Double Cross - James Patterson [29]
“Blogosphere?”
Kitzmiller started pulling up several new windows at once, layered over one another on the screen to show us what he was getting at.
“First of all, we’ve got everyone who posted responses to the original blog. There was the MY REALITY site, for example. It’s already been taken down, but there were more than three dozen separate screen names for people who had replied to at least one of his entries. So that’s a pretty good start. You remember the old shampoo commercial? ‘You tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on and so on’? Same thing here. Some number of people read this, then turn around and talk about it on their own blogs, and the scope goes up exponentially. Chat rooms too.
“Now add to that the fact that you’ve got a killer who apparently likes to be in the spotlight. There’s a good chance he’ll stay a part of the community in some way. People intersect. You find the right intersection, maybe you solve your case, find your killer, go into the Detectives’ Hall of Fame.”
“That’s a lot of ifs,” Bree said. “I don’t like ifs and maybes.”
People had been talking about cyberspace as the new frontier in law enforcement for years now. It looked like I was about to get my first extensive taste of it.
Kitzmiller ran a simple Google blog search for us to illustrate his point. He searched Audience Killer and got a whole screenful of responses.
“Wow,” said Bree. “I’m kind of impressed already. Or maybe I should say depressed. That’s a lot of detritus.”
Sampson added, “Fuck! It’s an epidemic.”
“You notice he never uses that full title on his own site. That’s probably why you hadn’t found it earlier. Even so, right here you’ve got more than eighty other strands that mention him, and two specifically dedicated to the subject. And he presumably hasn’t even hit three homicides yet.”
“Does the fact that he’s courting the attention speed all this up?” I asked.
“Sure, it does. There’s a voracious audience for all this stuff on the Internet. Most people say they abhor the killing, and a lot of them actually do, I’m sure. What you end up with is a mix of folks with legitimate forensic interest, people who want to know more but maybe for the wrong reason, and then people who just plain get off on it all. This guy is their dream come true. No one’s ever been so accessible, not while he was still this active.”
Bree spoke quietly, working it out in her head. “So . . . he uses other people to help turn himself into the thing he wants to be.”
Kitzmiller nodded and pulled up another window, the “official” Jeffrey Dahmer fan club site. “Pick your poison. He wants to be Dahmer. He wants to be Ted Bundy. He wants to be the Zodiac Killer.”
“No. He wants to be a much bigger star,” I said. “I think he wants to be bigger than any of the others.”
Including Kyle Craig? I had to wonder. How the hell does Kyle fit in?
Chapter 38
I WAS ALREADY FRUSTRATED about the case, plus I was suffering from Bree deprivation. I was concerned that I’d have trouble focusing at work that week, so I decided to tape my sessions. Just in case, just to be safe.
Anthony Demao, the Desert Storm vet, did something unusual for him, which was talk in depth about his combat experience. I sat and reviewed the tape again over lunch at my desk. As I listened, I could picture Anthony: ruggedly good-looking, still in shape—a quiet man, though.
“We didn’t have sufficient support on the ground. The CO didn’t give a rat’s ass. We had a mission. That’s all he cared about,” he said.
“How long had you been there at that point?”
Silence. Then, “Ground attack started end of the month, so a couple of weeks, I guess.”
I was becoming more and more convinced that something really bad had happened to him during Desert Storm, something that could be a key to Anthony’s difficulties, maybe even an incident he’d repressed. The balance in this case was between not wanting to push too hard and a gut feeling that he wasn’t going to stick with the therapy for long, especially if he didn’t