Read The Watcher in the Wall Online

Authors: Owen Laukkanen

Tags: #Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, #Thrillers & Suspense, #Crime, #Crime Fiction, #Thrillers

The Watcher in the Wall (3 page)

BOOK: The Watcher in the Wall
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“A friend.” Windermere sat forward. “What kind of friend?”

“I don’t really know much. It was this girl in Pennsylvania, some depressed chick. They were supposed to have a suicide pact, or whatever. She gave Adrian the idea of hanging himself. Told him to do it on a webcam so she could watch. She told him all this crazy shit—” He caught himself. “
Stuff
, like how it was never going to get better for them and they were really saving themselves a lot of misery by doing it. She said if he filmed it, he would inspire her.”

Lucas’s eyes welled up again. He hid his face in his hands. “And I didn’t do
anything
. I let him fucking
die
.”

Windermere barely heard him. Her mind was racing. A suicide pact. Another girl.
Shit.

This might not be violent crimes material,
she thought, reaching for her phone.
But I’ll be damned if I’m going to get hung up on a technicality.

<
9
>

Adrian Miller
had lived with his family in the Lexington-Hamline neighborhood in Saint Paul, west of the downtown core and just north of the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi River. It was a quiet, older neighborhood, plenty of families and leafy, tree-lined streets. Stevens and his own family lived barely half a mile away.

There was a newish minivan parked in the driveway when Stevens and Windermere pulled up to the Miller house, and an old sedan at the curb. Stevens had called ahead from CID, told Windermere he’d talked to a Brenda Miller, Adrian’s mother. She was home, she’d told Stevens. She had no plans to leave anytime soon.

Stevens pulled his Cherokee over, and Windermere stepped out onto the sidewalk, looked around. Caught Stevens watching her over the roof of the Jeep, a funny expression on his face.

“What?” she said.

“You all right?” he asked her.

“Never better,” she said. “Doing great, partner. Why?”

She’d called him back in after her interview with Lucas Horst. Explained about the suicide pact, didn’t tell him about the rest of what the kid had told her. Insisted on coming along when Stevens wanted to take a drive to the Miller place.

“No reason,” Stevens said, still watching her from the other side of his truck. “Just, this isn’t even our case, really. I’m just doing this as a favor for my daughter, you know?”

“There’s a girl in a suicide pact,” Windermere said, staring up at the house. “Her partner’s already dead, Stevens. I’m supposed to sit back and do nothing?”

•   •   •

Adrian Miller’s father greeted them at the door. Nick Miller, his name was. He’d probably been an imposing man a couple days ago, tall and broad-shouldered. He seemed shrunken now, stooped over, his eyes weary. He wore a rumpled suit; there was a stain on his tie. Windermere looked at him and saw Rene Duclair’s dad when he’d come to the school to collect Rene’s belongings. She’d passed him in the hallway, a wrecked man. Nick Miller looked just as shattered.

“Sorry about the mess,” he told Stevens and Windermere, leading them into the living room. There were flowers everywhere—bouquets and arrangements. Sympathy cards. Casserole dishes. “People seem to just come out of the woodwork with this stuff when, you know . . .”

He gave them a forced smile, gestured to the couch. “We’re still coming to terms with it all, I guess. Everything just seems so surreal.”

Before Stevens or Windermere could respond, Brenda Miller appeared from the kitchen, holding a tray of coffee mugs, some cream and sugar. She, too, wore a smile, like she was desperately trying to maintain the illusion that this visit was a social call, that this whole thing was just a bad dream. Behind her, in the kitchen, a little girl of about six colored at a high table.

“So nice of you to come,” Brenda Miller said, setting the tray down on the coffee table. “I made coffee. I hope that’s okay.”

“More than okay,” Windermere said, reaching for a mug. “Thanks very much for seeing us. This can’t be easy, we know.”

“What can we do for you agents, anyway?” Brenda Miller still wore the smile, but there was an edge to her voice, as if any further conversation would knock the whole house of cards over. “What does the FBI want with our situation?”

Stevens cleared his throat. “One of Adrian’s friends paid us a visit this morning,” he said. “My daughter, Andrea, had math class with your boy. She’s been distraught about what happened, trying to find ways to help out with the case.”

“What case?” Brenda Miller asked. “Saint Paul PD says it’s just teenagers being bullies. Something Adrian took a little too personally, they say. And that even if they could prosecute the kids who drove him to this, there’s not much they could charge them with, anyway. It’s not like they made him do what he did, right?”

Her voice wavered, and Nick Miller reached over, took her hand. “We’re not out for revenge,” he told Stevens and Windermere. “We know there’s no way to bring Adrian back. We figure those kids who bullied Adrian probably learned a lesson they’ll carry with them for as long as they live, and as angry as we are, that’s pretty much the best we can hope for.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Windermere said. “We talked to a friend of Adrian’s today, Lucas Horst. Does that name sound familiar?”

“Oh, yes, Lucas,” Brenda said. “He came over once or twice. He was a nice boy.” She paused, and the hint of a smile played on her lips. “I think Adrian had a little bit of a crush on him.”

“It sounds like he may have,” Windermere said. “Enough that he was willing to confide in Lucas with secrets he kept from everyone else.” She outlined what Lucas had told her back in CID, the suicide forum, Adrian’s secret friend. “According to Lucas, this girl encouraged Adrian to
buy a webcam, told him how to tie the rope the right way,” Windermere said. “She coached him to do what he did.”

Neither Miller responded right away. Brenda Miller had gripped her husband’s hand tight with both of her own.

“He asked us to buy him that webcam,” she said. “He told us it was for Internet gaming.”

“We think he recorded it so this online friend could watch,” Stevens said. “As far as the why, we’re afraid this girl wanted to replicate what Adrian did.”

“We want to borrow your son’s laptop,” Windermere said. “We need to track down this Internet friend of his. And if Adrian was part of some suicide pact, we want to put a stop to it before anyone else dies.”

Brenda Miller dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. Held tight to her husband with her other hand. Nick Miller squeezed her hand for a moment. Then he straightened, squared his shoulders.

“Adrian’s room is upstairs,” he told Stevens and Windermere. “Take whatever you need.”

<
10
>

An hour later,
Stevens and Windermere had Adrian Miller’s laptop open on Windermere’s desk, Mathers bent over around back, fiddling with a couple of cords.

Lucas Horst was long gone, back at Kennedy with Andrea and Calvin, one of Windermere’s business cards in his pocket. Windermere figured she’d be calling the school a little while later, asking the grief counselor to have a chat with the kid, as discreet as possible.

She wondered if Lucas would find a way past this, if he’d figure out a way to move on. Thought about Rene Duclair, heard Wanda’s voice again, that old mocking singsong. The laughter as it echoed down the hall, the way Rene slunk past. The hurt on her face when her eyes found Windermere’s, the betrayal. She’d turned her back, sold out her friend, just as Lucas had.

Forget it. Everything came secondary to Adrian Miller right now. Miller’s parents had handed over the laptop without complaint, the webcam, too, a brand-new, high-def model purchased for one purpose. The thought made Windermere’s stomach churn.

Nick Miller had walked them out.

“Find that girl, and anyone else in the pact,” he’d told Stevens and Windermere. “If there’s any way you can save them, agents, you do it. No parent should have to go through what we’re going through.”

Windermere had looked back into the house: Brenda Miller tidying up the coffee mugs in the cluttered living room, her cheeks tracked with fresh tears. Nick Miller with his tired eyes and dirty suit, the little sister coloring away in the kitchen, the whole place looking like a bomb had gone off, imploded a family, while outside, on the rest of the block, families came home, walked dogs, ate dinner. The leaves overhead starting to turn. Life went on.

Windermere tucked the laptop under her arm. “If we can save this girl,” she’d told Nick Miller, “we will.”

•   •   •

Now Stevens and Windermere waited and watched as Mathers hooked up the laptop to a power source and a hardwired Internet connection.

“Let’s hope this thing isn’t too hard to hack,” Mathers said, turning the laptop around to study the screen. “If this kid was some kind of computer genius, we’ll have to call the tech guys in. Could take hours.”

“We don’t have hours, Derek,” Windermere said. “For all we know, this girl’s already dead. We need to find her, and fast.”

She’d already put out feelers to law enforcement agencies in Pennsylvania, local cops in the major cities, state police, the Bureau. Asked them to check for reports of teenage suicides from Wednesday night to now. So far, they’d heard nothing to suggest that Adrian Miller’s online friend had gone through with her end of the bargain.

Pennsylvania was big, though, and the search criteria were flimsy. At this point, Windermere had no idea if she and Stevens were still in the race or in last place by a mile.

Mathers tapped a couple of keystrokes. “Got it,” he said. “I’m in.”

Windermere and Stevens crowded around behind him. Studied the laptop’s screen. A browser window. A black background. “‘Death Wish,’” Stevens read. “‘For those ready to make the transition.’”

It was a pretty low-rent website, to Windermere’s eyes. A bunch of forum postings arranged newest to oldest down the page, topics like
GUN PILLS OR KNIFE P
LZ ADVISE
and
GARAGE EXH
AUST PROS/CONS
. The first page had fifty postings, a button to push to navigate backward. Had to be hundreds and hundreds of topics, some of them with a thousand replies. Suicide fetishists, sitting around all day debating the best ways to kill themselves. It would have been pathetic if Windermere
hadn’t just come from Adrian Miller’s ground zero. Instead she felt only a mounting urgency.

There was a link to Adrian’s profile at the top of the page. Windermere clicked through, read the details. His profile. “‘Seventeen years old, sick of the bullshit,’” she read aloud. “‘Nothing could be worse than this.’”

“Check the chat history,” Stevens told her. “He was probably talking to this Pennsylvania girl before he died.”

Windermere scrolled down, found a page for private chats. Waited as the browser loaded, then leaned in to study the screen. Found what they were looking for at the top of the page.

“Ambriel98,” she read. “Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. ‘Seeking a friend for the big good-bye.’”

The chat log was dated Wednesday afternoon. Hours before Adrian Miller’s parents found his body. Windermere clicked through and forced herself to read, fighting the sudden wave of nausea that washed over her, feeling like she was watching a plane crash in slow motion.

AM:
I think I’m ready. I think I’m going to do it today.

Ambriel98:
It’s the right decision. U’ll be in a better place.

AM:
At least I won’t be in this place.

A:
I wish I had your balls.

AM:
Take them.

A:
Turn on your webcam if you’re doing it. Like we talked about. You’ll inspire me. You’ll inspire so many people like us.

AM:
Get ready for the show. See you on the other side.

AM:
Here goes nothing.

A:
Do it. Do it for me
.

That’s where the chat log ended. There was no response from Adrian Miller. Nothing more.

That was it.

“The girl talked Adrian into it,” Stevens said, stepping back from the computer. “Goddamn it all, Carla.”

Windermere was already reaching for the phone, pushing the bad feelings away, the adrenaline taking over. “I know, partner,” she said. “So let’s find her.”

<
11
>

“Her name’s Ashley Frey,”
Mathers told Stevens and Windermere. “That profile on the Death Wish forum links to a free Outlook account registered in her name. But there’s no real-world address linked to either the email account or the Death Wish profile, so we can’t trace her.”

“The IP address,” Stevens said. “That’ll find her, right?”

“It damn well better,” Windermere said. “Mathers, run a trace on her IP address. I’ll get on the phone with Harrisburg PD, tell them to run down any and every Ashley Frey they can find.”

“On it.” Mathers turned back to the computer, started typing again. Windermere picked up the handset, picturing this Ashley Frey girl somewhere, a length of rope in her hands. Got someone on the line from the Bureau’s Harrisburg resident agency, filled him in and told him to start canvassing for people named Frey. Slammed down the phone just as Mathers came back frowning.

“Weird,” he told them. “Really weird. I can’t get a trace on her location. This IP address is blocked.”

“Blocked?” Windermere leaned forward and studied the screen. “No, forget that. Unblock it, Derek. There’s no time.”

“Too complicated for me,” Mathers told her. “I think we need to call tech.”

The tech was a young guy named Nenad. Close-cropped haircut, a Superman tattoo on his forearm. He couldn’t do much more than Mathers could.

“Whatever this girl’s up to, she knows what she’s doing,” he told Stevens and Windermere. “She has this IP address bouncing all over the freaking globe.
Really
doesn’t want to get found.”

Windermere stared at the laptop. Felt that roiling, churning starting up in her stomach again.

“She’s using something called an anonymizer,” Nenad told them. “Basically, it’s a proxy server that you can use to shield your Internet usage. Hide out from prying eyes, that kind of thing.”

BOOK: The Watcher in the Wall
5.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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