Vail 02 - Crush (46 page)

“KNTV’s downstairs. They’re ready to go. But they want to know what the story’s about so they can set up the shot.”

Brix and Dixon shared a look. Vail knew what they were thinking. All the pieces were in place and things were coming to a head.

“Have them set up in the second floor lobby,” Dixon said. “Tell them there might be a wait because we’re engaged in sensitive negotiations. But we think it’ll be worth their while.”

After Lugo relayed the message and hung up, the tone from Outlook indicated a new email had arrived. He slid his chair forward and checked out the message. “Aaron sent us the document. It’s a PowerPoint file.”

“Can you put it up on the screen?” Vail asked.

“Yeah,” Lugo said. He thumbed the white remote control to his
left and the screen unfurled from the ceiling. He pressed a couple of buttons on the laptop, the projector flickered to life, and the Windows desktop appeared on-screen. Lugo double-clicked the PowerPoint attachment and it opened.

“Napa Crush Killer” appeared in bold letters on the first slide.

“May I?” Vail asked.

Lugo handed over the remote and Vail advanced to the next slide: a list of nine names.

Vail felt a pounding in her head. “Holy shit. If this is real, he held up his end of the bargain. Which means we need to, also.”

Dixon pointed at the screen. “Ray, print this page.”

Lugo was staring at the screen, but didn’t move.

Dixon looked over at Lugo. “Ray. Print the list.”

“Yeah, yeah. Okay.” His mouse movements appeared on-screen as he sent the page to the printer.

Vail scanned the list: there were names missing. It was incomplete—but she would worry about that in a minute. Next slide. A video file was embedded. “Double-click that,” she told Lugo.

Lugo’s mouse pointer skidded across the screen and found the image. The video jumped to life. Onscreen: a shaky, dark, grainy, moving image of a lifeless woman.

“Oh, shit,” Agbayani said. “Don’t tell me this is what I think it is.”

Vail rubbed her forehead. It was exactly what Agbayani thought it was. She wanted to divert her eyes, but she couldn’t. This was her job, what she signed up for. And unfortunately, watching videos of an offender’s handiwork was becoming a more frequent occurrence.

“Audio,” she said, her voice coarse, strained. “Is there audio?” Lugo pulled his eyes from the screen and pressed a button.

Sound filled the room’s speakers. But the offender wasn’t speaking. His breathing could be heard, rapid.
The bastard’s excited. He’s loving this.
“Son of a bitch.” Vail realized she was balling her right fist so hard her knuckles hurt.

The camera panned down and showed what looked like a hand—no, a wrist. Blood oozing. It ran a few more seconds, then ended.

Without a word, Vail pushed the remote to the next slide. Still photos
of other victims she did not recognize. She paged through them, stopping long enough at each photo for everyone to get a look at the victim’s face. “We’ve got a problem.”

“Not all the vics are accounted for,” Dixon said. “But there are plenty we didn’t know about.”

“No names on the pictures,” Brix said. “There’s no way for us to match up those photos with missing persons, unsolved cases. Shit, we don’t even know if these vics are from California.”

“I only recognize Dawn Zackery and Betsy Ivers,” Vail said. She was reluctant to broach the subject, but sooner or later, someone would. “No photo of Fuller.”

No one commented.

Finally, Vail said, “Okay, so we’ve got some questions that need answers. Let’s keep the line of communication open with him. We should send him an email so he knows we’re going to keep up our part of the deal and ask him who the hell these other vics are.” She looked at Dixon for approval.

Dixon appeared distracted, staring at the screen and not responding. Finally, she said, “Do we want to do that? I mean, he didn’t keep up his part of the bargain. We said
all
vics. We wanted a list of all his vics. He didn’t give us that.”

“You want to argue with him?” Vail asked. “At this point, I think that’s the wrong move.”

Dixon sat back hard. “Yeah, okay. Fine.”

Vail looked around at everyone’s body language. They were slumped in their seats. All were looking off, lost in thought. “Hey,” Vail said. “This is good. We’ve got a lot more than we had an hour ago.”

Failing to get a response, she pulled her BlackBerry and began composing a reply:

Vail read the proposed message to the task force members. “Comments?”

Lugo turned to her, slowly. His face was hard, his jaw set. “I hate this fucker. Why are we sucking up to him? That email sucks. We should tell him to go fuck himself.”

“Ray,” Vail said calmly, “this offender is a narcissist. We’ll get more by being subservient to him, by showing him respect and deference. Our goal, our only goal, is to catch the bastard. If we piss him off and he cuts off communication with us, we may not have another opportunity to achieve our one and only objective.”

“Send it,” Dixon said. She looked over at Brix, who nodded agreement.

Vail said, “I’m emailing this to you, Ray. Send it through Outlook, like you did before.”

“But he didn’t like that—”

“I want his response coming to you guys. In a little while . . .” She couldn’t bring herself to say it. “I just want the communication to go to the sheriff’s department mail server, not my BlackBerry.”

Brix sighed deeply, then pushed himself from his chair. “I’ll call the Mayor. And Congressman Church. And Stan Owens. We’ll all need to huddle on this media story. I’ll tell the reporters we’ll have something for them around nine. Roxx, as lead, I think you should be the face of the investigation. Agreed?”

Dixon nodded slowly. “Yeah.”

Brix pulled his phone to make the calls. Vail looked at the screen, where the image of an unnamed woman lay. The mask of death draped across her face.

B
urt Gordon walked into the room and nodded at the people who looked up. “I handed off the Guevara surveillance to a couple guys from NSIB. But I have doubts about him being our UNSUB.” He glanced at the screen, then froze.

“Hate to say it,” Dixon said, “but it’s beginning to look that way.”

Vail felt like saying, “I’ve always had doubts about him. It just doesn’t fit.” But she didn’t. She’d already voiced her opinion. And she hadn’t had anything better to offer.

A call came through on the room phone. Lugo picked it up, then pressed a button. “It’s Aaron.”

Matthew Aaron’s voice filtered through the speaker. “Redd, you there?”

Brix, leaning against the wall, said, “We’re here, Matt. Got anything for us?”

“You’re not going to like it. We’ve traced the flash drive to a PC right here at the SD.”

Brix pushed away from the wall and walked closer to the phone’s speaker. “What?”

“I watched the cybergeeks do their thing, and they’re sure about it. I’ve had them lock down the room. I’m gonna go over there in a minute and start dusting.”

Brix shook his head. “How can that be? It’s a secure facility. You need a prox card—”

“Yeah, that’s the thing. Turns out there was a prox card lost about three weeks ago. Shil-ray Simmons. I just talked with her, took her to task, questioned her pretty hard. She said she thought she just misplaced
it and was afraid to report it lost. Nothing was missing, nothing was reported stolen in the building, so she figured it’d turn up, that it was just misplaced in a drawer somewhere.”

Brix’s face shaded red. “What the hell was she thinking? Evidence could’ve been tampered with, cases could’ve been compromised.” He leaned a hand on the wall. “And what were you thinking, questioning her? You’re a CSI, Matt.”

“I was just trying to help. I uncovered the missing card, didn’t I?”

Brix swiped a hand down his face. “We’ll discuss this later. Have they deactivated the stolen card?”

“Already done.”

“Fine. There are database records entries for every swipe each card makes. Get a printout of that log. Which doors, which times, which days.” He motioned to Lugo, who clicked off the call.

“So our UNSUB’s got someone on the inside,” Vail said. “Or he
is
someone on the inside and he used Simmons’s card to cover his tracks. He had to know sooner or later the card would be reported missing.”

Brix nodded. “Ray, have Lily in HR print us out a list of all county employees. I want to know everyone who’s had access to the sheriff’s department facility. Include contract workers. Everyone.”

Lugo made a note on his pad. “And you want this tomorrow, I take it.”

“No,” Brix said with a tight mouth. “I want it today.”

“And have them pull the surveillance video for the past week before it gets overwritten,” Dixon said. “We’re gonna have to go through it all, correlate it with the doors that card opened, see if we can ID the fucker who stole it.”

“They already pulled the video when Karen got that letter,” Lugo said.

“That may be all we need,” Agbayani said. “Have Aaron look at the date the PowerPoint document was created and last modified. That’ll tell us when the UNSUB was in the building.”

“Yes, yes,” Brix said. “Perfect. Then match it up with the swipes of that prox card. And find out what’s taking them so goddamn long with that video. Did they find anything or not? Got all that, Ray?”

Lugo tossed down his pen. “Yeah. Got it.” He swung his chair around, rose, and walked out of the room.

Dixon watched him leave, then said, “Is it me, or has he been on edge lately?”

Brix walked to the whiteboard. “We’ve all been on edge. With everything that’s gone on this past week, I think we’re holding up pretty goddamn good.” He waved a hand. “Ray’ll be fine. Besides, we’ve got other things to worry about. We don’t know for sure this card was used by our UNSUB. But it’s highly probable. Now I’m assuming no one on the task force is our guy. But that still leaves a lot of county employees, a lot of ’em in this building, who could’ve palmed that card. So from this point forward, no one’s to share any information with anyone. Have it go through me. I’ll control all info in and out. So don’t leave any important papers lying around.”

Vail snapped her fingers. “That’s how the offender got my phone number, how he started texting me. Those sheets you printed up and gave out with everyone’s cell numbers. He was here, in this room.”

“Shit.” Dixon looked around, acutely conscious of her surroundings. “What else could he have taken or seen? The whiteboard—”

The door swung open. Lugo stood there, his face crumpled in thought.

“Forget something?” Brix asked.

Lugo stepped in and let the door close behind him. “Your PC has all sorts of personally identifiable information buried in it. Like what Eddie was saying, about the date the document was created. But there’s a lot more info on there. Every single document you create embeds info that it takes from your computer.”

“I know a guy at Microsoft who’s helped me out before,” Agbayani said. He checked the room clock. “It’s late, but maybe I can catch him.”

“Do it,” Dixon said. “Burt, can you run down and take care of that other stuff Ray was doing? The video, county list—”

“Got it,” Gordon said, then left the room.

Agbayani settled himself in front of the conference room laptop and logged in to Windows Live Messenger. “Cool, he’s online. We’re in
business.” He clicked, Start a live video call. It rang through the speakers, then the ringing abruptly stopped and a face and torso filled the screen.

“Tomás, how goes it?”

“Eddie, my man. Still catching bad guys?”

“That’s what I’m calling about. I’ve got a thing here and I need to pick your geek brain.”

“I’m out the door for a meeting in the EBC—I mean, the Executive Briefing Center. A delegation of security people from China are here to discuss a new relational database. My boss will have my head if I try to cut out early. Can it wait?”

Agbayani looked off to Brix, then back to the screen. “The sooner the better. We’re really under the gun on this one. It’s bad.”

“What’s the deal?”

“We got an Office document written by a serial killer,” Agbayani said as he opened Outlook and started a new email. “PowerPoint. We need you to crack it. The embedded info.”

Tomás tapped his #2 Black Warrior pencil on the desk. “Okay, send it over. I’ll get started on it as soon as I’m done with the meeting. How about I get back to you in two hours or so?”

Agbayani hit Send and the Crush Killer’s files were on their way. “That’d be great, Tomás. Looks like we’ve got RoundTable in the sheriff’s department here, so we can video conference with the task force. And—same as before—this is confidential shit, don’t be circulating it around the campus. And for your sake, don’t view its contents. It’ll chill your flabby geek ass.”

“That’s a geek ass of steel, bro.” The Outlook chime sounded and Tomás’s eyes canted down, away from the camera. “Got the email. Be good. Catch you later.”

The Live Messenger webcam screen went blank.

“Great work, Eddie,” Brix said. “Ray, email a copy of that PowerPoint file to the video guys and have them analyze the clips. Maybe something in the background’ll tip off the UNSUB’s location—a site-specific sound, a landmark sign, whatever. Eddie, you, me, and Burt, when he gets back, will work on the vics in the file. Austin, Roxxi, Karen, why don’t you three take a break, grab some dinner, meet back
here in a couple hours. I think we’re gonna be here all night. We’ll work in shifts.”