‘I told you we wouldn’t get anything out of the ordinary,’ Garcia said, walking back into the office. He had a file in his hands. ‘Kevin Lee Parker was your everyday John Doe. A simple guy, with a simple life. He’s never been arrested. Always paid his taxes on time. He’s not a homeowner; he rents. We contacted his landlord. Only once, about two years ago, Kevin wasn’t able to pay his rent on time. It was just after his wedding and he was a little low on his finances. Anyway, he was only late by a couple of weeks. The landlord said that he was an upstanding guy.’
Hunter nodded and leaned back in his chair.
‘Kevin grew up in Westlake, where he went to school. His school records were average. Not the best of students, but not the worst either. He never went to university. Kevin had a series of odd jobs all over the place – waiter, supermarket attendant, warehouse clerk . . . ’ Garcia made a hand gesture indicating that the list went on and on. ‘He started working for Next-Gen Games Shop in Hyde Park five years ago, and took the manager’s position three years later. He married Anita around the same time. They’d been going out together for five years then. His daughter, Lilia, was born six months ago.’
Garcia had to clear his throat as the memory of the smiling baby in her mother’s arms came back to him.
‘It sounds like he was a very careful person too.’ He moved on. ‘As we found out, he had a heart condition – mitral stenosis. He was conscientious enough never to abuse it. No strenuous exercise, never smoked, apparently no drugs either. He was part of a healthcare plan, but it doesn’t look like it was a great one. He still had to cough up a little more money every time he saw a doctor. And that’s why in the last five years he’d been to see a cardiologist only twice – Doctor Mel Gooding. His practice is in South Robertson. We can drop by tomorrow morning.’
Hunter nodded.
‘As Emilio told us earlier today, Kevin didn’t have a vast circle of friends. His life was centered around his family and his job; that was it. Emilio was his best friend.’ Garcia flipped a page on the report before carrying on. ‘We should have a statement on his latest bank transactions by tomorrow morning. Nothing yet from his cellphone or web provider, but hopefully we’ll get something in a day or two.’
‘Any news on the bus?’ Hunter asked.
Garcia nodded. ‘Kevin used to take a bus on route 207 back home. It goes from Athens to Hollywood. There were six drivers driving that route for the LA Metro on Monday evening. I’ve got all their names here. Four are working tonight. The other two will be in tomorrow morning.’ He quickly consulted his watch and handed the report to Hunter. ‘It’s your call. But we can be at the depot in an hour or so and check with the four drivers working tonight if any of them remember seeing Kevin on their bus on Monday evening.’
Hunter was already out of his chair. ‘Let’s go.’
Before he got to the office door, his cellphone rang in his pocket. He checked the caller display window – unknown number.
‘Detective Hunter, Homicide Special,’ he answered it.
‘Hello, Detective Hunter,’ the caller said in the same raspy voice and calm tone as two days ago.
The way Hunter looked at Garcia suppressed the need for any words.
‘No way,’ Garcia said, hurrying back to his desk. Within seconds he was on the phone to Operations. ‘I need you guys to try to trace a phone call that’s being made to Detective Robert Hunter’s cellphone, right now.’ He gave them the number.
‘How did you get this number?’ Hunter asked and pressed the loudspeaker button on his phone so Garcia could hear it as well.
The caller laughed. ‘Information, information, Detective Hunter. It’s all out there. You just have to know how to grab it. But guess what?’ There was a hint of amusement in his voice.
‘You called me to give me your name and address?’ Hunter said.
The caller laughed more animatedly this time. ‘Not quite, but I do have something for you.’
Hunter waited.
‘Your favorite website is back online.’
Hunter moved purposefully toward the computer on his desk and brought up his browser application. He still remembered the IP address. He typed it into the address bar and hit ‘enter’.
ERROR 404 – PAGE CANNOT BE FOUND.
Hunter frowned.
‘This time I decided to do things a little differently, Detective,’ the caller said. ‘You were no fun the first time around, refusing to choose until I picked
Hunter felt adrenaline rushing through his body.
‘Detective?’ the caller insisted.
‘No, I haven’t watched any of them.’
‘But you are aware that such shows exist, right? C’mon, Detective, I thought you were supposed to be an informed man.’
Hunter said nothing.
‘Well, I decided that it would be real fun if I turned this into a web show.’
Hunter looked at Garcia, who had just typed the old IP address into his address bar and gotten the error page too.
‘Are you at your office?’ the caller asked.
‘Yes.’
‘OK. I want you to check this website out. Are you ready for it?’
Silence.
‘www.pickadeath.com.’ He chuckled. ‘Isn’t that a great name?’
Hunter and Garcia both quickly typed the address into their address bars and hit the ‘enter’ key.
The screen flashed once. The website loaded in three seconds flat.
There was nothing on the screen. It was completely dark. Hunter checked the web address again to see if he had mistyped it. He hadn’t.
Garcia looked up from his screen, lifted both of his palms up in frustration and shook his head. His screen was also dark.
‘Do you have it?’ the caller asked.
‘I’ve got nothing but a dark screen,’ Hunter replied.
‘Patience, Detective Hunter. You have the right page.’
Suddenly, in the top left-hand corner of the screen, three small white letters appeared – SSV.
‘What the hell?’ Garcia sighed.
Hunter squinted at the letters, as his brain searched for a meaning. He looked at Garcia and shook his head. ‘I don’t think it’s a chemical formula this time,’ he whispered.
Then, in the top right-hand corner, three small white numbers appeared – 678.
‘Do you see it now?’ the caller asked.
‘I see it,’ Hunter said calmly. ‘What does it mean?’
The caller chuckled. ‘You’ll have to figure that out for yourself, Detective. But that is secondary. Here’s the main attraction.’
All of a sudden, darkness dissipated from the screen. The familiar green tint of images being broadcast through night-vision lenses took over.
Hunter and Garcia were expecting to see the same reinforced glass structure they saw just a couple of days ago. They were expecting to see a new victim tied down to a metal chair and stripped of his clothes. They were expecting the caller to play the same sadistic game he did the first time around – a choice between drowning and burning the victim alive.
That was not what they saw.
What they saw chilled them even further to the bone.
Michelle and Harry had been involved in a sting operation for seven months now. They’d been tracking a serial pedophile, who’d been grooming ten to thirteen-year-olds via Internet chat rooms for years. The guy was a real scumbag. He knew how to identify the lonely kids. The ones who felt they didn’t fit in. The outcasts. The vulnerable. He was very patient. He would chat with them for months, gaining their trust. At first he would tell them he was thirteen, but as their virtual relationship strengthened, he would reveal he was in his early twenties and that he was a university student. The truth was, he was in his late thirties.
He was always charming, understanding, supportive and very flattering, and to any teenage girl who felt she was misunderstood by everyone, including her parents, that was a very powerful wall breaker. It worked every time, and soon they’d be infatuated with someone they’d never met. After that, it was almost impossible for them to say no to a meeting.
To the FBI’s knowledge, he’d seduced and had sex with six girls so far. Two of them were only ten.
But this predator was far from dumb. He was also very good with computers. He was always mobile. He used a laptop, and he only chatted from free Wi-Fi spots, like cafes, bars and hotel lobbies. He never purchased a Wi-Fi connection password, either hijacking them from other users or hacking the system. Most free Wi-Fi spots aren’t best known for their unbreachable Internet security.
He also kept on jumping from chat room to chat room, sometimes even creating his own. He used different aliases, and he never chatted for more than ten to fifteen minutes at a time.
Four months ago, almost by chance, Michelle found him chatting out of a chat room set up in Guatemala. The FBI CCD had run hundreds of these operations. They all knew that the easiest way to reel these types of sickos in was to fool them into believing they were chatting with a potential victim. Michelle jumped at the chance, and in a blink of an eye she became ‘Lucy’, a thirteen-year-old girl from Culver City. He bought it, and they’d been chatting almost every day since. He’d been using the alias ‘Bobby’.
‘Bobby’ was indeed very charming and supportive. It was very easy for Michelle to see how any teenage girl with low self-esteem would be completely swept off her feet by ‘Bobby’.
‘Lucy’ and ‘Bobby’ had been talking about a meeting for weeks now, and yesterday morning ‘Lucy’ finally gave in. She told him that she could skip school on Monday. She’d done it before. They could meet somewhere not too far, and spend the day together, but they had to be careful. If her parents found out, she would be in a lot of trouble. ‘Bobby’ promised her that they would never find out.
Right now, they’d been chatting for seven minutes, making the final arrangements for where and when they’d meet on Monday.
‘Do u know it?’
Venice Beach was just a bus ride away from Culver City. It was a wide-open space where the FBI could easily set up long-distance cameras with powerful lenses, and pack the entire area with undercover agents and dogs.
‘Do you know where the sk8 park is?’
‘No one will know. It will be our little secret [face with a zipped-up lip].’
Harry smiled. ‘Are you OK, though?’
She nodded. ‘I’m fine. I’m glad that this one is coming to an end.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘I want to be there on Monday. I want to look straight into his eyes when they cuff this sack o’ shit,’ Michelle said.
‘You and me both.’
‘I want to see the look on his face when he finds out I’m “Lucy”.’
‘Um, Boss, can you come and have a look at this?’ Another CCD agent, who’d been monitoring some of their web crawlers, called from his desk.
‘What is it, Jamie?’ Michelle replied.
‘I’m not sure, but I’m pretty certain you’re going to want to see it.’
Garcia felt his heartbeat pick up speed.
The woman looked absolutely petrified. Her eyes were open as wide as they would go, moving constantly, as if searching for something. She kept on turning her head from side to side, clearly trying to understand where she was, or what was happening to her. Her lips were trembling and it looked like she was having trouble breathing. She seemed to be lying down, but her movements were limited, not because she was tied up, but because she was locked inside a confined enclosure. Some sort of transparent box made out of glass, or Perspex, or a similar material. But it was much smaller than the one the killer had used for the first victim. The woman only had about five inches of space on each side, and maybe three inches above her head.
‘Is she in a glass coffin?’ Garcia looked at Hunter, who gave him an almost imperceptible shrug.
Hunter quickly opened the screen recording application he had asked IT to install on his computer and started recording the broadcast.
If the glass coffin was lying flat on the floor, the camera streaming the images seemed to be directly above it, positioned at a slight diagonal angle. But they could only see down to her waist. Her legs didn’t make the shot.
Panic erupted inside the woman and she started to frantically hammer her fists and seemingly kick her feet against the glass walls, but they were way too thick for her feeble efforts to make any impression. She was screaming as loud as she could. The veins on her neck looked like they were about to pop, but neither Hunter nor Garcia could hear a sound.
‘What is this?’ Hunter asked, pointing at his screen.
Only then Garcia noticed the end of what looked like a large dark tube, about five inches in diameter, attached to one of the sides of the glass box.
Garcia squinted at his screen. ‘I don’t know,’ he finally said. ‘Ventilation, maybe?’