Kiss of Death (14 page)

I could do with more time. “Sure. If that's okay?” I look to Carey who gives me a shrug and then a nod.

We all get in the car and once we're on the move I say, “I've got the FBI computer guys working on Sherry's computer, and they can probably help out with the video footage when it comes in.”

“Might be an idea. Sounds like our tech guys are swamped. Carey, can you please—”

My mobile phone interrupts Sloan but I let it ring while she finishes her sentence.

“—chase down the footage and send it over to the FBI once you get it.”

Carey gives a nod as I answer the call.

“Special Agent Anderson.”

“Hi. It's Brad Razor from the Monte Cristo. You left a message.”

Speak of the devil. “Thanks for returning the call. We came in last night and spoke to your bar manager about After Dark and a few of your other customers.”

“Yup, Cheryl told me.”

“We're interested in getting more information about some of your clients. Maybe from the bar tabs, credit card receipts or your mailing list.”

“Um…I don't know about that. Don't you need a warrant or something? I don't think my customers would like it if I gave out their details.”

“We understand, Mr. Razor. But a young woman's been murdered. Anything you can do to help us would be greatly appreciated.”

He hesitates. “I don't know.”

“Cheryl mentioned three guys and a woman who come in. One of the guys dresses like
Clockwork Orange
.”

“I know them.”

“Maybe if you could just give us their names…it'd be most helpful.”

“The ones you're talking about, they're all friends on our Malediction Society MySpace page. But I don't know their real names, only their user IDs. They don't have a tab and if they've ever used credit cards I wouldn't be able to match their real names to the names I know them by anyway.”

I guess that's fair enough. “Okay. I'll check out the MySpace page and track them down from there.” I pause. “We noticed you had a few video cameras in the club. Do you keep the footage?”

“Uh-huh, but only for a month or two.”

“We'd like all the footage from the past two months.” I'm hoping Brad Razor isn't going to force us down the warrant route for the video, too.

He's silent for a bit.

“This is a murder investigation, Mr. Razor. And it's not customers' names and addresses we're asking for. Besides, this is precisely why video cameras exist, no?”

“Okay, okay.”

“Thanks. We'll send someone over to pick up the discs. Do you ever get much trouble in the club?”

“Not really, no.”

“So there's no one in particular you think we should focus on?”

“Most of my clientele are very well behaved, Agent.”

“Okay. I'll check out your MySpace friends. Thanks, Mr. Razor.”

“No names?” Sloan asks once I've hung up.

“No. But apparently they're friends on Malediction Society's MySpace page. I doubt we'd get probable cause for a search warrant at this stage.”

“Damn system makes it too hard.”

Probable cause
can
make things hard for law enforcement, but I'm not going to get into a debate with Sloan or anyone else on personal privacy versus law-enforcement's discretionary powers. It's a never-ending argument.

I shrug. “It's okay. At least he's giving us the video footage.” I stare out the window. “We should check out Damien Winters today, too. See what his story is.”

“Let's not forget Todd Fischer and Professor Carrington.” Sloan pulls onto North Mission.

“I know we can't ignore some of the standard murder scenarios, but we've got a circle of candles, potential fang marks on the body and blood loss as the most likely cause of death, plus we've got Sherry's recent involvement in the Goth scene.” Why did Sloan call me in if she wasn't going to take this angle seriously? I cross my arms, knowing all too well the answer—she was covering her bases. No matter what happens now, she can say she got the Feds involved and a profiler on the case.

“Heeler and his circle of candles…the guy's a drunk. Who knows what he saw? And I'm still not convinced someone didn't stage the other elements.”

I resist the urge to blow out a sigh of frustration but I think my silence is enough of a response.

Sloan gives me a tight smile in the rearview mirror. “Let's see what the professor and Desiree have got to say this afternoon, huh?”

 

At the Cyber Crime Division I sit with Mercedes.

“You don't look that tired,” I say.

“I'm not too bad. I didn't get up for the gym this morning, though.”

“Me neither.”

“So, you want to use one of those pics I took last night?”

“Yeah.”

“I haven't downloaded them yet, but I remembered to bring in the camera.” Mercedes pulls out her small digital camera from her handbag. Once the photos are downloaded, we go through them.

“I like this one.” She gives me a little smile.

“I don't think so.” She's picked one that shows the most flesh. “Besides, head and shoulders is best, right?”

“Yeah. Or I could do you up a little graphical icon. Lots of people do it online anyway, so it won't look out of place.”

“Let's go with the icon and then we can upload one of these pics into the photos area.”

“Good call.” Even as she speaks, she's typing and multiple screens are flashing up in front of her face. Within a couple of minutes she's got three icons on screen. “One of these should do the job. What do you think?”

The first graphic is a cartoon-style version of a bat—clichéd but descriptive. The second one is a woman's
face, with fangs. And the third one is a bite mark, blood oozing on a white background.

“Let's go with the face,” I say. “It's kinda cute.”

She smiles. “If you like that sort of thing.”

“Which our target audience does.”

Within less than a minute she's set up a Yahoo account under the username LadyVeronica, and she's routed the confirmation e-mail to a dummy Bureau account we use for our online activities. Next, it's onto Facebook, where she registers and starts setting up the page.

“Date of birth?”

“The youngest I can get away with…twenty-eight?”

“Easy.”

“Thanks.” Like many women over thirty, I don't mind shaving a few years off my real age. “Any date is fine.”

“Okay.” Mercedes enters May 22 and selects 1982 as the year. Even though the year is optional, why not give Anton Ward and other viewers the age of our character? And judging by After Dark's female members, he likes them in their twenties.

For location we put L.A., obviously, and list most of the vampire novels, films and TV shows under the respective sections.

“We don't need to fill out too much information,” says Mercedes. “Just enough to give Veronica a presence.”

“Maybe we should set one up for you, too? Realistically, both Veronica and Crystal would be on Facebook and they'd be friends.”

“Yeah, you're right. I'll set up some extra profiles that we can friend, too. It would look pretty lame if Veronica and Crystal only had one friend each.”

“Good point.”

It takes Mercedes less than ten minutes to create her own Facebook profile as Crystal and set up twenty additional dummy profiles, linking them all up.

“So, friend requests.” Mercedes looks to me for some names.

“Detectives Sloan and Carey will be getting a full list of the members of After Dark tonight, but I think we should start with Anton Ward and the two girls we met last night.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Besides, it should be a natural growth. It would be suspicious if we suddenly sent friend requests to all the After Dark members.”

“Sure.” She keeps typing.

“And we can send requests to the clubs, too, or sign up for their pages.”

She nods and does a search for Anton Ward in my fake Facebook page. “There he is.” She clicks on
Add Friend
. “Do you want to send a message?”

“Yeah. Say, ‘It was great meeting you last night. Can't wait to see you tonight.'”

Mercedes types it in. “So you're definitely going?”

“I've just cleared it with Brady. The paperwork is doing the rounds.”

“Official undercover operation?”

“Not exactly. We're still not sure where we're going to take it. But I've got formal permission to go tonight and to set up an online profile.” I roll my eyes. “At least it'll get Detective Sloan off my back.”

“She's been giving you a hard time?” Mercedes types in the verification words and hits
Okay
.

“Kinda. She thinks I'm taking the vampire angle too seriously for this stage of the investigation.”

“And are you?”

I give her a little punch on the arm. “No.” I sigh. “Well, I don't think so.” I can't tell Mercedes or Sloan about my dream, so maybe from an outsider's point of view it does look like I'm putting all my eggs in one basket.

Mercedes gives me a little smile. “You're just enjoying the research.”

I am enjoying the research, and that worries me. But instead of admitting that, I make a joke out of it. “All in the line of duty.”

She lets out a little giggle. “The things we have to do.” She turns her attention back to the screen. “I'll send a request to Anton from me, too.”

“Anton, is it? Could it be that you're enjoying the research?”

She laughs. “Maybe.” Once she's logged in as Crystal, she sends Ward a friend request. “Okay. Next are Teresa and Paula. Except we don't know their surnames.”

“Oh, yeah.” I lean back in the chair. “So maybe we need to wait until we can view Ward's full profile. Then we can contact them.”

Mercedes shakes her head. “We can lift their names off MySpace. You don't have to be official friends to view someone's profile on MySpace…unless it's locked.”

“Cool.”

Mercedes opens a new window and sets up two MySpace pages for us under our aliases. From there she sends friend requests to Anton Ward, Malediction Society, Bar Sinister and Ruin.

She brings up Ward's MySpace profile and starts sorting through the friends, looking for Paula and Teresa. “Here's Teresa. Says her last name is Somers.” Mercedes sends MySpace requests for us both and within a few seconds she's back in Facebook doing a search for Teresa Somers. It doesn't take her long to find the right girl. “Want to say anything in this friend request?”

“Just ‘Nice to meet you last night.'”

Mercedes nods and types in the message before clicking
Okay
. She goes through the same procedure on her Facebook page before moving back to MySpace and looking for Paula. She finds her quickly—Paula Torres—and
soon Veronica and Crystal have sent Paula friend requests, too.

“Done.” Mercedes smiles. “The Bureau's e-mail account is automated and I've set it up so all alerts for Veronica will be rerouted to your personal Bureau account and the ones for Crystal to me. That way we can keep on top of the responses, wall posts, etc. It'll come straight into your BlackBerry.”

“Sounds great.” I pause. “That's it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“If only all my leads were that easy to check off.”

Mercedes smiles. “Now you know why I like computers so much.”

“Because it's not reality?”

“It's just a different reality, that's all.”

I stand up and arch my back, stretching. “Hey, any luck with Sherry Taylor's computer?”

Mercedes looks over the corrals. “Steve?”

A few rows over Steve pops up. “Yo.”

“How you going with Sherry Taylor? You got that one, right?”

“Uh-huh. I'm working on it now.”

“And?” Mercedes walks us over to his desk.

“Usual stuff. I've managed to get into her e-mail accounts, one with AOL and one with Yahoo. Plus MySpace, Facebook and Twitter of course.”

“Anything?” I ask.

“Steve Cooper, meet Agent Anderson, profiler.”

“Sure. You logged the request.”

“That's right.”

“I'll have my report to you by tomorrow, but I can show you what I've got so far if you like.”

“Sounds great.”

“Okay.” He takes a breath. “E-mails. Any names in particular you want to look at right now?”

“How about e-mails from the past two weeks to or
from Desiree Jones.” I still want to know why Desiree omitted Sherry's crush on the professor from our conversation, not to mention their interest in the Goth culture. It might be handy to go to this afternoon's interview armed with correspondence between the two girls.

Cooper is fast, maybe even faster than Mercedes, and soon he looks up at me. “Printing now. Anyone else? Boyfriend?”

“Yeah, see if there's anything from Todd Fischer.” That'll keep Sloan happy at least. “And any luck with the mystery date on Saturday night?” In the request, I'd mentioned that Sherry was supposed to be meeting a guy on Saturday night. Maybe something in her laptop will tell us who.

“Nothing on that yet, I'm afraid. But I'll keep looking.” He pauses. “I've got one e-mail from Todd Fischer and Sherry's reply. Printing now. Anything else?”

“Um…have you got her MySpace, Facebook and Twitter login details? I wouldn't mind checking out those accounts, too.”

“I can copy the contents onto our server for you, but it won't be interactive. It's better if we don't have too many people accessing her actual account, so we can maintain its integrity.”

“Sure.” Something from one of the social networking sites may be required in court, and the chain of evidence requirements are a little different for computer and online evidence. I can understand that Cooper doesn't want some computer hack like me fooling around with Sherry's details in real time.