Chat Page 18

  Leppman shrugged. “It’s a shame, really. Chat rooms and the Internet are mostly wonderful outlets—real extensions to how people naturally mingle, while easing the potential social burdens of appearance or social awkwardness. People can be so much more honest there, plus, you can get information, products, services, a few laughs, and even find that special someone. Sad that it’s mostly the bad aspects that attract all the headlines.

  “Still,” he added with an incredulous look, “when people do screw up online, they certainly can do it with style. It’s amazing to me—everyone thinks they’re all alone when they’re on the Net. Totally crazy. I tell people it’s like taking your clothes off in a crowded room and thinking you’re by yourself just because your eyes are shut . . . Okay, here we are.”

  Spinney sat straighter in his chair, recognizing the contents of the garage’s hard drive. He worked with computers routinely, was young enough to consider them a standard piece of office equipment, and played with them with his two kids at home. They were as natural to him as a typewriter was, or used to be, to Joe Gunther—just as Leppman had been saying.

  But this was different—a freeze-frame, forensic snapshot of an entire hard drive’s moment in time. It was the computer equivalent of stopping a stage production in mid-motion and then wandering among the motionless, mute actors from all angles, studying their positions relative to one another and the audience, including angles that wouldn’t be otherwise available.

  Of course, instead of actual people and a stage, here you had screen-mounted data, only some of it readable. But to Spinney the impression was similar, and he sat transfixed as his host moved the cursor among the serried lines of type.

  “This is the main chat room,” Leppman was saying. “It’s going to be a bit messy. The data is overwritten all the time, kind of like conversations are at a noisy dinner party. What did you say the name was we’re interested in?”

  Lester paused before answering, thinking of all the various labels they’d attached to the man, including the uniquely descriptive Wet Bald Rocky. “Rockwell,” he said.

  Leppman typed in a search inquiry with that name and hit “Enter.” Instantly it reappeared on the screen, floating clearly among the garbled letters.

  “Well, he’s here, all right,” Leppman murmured, still working the cursor. “Let’s see if he’s chatting with anyone in particular.”

  He was. Just below his name, they noticed Mandi144, which Leppman copied down on a pad by his hand. Searching for Rockwell a second time, Mandi was once more right beside him. This trend continued several more times.

  “So,” Leppman announced, “we’ve got an ongoing conversation. That’s good—means a relationship is building. You already know about Rockwell, right?”

  Spinney was caught by surprise. “What? No, I mean, we think he’s a dead man we found in Brattleboro, but that’s about it. That’s why we’re doing this.”

  Leppman took his eyes off the screen to look at him. “Not Mandi? She’s probably the one in trouble here.”

  Lester’s brow furrowed. He felt he was missing something. “In trouble? How?”

  Leppman looked incredulous. “Child predation. Rockwell’s going after her.”

  “Why do you say that?” Lester asked. “I mean, I know it’s all over the place, so I’m not saying you’re wrong. But what did you see?”

  Leppman hesitated, blinked a couple of times, and returned to studying the screen before admitting in an abashed tone, “Nothing. I guess you’re right. Just jumping to conclusions. Let’s dig around some more.” He stopped again abruptly to ask, “You do have a way to secure subpoenas as we go, right?”

  Spinney nodded. “By phone and fax.” He pointed to a fax machine in one corner of the large office, adding, “If that’s all right.”

  Leppman nodded enthusiastically. “No, no. That’s great. Done it before with other agencies. I just wanted to make sure. Don’t want any loopholes.”

  Spinney glanced at him covertly, wondering if this civilian’s enthusiasm wasn’t maybe getting a little too much stoking by association. He made a note to ask Joe later. It was a common enough sight to see consultants become more aggressive bloodhounds than the actual hunters—and pay a psychological price as a result.

  Leppman had returned to the hunt. “We’ve got snippets of exchange here and there—usual introductory chitchat. Bingo,” he finally said, straightening. “What did I tell you?” He tapped the screen with his fingertip. “Right there. She says, ‘14. U?’ See that?”

  Spinney was already reading the next line. “And Rocky says, ‘19.’ There’s a crock.”

  Leppman was shaking his head, continuing to scroll the lines before them. “I knew it. There’s so much of this out there—guys preying on children.” He fixed Lester with a determined look. “That’s one of the biggest reasons I do this work.”

  Lester nodded, figuring the man needed some kind of response.

  But Leppman wasn’t watching. “These are tricky cases to prosecute—you ever done one before?”

  “Nope,” Spinney acknowledged.

  “The bad guys—or their lawyers, at least—hide behind all sorts of excuses. And they’re getting better and better as they get more knowledgeable about this high-tech world. They can make the claim that what the police find on their clients’ computers was put there by a cookie or a virus or Christ knows what else, and then they convince the jury of it. I mean, who hasn’t gotten spam in their e-mail? Or all those pop-up ads—where do those come from? Juries absolutely believe that complete strangers can put whatever they want onto your computer, no problem. Blame TV for that—there’s no technical wizardry that can’t be done if you know how to do it, right? Mostly baloney, of course, but these are paranoid times.”

  He added a few more notes to his pad. “Okay, I got the date and time stamp for this chat. That’ll come in handy when you figure out what Rocky was doing when and where. The biggest catch here, though—since you seem a little vague on everyone’s identity—will be the chat room profiles of both Mandi and Rockwell. From there, we should be able to get their IP addresses, which will finally—after you get those subpoenas I mentioned—land us the home addresses through their Internet service provider records. Their monthly bills, in other words.”

  Lester didn’t bother pointing out that he actually understood a great deal of this already.

  Leppman had by now switched over to another computer, so that he could access the Internet rather than merely study the static contents of the Steve’s Garage clone.

  “Huh,” he grunted. “Rockwell put a block on his chat room profile. No surprise there. Being a kid, though, Mandi was a little less cagey. She lied about her age—you can’t log in, supposedly, unless you’re over eighteen—but all the rest looks legit.”

  He scribbled down her particulars onto his pad. “Okay, so far, so good. She even gave us an address, which is unusual—the standard profile is hobbies, age, gender, general location, and the rest. I guess Mandi’s still used to filling out forms correctly. Great for us.”

  He sat back and rested his hands for a moment, not bothering to turn his head as he spoke. “One last step before we get legal—this is just something I’ve learned through habit. So far, all this has been pretty much public domain information—something anyone can do with a computer and a connection. I do one more thing along similar lines: I check that address I just got against one of the mapping programs, just to make sure it’s not in the middle of the Hudson River, or Lake Champlain, or Christ knows where.”

  He put his hands back over the keyboard and began typing. Lester watched as the screen did its version of scratching its head—portrayed by a small ticking-clock icon—before finally flashing, “Address not found.”

  Leppman tried a couple of variations, equally unsuccessfully, and then sat back in his chair again. “Nothing. Well, so much for good little Mandi. I guess she saw me coming after all.”

  Lester watched his profile, again caught by the
man’s level of engagement. “No sweat,” he said. “I’ll get on those subpoenas.”

  JMAN: U there?

  JMAN: Mandi144. U there?

  Mandi144: hey

  JMAN: thot I got the wrong time

  Mandi144: nop. Probs w/ my mom

  JMAN: wat?

  Mandi144: she got fired. At home a lot

  JMAN: bummer

  Mandi144: ur telling me. R plans r messed up now

  JMAN: I cant cum up?

  Mandi144: Ill tell u when

  Chapter 17

  “Your mom tells me you’re a police officer.”

  Joe looked up from the coffee machine, where he’d been hoping the spigot over his paper cup wouldn’t either miss or overflow. He was so used to everyone knowing what he did for a living—and had been, it felt, for two lifetimes—that he was almost startled at the question.

  Karl Weisenbeck, Leo’s doctor, was standing next to him with a dollar in his hand.

  “Hi, Doc. Yeah. Vermont Bureau of Investigation.”

  Weisenbeck nodded a couple of times, as if trying to remember the name of a song. “Sounds important.”

  Joe laughed as he watched the cup filling, successfully so far. “Not if you’re in law enforcement. Most cops assume we exist only to steal all the credit and headlines they have coming, not to mention the grant money.”

  “Do you?”

  Joe retrieved his cup and stood back to give Weisenbeck a shot at his own luck. The condition of the floor at the foot of the machine suggested he had a fifty-fifty chance. He enjoyed the man’s directness—had from the day they first met.

  “Try not to. How’s Leo doing? I mean really?”

  Now it was Weisenbeck’s turn to look up inquiringly. “You think I’ve been bullshitting you?”

  “Not one bit. That’s why I’m asking.”

  The doctor returned to monitoring his progress, even delicately placing his fingers around the cup so he’d be in position to tear it away at the right moment. A veteran.

  They both waited until that time when, indeed, he had to extract prematurely and allow the spigot to piddle a little extra coffee into the miniature catch basin, from where it dribbled onto the floor. Weisenbeck shook his head with disgust and began walking with Joe down the hallway toward the ICU.

  “He’s no worse, which, given what he’s facing, is saying a lot. From what we can tell, he’s suffered no additional setbacks, which means that time is now playing to our advantage.”

  “Because of the bone knitting?”

  “Right. Once the flail chest is behind him and he can breathe entirely on his own, my suspicion is that we’ll see improvement.”

  “But you did say, ‘From what we can tell.’”

  Weisenbeck stopped walking to look at Joe straight-on. “Mr. Gunther, as I told your mother earlier, there’s a lot we don’t know. Sometimes, it can be like driving in winter with the windows fogged up. You trust to instinct, luck, your knowledge of the road, all your other senses, and anything else you can find. In the end, you can usually figure out why you failed—ice on the pavement, a deer jumping out in front of you, a mechanical failure. But only rarely can you do the same with success. Things often work out simply because it wasn’t your time for them not to.”

  Oddly, Joe thought, he found those words comforting despite their absence of medical vocabulary or cant, perhaps because they so eloquently applied to life in general.

  Weisenbeck’s pager went off. He glanced at it briefly and began making apologies before Joe cut him off with “Believe me, Doc, I know what it’s like. Thanks for your time,” and headed down the hallway on his own as the doctor disappeared into a nearby stairwell.

  In the ICU waiting room, as if in counterpoint to the conversation he’d just left, he walked in on Gail Zigman and his mother, sitting side by side near the window overlooking the euphemistically called “floor,” their heads together in a deep discussion.

  They both looked up as he entered, Gail rising.

  “Hey, guys,” he said, smiling. “Plotting an overthrow?”

  Gail gave him a brief hug as he drew near to kiss his mother, who admitted, “Good Lord, no. We were comparing recipes.”

  “God, don’t tell him,” Gail protested. “He always hated my cooking.”

  “I did not,” he exclaimed. “I just could never tell what it was.” He glanced at his mom. “Tofu-no-fish? Instead of old-fashioned tuna? I mean, give me a break.”

  “That’s an extreme example,” Gail said.

  “Tofu instead of tuna?” their elderly spectator spoke up, her interest sharpened. “That sounds wonderful. You spread it on bread?”

  Joe left them to exchange details and approached the window, where he watched nurses and technicians in gowns and masks working their way among their swathed, recumbent, immobile charges. It was both futuristic fantasy and lunatic ant farm, where those bedded in the white pods were tended and catered to for reasons far outreaching their apparent usefulness.

  Of course, one of those pods had a very clear use to him personally, and he found himself staring at Leo’s supine shape with the intensity of an aspiring mentalist, wishing he could transfer some of his own life force across the sterile space between them.

  “What’re you thinking?” Gail’s voice said quietly from beside him.

  He turned to look at her, surprised by her presence. A glance over his shoulder revealed his mother’s absence from the room, as well as how deeply in thought he must have fallen.

  “Bathroom trip,” Gail explained.

  He returned to his viewing and answered her question. “I was trying to figure out how to revive him using ESP, or maybe a ray gun.”

  “It’s weird seeing him like that,” she said. “A guy so famous for his energy. You learn anything new? I heard you talking with Weisenbeck outside.”

  “No,” he answered simply. He considered sharing some of the thoughts he’d entertained as a result, but held back, realizing that he didn’t have that kind of bond with her anymore—a continuing revelation, which jarred him still, and which, he knew, was inhibiting his taking any great steps forward with Lyn. He and Gail were friends now—old and deeply intertangled friends, to be sure. But they weren’t what they’d once been, and he now found a governor restricting the things that he’d never held from her in the past.

  As if to cover his own embarrassment, he added, “It boiled down to no news being good news.”

  “No news is becoming agony, if you ask me,” she said softly. She then checked her watch and added, “I better get going.”

  They both turned as the door opened and his mother rolled in. Gail crossed to her and made her farewell, giving Joe another brief hug, and was gone before they knew it.

  And before she noticed that she’d left her cell phone behind.

  Joe grabbed it and jogged for the elevator banks, finding nobody there. He mimicked Weisenbeck earlier and headed for the stairs, taking two steps at a time and hoping the elevator had lots of stops.

  When he reached the lobby, he saw her in the distance, swinging through the bank of doors to the driveway outside. He broke into a jog that wouldn’t also alarm the small army of people milling around him, and reached the doors in under a minute.

  From there, he saw her approached by the well-dressed driver of a fancy waiting car, its exhaust plume thick in the cold air, and greeted with a hug and an intimate, almost lingering kiss.

  He stopped dead in his tracks, assessing what to do.

  In his training as a cop, public and personal safety were the priorities, followed by tactical considerations—level of threat, availability and nature of countermeasures, and on down the line.

  Here there was none of that. The adrenaline rush was similar, but the situation was absurdly benign. He stood rooted where he stood, people jostling him to use the doors before him, and tried to unscramble his synapses.

  Fortunately, or perhaps not, Gail ended his dilemma by glancing over her shoulder as she broke a
way from the embrace and began circling the front of the car.

  She, too, froze in place, transparently nonplussed.

  Lamely he held up the cell phone he still clutched in his hand, and pushed the door open before him, hoping his expression was within a mile of normal.

  The car’s owner, one foot already inside his vehicle, was arrested by Gail’s abrupt immobility and glanced in Joe’s direction, giving the latter more purpose.

  This was perfectly reasonable, Joe was thinking as he approached—reasonable and logical. Wasn’t he seeing someone else? Hadn’t he and Gail both moved on?

  He smiled as he reached them. “Can’t live long without this, I bet,” he told her, sticking out his right hand to the man and adding, “Hi. Joe Gunther. Glad to meet you.”

  Gail had, by now, returned to that side of the car, a black BMW, her face red and pinched as if from a steady blast of cold air. “This is Francis Martin, Joe. He works with Martin, Clarkson, Bryan.”

  Joe laughed. “Top of the masthead. Good going.”

  Martin smiled back, his eyes betraying that he’d figured out what was going on. “Not that tough when you created the company. I’ll never have a reputation like yours—or deserve it.”

  Joe gave his hand a last squeeze and dropped it. “I guess that depends on the reputation and who you’re hearing it from.”

  Martin nodded. “Good one. You’d make a good lawyer. I promise, I’ve only heard the best.” Here, he glanced at Gail, who was standing quietly, her eyes blank, fingering her cell phone.

  “You all set?” he asked her. “We’ll have to beat feet to make that meeting.”

  Nicely done, Joe thought, and stepped back. “Have a safe trip,” he said, waving to them both, and added to her, “I’ll let you know if anything changes, one way or the other.”