Forty-Five
The atmosphere inside the FBI Cybercrime Division was one of triumph. Smiles and congratulations were going around the room like a carousel. Even the FBI director in charge of the Los Angeles field office had called Michelle Kelly to express his satisfaction. He had two small daughters of his own and he couldn’t even begin to imagine what he would do if either of them ever fell victim to an Internet pedophile.
Sitting at her computer, Michelle brought up Bobby’s case file. On its front page she right-clicked on the empty square in the top right-hand corner that said ‘‘photo file’’, and selected ‘add’ from the pop-up menu. Harry Mills had already transferred a series of mugshots taken after Bobby’s arrest into the FBI’s mainframe computer. Michelle selected one, and clicked ‘add’.
She then placed the cursor over the ‘Name’ field and typed in Bobby’s real name – Gregory Burke.
Bobby was no longer a faceless, nameless threat to young kids anymore.
Michelle moved the cursor over to the Investigation Status field, deleted the word ‘open’, and as she typed in ‘closed – subject arrested’, she felt enormous satisfaction run through her. But she knew that that feeling wouldn’t last long.
Unfortunately there were way too many ‘Bobbys’ out there, stalking social network sites, chat rooms, games websites or wherever kids would gather to socialize in cyberspace. Michelle and the FBI CCD were doing the best they could, but the simple truth was that they were hugely outnumbered, and the ratio grew the wrong way year after year. She knew that putting Bobby away was only a small victory in a war they’d been losing since the early days of the Internet, but even so it was days like today that made the fight worthwhile.
‘You OK?’ Harry asked, coming up behind her.
‘I’m great.’ She clicked the ‘save’ button.
‘How’s the lip?’
Michelle brought her fingertips to her swollen bottom lip. ‘It hurts a little, but I’ll live. A small price to pay for sending one more scumbag to prison.’
‘And I hope he rots in there.’
Michelle chuckled, more out of relief than amusement. ‘With what we have on him, I’m sure he will.’
It had taken the FBI less than two hours to discover the small hotel Bobby had booked for the day. It was only three blocks away from Venice Beach, where he was arrested. Inside the room they had found personal documents, credit cards, money, sex paraphernalia, pills, alcohol and a small, medicine-sized bottle containing some clear liquid. The bottle was already with the FBI forensics lab, and everyone had their money on the liquid testing positive for some sort of homemade date-rape drug, like gamma-hydroxybutyric acid. But the real finding came from a small black case by the bed. Inside it they’d found Bobby’s personal laptop computer with hundreds of images and video clips, together with a digital video camera.
To Michelle’s delight, Bobby hadn’t had a chance to transfer the contents of the camera’s memory card to his laptop – an unedited, twelve-minute video clip filmed only two days ago. The clip clearly showed Bobby with a girl who looked no older than eleven.
‘So,’ Harry said. ‘You’re coming out to celebrate, right? We’re all going to Baja for a few drinks, and maybe some food.’
Baja was a Mexican grill-restaurant and bar just two blocks away from the FBI building.
Michelle glanced at her watch. ‘Sure, but why don’t you guys go ahead and I’ll meet you there in about forty minutes or so. I just want to have another look at that crazy footage we recorded on Friday. You know, that woman inside that glass coffin . . . that whole voting thing.’
Harry gave her a feeble smile. He knew they had thrown everything they had at that transmission while the stream was live, but they’d gotten nowhere. Every path had led to a dead end. The FBI CCD was rarely blocked out of an Internet transmission so professionally, and their “failure” to find a way in had pissed Michelle off in a way Harry had only seen once before. She simply didn’t know how to accept defeat.
‘What are you hoping to find, Michelle?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe nothing.’ She avoided eye contact. ‘Maybe the killer is that much cleverer than we are.’
‘It’s not a competition, you know?’
‘Yes, it is, Harry.’ She finally looked at him with something burning in her eyes. ‘Because if he’s better than we are . . . if he wins and we lose, people die . . . in a very grotesque way.’
Harry lifted both hands in a surrender gesture, but he knew Michelle wasn’t angry with him. ‘Would you like some help?’
Michelle smiled. ‘I’ll be OK. You know me. Go celebrate with everyone, and I’ll be down in a little while. And don’t get too drunk before I get there.’
‘Oh, I can’t promise you that.’ He started moving toward the door.
‘Harry,’ she called. ‘Order me a Caipirinha, will you? Extra lime.’
‘You bet.’
‘I won’t be long.’
Harry turned away from Michelle and smiled at himself. ‘Yeah, I bet you won’t,’ he muttered.
Forty-Six
After everyone had left, Michelle dimmed the lights around her desk, poured herself a large cup of coffee and started going over the footage they had recorded from the Internet three days ago. She had never forgotten those images, but watching that woman locked inside that glass coffin again, while a nest of tarantula hawks slowly stung the life out of her, made every hair on Michelle’s neck stand on end. Her swollen bottom lip started throbbing again, as her heartbeat accelerated. For an instant, right at the end of the footage, when one of the large black wasps exited through the woman’s nasal cavity, Michelle had to fight the urge to be sick, a sensation, she remembered, not that much different from the day four FBI agents blasted through her door in the early hours of the morning to arrest her.
From a very early age, Michelle had always been great with computers, something that not even she could explain. It was like her brain was wired differently, patched up to make even the most complicated lines of machine code read like a nursery rhyme.
Michelle Kelly was born in Doyle, northern California. Her father passed away when she was only fourteen years old. A smoker since his early teens and with a weak immune system, he had contracted pneumonia while he struggled to get over a very bad cold. Her mother, a timid and submissive woman, who had always dreaded being alone, remarried a year later.
Michelle’s stepfather was a violent drunk, who very soon transformed her low-self-esteem mother into a drug-taking, alcohol-drinking zombie. Despite trying hard, Michelle was powerless to stop her mother from becoming a wreck.
Late one night, six months after her stepfather moved in, he carefully pushed open the door to Michelle’s bedroom and stepped inside. Her mother was passed out in the living room, after consuming three-quarters of a bottle of vodka.
Michelle jerked awake as her stepfather threw his large, sweaty and naked body on top of her, her heart racing in her chest, her breath rasping in her throat, confusion and terror lighting her eyes. He cupped his meaty hand over her mouth, pushed her head hard into the pillow and whispered in her ear,‘Shhhh, don’t fight it, babe. You gonna like this. I promise you. I’m gonna school you on what a real man feels like. And very soon you’ll be begging me for more.’