The Poet (56 page)

The other looked up then and they said their hellos along with their names. Rachel then introduced me. The agent who had first looked up and had identified himself as Don Clearmountain spoke.

“We’re doing good. End of the day we’ll have a list of names and addresses. We’ll ship them to the nearest FOs and they should have enough for search warrants.”

I visualized teams of agents hitting doors and pulling the pedophiles who had bought digital photos of murdered children out of their beds. It would be a nationwide reckoning. I began to visualize the headlines. The Dead Poet’s Society. That’s what they’d call these men.

“But I’ve got something else working here that is really pretty special,” Clearmountain said.

The computer agent had a hacker’s smile on his face as he looked at us. It was an invitation and Rachel moved into the room, me right behind her.

“What is it?” she said.

“Well, what we have here are a bunch of numbers that Gladden shipped digital photos to. Then we also have the wire deposit records of the bank in Jacksonville. We collated it and it all fits together pretty well.”

He took a stack of pages off the keyboard of the other agent, looked through it and selected a sheet.

“For example, on December fifth of last year there was a deposit of five hundred dollars made to the account. It was wired from the Minnesota National Bank in St. Paul. The sender was listed as Davis Smith. Probably a false name. The next day, Gladden’s cellular modem placed a call to a number we’ve traced to a fellow named Dante Sherwood in St. Paul. The connection lasted four minutes, about what it takes to transmit and download a photograph. We’ve got literally dozens of transactions like this. One-day correlations between deposits and transmissions.”

“Great.”

“Now, the question all of this raises is, how did all these buyers know about Gladden and what he had to sell? In other words, where was the marketplace for these photos?”

“And you found it.”

“Yes, we did. The number called most often on the cellular modem. It’s a computer bulletin board. It’s called the PTL Network.”

Rachel’s face showed her surprise.

“Praise The Lord?”

“You wish. Actually, we think it means Pre-Teen Love.”

“Gross.”

“Yeah. It was actually kind of easy to figure out. Not that original and most of these boards use these kinds of euphemisms. It was getting into the network that took us all morning.”

“How’d you do it?”

“We came up with Gladden’s passwords.”

“Wait a minute,” Rachel said. “What happened last night has been all over the news across the whole country. Wouldn’t whoever was operating this bulletin board have wiped him out? You know, killed his access and his password before we got in?”

“He should’ve but he didn’t.” Then Clearmountain looked at the other agent and they shared conspiratorial smiles. There was something still not said. “Maybe the systems operator was sort of tied up and couldn’t get to it in time.”

“Okay, tell me the rest,” Rachel said impatiently.

“Well, we tried everything to get in, variations on Gladden’s name, DOB, social security, all the usual tricks. Nothing. We were thinking the same thing you were, that he was deleted from the system.”

“But?”

“But then we went to Poe.”

Clearmountain took the heavy book off his monitor and held it up.

“It’s a two-password entry system. We got the first one easy. It was Edgar. But then the second, that’s where we had trouble. We tried Raven, Eidolon, Usher, everything we could pull out of this book. Then we doubled back and went through Gladden’s names and numbers again. Still nothing. Then-bingo!-we nailed it. Joe did while he was having coffee cake.”

Clearmountain pointed to the other agent, Joe Perez, who smiled and took a bow in his seat. For computer cops, I guessed that what he had done was like making a felony arrest for a street cop. He looked as proud as a boy who scores in a hotel room on prom night.

“I was just reading about Poe while taking a break,” Perez explained. “My eyes get tired looking at a monitor too long.”

“Lucky for us he decided to rest them looking at a book,” Clearmountain said, regaining the narrative. “Joe, in the biographical section, comes across a reference to Poe having once used an alias to enlist in the army or something. Edgar Perry. We stuck it in and like I said, bingo! We were in.”

Clearmountain turned and exchanged a high five with Perez. They looked like a couple of nerds in heat. Today’s FBI, I thought.

“What did you find?”

“There are twelve message boards. Most are for discussion about specific tastes. In other words, girls under twelve, boys under ten, that sort of thing. There is a lawyer referral board. We found Gladden’s lawyer, Krasner, listed on it. Then there’s also a kind of bio board with a lot of strange shit on it, essays and such. There’s a few that have to be by our man. Look at this.”

He looked through the stack of papers again and pulled out a printout. He started reading from it.

“This is from one of them. ‘I think they know about me. My time in the light of public fascination and fear is near. I am ready.’ Then further down he goes, ‘My suffering is my passion, my religion. It never leaves me. It guides me. It is me.’ It’s full of that kind of stuff and the author at one point calls himself Eidolon. So we think it’s gotta be him. You BSS people are going to get a lot of stuff for the research banks out of this.”

“Good,” Rachel said. “What else?”

“Well, one of the boards is a barter board. You know, where people post things to sell or buy.”

“Like photos or IDs?”

“Yup. There’s somebody on there selling Alabama DLs. I assume we’re going to have to shut that sucker down in a hurry. And there was a file for selling what Gladden had in his computer. Minimum price was five hundred dollars per picture. Three for a grand. You wanted something, you left a message with a computer number. You wired the money to a bank account and your pictures showed up in your computer. On the barter board, this advertiser said he could provide photos to meet specific tastes and desires.”

“Like he was taking orders and then he’d go out and …”

“Right.”

“You tell Bob Backus about this yet?”

“Yeah, he was just in here.”

Rachel looked at me.

“That parade is sounding better and better all the time.”

“You’re forgetting the neatest part,” Clearmountain said. “And what parade?”

“It’s nothing. What’s the neatest part?”

“The bulletin board. We traced the number to a location.”

“And?”

“Union Correctional Institution, Raiford, Florida.”

“Oh, my God! Gomble?”

Clearmountain smiled and nodded.

“That’s what Bob Backus thinks. He’s going to have somebody check it out. I already called the prison and asked the captain of the day where that line went to. He said it was to the supplies office. And, see, I had noticed that all of Gladden’s calls to that number were placed after five P.M. eastern time. The captain told me that the supply office was closed and locked up every day at five. Opens up at eight every morning. I also asked him if there was a computer in that office for keeping track of orders and supplies and such and he said there sure was. I said what about a phone and he said there was one but it wasn’t connected to the computer. But believe me, this is not a guy who knows a modem from a hole in the ground. This is a guy who volunteers to go to prison every day. Think about that. I told him to check again on the phone line, like some night after the office is closed up and-“

“Wait a minute. He isn’t-“

“Don’t worry, he’s not going to do anything. I told him not to mess with things until he hears from us. For now, the network should remain on line, after five in the East, that is. I asked him who works in there and he told me Horace Gomble. He’s a trustee. I see you are already familiar with him. I guess each night he sticks the phone line into the computer before he locks up and goes back to his cell.”

Rachel canceled lunch with me because of the new developments. She said I’d have to grab a cab back to the hotel and that she’d call me when she could. She said she might be going back to Florida but would let me know. I wanted to stay, too, but fatigue was finally setting in from my sleepless night.

I took the elevator down and was walking through the lobby of the federal building, thinking about calling Greg Glenn and checking my messages, when I heard a familiar voice behind me.

“Hey, hot shot, howzit hanging?”

I turned around and Michael Warren walked up to me.

“Warren. I just tried to call you at the Times. They said you were out.”

“I was here. Supposed to be another press conference at two. Thought I’d come early and see what I could dig up.”

“Like another source maybe?”

“I told you, Jack, I’m not talking to you about that.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not talking to you either.”

I turned and started away. He called after me.

“Then why’d you call me? To gloat?”

I looked back at him.

“Something like that. I guess. But you know, Warren, I’m not really mad at you. You went after a story that was given to you and that’s cool. I can’t blame you. Thorson had his own agenda and you didn’t know about that. He used you but we all get used. I’ll see you.”

“Wait a minute, Jack. If you’re not pissed off, why don’t you talk to me?”

“Because we’re still competitors.”

“No we’re not, man. You’re not even on the story anymore. I had the front page of the Rocky faxed to me this morning. They gave it to somebody else. Only place your name appears is in the story. No bylines, Jack. You’re not on the story. You are the story. So why don’t we go on the record here and let me ask you a few questions?”

“Like ‘How do you feel?’ Is that what you want to ask?”

“That’s one of them, yeah.”

I looked at him a good long moment. No matter how much I didn’t like him or what he had done, I couldn’t deny the empathy I had for his position. He was doing what I had done so many times before. I looked at my watch and out at the parking circle beyond the lobby. There were none of the waiting cabs I had seen the day before.

“You got a car?”

“Yeah, a company car.”

“Give me a ride to the Chateau Marmont. We’ll talk on the way.”

“On the record?”

“On the record.”

He turned on a tape recorder and put it on the dashboard. He just wanted the basics from me. He wanted to quote me about what I had done the night before rather than rely on a secondhand source like an FBI spokesman. That was too easy and he was too good a reporter to settle for a spokesman. Whenever possible he went straight to the source. I understood this. I was the same way.

Telling him the story somehow made me feel good. I enjoyed it. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t already given Jackson at my own paper, so it wasn’t like I was revealing company secrets. But Warren had been around at almost the start of the trail and I liked being the one who told him where it had led and how it had ended.

I didn’t tell him about the latest developments, about the PTL network and Gomble running it from a prison. That was too good to give away. I planned on writing that one myself, whether it was for the Rocky or one of those publishers in New York.

Finally, Warren drove up the short hill to the entrance of the Chateau Marmont. A doorman opened the door but I didn’t get out. I looked at Warren.

“Anything else?”

“No, I think I got it. I have to get back to the federal building for the press conference anyway. But this is going to be great.”

“Well, you and the Rocky are the only ones that got it. I’m not planning to go to ‘Hard Copy’ unless it’s six figures.”

He looked at me, surprised.

“Just kidding, Warren. I’d break into the records room with you at the foundation but, hey, I draw the line at selling my story to the tabs.”

“What about the publishers?”

“I’m working on it. You?”

“I gave up once your first story came out. My agent said the editors he talked to were more interested in you than me. You had the brother, you know? You were obviously on the inside. Only thing I’d be able to sell was one of those quick-and-dirty jobs. I’m not interested. I’ve got a reputation.”

I nodded and turned to get out of the car.

“Thanks for the ride.”

“Thanks for the story.”

I was out and about to close the door when Warren started to say something but then stopped.

“What is it?”

“I was going … ah, hell, look, Jack, about the source on that story. If-“

“Forget it, man, it doesn’t matter anymore. Like I said, the guy’s dead and you did what any reporter would do.”

“No, wait. That’s not what I’m saying … I don’t give up sources, Jack, but I can tell you who isn’t a source. And Thorson wasn’t my source, okay? I didn’t even know the guy.”

I just nodded, saying nothing. He didn’t know that I had seen the hotel phone records and that I knew he was lying. A new Jaguar pulled under the parking overhang and a couple dressed head to toe in black started getting out. I looked back at Warren, wondering what he was trying to do. What scam could he be pulling by lying now?