Last Breath (13 page)

It might have been nothing, just the old house settling.

Or a door, opening. The back door.

Her gun. She needed her off-duty Smith. She looked around the kitchen before remembering that the gun was in her handbag, and her handbag, damn it, was in her bedroom at the rear of the bungalow.

The prudent course of action was to leave the house, drive to Wilshire Station, come back with a patrol unit.

But she wasn’t going to do that. Wasn’t going to be chased out of her home by a glimpse of light and a barely audible creak.

No gun? Then make do with another weapon.

She opened the cutlery drawer and pulled out a carving knife. Part of her recalled the knife she’d grabbed from another kitchen before descending into the crawl space. But she refused to think about that.

She studied the knife. It was long and wickedly sharp and felt heavy in her hand. She liked its weight, the gleam of its blade. But she would have liked her .38 Smith better.

Knife in hand, she advanced toward the rear of the house.

No lights burned in this part of the bungalow. She had turned off the light on her nightstand before leaving the bedroom. Now she wished she hadn’t.

She reached the rear hall. It was empty.

Drawing back against the wall, she scanned the hallway. The back door appeared closed, but possibly the intruder had shut it behind him.

She looked for footprint impressions or tracks of dirt on the carpet. None were visible in the dim glow from the living room, but she could see only halfway down the hall.

The hallway opened onto three rooms. On the left were the guest lavatory and the laundry room. On the right, farthest down, was her bedroom.

If someone had gotten inside, he could have concealed himself in any one of those rooms. She would have to check each one in turn.

She advanced, the knife’s wooden hasp cold against her palm.

The door to the guest lavatory stood open. She didn’t think the intruder could have progressed that far without leaving some marks on the carpet. Even so, she took the precaution of pivoting into the bathroom doorway, knife raised.

No one there.

Emerging into the hall, she looked to her right, then left, then right again, like a child looking both ways before crossing the street.

The laundry room was next. That door was closed. She wasn’t looking forward to opening it, so she did it fast, throwing the door wide and darting in.

This room, too, was unoccupied. Maybe there was no intruder. Maybe she had imagined the whole thing.

This thought, dangerously seductive, was instantly dismissed. With one room still to go, she couldn’t afford to drop her guard.

She stepped to the laundry-room doorway, peering to her right, her left—

Sudden pressure on her face.

Gloved hand, wet cloth.

Couldn’t see him in the darkness, could only lash out blindly with the knife.

Her thrust missed, and then his other hand clamped on her wrist, holding the knife at bay.

He pressed the cloth harder against her nose and mouth. Instinctively she knew she must not take a breath.

She flailed at him with her left hand. If she could find his throat, pinch the carotid artery—

He sensed her strategy and jammed himself closer to her, wedging her against the door frame of the laundry room, restricting her range of movement.

She struggled against him. His face was masked, invisible. His body was pure darkness.

Her lungs demanded air. With a last effort she drew up one knee and pistoned out her leg, connecting with his gut. He loosened his grip on her face. The cloth came away. She sucked in a deep draft of oxygen, and then the cloth was over her nose again, and before she could stop herself she had breathed its fumes.

Cold.

A shiver of cold in her nasal passages, in her throat.

The fumes were sweet-swelling, intoxicating. They made her head spin. The world blurred, everything going double, no clarity anywhere, and she was tired, sleepy. Her fingers losing purchase on the knife, letting it fall, and though she knew that she was defenseless, she didn’t care.

Far away, his chuckle of triumph. Then his words, low, spoken close to her ear.

“Got you now, C.J.”

That voice.

She
knew
that voice.

Her last thought was a question, echoing unanswered.

... Adam?

Something nagged at Rawls. He knew there was more here than a voyeuristic Web site.

That name, Bluebeard ... three women under surveillance ... one for each month ...

The connection was close but continued to elude him.

He and Brand followed Gader into the guest bedroom on the second floor. The room had been made into a work space cluttered with computers, printers, cables, surge suppressors, and battery backup units. The shades were down, the room lit only by a pair of gooseneck lamps, bulbs angled away from the equipment to minimize screen glare. The cold wind beat against the windowpanes.

It occurred to Rawls that computer people, himself and Brand included, spent far too much time behind closed windows in rooms like this.

The machine they wanted was easy to find. Rawls spotted it even before Gader led them to it. It was a Compaq Proliant server with a twenty-inch monitor and a standard keyboard. Superficially the setup resembled any other personal computer with a tower design, but because it was a server, it had capabilities that an ordinary PC did not.

“What OS are you running?” Brand asked.

“Windows 2000 Server edition.”

“Log on. And, Mr. Gader, there better not be a format bomb or any other funny business.” A format bomb would erase the contents of the drive when an incorrect log-in was attempted.

“There’s no funny business.” Gader sat at the computer and turned on the monitor, which had been powered down to save energy. The server itself had been left on. It would be active twenty-four hours a day, allowing visitors to access the site whenever they wished.

Rawls watched Gader type in the screen name Nasty Boy and the Fatima password.

“NastyBoy,” Rawls muttered. “Seems appropriate.”

“Hey, get off my case, okay? You’ve got me all wrong.”

Rawls ignored him. “How’d you pick the password anyway?”

“I didn’t.
He
did.”

“Bluebeard?”

“Yeah.”

“You let a visitor pick the password to the whole site?”

“He’s more than a visitor. He runs it with me. Well, the truth is, he pretty much runs it, period.”

“From a remote location?”

“Yeah.”

“You turned over your sysop duties to a remote administrator?”

“That’s right. He wanted to do it, and I let him. I have other things to do. And he was contributing the most interesting content anyway.”

“The content being the videos of these women?”

“Yeah,” Gader said in a smaller voice.

“Once he took control, he changed the password to Fatima?”

“Right. That was his idea. Of course, you’re supposed to change a site’s password periodically. It’s a standard security measure.”

“Standard,” Rawls echoed, but there was nothing standard about a name like Bluebeard. “Didn’t you wonder why he chose that particular alias?”

“What, you’re saying he’s some kind of murderer or something?” Gader laughed. “I guess if he called himself Napoleon you’d figure he was a world conqueror. People pick crazy nicknames online. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“So it never worried you?”

“No.”

“Well,” Rawls said, “it worries me. What made you cede control of the site to a stranger?”

“He’s not exactly a stranger.”

“You’ve met him?”

“Not face-to-face, but we’ve corresponded—e-mail, I mean. We had similar interests. He liked my site, but he thought we could do more with it. Back then there was no video, just vidcaps from adult movies—stuff on Showtime at two A.M. I would pull some frames and put them on the site. Frontal nudity, bondage, babes in hot tubs—that kind of crap. It was nonprofit, just for kicks.”

“Was the site kept secret?” Rawls asked.

“Pretty much. I had it password-protected, because I was a little worried about copyright-infringement issues. I’d heard of other sites being shut down for using pirated stills, so I kept a low profile. I gave out the site address and the password in e-mails to people I met in chat rooms. Bluebeard was one of them.”

“And you two hit it off?”

“I guess you could say that. He checked out the site, then told me he had a way to spice it up. He sent me some footage as an e-mail attachment—an .avi file.”

“A woman in her bedroom?”

“Right.”

“And you had no qualms about putting that kind of material on your site?”

Gader swiveled his desk chair to face Rawls. “Look, he told me she knew about it. He
assured
me she knew.”

“Knew what?”

“That she was on the Web. He said it was her idea.”

“And when a second woman showed up on the site?” Brand asked. “Didn’t that make you wonder?”

“Yeah, but again, he
assured
me. I mean, he gave me his assurance ...”

He seemed to like that word
assure
, but Rawls was tired of hearing it. “Mr. Gader, stop trying to cover your ass and just tell us what happened.”

“Okay, okay. Well, like I said, Bluebeard wanted to supply streaming video. I thought it was cool—way better than the stuff I was uploading. So I gave him my log-on info to let him access my site’s file manager. That’s when he started sending the video feed. Real-time video—at least I’m pretty sure it was. The first woman became Miss November. Next month, he sent video of Miss December, and now Miss January. I guess this is her last night—probably there’ll be a Miss February tomorrow. And so on. It was Bluebeard’s idea to have people vote for their favorites. Eventually he assumed so many responsibilities that I just let him administer the whole site. It’s still physically on my server, but he’s controlling it through the network.”

“So he could be anywhere?” Rawls asked.

“I guess.”

“You don’t know where he lives, or where these women live?”

“No. Well, I assume they live near him, wherever that is. He must have access to them.”

“You can’t tell me you were never curious as to this Bluebeard’s identity.”

“I was curious. Sure.”

“Well, you’re not exactly naive about computers. You know how to trace a visitor to your Web site.”

Gader shook his head. “Tried that. No good. He sends the video feed through a proxy server. I can trace it back that far and no farther.”

“With a court order,” Brand said, “we could force the proxy’s administrator to surrender their logs.”

“If they keep the logs in the first place,” Rawls mused. Some of those outfits routinely destroyed all information to defeat any possible subpoenas. He looked at Gader. “How about the e-mails he sent you? Were those untraceable too?”

“Sent through a remailer. Scrubbed.”

“You didn’t find that suspicious?”

“Hell, a lot of people use anonymizer services on the Web. Big Brother’s out there. As I guess you two ought to know, seeing as how you work for him.”

Rawls brushed aside the jibe. “Bluebeard shut off the other video streams? He keeps only one going at a time?”

“That’s right.”

“Did you capture the other streams, or parts of them? You know, highlight reels?”

“No, never did.”

Rawls leaned on Gader’s desk and made eye contact. “Don’t play games with me. You’ve got footage of naked women streaming into your computer, and you make no effort to save any of it for a rainy day?”

“Well ... maybe some stills.”

“Maybe?”

Gader shrugged. “Stills. A few.”

“Where are they? On the site?”

“No, I posted a few of Miss November after she was off the site, but Bluebeard took ’em down. Guess he wanted to stay current. Funny, though. He seemed really upset about it—kind of flamed me. Said he wanted only that month’s playmate on display.”

“Playmate?” Brand asked with a smirk.

Gader was embarrassed. “That’s what he calls them. You know, playmate of the month.”

“He’s a real charmer, this friend of yours,” Brand said.

“Where are the stills?” Rawls asked.

“On the hard drive of my PC.”

“Show us.”

Gader kicked his swivel chair away from the server and rolled across the room to a Hewlett-Packard desktop system. He booted it up and activated a picture editing program, then loaded three .jpeg stills.

“Here’s a sample,” he said, waving his hand over the tiled images. “Miss November, December, January.”

The photos caught the women in medium shot or close-up. All were Caucasians, but otherwise they differed in appearance. Two were blondes, while Miss January, as Rawls had already noted, was a brunette. Their ages varied from early twenties to perhaps late thirties. All of them had been videotaped in their bedrooms.

“Are these the clearest facial shots you’ve got?” Rawls asked.

“I guess so. I don’t always concentrate on the faces, if you know what I mean.”

“Print them out. One photo per page, full sheet.”

Gader obeyed. His inkjet printer buzzed and whirred until all three sheets had been deposited in the tray. Rawls picked them up and shared them with Brand, farming out the pages like a hand of cards.

“What are we looking for, exactly?” Brand asked.

“I’m not sure. You know how something is on the tip of your tongue and you can’t quite remember?”

“You saying you may have seen these women before?”

“The first two, yes.”

“Where?”

“I’m not sure,” Rawls said again. He stared at the faces, ignoring Miss January, focusing on Miss November and Miss December. Two women with nothing obviously in common except the color of their hair.

They had been spied on, each for a separate month. When the month was over, the spying had stopped, and they had not been seen on the site again. Bluebeard had been very vocal about keeping them off the site. Why?

Because someone would recognize them? Someone who might have seen them?