Next Victim (26 page)

The question was rhetorical. Dodge knew exactly what Levine would say—namely, nothing at all. The man just stared.

"That’s right, my friend," Dodge went on. "This city is in some serious shit. And I know the details."

"You shitting me?"

Dodge gave him a bored look.

"Okay, okay, you’re not bullshitting, sorry, I just mean that this is, I mean, this is…"

Awful. Terrifying. Unthinkable
. There were lots of words he could have used.

"This is
fantastic!
I mean, this is fucking incredible. If it pans out," he added cautiously.

"It’ll pan out." Dodge waited, saying nothing more.

"So give," Levine said finally.

"What’s it worth to you?" Another rhetorical question.

"
If
it pans out, like you claim…you’ll get the ten grand."

Dodge smiled. "That’s what I like about you, Myron. In the end, you’re always willing to be reasonable."

When he was done with Levine, Dodge sat alone and had himself a slice of Lucy J’s pie. He was going to grow a goddamned potbelly if he kept celebrating like this, but what the fuck. He had reason to celebrate. He’d obtained three grand in cash, with an IOU for the rest. He knew Levine was good for it. Gutless little troll didn’t have the balls to double-cross him, and besides, he couldn’t afford to shut off such a valuable pipeline of information—especially after today.

Anyway, Levine had gotten a bargain. Fucking story was worth twenty grand easy, maybe twenty-five. But Dodge had known that Levine would never go that high without tedious negotiations. That process would take time, and Dodge couldn’t wait. Some other media outlet might get hold of the story.

There were a dozen—hell, a hundred—places that might spring a leak. Even in Tess McCallum’s rushed synopsis of events, it had been obvious that just about every local government operation was involved in this case. Not everybody knew the whole story, but enough people knew bits and pieces. It would all come out before long, whether it was Levine who got the tip or some other jackass at a rival station or a newspaper.

And, honest to God, the story really ought to come out. The public, bless their precious constitutional rights, was entitled to know. And he, Jim Dodge, was just a public-spirited citizen. Sure he was. And pigs could fly to the fucking moon.

He swallowed his last forkful of pie and left his payment, adding a smaller tip than usual because the waitress with the Jennifer Lopez ass wasn’t on duty today. Which was too bad, because with money in his pocket and a song in his heart, he was looking to get laid tonight.

When Special Agent McCallum had walked back into his life, he’d thought he might have been offered a second chance to find out if she was a natural redhead. But he’d decided McCallum was butch, or de-sexed or a nun or something. She hadn’t responded to his manly charms or his pheromones or whatever women responded to.

Well, fuck her and the horse she rode in on. The way he had it figured, the news leak would prompt an FBI internal investigation. And who was likely to get nailed for talking out of school? Little Miss McCallum, who had a prior connection with Myron Levine in Denver. She would take the rap, and Dodge would walk away clean.

Tough break, Tess. Serves you right for giving me the cold shoulder
.

30

Tess sat alone in a squad room of the Westwood field office, staring at a computer monitor as she studied the results of another database search.

She had waited at the Life Sciences Center for nearly two hours. First Larkin had arrived to ferry the tape player, sealed in its plastic bag, to the AD. A long time later the forensics team had finally showed up. Tess had left them at their work and driven the short distance to the field office.

In the hallway she’d run into the Nose, the last person she wanted to see.

"Hard on the case, McCallum?" Michaelson had asked.

She said something noncommittal. He studied her shrewdly.

"You don’t have to be evasive with me. I know what’s going on."

Tennant brought you in?
she almost asked, but of course no one had brought him in. He was fishing for information.

"Going on?" she said innocently.

"The other squad. You know."

Yes
, she thought.
I do know. And you don’t
.

"The other squad’s not talking to me." The lie came easily to her. "If they’ve opened up to you, I’d like to hear about it."

He stood there, frustrated, evidently pondering several possible comebacks before settling on "Never mind."

She watched him walk away. His shoulders, she noticed, seemed to be sagging a little. He was out of the loop, and he knew it. She would have felt sorry for him if he wasn’t such a jerk.

She’d found an empty squad room, commandeered a computer, and set to work.

"Wipe Out" was the song title. It had to mean something to Mobius. Maybe she could find out what. But it wouldn’t be easy.

The idea that there was a vast searchable computerized archive of crimes and criminals, and that anyone with a badge could type a few keywords into a search box and obtain instant results, was unfortunately a myth. The reality was that most law enforcement databases were useful only for a fingerprint search, in which case the FBI’s NCIC system was the best bet, or a search by the suspect’s name. There was no nationwide archive at all, merely a variety of more or less inclusive databases run by states and counties, accessible only by dedicated terminals within courthouses and halls of records.

Tess, of course, had neither a fingerprint nor a suspect’s name. She had the name of a song that might or might not be connected to a crime Mobius had committed early in his career—perhaps in his youth, even before he
was
Mobius.

The only official database that might be of help was VICAP, short for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. VICAP listed crimes by modus operandi, including any signatures—distinctive peculiarities of the crime scene, such as notes or messages left by the perpetrator. But when she typed in the Boolean search term "wipeout OR wipe out," she got no hits.

This meant she would have to try other databases not specifically designed for law enforcement. LexisNexis, a repository of newspaper articles, was her first stop. Her initial search yielded a number of hits, too many to peruse. When she narrowed the search to eliminate irrelevant articles, she came up dry.

The same thing happened when she visited the major Web search engines. There were thousands of Web pages containing the term "wipeout" or "wipe out," but nothing that seemed relevant to her needs.

So what now? She had to conduct a more focused search, and she had to cover the entire Web.

Most people didn’t realize it, but even the most popular search engines scratched only the surface of the vast pool of material available online. There were millions—actually billions—of Web pages that had never been collected and indexed by any standard search engine. This mass of material was sometimes known as "the deep Web."

There were ways of accessing the deep Web. Just as it was possible to send a robot probe into ocean trenches, exploring realms off-limits to human beings, so it was possible to launch a software robot—a bot, in computerese—into the deep Web. A bot was a program that searched for specific keywords in specific contexts. The search could be as narrow or as broad as the user desired. It could take a long time—hours, even—because the bot was simply set free to follow link after link, collecting any data that matched the search criteria, crawling automatically and unsupervised through myriad uncharted Web pages.

Tess had downloaded a bot program in Denver for use on a case last year. It had spidered across the Web for twenty hours before finally returning the hit she needed, a site unlisted in any of the brand-name search engines. She decided to try it again.

Since this wasn’t her own computer, she had to find the shareware site where she had obtained the bot, then download the software and install it. This took only ten minutes, thanks to a high-speed connection. Next she set the search parameters, trying to include only pages in which "wipe out" was mentioned in conjunction with criminal activity. If she set the parameters too wide, she would haul up a mass of junk she could never sift through. Too narrow, and she might miss what she was looking for.

Before initiating the search, she instructed the program to place any Web links that it found in an online storage service she used, rather than on the desktop’s hard drive. That way she could access the search results from her laptop or any other computer.

When she was ready, she launched the bot. Nothing to do now but wait, maybe get some coffee or something to eat. It occurred to her with a touch of surprise that she had eaten absolutely nothing all day, and it was now nearly seven o’clock. She was about to go in search of a vending machine when the squad room door opened and Andrus walked in.

"Gerry," she said with a smile. "You get the evidence from Larkin okay?"

"I got it," he said, but he looked strangely unsettled, and there was a coldness in his tone she hadn’t heard before.

She frowned. "There a problem?"

"Problem?" He took a chair near her desk and swiveled restlessly. "No problem. What could possibly be a problem?"

Sarcasm was a blunt instrument in his hands. He rarely wielded it.

She shut off the monitor on her computer, leaving the machine at work without a display, and pushed her chair away from her desk. She looked at him, saying nothing. Whatever was on his mind, he would give voice to it soon enough.

"You always have to do things your way," he said, "don’t you, Tess?"

This was so unexpected, so incomprehensible, that she had no answer.

"No one else can be right if they disagree with you. It’s your judgment and only yours that counts. Why is that? Is it because you’re so much smarter than all the rest of us, or do you just think you’re the only one whose intentions are sufficiently pure?"

"I…I don’t know what—"

"You’ve always had this, I don’t know, cowboy streak in you. Black Tiger, for instance. Sometimes I think you actually wanted to go
mano a mano
with that scumbag. You wanted to be Wyatt Earp at the OK Corral. And last night when you said you were looking for a chance to take down Mobius—you weren’t kidding, were you? You want to be judge, jury, and executioner. You want to make all the rules."

"Gerry—"

"You basically blackmailed me into including you in the EOC briefing. Said you’d investigate on your own if I didn’t go along. You forced my hand, made me tangle with Tennant—and my relations with him were none too friendly to begin with. And after all that, you still weren’t satisfied. You had to start freelancing. You had to go behind my back, behind everybody’s back. Thanks a lot, Tess. Thanks for fucking me over, big time."

"Gerry, I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about."

"Don’t you? Okay then, I’ll explain." He leaned forward, the chair creaking on its casters. "A half hour ago the mayor of Los Angeles got a call from the news director at KPTI-TV, Channel Eight. The station’s getting set to run with an exclusive report on, quote, ‘a city under siege. Deadly nerve gas in the hands of a psychotic serial killer.’ Does the mayor have any comment?"

"So it got out," Tess said softly, still not seeing what this had to do with her.

"Yes, it got out. And yes, the mayor did have a comment. He spent fifteen minutes begging the station to kill the story. Mayors don’t like to beg, Tess. They like it even less when they beg and come away empty-handed. The story is set to run as a special report in about half an hour. Be sure to tune in. You can admire your handiwork."

"
My
handiwork?" Suddenly things were coming together.

"We told you we didn’t want the story out there. You put it out anyway. Tell the people—that’s your mantra, right? The people need to know the truth, they can handle it, they won’t panic. Well, maybe they will, maybe they won’t. Thanks to you, now we’ll all get to find out."

"You think I leaked the story…?"

"Oh, gosh. Did I give you that impression?" Sarcasm again. "Well, possibly the thought had occurred to me, seeing as how you made that eloquent plea for the public’s right to know at the EOC briefing."

"For God’s sake, Gerry—just because of that? Because I made a suggestion?"

"No, not just because of that. KPTI knows things they had to have gotten from you."

"What things?"

"The fire in the chemistry lab. And its connection to this case. You were the only one working that angle."

"In case you’ve forgotten, that’s because I’m the one who made the connection in the first place."

Andrus ignored her. "And then you spilled it to a reporter, along with the rest of the story, so it wouldn’t be hushed up. So you could get your way."

"This is crazy. I’ve only been in town twelve days. How would I have any contacts with the local media?"

"Does the name Myron Levine mean anything to you?"

She almost said no, then realized the name was familiar. "TV guy, used to work out of Denver," she said slowly.

"He interviewed you there, as I recall."

"Not exactly. He tried to. I wasn’t interested."

"Not interested in going on the record, anyway. Off the record—who knows?"

"What are you saying?"

"I’m saying, Tess, that Levine is in LA now, and he’s the one with the story, and you knew him in Denver, and it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together."

"I didn’t talk to Levine. I didn’t even know he was here. And besides, I’m not the only person who knew about the lab."

"Who else knew? Besides me, I mean."

"The cop I was working with." She’d disliked him from the moment she saw him in his cheap suit. "Detective Dodge, West LA. That’s who my money’s on."

"Well, that’s great, Tess. But
my
money is on you."

"Gerry, you
know
me…."