Chat - Archer Mayor [83]
She stopped and looked pointedly at Gunther, adding, “Legally—don’t worry. The locals were great. I got names and numbers for your Christmas card list. Anyhow, what I found was a huge collection of child porn—pictures, articles, X-rated stories, DVDs, videotapes. Some of it printed or downloaded off the Web, some of it ordered through various sites. It was all neat and tidy and organized like a stamp collector’s dream world, with categories and subcategories in carefully labeled files and boxes. It was textbook obsessive-compulsive.”
“The wife was clueless?” Joe reiterated.
“Totally. I even tried the girl-talk approach, to see what he might’ve been like in bed. Nothing. Unless she was either bullshitting me or as dumb as an ox—which I didn’t get—he performed perfectly normally, if maybe not like a sexual athlete.”
“The kid a boy or girl?”
“Boy. I only met him in passing, since I didn’t have that much time, but he seemed as normal as his mom.”
“So did his dad, from the outside,” Joe mused.
“True,” Sam agreed. “It’s early yet. We’ll get a better crack at both of them soon enough.”
“How come they didn’t report him missing?” Lester asked.
“They didn’t think he was,” Sam told them. “He said he’d be in Vegas at a week-long convention, and that maybe he’d extend his stay to enjoy the sights afterward.”
“It’s been a hell of a lot longer than a week,” Joe commented.
“I said the same thing,” Sam agreed, adding, “I guess it was that kind of marriage. In her defense, I don’t think the wife missed him any. When I told her he was dead, she took it pretty well—more like he was a relative they hadn’t seen in a while. Sad, but not destroyed.”
“Married how long?”
“Sixteen years.”
Gunther cupped his chin in his hand thoughtfully. “He ever do this before? Go off to quote-unquote Vegas?”
“Nope—overnights only.”
“Meaning what?”
“Business trips. I checked with his boss. Nashman didn’t have the kind of job that called for any trips.”
Joe straightened. “Huh.”
“What?” Lester asked him.
“Just a thought,” Joe told them both. “Earlier we played with the idea that both he and Rockwell came here following a recipe—come by bus, get two keys at the desk, stick one on the door, etcetera. How ’bout a part of that being that they were supposed to tell everyone they’d be gone for a week or more?”
Spinney was already nodding enthusiastically. “That’s what happened with my guy. Told his roommates the exact same thing.”
“Makes sense,” Sammie agreed. “It would guarantee the trail being pretty cold before anyone like us started backtracking.”
“Except,” Joe then countered, playing devil’s advocate, “why would they agree to that? It would sure make me suspicious.”
“You aren’t horny out of your mind,” Sam answered. “We don’t know what they were promised.”
“Okay,” Joe said to Lester. “How ’bout you?”
Spinney read from notes, sitting at his desk, while Sam settled down on the edge of hers to listen.
“Rockwell, or Wet Bald Rocky, was actually Norman Metz. Totally different outward appearance. Or maybe just further down the slippery slope than Red Fred. He was divorced, unemployed, living in a dump, and nobody’s best pal among the other tenants I interviewed. They all thought he was weird and antisocial, what little they saw of him. He kept all hours, didn’t go out much, and, like Fred, seemed to spend all his spare time on the Net.”
“How did they know that?” Joe asked.
“When it was hot, he’d leave his door open a bit, to allow for circulation. The only thing people saw or heard was him tapping on the computer. Bit of an assumption, I suppose, but borne out by what I found once we got access.”
“Which was what?” Sam asked.
“Like you did,” he said, “but a lot messier. Metz had porno all over the place, including on the walls of the bathroom—that was gross; I didn’t want