The 7th Victim - Alan Jacobson [65]
But I watch him. I watch everything he does through little holes in the walls. I watch him bring home the whores, I watch what he does to them before dragging them upstairs to his bedroom. Sometimes I even hear what they’re saying, but most of the time I just see. I see what he does.
But I really don’t have to see. I already know. I know because he does the same things to me.
Holy shit. He’s communicating with me. Dead Eyes sent me a message. Had there ever been a serial offender who sent the cops an email? A letter, yes, but an email? Not that she’d ever seen. Emails are inherently easier to trace—
She looked at the sender’s name: G. G. Condon. She knew that would be a dead end, that it was easy to obtain an email account with fake information. She tried forwarding the message to the lab, but nothing happened. She clicked File/Print, yet the page came out blank.
“What the hell?”
She pressed the PrtScn key to take a “picture” of the screen—everything that was displayed on her computer desktop—and pasted the image into a Word document.
Vail lifted the phone and dialed CART, the Computer Analysis Response Team, and informed the technician, Cynthia Arnot, of what she had. While she was on the line, the email vanished from her inbox.
“It’s gone?” Cynthia asked.
“Gone,” Vail said, furiously scrolling through her Outlook inbox. “Like it was never there. All my other messages are there, but this one just . . . disappeared.”
“Check your Deleted Items folder. Maybe you accidentally deleted it.”
“I didn’t delete it, Cynthia.” Nonetheless, Vail clicked to the folder. “Not there.”
If she’d been able to retain the email, they could’ve gone into the originating server, tracked the routing information, and traced it using digital clues largely unknown or poorly understood by the average computer user. The offender may think he’s smart; the Bureau’s experts were often smarter. But without the message. . . .
“I did get a screen shot of it.”
“Very good, Karen. Send it over, let us take a look at it.”
“I’m not losing my mind. I didn’t delete it. Could it be some kind of virus?”
“Not likely. But there is some interesting stuff out there that can make messages unprintable, make them self-destruct, allow them to spy on your movements and passwords—”
“This isn’t just spyware, Cynthia. I’m working Dead Eyes. I’ve got reason to believe this message was from the offender. This could be huge.”
“We’ll do our best. Meantime, shut it down and unplug the PC. I’ll send someone over to get it, we’ll need to go through the hard drive. Just because a message is deleted doesn’t mean we can’t pull traces of it off the disk. But it’ll take a while.”
Vail glanced at the clock and realized OPR would be arriving soon. “Would it help to tell you we don’t have a while?”
“Nope.”
Vail leaned back in her chair and sighed. “Didn’t think so.”
“OKAY, LISTEN UP,” Bledsoe said as they walked through the door to the op center. “I hope everyone made good use of the hour off, because we’ve got more work to do. More legwork and more brain-work. I know you’re all tired. So am I.” He ripped open a box of Danish and set them on the table in front of him. “Before we get started on the new vic, I want an update on all our loose ends. This thing is threatening to get away from us real fast, and I want to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
The detectives and Hancock took their seats. Vail’s chair was conspicuously empty.
“What about Karen?” Sinclair asked.
Bledsoe stood in front of the whiteboard at the short end of the living room. “We go on without her. I’ll brief her later.” He pulled the cap off a marker and wrote “Dental patient lists.”
“Sin, you’re first up.”
“Right. Vic worked for three dentists. I’ve gotten patient