WELCOME TO CHARLOTTE’S WEB SITE
Below the message a moving cartoon image formed. A spider crawled along the bottom of the page and then began weaving a web across the screen, shooting back and forth until the web was formed. Then tiny photographic images of young girls’ faces appeared in the web, as if caught there. When the image of the web and its captives was complete, the spider took a position at the top of the web.
“This is sick,” Edgar said. “I’m getting a bad feeling here.”
“It’s a pedophile site,” Rider said. With a fingernail she tapped the screen below one of the photos in the web. “And that is Stacey Kincaid. You click on the photo you like and you get a full spread of photos and videos. It is truly, truly horrible stuff. That poor little angel, she might be better off dead.”
Rider moved the arrow to the photo of the blond girl. It was too small for Bosch to identify the girl as Stacey Kincaid. He wished he could just take Rider’s word for it.
“Are you ready for this?” Rider asked. “I can’t run videos on my laptop but the photos give you the idea.”
She didn’t wait for a reply and she didn’t get one. She double-clicked the mouse and a new screen appeared. A photo appeared on the screen. It was a young girl standing naked in front of a hedge. She was smiling in a forced, seemingly unnatural way. Despite the smile she still had a lost-in-the-woods look on her face. Her hands were on her hips. Bosch could tell it was Stacey Kincaid. He tried to breathe but it felt like his lungs were collapsing. He folded his arms across his chest. Rider started scrolling the screen and a series of photos came up featuring the girl in several poses by herself and then finally with a man. Only the man’s naked torso was shown, never his face. The last photos were the girl and the man engaged in various sex acts. Then they came to the final photo. It showed Stacey Kincaid in a white dress with little semaphore flags on it. She was waving at the camera. The photo seemed somehow to be the worst one even though it was the most innocent.
“Okay, go back or forward or whatever you do to get that off there,” Bosch said.
He watched Rider move the cursor to a button below the final photo that said HOME on it. It seemed sadly ironic to Bosch that clicking HOME was the way out. Rider clicked the mouse and the screen went back to the spider’s web. Bosch pulled his chair back to his spot and dropped down into it. Fatigue and depression suddenly hit him. He wanted to go home and go to sleep and forget everything he knew.
“People are the worst animals,” Rider said. “They will do anything to each other. Just to indulge their fantasies.”
Bosch got up and walked over to one of the other nearby desks. It belonged to a burglary detective named McGrath. He opened the drawers and started looking through them.
“Harry,” Rider said, “what are you looking for?”
“A cigarette. I thought Paul kept his smokes in his desk.”
“He used to. I told him to start taking them home with him.”
Bosch looked over at her, his hand still holding one of the drawers.
“You told him that?”
“I didn’t want you slipping, Harry.”
Bosch shoved the drawer closed and came back to his chair.
“Thanks a lot, Kizmin. You saved me.”
There wasn’t a drop of thanks in the tone he had used.
“You’ll get through this, Harry.”
Bosch gave her a look.
“You probably haven’t smoked an entire cigarette in your entire life and you’re going to tell me about quitting and how I’ll get through it?”
“Sorry. I’m just trying to help.”
“Like I said, thanks.”
He looked over at her computer and nodded.
“What else? What are you thinking about? How does that tie in Sam and Kate Kincaid to the point we should’ve advised them?”
“They had to know about this,” Rider said, amazed that Bosch didn’t see what she saw. “The man in the photos, that’s got to be Kincaid.”
“Whoah!” Edgar said. “How can you say that? You couldn’t see the guy’s face. We were just talking to the guy and he and his wife are still righteously fucked-up over this.”
It hit Bosch then. When he had first seen the photos on the computer he had thought they were taken by the girl’s abductor.
“You’re saying these photos are old,” he said. “That she was abused before she was abducted.”
“I’m saying there probably wasn’t an abduction at all. Stacey Kincaid was an abused child. My guess is that her stepfather defiled her and then probably killed her. And that doesn’t happen without tacit knowledge, if not approval, by the mother.”
Bosch was silent. Rider had spoken with such fervor and even pain that he couldn’t help but wonder if she was talking from some kind of personal experience.
“Look,” Rider said, apparently sensing the skepticism of her partners. “There was a time that I thought I wanted to move into child sex crimes. This was before I put in for homicide. There was an opening on the endangered-child team in Pacific and the job was mine if I wanted it. They first sent me to Quantico for a two-week training program the bureau puts on once a year on child sex crimes. I lasted eight days. I realized I couldn’t hack it. I came back and put in for homicide.”
She stopped there but neither Bosch nor Edgar said anything. They knew there was more.
“But before I left,” Rider continued, “I learned enough to know that most often sexual abuse of children comes from inside the family, relatives or close friends. The boogey monsters who climb through the window and abduct are few and far between.”
“It’s still not evidence in this specific case, Kiz,” Bosch said gently. “This could still be the rare exception. It wasn’t Harris who came through the window but this guy.”
He pointed to her computer, though the images of the headless man’s assault on Stacey Kincaid were thankfully not on the screen.
“Nobody came through the window,” Rider insisted.
She pulled a file over and opened it. Bosch saw it contained a copy of the protocol from the autopsy of Stacey Kincaid. She leafed through it until she came to the photos. She picked the one she wanted and handed it to Bosch. While he looked at it she started paging through the protocol.
The photo Bosch held was a shot of Stacey Kincaid’s body in situ — the position and place where it was found. Her arms were spread wide. Sheehan had been right. Her body was darkening with interior decomposition and the face was gaunt, but there was an angelic quality to her in repose. His heart ached from looking at the photos of her tortured and now dead.
“Look at the left knee,” Rider commanded.
He did so. He saw a round dark spot that appeared to be a scab.
“A scab?”
“Right. The protocol calls it premortem by five to six days. It happened before she was abducted. So she had that scab on her knee the entire time she was with her abductor — if there really was one. In the photos on the web site, she has no scab. I can go back in and show you if you like.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Bosch said.
“Yeah,” Edgar added. “Me, too.”
“So these photos on the web were taken well before she was supposedly kidnapped, well before she was murdered.”
Bosch nodded, then shook his head.
“What?” Rider asked.
“It’s just . . . I don’t know. Twenty-four hours ago we were working the Elias thing and thinking maybe we were looking for a cop. Now all of this . . .”
“It changes things all right,” Edgar said.
“Wait a minute, if that’s Sam Kincaid in those pictures with her, why the hell are they still on that web site? It doesn’t make sense that he would risk that.”
“I thought about that,” Rider said. “There are two possible explanations. One being that he doesn’t have editing access to the web site. In other words, he can’t take those photos off without going to the site administrator, raising suspi
cions and exposing himself. The second possibility, and it might be a combination of both, is that he felt he was safe. Harris was fingered as the killer and whether he was convicted or not that was the end of the story.”
“It’s still a risk leaving those photos out there to be seen,” Edgar said.
“Who’s going to see them?” Rider asked. “Who’s going to tell?”
Her voice was too defensive. She realized this and continued in a calmer tone.
“Don’t you see? The people with access to this site are pedophiles. Even if someone recognized Stacey, which is unlikely, what were they going to do? Call the police and say, ‘Uh, yes, I like fucking children but I don’t stand for murdering them. Could you get these photos off our web site?’ Not in a million years. Hell, maybe keeping the photos on there was a form of bragging. We don’t even know what we have here. Maybe every girl on that site is dead.”
Her voice was growing sharper as she tried to convince them.
“Okay, okay,” Bosch said. “You make good points, Kiz. Let’s stay on our case for now. What is your theory? You think Elias got this far along and it got him killed?”
“Absolutely. We know it did. The fourth note. ‘He knows you know.’ Elias went onto the secret web site and was found out.”
“How’d they know he was in there if he had the passwords from the third note?” Edgar asked.
“Good question,” Rider replied. “I asked the O’Connors the same thing. They did some snooping around after getting into the server. They found a cookie jar on the web site. What that means is that there is a program that captures data about each user who enters the site. It then analyzes the data to determine if someone has entered the site who should not have had access. Even if they have the passwords, their entry is still recorded and a data trail called an Internet protocol address is left behind. It’s like fingerprints. The IP, or the cookie, is left on the site you enter. The cookie jar program will then analyze the IP address and match it to a list of known users. If there is no match a flag is raised. The site’s manager sees the flag and can trace the intruder. Or he can set up a tripwire program that waits for a return visit from the intruder. When he comes back, the program will attach a tracer which will provide the site manager with the intruder’s E-mail address. And once you have that you have the intruder cold. You can identify him then. If it looks like a cop you close the elevator — the page you hijacked and were using as a secret gateway — and you go find a new web page to hijack. But in this case it wasn’t a cop. It was a lawyer.”
“And they didn’t shut down,” Bosch said. “They sent someone out to kill him.”
“Right.”
“So you think this is what Elias did,” Bosch said. “He got these notes in the mail and followed the clues. He stumbled into this web site and set off an alarm. A flag. They then killed him.”
“Yes, that would be my interpretation of what we know at this point, particularly in light of the fourth note. ‘He knows you know.’ ”
Bosch shook his head, confused by his own extrapolations of the story.
“I’m still not getting this. Who is the ‘they’ we’re talking about here? That I just accused of murder.”
“The group. The users of the site. The site administrator — which might possibly be Kincaid — picked up on the intruder, realized it was Elias, and dispatched someone to take care of the problem in order to fend off exposure. Whether or not he polled all members of the group first doesn’t matter. They are all guilty because the web site is a criminal enterprise.”
Bosch held his hand up to slow her down.
“Slow down. We can leave the group and the bigger picture for the DA to worry about. Stay focused on the killer and Kincaid. We are assuming he was involved in all of this and somehow someone knew about it, then decided to inform Elias instead of the cops. Does that make sense?”
“Sure it does. We just don’t know all the details yet. But the notes speak for themselves. They clearly indicate someone tipped Elias to the site, then later warned him that he had been found out.”
Bosch nodded and thought about this for a moment.
“Wait a minute. If he set off a flag, then didn’t you just do the same?”
“No. Thanks to the O’Connors. When they were inside the server they added my IP as well as their own to the site’s good guy list. No alarms. The operators and users of the site won’t know we’ve been there unless they actually look at their good guy list and notice it has been altered. I think we’ve got the time to do what we need to do.”
Bosch nodded. He wanted to ask whether what the O’Connors had done had been legal but thought it best not to know.
“So who sent Elias the notes?” he asked instead.
“The wife,” Edgar said. “I think she got an attack of the guilts and wanted to help Elias rip Sam the car czar a new asshole. She sent the notes.”
“It fits,” Rider said. “Whoever sent the notes had knowledge of two separate things: Charlotte’s Web Site and the car-wash receipts. Actually, a third thing as well: that Elias had tripped an alarm. So my vote goes with the wife, too. What was she like today?”
Bosch spent the next ten minutes updating her on their activities during the day.
“And that’s just our work on the case,” Edgar added. “Harry didn’t even tell you how we got the back window of my car shot out.”
“What?”
Edgar told the story and Rider seemed mesmerized by it.
“They catch the shooter?”
“Not that we heard. We didn’t wait around.”
“You know, I’ve never been shot at,” she said. “Must be a rush.”
“Not the kind you want,” Bosch said. “I still have questions about all of this Internet stuff.”
“What are they?” Rider said. “If I can’t answer, one of the O’Connors can.”
“No, not technical questions. Logic questions. I still don’t understand how and why this stuff is still available for us to look at. I understand what you said about the users all being pedophiles and their seeming feeling of safety, but now we have Elias dead. If they killed him, why the hell didn’t they at least move to a new gateway?”
“Maybe they are in the process of trying to do just that. Elias hasn’t been dead forty-eight hours.”
“And what about Kincaid? We just told him we are reopening the case. Whether he was in danger of exposure or not, it seems he would have gotten on the computer the minute we left and either contacted the site administrator or tried to crash the site and those pictures himself.”
“Again, maybe it’s in process. And even if it is, it’s too late. The O’Connors backed everything onto a Zip drive. They can crash the site but we still have it. We’ll be able to trace every IP address and take down every one of those people — if you consider them people.”
Again the fervor and anger in her voice made Bosch wonder if something about what she had seen on the web site had touched something personal, something deep inside.
“So where do we go from here?” he asked. “Search warrants?”
“Yep,” Rider said. “And we bring in the Kincaids. Fuck their big mansion on the hill. We have enough already to bring them in for questioning on the child abuse. We separate them and sweat them in the rooms. We go for the wife and get a confession. Get her to waive spousal privilege and give us her husband, that rat bastard.”
“You’re talking about a very powerful and politically connected family.”
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the car czar.”
Bosch checked her look to make sure she was kidding.
“I’m afraid of moving too fast and blowing it. We’ve got nothing that directly links anybody to Stacey Kincaid or Howard Elias. If we bring mom down here and don’t turn her, then we watch the car czar drive away. That’s what I’m afraid of, okay?”
Rider nodded.
“She’s dying to be turned,” Edgar said. “Why else send those notes to Elias?”
/>
Bosch put his elbows on the desk and washed his face with his hands as he thought about things. He had to make a decision.
“What about Charlotte’s Web Site?” he asked, his face still covered by his hands. “What do we do with that?”
“We give that to Inglert and the O’Connors,” Rider said. “They’ll jump all over it. Like I said, they’ll be able to trace the good guy list to the users. They’ll identify them and take them down. We’re talking multiple arrests of an Internet pedophile ring. That’s just for starters. The DA might want to try to link them all to the homicides.”
“They’re probably all over the country,” Edgar said. “Not just L.A.”