttered, “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

Lester forged on: “Our cars have everything about us—papers, fingerprints, DNA samples, you name it.”

“You’re saying Fred pulled a fast one,” Sam said, her excitement building. “Disobeyed orders. Either stashed his car and walked, or just took the bus for the last leg of the trip.”

“I’m saying,” Joe expanded, “that we love our cars and we tend to bend the rules out of habit, especially if we’re already breaking the law.”

Willy said in a bored voice, “I already checked with the parking division downstairs. No abandoned cars in the last week.”

“That still leaves a possible short bus trip,” Sam countered.

Willy shrugged, but Joe followed up. “Issue a BOL to all municipalities within fifty miles. What we’re after is an abandoned car in a lot or parking space near a bus depot or train station, maybe with out-of-state plates.”

Sam began writing herself a note as Joe pointed at Lester. “I’m having Rob Barrows send you a copy of the hard drive we collected from Steve’s Garage. Like I said, they’ll be concentrating on the drug deal between CarGuy and SmokinJoe, but I’d like you to find out what you can about Rocky from that—retrieve what he said and who he said it to, or at least do the best you can.”

Lester looked doubtful. “I’ll give it a shot, Joe, but it may be slim pickings. You know that.”

“Yeah, Barrows already warned me. But until we can either locate Rocky’s computer or find whoever he was talking to in that chat room, we’re reduced to grabbing whatever straws float by. Which includes John Leppman, by the way,” he added as an afterthought. “If you can pull him on board sooner than later, he might be able to help you profile this guy, even with the little we get off the hard drive. Not to mention,” he suddenly added, “that he might have a file with N. Rockwell already on it—this is his line of work, after all, and my guess is that a name like that is a whole lot rarer than Ready Freddy or all the other playful crap out there.”

“Roger that,” Lester acknowledged.

There was a momentary lull in the conversation, after which Willy asked, “Who do you want me to chew on?”

Joe pressed his lips together. “I haven’t forgotten you,” he finally admitted, adding, “but I’m of two minds about using you for what I’m after.”

“Don’t tell me,” Willy said with a pitying smile. “It’s the car thing up north, right? Your big family drama?”

Joe barely heard the tone in his voice, being so used to the man’s unrelenting style. “It may not be only about me anymore, as the Rocky reference just made clear. Still, I won’t deny I’d love to get to the bottom of what happened to Mom and Leo.”

“Want me to torture Dan?”

Joe shook his head, not doubting for a moment that Willy could and would do it if properly encouraged. “Tempting, but no. Dan’s too hot right now. Go after the old man—E. T. Cozy up to him somehow, get under his tent flaps. In his prime, there was nothing that moved in that whole township without his knowledge, and he ran his family like a full-bird colonel. That’s changed. I need to find out what happened, and I’m too involved and too well known to do the kind of job you might. And I’m not just after the car crash—think more generally than that. Barrows could benefit from this, too, if you get lucky.”

Willy’s response was eloquent in its brevity. “Sure.”

Volunteering to do the unorthodox was an easy response. What Joe sensed here, however—never to be publicly recognized—was Willy’s implicit personal loyalty to him. That was a trickier trait for an avowed hard case to acknowledge.

Joe honored the message with a single nod of the head. “Thanks,” he added quietly before addressing them all. “Okay, let’s break it down into pieces, so nobody’s stepping on anyone else’s toes.”

Joe parked his car on Oak Street, appreciating that the plows had kept the curbs clear, and got out into the still falling snow. This had turned into an old-fashioned snowstorm. Forecasters were calling for six inches by morning.

He paused by his car, looking up the street, noticing a few forlorn electric candles in windows, and the odd wreath or two on a door, left over from Christmas. This was familiar territory. Not only was it a major backstreet thoroughfare in a town he’d known since his days as a rookie, decades earlier, but he’d once lived a hundred yards to the south, on the corner of Oak and High, before he and Gail even met, when she’d been merely a successful local Realtor and he’d been a lieutenant on the detective squad.

The coincidence was ironic, since he had parked opposite Lyn Silva’s address—a two-story, two-apartment Victorian rental. There was an argument in times like this, he thought, for a small world being just a little too tight for comfort.

He glanced up at the upper apartment, its lights blazing behind the soundless, shifting veil of falling snow. She’d given him her phone number, but he hadn’t called ahead. For reasons he didn’t ponder, he’d merely used the number to cross-index her address on the office computer and driven the one block from the municipal building.

Joe walked up the central path, already softened by the new snow, and climbed the broad porch steps to the front door. That led to a heated, well-lighted lobby with a carpeted staircase, which he climbed to the second-floor landing and an age-darkened oak door.

He pushed the doorbell near the knob and waited, a small part of him hoping no one would be home.

His reaction to hearing her footsteps approaching was hardly disappointment, however. As the knob turned and the door opened, he felt his heart beating as fast as a teenager’s.

She smiled up at his slightly reddened face. “There’s a sight for sore eyes.”

His color darkened further. “Same for me.”

She leaned in and brushed his lips fleetingly with her own, a gesture combining friendship with intimacy while overstating neither. “Would you like to come in?”

“Is that okay? I know I should’ve called.”

She took his hand and tugged at it. “It’s a pleasure. Plus,” she added, looking at him over her shoulder as she led the way through what might once have served as a dining room, “I need a break. I’ve been spending so much time at the bar, getting ready, that I’m still living out of boxes here. It’s a drag to be unpacking no matter where I am.”

She wasn’t exaggerating. The room looked like a shipping depot, with cardboard boxes alternating with loose bundles of crinkled newspaper and bubble wrap, piled up in almost every nook and cranny.

“Impressive,” he said softly, half to himself.

But she heard him. She laughed, still walking toward the front of the large apartment. “It is bad, but you’ll find out why in a second. There’s method to my madness—at least, I hope so.”

They reached the far wall of the cluttered room, and Lyn slid open a pair of double pocket doors to what turned out to be a spacious living room.