The Watcher in the Wall (18 page)

“How do you pay him?”

“Western Union, money transfer,” Abrams said. “Through that same dummy email address. I send it to someone named Earl Ashley, but if you’re talking to me, you probably already know that’s a fake name.”

“His stepfather’s name was Earl. His stepsister’s middle name was Ashley,” Stevens said. “She died twenty years ago. Hanged herself while he watched.”

“Unfortunately, there’s no footage,” Windermere said.

Abrams made a face. “Funny,” he said. “I see what you did there.”

“So, this last file you posted,” Windermere said. “Kid named Adrian Miller, a high school student in Minnesota. Killed himself because kids were bullying him at school.”

Abrams stared at her, like he knew this was supposed to make him feel contrite, and he just wasn’t feeling it. Windermere inhaled a long breath, willed herself to stay calm, to resist the urge to reach across and smash this guy’s head into the table.

“Anyway,” she said, exhaling. “Adrian Miller. That the last time you heard from this Ashley guy?”

She was hoping she knew the answer, hoping Adrian Miller was the last of Gruber’s victims. It had only been two weeks after all, and they’d had Gruber distracted for some of it. But that didn’t mean squat.

“That’s the last time he sent me any footage,” Abrams said, “but it sounds like he’s gearing up. He tried to hit me up for an advance a couple days ago, said he had something big in the works. Two more kids—prospects, he calls them. Sounded like a couple mint scores.”

Windermere twisted in her seat, met Stevens’s eyes. “Two more prospects, partner,” she said. “I knew he’d keep going.”

“Clock is ticking,” Stevens said. “But where is he operating? He hasn’t been back on Death Wish since we made him.”

“Oh, he has more accounts,” Abrams said. “This guy’s everywhere. Like a dragnet for hopeless cases. Sweeps them up, grooms them, tells them how to end it all.” He paused. “And films it, hopefully.”

“These new prospects he’s grooming,” Windermere said. “Where did he find them? Which of these forums is he working now?”

Abrams shifted in his seat, didn’t answer. Avoided eye contact.

“If you know something, share it with the class,” Windermere told him. “Otherwise, not only will I make sure you’re prosecuted to the full extent for this shit, but I’ll see to it that everybody on your little forum knows you’re the guy who got them all arrested, locked up, and publicly outed, to boot. Get it?”

“Shoot.” Abrams looked up, a shade paler. “Okay, yeah, I get it,” he said. “Like I said, I don’t really know much. But I think he’s grooming his next, you know,
prospect
on a site called The End.”

<
66
>

“Why so glum, homey?”

Madison spun, found Paul standing a few feet from her locker, leaning against the wall and looking smug. She tucked her phone into her backpack, picked up her history textbook. Slammed her locker closed.

“You don’t have to follow me,” she told him. “We have class together. You’ll be right beside me for the next, like, hour and a half.”

“Figured I could maybe walk you to class,” Paul said. “Like, we could walk and tell jokes and, I dunno,
gossip
. Like, you know,
friends.
”

“We’re not friends,” Madison said, before she could stop herself. Paul laughed, smiled wider.

“Well, not with that attitude,” he said. “Anyway, come on. The bell’s about to ring.”

He turned and started down the hall, stopped after a few steps and waited for her to catch up. Madison hesitated. Sighed and walked after him.

“So how come you’re so miserable?” Paul asked her. “This have something to do with that Internet boyfriend of yours?”

“That’s none of your business,” Madison said. “But yes, it kind of does.”

“Ooh. Well, go on. What did lover boy have to say? Did he flunk a test? Pollute a river? What terrible stories did this guy have to tell you?”

“It’s nothing like that,” Madison said. “Don’t worry about it, dude. It wasn’t anything, really.”

But it was; it was everything. She’d been thinking about Brandon all day, about that phone call, how miserable he’d sounded, defeated. Like he was ready to find a cliff and drive off it without her, like he didn’t even care that he’d already changed her life.

She didn’t want to die. She knew this. She didn’t want Brandon to die, either. She wanted to meet up with Brandon and drive off somewhere—Los Angeles, maybe, if that wasn’t too cliché, or Mexico—and live badass lives together and be the envy of everyone and never
miss anything about their homes or their old towns or their crummy families. Madison would take that. She could accept it. She didn’t need to die.

“So he told you he was sad,” Paul said. “And you’ve been worrying about him ever since. How cute.”

“He’s not just
sad
, moron,” Madison told him. “He’s really depressed. Like, he’s talking about wanting to kill himself. I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Wow.” Paul dodged an army of jocks coming down the hall in the opposite direction. “This is the guy you’ve never actually met, right? The one who might be, like, a forty-six-year-old sex pervert?”

“He’s not a sex pervert,” Madison said. “We talked on the phone and he’s an amazing guy. We’re going to run away together, and you’ll never see me again.”

“Until they dig up your body.”

“Screw off.” Madison gave him the finger. Pushed ahead of him into Mr. Rhodes’s class. Left Paul standing in her wake, but couldn’t stop thinking about Brandon.

I have to do something,
she thought.
There has to be a way to save him. If he freaking dies on me, I actually
will
kill myself.

<
67
>

Windermere put Mathers
on the money trail. Gave him the dummy email address Gruber used to communicate with Frank “SevenBot” Abrams, and the payment history through Western Union. Figured it might take a few days, but they could probably count on a lead to Gruber eventually. Meanwhile, she and Stevens went right to The End.

It took a full day to get a warrant to search the suicide forum’s servers. And it wasn’t like the forum’s owner was ready to play ball without one.

“Total invasion of my users’ privacy,” he told Windermere over the phone. He had a high-pitched, obnoxious voice that didn’t blend well with his self-righteous tone. Clearly, he’d been waiting for a phone call like this.

“These people are consenting adults, American citizens,” he continued. “They have a right to be protected against unreasonable search and seizure. If they want to die, who am I to try and stop them?”

“Only, they’re not adults,” Windermere said. “They’re teenagers. Doesn’t that bother you at all?”

But the guy had already hung up in her ear, leaving Windermere talking to an empty line. She put the phone down, told Stevens to start calling judges. Placed her next call to the FBI office in Bangor, Maine, where she’d traced the forum’s servers, had the local field agents put together a team to raid the owner’s house just as soon as the warrant came through.

“Be careful,” Windermere told the Bangor agent. “This guy sounds like he fancies himself a real proponent of personal freedoms. If he’s
not deleting his forum records off those servers, he’s probably cleaning his collection of assault rifles. So tread lightly.”

The Bangor agent thanked her, assured her his team would move on the servers as soon as they had a warrant in hand.

Windermere ended the call. Turned to check on Stevens, found him rolling his eyes, explaining to the federal judge why Gruber’s pursuit of those teenage victims should be considered a crime.

“State law says it’s a felony to coerce or counsel someone into committing suicide,” he was saying. “This guy is pretending to be a teenager and luring vulnerable kids to their deaths.” He paused, listened. “Yes, I
know
it’s a state law. But this guy’s operating over interstate lines. He’s clearly—”

He stopped abruptly. Listened. Caught Windermere’s eye and grimaced. “Okay,” he said. “Sure, I understand. We’ll work on it.”

He made to hang up the phone. Windermere had the handset out of his hands before she really knew what she was doing. Brought the phone to her ear. “Who am I talking to?”

A silence, and she was afraid the judge had hung up. But then: “This is Judge Waite,” a woman said slowly. “To whom am
I
speaking?”

“Carla Windermere, FBI,” Windermere told the judge. “You want to tell me why you’re playing hardball on this warrant?”

The judge laughed a little, incredulous. “As I explained to your colleague, Agent Windermere, there’s no federal law against encouraging people to commit suicide, even in situations like this. I told your partner I wasn’t even sure why you’re pursuing this case, when by my interpretation of the law, the target of your investigation is within his right to free speech to do what he’s doing. I’m not even sure how you—”

“Oh, don’t come at me with that free-speech bullshit,” Windermere
told the judge. “Soliciting someone to commit suicide is a felony in just about every state in the union. This is just another case of the law lagging behind criminals and their technology.”

“Then it’s a state issue,” the judge replied. “I might suggest bringing your case to a judge at the state level.”

“You’re not listening,” Windermere told her. She could see Stevens in the background, waving her off, wide-eyed. Ignored him. “We have a victim in Minnesota. Another in Texas, a third in Delaware. We have servers we need to access in Maine, and a suspect hiding God knows where. In which state, exactly, do you expect us to start?”

“Wherever you think you have the best shot,” the judge replied. “You’re a federal agent, Ms. Windermere. Surely you don’t expect me to simply hand over a warrant without respect to the law.”

“I am a federal agent,” Windermere told her. “And you’re a federal judge,
Ms. Waite
. These people my suspect is targeting, they’re teenagers.
Kids
. You really want to go on record as the judge who prevented the FBI from chasing an online predator?”

The judge was silent.

“This isn’t a free-speech situation,” Windermere told her. “This is a case of impressionable young minds being preyed upon. You shut me down here, first place I’m calling is the Minnesota state courts. Second place I’m calling is the
New York Times.
You feel me?”

Waite still didn’t answer. Finally, she sighed. “You have a fax machine over there, I assume?”

Windermere gave her the details. Ended the call and put down the phone. Stevens was staring at her. “That was a federal judge you were talking to, Carla,” he said. “You kind of sounded like you thought she was a suspect.”

“She
was
suspect, partner,” Windermere said, standing. “Now, point me to the fax machine. And next time, leave the bad cop stuff to me.”

<
68
>

Donovan paced the living room.
Kicked an empty Funyuns bag across the carpet.
“Shit
, dude,
”
he said. “Would it kill you to clean up a little?”

Gruber smirked up at him from the computer. “I like it this way. You want the place clean so bad, you do it. It’s not like you’re doing anything else.”

The asshole had a point. Donovan had worn a track through the carpet already, burned a hole in his digestive tract eating White Castle and Taco Bell because this cornball Gruber really
was
flat fucking broke, not even a stick of butter in his fridge. Donovan had been here for, shit, a day and a half, felt longer than the six months he’d spent in juvie.

There was nothing to do but wait. Wait and eat shitty food, and listen to Gruber brag about the sick shit he was doing on the computer, the way he was luring his victims closer to death. Donovan had already sat through one lecture about how Gruber used Facebook, how he’d created accounts for both of his personas, filled them with stock pictures, built lives for these people.

“I found this kid on the Death Wish forums,” Gruber told him. “He
was from Kansas City, nineteen years old. Jumped in front of a train. Anyway, he left his Facebook page unlocked, so I stole his life. Copied all his pictures to my hard drive and created a new account.” He grinned. “I call him Brandon.”

Donovan didn’t say anything. Figured it didn’t matter what he said, Gruber wasn’t going to shut up.

“I post the pictures every now and then, randomly, so it seems like they’re just happening,” Gruber continued. “And it’s easy to make friends on Facebook. Teenagers are so obsessed with being popular, they’ll add anybody just to pad their friend counts. It’s self-perpetuating, too, because the more friends you have, the more people want to know you. Genius, right?”

Donovan had ignored him. Turned away and tried to stifle the urge to shoot the bastard in the back of the head right then and there.

He’d gone into the kitchen, called Rodney while Gruber was in the bathroom. “This dude is sick,” he said. “This is kids we’re talking about, man. This is innocent kids.”

Rodney wasn’t moved. “You got another way to come up with the money?” he asked. “The message must be sent, dude. Can’t be backing down.”

Outside, a train rumbled past, blew its horn, loud. The trains were always coming and going, shaking the whole house on its foundation. Donovan missed what Rodney was saying. Had to ask him to repeat it.

“I said, you don’t think you can do it, I’ll find someone else who can,” Rodney told him. “So what’s up, Curtis? You in, or you out?”

Gruber flushed the toilet. Came out of the bathroom, wiping his hands on his ragged T-shirt. Went back to the computer and sat down, opened up a chat window. Donovan watched him. Stifled his disgust.

“I’m in,” he said. “I just wish this motherfucker wasn’t such a goddamn piece of
work
.”

<
69
>

Windermere faxed
the warrant to Bangor. A half hour later, Bangor phoned back.

“Bingo,” the agent told Windermere. “Got the servers in custody. No shots fired. Your guy talked a big game, but he caved pretty easily when the G-men showed up at his door.”

“Sounds about right,” Windermere said. “Can you get us those files, or do we need to fly out to Maine to see them?”

“We’ll get them to you,” the agent replied. “We snagged an admin log-in when we picked up the servers. I’ll send it over and you can browse through your man’s files from the comfort of your own home.”

Windermere surveyed the Phoenix FBI office, the long row of workstations in CID. “Or a cubicle farm in Arizona,” she said. “Whichever’s more convenient.”

•   •   •

The suicide forum called The End had no users named Ashley Frey registered. And a search through the master archives brought back no hits for that name in either the chat logs or the thread histories.

“So what now?” Windermere asked. “We just spent a day leaping
through epic hoops to get this data, Stevens. How do we use it to find Gruber?”

“Maybe Gruber’s using a different alias,” Stevens said. “He was always an angel on the Death Wish forum. How about searching biblical usernames?”

Windermere snapped her fingers. “Angels,” she said. “I can dig it.”

She searched through the forum’s archives until she found a list of every user. Realized there was no way to pare down the search using biblical references, that she and Stevens were going to have to work through the whole list manually.

“Not exactly the most specific search criteria in the world,” she said, settling into her seat. “I guess we’ll do this the old-fashioned way.”

Stevens rolled his chair over beside her. “Gruber’s Frey accounts always had a number in the name,” he said. “High nineties, probably supposed to be a year of birth. Any luck, he’s doing the same thing here.”