The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [101]
“And?”
“No links to any outside servers, but I am seeing someone browsing on a bunch of weird Web sites.”
“What kind of weird Web sites?”
“Hard to say for sure,” she muttered, cheeks flushed. “But the two places that seem to be getting the most page requests are PinkTushy dot com and SchoolgirlPunishment dot com.”
“Schoolgirl Punishment” didn’t sound like an advice site for parents.
“Porn?”
“Easy enough to find out.” She typed something rapidly and hit the enter key. “Yuck.” She spun the computer toward me.
Inch-and-a-half magenta letters spelled schoolgirl punishment at the top of her screen. Below was a photograph of a fully clothed guy with a naked woman draped over his lap. His hand was uplifted over her bottom, and his mouth was twisted into the exaggerated grimace of a silent-movie villain. The woman was wearing white knee socks and had her hair in childish braids, but her face was turned to the camera, revealing her to be in her mid-thirties. Her expression was one of extreme boredom.
“Ganesa’s a two-person outfit, as far as we know,” I mumbled, feeling a little flushed myself. I’d seen porn before but never in the company of my daughter. “I doubt Ellen Cho’s the one looking at this stuff. So, in addition to being a stock-market manipulator and an accomplice to murder, I’m guessing this makes Mohler a pervert.”
Claire joined us, carrying coffee.
“Can he be arrested for looking at stuff like that?” she asked disgustedly, tipping her head toward the screen as she handed cups to me and Reggie.
“No,” Reggie answered. “Not unless there are minors involved. And I don’t want to shock anyone, but taken by itself, this sort of thing doesn’t make Mohler that strange a dude. One of the things you learn in my line is that lots of otherwise mild-mannered people are into all kinds of freaky stuff. Patrol cops see it all the time, because they get called out when people forget to close the drapes or when sex games go wrong. The homicide guys are the ones with the really weird stories, though. They dig deep on people who didn’t know they were about to check out, and who didn’t have time to tidy up beforehand. Spanking porn is on the mild end of the fetish scale.”
“Which is one of the things that made you wonder if Alex committed suicide,” I said uncomfortably, remembering our conversation on the park bench. “Because you figured he might have been into something strange and dumped his hard drive to tidy up.”
“Possible.”
“I’m kind of offended to hear you call this stuff mild,” Kate burst out angrily. “I don’t see how porn promoting violence against women is any less bad than porn involving children.”
Reggie glanced upward, looking as if he wished he was somewhere else.
“World’s a complicated place,” he said. “When it comes to sex, the only bright line I know to separate right from wrong is consent. Children can’t consent.”
“And women who are abused or dependent can?”
“Enough,” Claire interrupted. “We can have this debate another time. The only question that interests me right now is whether this tells us anything useful about Mohler.”
“Maybe,” Reggie replied, looking relieved to be let off the hook. “Porn addiction generally suggests a loner and a guy who feels bad about himself for some reason. Mohler could be the life of every party and never miss a night’s sleep, but it’s a better bet that he has something gnawing at him. It’s also likely that he has other addictions. Guy strike you as a boozer, Mark?”
“Possible,” I said, still half thinking about Alex. Reggie’s description fit Alex to a T. Maybe Reggie was right to suspect that he’d ditched his own hard drive. “He didn’t look like the healthy type.”
Reggie’s phone rang before he could follow up.
“Sorry,” he said, checking the display. “I got to take this.” He put the phone to his ear and stepped