One by One (13 page)

‘Detective Hunter,’ she said, offering her hand. Both of her arms were completely covered in tattoos, all the way to her wrists, which in turn were lined with different bracelets. Her fingernails were manicured and done in black nail varnish. She looked completely at ease and entirely self-confident.

The first thought that crossed Hunter’s mind was that Michelle Kelly hadn’t become an FBI agent out of choice. Hunter had been to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, more than once. He had dealt with agents and their section chiefs. He had read their rulebook. The Federal Bureau of Investigation was still run under a classical approach – old school. Dress codes, hairstyles and rules of conduct were strictly enforced, especially when inside an official building. Facial piercings and clearly visible tattoos were simply not allowed. Of course, exceptions were made for deep-cover agents who had to infiltrate gangs, cults, criminal organizations, etc., but a regular person applying for a place at the academy with his or her arms covered in ink would’ve been turned away at the gates. Hunter’s conclusion was that Michelle Kelly probably owed the federal government a debt. Maybe she had been a master hacker in her former life. Someone with cyber skills the FBI didn’t have and couldn’t ignore. They had finally caught up with her, and a deal was placed on the table – a very long spell inside or a position with the Cybercrime Division. She took the job.

Hunter took her hand. ‘Ms. Kelly, thanks for seeing us.’ She had soft hands but a very firm grip. ‘This is my partner, Detective Carlos Garcia.’

They shook hands.

‘Please call me Michelle,’ she said, showing them inside a large room that was chilled to a few degrees below comfortable.

Unlike the LAPD Computer Crimes Unit, which resembled a large open-plan high-tech newsroom, the FBI Cybercrime Division looked to be in a league of its own. First impressions were that the inside of the room looked like the bridge of the starship
Enterprise.
Lights were blinking on and off just about everywhere they looked. The east wall was taken by six massive monitors, each one showing maps, images or lines of data neither Hunter nor Garcia understood. Sixteen spacious desks, covered with monitors and high-tech computer equipment, were scattered around the room. There was no separate enclosure. No office. No visible hierarchy. Inside that room, everyone was equal.

Michelle guided them to the desk closest to the north wall. ‘Dennis Baxter gave me very few details. He said that it would be better if you ran me through the whole story.’ She dragged two chairs from the nearby desks and positioned them in front of her own.

A man in his mid twenties approached them. He had wavy, rust-colored hair, thin lips, longish eyebrows and large and round, almost black eyes. He looked like a pensive owl – the spitting image of what most people imagine a geek would look like, without the thick glasses.

‘This is Harry Mills,’ Michelle said, making the necessary introductions. ‘He’s part of our unit, and a computer genius, with the diplomas to prove it.’

More handshakes.

Harry took a seat and Hunter ran them through everything that had happened so far. Michelle and Harry listened without interrupting.

‘And you managed to record most of the broadcast from the first murder?’ Michelle asked when Hunter was done.

He retrieved a pen drive from his pocket and handed it to her. ‘It’s all in there.’

She quickly connected it to a USB port on the computer on her desk, and for the next seventeen minutes no one said a word.

Thirty-Two

When the footage ended, Michelle pressed the ‘esc’ key on her keyboard. Hunter noticed her hands were not as steady as they were before.

Harry let go of a breath that seemed to have been stuck in his throat for the past seventeen minutes.

‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘Until late this afternoon I had never seen anyone die. I’ve seen pictures of dead bodies . . . I was present during an autopsy, but never actually seen anyone die, never mind being tortured and murdered. Now I’ve seen two.’

Hunter explained the details of his first telephone conversation with the killer, and how the alkali bath came to be.

‘And you believe he tricked you?’ Michelle asked.

Hunter nodded. ‘He knew beforehand that I would choose water. It was all part of the show.’

Michelle finally blinked. ‘Can I get you guys some coffee or something?
I
certainly need a drink. My throat feels like the Nevada desert.’

‘Coffee would be great, thanks,’ Hunter said.

‘Yeah, for me too,’ Garcia added.

‘I’ll get it,’ Harry said, already getting up.

‘You said that he used an IP address for this transmission, not a web address like the one today?’ Michelle asked.

‘That’s right,’ Hunter said. ‘According to Dennis, it was probably a hijacked IP address.’

Michelle nodded. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me at all, but that’s strange.’

‘What is?’ Hunter asked.

Harry came back with four coffees, a small jug of milk, a container with cubes of brown and white sugar and sachets of sweetener.

‘The fact that the first murder was practically a
for-your-eyes-only
broadcast,’ Michelle explained, ‘but the second one was let loose over the World Wide Web.’

Hunter tilted his head to one side. ‘Well, according to the caller, the reason why he made the second broadcast a more public affair was because I was no fun the first time around. I didn’t play his game the way he wanted me to.’

‘But you don’t believe that,’ Harry said, handing both detectives a cup of coffee.

Hunter shook his head. ‘He was too well prepared.’

‘He was,’ Michelle agreed. ‘And that’s exactly why it’s strange he didn’t go for a public broadcast the first time around. He already had everything in place. We’ve checked. The domain www.pickadeath.com was registered twenty-nine days ago with a server in Taiwan. I don’t think he did that just in case. He knew he would go public, and that gives us a second huge problem.’

‘Which is?’ Garcia asked.

‘Today’s broadcast was live for exactly twenty-one minutes and eighteen seconds. It received over fifteen thousand hits while it was online. But we’re now living in the social network era. Everyone shares everything.’

‘The footage was cloned,’ Hunter said, anticipating what Michelle was leading to.

‘It was,’ Michelle admitted. ‘Two minutes after the transmission ended, snippets of it were uploaded to several video and social network sites such as YouTube, Dailymotion and Facebook.’

Hunter and Garcia said nothing.

‘Unfortunately that was inevitable,’ Harry added. ‘Once something this weird hits the World Wide Web, it has the potential to go viral. Luckily for us, that potential didn’t materialize. The video has spread a little over the net, but nothing close to going viral. Because we were able to go to work as soon as the transmission ended, we were also able to limit its spread.’

‘We monitor thousands of video and social network websites around the world,’ Michelle explained. ‘As soon as a snippet springs up in one of those, we ask the site webmasters to take it down. So far, they are all cooperating.’

‘The killer knew very well this would happen,’ Garcia said. ‘I mean, snippets, or even the entire original broadcast, spreading over the Internet. I’m sure he was counting on it. He’s having fun torturing and killing his victims. And the more people who watch it, the better.’

No one said anything.

Michelle clicked a few icons on her computer and the image of the woman lying inside the glass coffin filled the large monitor to her right. The first victim, sitting inside the glass tank, was on the monitor to her left.

‘We automatically record any Internet transmission that we deem suspicious,’ she said. ‘We obviously started recording this as soon as we came across it. I think we managed to get it all the way from the beginning.’ She hit the ‘play’ button.

Hunter nodded, looking at the images. ‘You did.’

‘Judging by the devices he created,’ Harry said, pointing to the glass tank and the see-through coffin on Michelle’s screens, ‘this guy is a pretty good handyman, with a decent understanding of engineering.’

‘I have no doubt,’ Garcia agreed.

‘Any luck tracing his call?’ Harry asked.

Garcia shook his head and explained that the first time around the killer had bounced his call to the LAPD all over Los Angeles.

‘But not the second time?’

‘No. This time he used a prepaid cellphone. No GPS. The call originated from Studio City, but it didn’t last long enough for it to be properly triangulated.’

Harry looked pensive for a moment.

‘Do you have an ID for her yet?’ Michelle asked, indicating the woman victim.

‘We’re working on it,’ Garcia replied.

‘How about the first victim?’

Garcia nodded and gave her a very quick résumé of Kevin Lee Parker.

Michelle’s attention returned to the images playing on the monitor to her right – the woman lying inside the glass coffin. ‘These were only on the screen for exactly sixty seconds.’ She pointed to the letters and numbers in the top left- and right-hand corners of the picture – SSV and 678. ‘Do you know what they mean?’

‘Not yet.’

‘Clues to who the victim might be?’ Harry suggested.

Garcia shrugged. ‘So that’s not a technical acronym? Something computer related?’

‘Nothing that I can see having any relevance in this context,’ Michelle replied, looking at Harry.

He agreed with a head gesture. ‘From the top of my head – Storage Server, Systems Software Verification, Static Signature Verification, Smart Security Vector . . . None of that makes any sense here.’ He paused and looked at the monitor to Michelle’s left – Kevin Lee Parker bound and gagged inside the glass tank. ‘Did the same happen during the first broadcast? I can see you didn’t start recording the footage from the beginning. Did the same, or a different combination of letters and numbers, appear?’

‘No, nothing,’ Hunter replied. ‘The only letters that appeared were the ones that formed the chemical formula for sodium hydroxide.’

‘So “SSV 678” must be something directly related to the woman,’ Harry concluded.

‘Possibly,’ Hunter said. ‘We’ll know more when we identify her.’

‘Can you leave this with us?’ Michelle asked, referring to the footage of the first victim. ‘I’d like to analyze it better. Compare it to today’s broadcast.’

‘No problem.’

Michelle watched the images on both monitors play for a few more seconds before pausing them. The look on her face was a combination of anger, frustration and disgust. Her lips started to part as if she was about to say something, but she hesitated, weighing her words for a moment.

‘Whoever this guy is,’ she finally said. ‘He’s a gifted programmer with great knowledge of cyberspace. He covered every angle – TTL, exploited servers, hideware, registering the site in Taiwan, bouncing his telephone calls around and so on. When the broadcast was over, his website vanished, as if it were never there. No trace. He’s expertly hiding under several electronic layers of protection. For us to get to him, we need to peel them back, one by one. There’s no circumventing it. The problem is, each layer also works as an intruder’s alert . . . a warning to him. As soon as we manage to peel one back, he’ll know, giving him more than enough time to react, to create more layers if necessary.’

Hunter took a deep breath. It was very clear that their investigation would have to concentrate on computer programmers with great knowledge of cyberspace, but in Los Angeles they were everywhere: public and private organizations, schools, universities, their own garages . . . Just about everywhere you looked, you were bound to find someone with Internet expertise. They needed something more to guide them.

Michelle looked Hunter in the eye. ‘The reason why this killer is so confident is because he knows that as far as cyberspace is concerned, he’s untraceable. He’s a cyber ghost. As long as he stays there, we can’t get to him.’

Thirty-Three

Early the next morning Captain Blake was standing in front of the large pictures board set up against the south wall inside Hunter’s office when he arrived. Garcia was standing just behind her.

New snapshots of the second victim lying inside the glass coffin had already been pinned to the board. Some showed her terrified face in varied stages of desperation. Some showed tarantula hawks freeze-framed as they entered the coffin, and then again as they covered her entire body, stinging almost every inch of it.

Garcia had already run Captain Blake through what had happened in their meeting with Michelle Kelly and Harry Mills at the FBI CCD the night before.

‘Nothing from Missing Persons yet,’ Garcia announced as Hunter took off his jacket and powered up his computer. ‘This time the killer didn’t gag the victim, so their facial recognition software should have no problems matching key points, but I was on the phone to them just moments ago. No matches so far.’

Hunter nodded.

‘The research team delivered the report on tarantula hawks last night,’ Garcia said, walking back to his desk.

Hunter and Captain Blake turned to face him.

He reached for the blue folder by his keyboard and flipped it open. ‘As we suspected, this killer knew exactly what he was doing, and how to deliver incredible pain. Unlike bees, that can sting their victims only once, wasps can sting theirs multiple times, delivering the same amount of venom and ferocity with every single sting. And like I’d said, their sting
is
ferocious. In the Schmidt Sting Pain Index the tarantula hawk sits right at the top.’

‘The what?’ The captain interrupted him.

‘It’s a pain scale, Captain,’ Hunter clarified. ‘It rates the pain caused by the sting of large insects.’

‘That’s correct,’ Garcia said with a nod. ‘The scale ranges from zero to four, four being the most painful. Only two insects rate at four – the tarantula hawk and the bullet ant.’

‘How common are they?’ Captain Blake asked.

‘In America, fairly.’ Garcia flipped a page on the report and pulled a face. ‘Actually, the tarantula hawk is the official state insect of New Mexico.’