Twisted (22 page)

“He is—just as you said—totally off the grid. That applies to California, Texas, nationwide. The last actual record I have of him is from twelve years ago”—
tap, tap, tap
—“when he received a citation for illegal lodging in Golden Gate Park. He wasn’t carrying any ID at the time, but they ran his prints through the system and
came back with a name.” Ben leaned back in his chair and looked around the room. “Since then, nothing.”

“So, you’re saying he’s what, a vagrant?” Allison looked at Mark. “What about a vehicle? A job? A residence?”

“It is possible he has all those things, and yet he doesn’t register them with any state,” Mark said. “I said before, he’s got a deep-rooted dislike for institutions.”

Sean snorted. “Yeah, and I’ve got a deep-rooted dislike for the IRS. Doesn’t stop them from collecting my taxes. Who does this guy think he is?”

“That’s exactly the point,” Mark said. “He thinks he’s better than all of us. He doesn’t need to register his car, or pay taxes, or have a license to drive. He can, and does, do whatever he wants. The complication is, he has to be careful so that he’s not caught and forced to interact with the system.” Mark looked at Ben. “I want to hear what you found. I’m guessing he only interacts with the system on
his
terms, is that right?”

“That’s one way to look at it.” Ben tapped a few keys. “First off, you all should know it is possible to do a lot using fake identities. He could have a phone, and a house, and an e-mail account, like the rest of us do, only he doesn’t use his real identity. Maybe he’s living with someone, the house is in her name. Or maybe he has a phone, but not a cell-phone contract. And any first-grader can set up an e-mail account. All you have to do is get access to a machine and fill in a few blanks.” Ben slid his laptop into the middle of the table so everyone could see it.

“What’s this?” Allison asked.

“His e-mail account.”

“What?”
Allison gaped at him. Mark edged closer for a better look.

“I hacked into his Hotmail account,” Ben said as everyone stared at the screen.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Jonah muttered, looking at the list of messages in the in-box.

“How do you know it’s him?” Allison asked.

“This account ties back to the blog comments Wolfe provided.” Ben nodded at Mark. “All of those tied back to this user.”

“Great,” Sean said. “We can read his mail. Now how do we find him?”

Ben’s brow furrowed. “That part’s trickier. This account’s free, so no payment records. The profile it’s set up with is totally bogus. And it’s old, too. He hasn’t sent a message from here in almost a year.”

Mark skimmed the list of messages. All appeared to be generic spam, and none of them looked to have been opened.

“I assume you’ve gone through these looking for any record of him doing business with someone?” Mark looked at Ben.

“It’s all junk mail. Nothing personal whatsoever. He hasn’t sent
out
anything personal, either. About once a year, he sends a blank message to another e-mail account, also used by this alias, just to keep things active. At least that’s why I’m guessing he does it. Who knows? Maybe he’s just bored.”

“But why have the account if he doesn’t use it?” Sean asked.

“
That’s
where it gets interesting. A lot of Web sites
require an e-mail address in order for you to post comments. They don’t post the e-mail address necessarily, but they use it to ‘verify’ identity, which is really a joke, but it makes people feel more secure.” Ben glanced at Mark. “It took some hacking, but I ultimately traced the posted comments on those sites you gave me back to this e-mail address. The user name he entered for it is E. Poe.”

“What about Internet service providers?” Mark asked. “If he sent anything at all, it had to have gone through a server.”

“I traced the comments he posted the day before Stephanie Snow’s murder. They all went through the server at the university.”

“You mean here in town?” Allison asked.

“That’s right. There’s free Wi-Fi all over campus, so he could have sat down on a park bench or whatever and used a phone or a laptop to visit the Web sites. I was hoping he used a home system, but no such luck. I can tell you he was in the area, but we already knew that because of the murder. I can’t tell you where he lives.”

The room fell silent. Jonah rubbed the bridge of his nose. Allison looked at Mark helplessly.

“We have a name,” she said. “We even have an e-mail address. And still we’re getting nowhere!”

“We’re not nowhere,” Mark said. “We’re much better off than we were yesterday—or even an hour ago.”

“Where are we on motive?” Sean asked. “Maybe that would help narrow the search.”

Mark glanced at Allison. “I’ve made some progress on that front.” He looked around the room at the other detectives. “Allison noticed that several of the victims
had been working in some sort of PR capacity, which made them interface with the public. I did some checking, and turns out,
all
of these women’s names were in the media—either through a press release or a personal blog or a news article in which they were quoted.”

“So you’re saying he has a beef with women in the public eye?” Jonah asked.

“Could be—and this fits with his profile—he doesn’t like outspoken women or women in positions of power,” Mark said. “He feels the need to degrade them, put them in their place. As a motive, it fits. Problem is, we’re at a point where motive doesn’t help us that much. We need to find him, not analyze him, and we’re running out of time.”

Mark turned to look at Sean. “You’ve been keeping tabs on Lauren Reichs. Any news there?”

He sighed. “We’ve been jogging every evening this week. No sign of any vans, green or white. And no sign of any other scumbags hanging around.” Sean folded his arms over his chest. “I’ve been checking into her background, too, for anything similar with the other two victims down here. Didn’t find anything.”

“We need to check out her online activities. She might have crossed paths with Moss somewhere.” Mark looked at Ben. “Could you look into it?”

“It would help if I had her e-mail address and social media account info.”

“I’ll get it for you,” Sean said.

Mark turned to Jonah. “What did you get on those paint contractors?”

“Nothing interesting,” Jonah said as someone’s phone
chimed. “But now that I have a potential name, I’ll circle back, see if anything hits.”

Allison checked the number on her phone and stood up. “I need to take this. Put me down for vehicles. I’ve got a lead on something.” She answered her call and slipped out of the room.

Mark looked at the remnants of his task force—even though it wasn’t his. Reynolds was in charge. But when Mark encountered a leadership vacuum, he had a habit of filling it. It didn’t always make him popular with the locals, but solving cases was his top priority, and nothing got in the way of that, ever. It was something that set him apart from most investigators, even those at the Bureau, which was notorious for demanding that its people make personal sacrifices for the job.

In Mark’s case, the sacrifices were somewhat easier because he didn’t
have
a personal life. Not anymore.

“So, that’s it?” Sean asked.

“That’s it.”

Chairs scraped back as everyone stood to leave.

“If anyone gets a break, call it in ASAP,” Mark said. “We’ve only got three days left, so the clock’s ticking.”

Allison spotted him outside the station house. “Mark, wait up.”

He turned to face her. He had his trench coat on again, and she glanced up at the sky. It was threatening rain.

His expression looked equally threatening.

“Thanks for stepping up in there. No idea where Reynolds is.”

He nodded.

“We’ve got a lot new to work with now,” she said, “thanks to our trip to Delphi.”

He just looked at her, definitely not inviting further conversation. He flicked a glance over her shoulder, and she heard a group of cops exiting the building. He was worried about appearances again.

“Listen, I was thinking,” she continued. “We should interview David Moss out in Huntsville, see what shakes loose.”

He didn’t look surprised by the idea. “We have no reason to believe he’s had any contact with his brother in the last twelve years.”

“But we can’t prove he
hasn’t
, right?”

He didn’t answer. It started to drizzle, and Allison glanced up at the sky. Mark did, too.

“The other leads we discussed are more promising,” Mark said.

“His brother’s doing life. He’s probably bored out of his mind and willing to talk.
That’s
promising. What harm could it do to interview him?”

His eyebrows shot up. “What
harm
?”

“Yes.”

“How about wasting what little time we have left? This isn’t a research project, Allison—it’s a manhunt. You need to be here, working the leads.”

Mark’s phone buzzed and he jerked it from his pocket.

“Wolfe.” His brow furrowed and he turned away slightly. “Yeah . . . yeah. I told you—Craigslist, Kijiji, Zac’s Page. Hit every goddamn one of them. Ryan can help you interpret what the ads mean.” Pause. “She was pimping out her kid, Donovan. She’s not going to come right out and say—” He flicked a glance at Allison, and
turned away again. “Yeah . . . No . . . No, that’s
not
him. We’re looking for a loner. He took them for personal use.”

Allison’s blood chilled as she stood there, eavesdropping.
Personal use?
Good God, what kind of case was that? She tried to imagine it as he finished up the call.

He stuffed the phone in his pocket and turned around, clearly not happy to see her still standing there.

He looked tired, she realized. Despite the smooth shave and the tie, the lines in his face were more pronounced than they’d been a few days ago and he seemed as though he carried the weight of the criminal world on his shoulders. She wanted to reach out and touch him, but the look in his eyes told her to stay away.

“I don’t know how you do it,” she said quietly. “I think I’d go crazy.”

His jaw tightened. He glanced at his watch. “I need to call my office, so . . .”

“I want to talk to David Moss. You’re a federal agent. One simple phone call and you could probably set it up—”

“Not happening.” He took his phone out again and started down the stairs toward the parking lot, completely dissing her.

“Get to work, Allison,” he said over his shoulder. “You’ve got more than enough to do here.”

It was a three-hour drive to Huntsville, and Mark spent the last ninety minutes on his phone, listening to a rookie agent out of San Antonio read the transcript from the sentencing phase of David Moss’s trial. The defense attorney’s account of Moss’s childhood provided a wealth of information Mark had only guessed at before. It also read like a primer on how to raise a psychopath.

Paul Moss died when Damien was four and David was only one. He was killed in an accident at a timber mill in Northern California, leaving Sheryl on her own with the boys. The timber company paid the family some sort of death benefit, even though Paul’s accident was attributed to drinking on the job, and apparently Sheryl used this money to keep her family afloat. When the funds ran out, though, they ended up with Sheryl’s grandmother, who passed away soon after. Sheryl inherited her grandmother’s house, but also a hefty set of responsibilities she was ill-equipped to handle.

And that, evidently, was when the trouble started. Beginning when David was just five, Child Protective Services went out to the house three times after neighbors
reported noisy confrontations between the mother and children. Sheryl told social workers that her boys were “wild” and “uncontrollable,” and oddly enough, the younger one seemed to be the bigger problem. Around that time, David started setting fire to outbuildings on the property. His mother’s response to this behavior—as noted in reports—was to give him “time-outs” in an unfinished basement. And although the mother claimed these punishments only lasted a few minutes, one social worker noted a strong odor of urine and feces down in the basement and suggested the possibility that one or both of the children might be spending a lot of time there. The social worker made note of a chain and a set of handcuffs attached to a basement pipe and recorded the puzzling conclusion that this had something to do with the family dog.

Two years later, a clerk at the nearby grocery store called CPS when Sheryl Moss brought both of her boys into the store with matching black eyes. She claimed they’d beaten each other up, but the clerk was suspicious and CPS was sent to follow up. The caseworker reported an unclean house and two cases of head lice, but she documented no overt signs of abuse.

She didn’t go into the basement.

At trial, Moss’s defense attorney made a lot of noise about these incidents, claiming they proved a pattern of abuse by a single parent who was by turns violent and neglectful. And instead of being removed from the home, the children were left in the care of an abusive woman who spent years on the cusp of a mental breakdown.