Angels Flight

Chapter 26

BOSCH couldn’t put his finger on the look he saw on Kizmin Rider’s face when he and Edgar returned to the squad room. She sat alone at the homicide table, her laptop in front of her, the glow of the screen reflecting slightly on her dark face. She looked both horrified and energized. Bosch knew the look but didn’t have the words for it. She had seen something horrible but at the same time she knew she was going to be able to do something about it.

“Kiz,” Bosch said.

“Sit down. I hope you didn’t leave hair on the cake with the Kincaids.”

Bosch pulled out his seat and sat down. Edgar did likewise. The phrase Rider had used referred to making a miscue that tainted a case with constitutional or procedural error. If a suspect asks for a lawyer but then confesses to a crime before the lawyer arrives, there is hair on the cake. The confession is tainted. Likewise, if a suspect is not advised of his rights before questioning, it is unlikely anything he says in that conversation can be used against him later in court.

“Look, neither one was a suspect when we walked in there,” Bosch said. “There was no reason to advise. We told them the case was open again and asked a few basic questions. Nothing came out of any consequence anyway. We told them Harris has been cleared and that’s it. What do you have, Kiz? Maybe you should just show us.”

“Okay, bring your chairs around here. I’ll school you.”

They moved their chairs to positions on either side of her. Bosch checked her computer and saw the Mistress Regina web page was on the screen.

“First off, either of you guys know Lisa or Stacey O’Connor in Major Fraud downtown?”

Bosch and Edgar shook their heads.

“They’re not sisters. They just have the same last name. They work with Sloane Inglert. You know who she is, right?”

Now they nodded. Inglert was a member of a new computer fraud unit working out of Parker Center. The team, and Inglert in particular, had gotten a lot of play in the media earlier that year when they bagged Brian Fielder, a hacker of international reputation who headed a crew of hackers known as the “Merry Pranksters.” Fielder’s exploits and Inglert’s chase of her quarry across the Internet had played in the paper for weeks and were now destined to be filmed by Holywood.

“All right,” Rider said. “Well, they’re friends of mine from when I worked Fraud. I called them and they were happy to come in to work this because otherwise they’d have to put on uniforms and work twelve hours tonight.”

“They came here?” Bosch asked.

“No, their office at Parker. Where the real computers are. Anyway, we talked over the phone once they got there. I told them what we had – this web address that we knew was important but at the same time didn’t make any sense. I told them about going to Mistress Regina’s place and I think I pretty much creeped them out. Anyway, they told me there was a good chance that what we were looking for had nothing to do with Regina herself, just her web page. They said the page could have been hijacked and that we should be looking for a hidden hypertext link somewhere in the image.”

Bosch raised his hands palms up but before he could say anything Rider kept going.

“I know, I know, talk English. I will. I just wanted to take you step by step. Do either of you know anything at all about web pages? Am I making even any basic sense here?”

“Nope,” said Bosch.

“Nada,” said Edgar.

“Okay, then I’ll try to keep this simple. We start with the Internet. The Internet is the so-called information superhighway, okay? Thousands and thousands of computer systems all connected by a Telnet system. It is worldwide. On that highway are millions of turnoffs, places to go. These are whole computer networks, web sites, so on and so forth.”

She pointed to Mistress Regina on her computer screen.

“This is an individual web page that is on a web site where there are many other pages. You see this on my computer here but its home, so to speak, is on the larger web site. And that web site resides in an actual, physical piece of equipment – a computer we call the web server. Do you follow me?”

Bosch and Edgar nodded.

“So far,” Bosch said. “I think.”

“Good. Now the web server may have many, many web sites that it manages and maintains. See, if you wanted to have a Harry Bosch web page you would go to a web server and say put my page on one of your web sites. Do you have one that features morose detectives who never say much of anything to anybody?”

That got a smile from Bosch.

“That’s how it works. Often you have like-minded businesses or interests bundled on one site. That’s why when you look at this site it’s like Sodom and Gomorrah on the Internet. Because like-minded advertisers seek the same sites.”

“Okay,” Bosch said.

“The one thing the web server should provide is security. By that I mean security from anyone hacking in and compromising your page – altering it or crashing it. The problem is, there isn’t a whole lot of security out there on these web servers. And if someone can hack into a server they can then assume site-administrator capabilities for a web site and hijack any page on the site.”

“What do you mean, hijack?” Edgar said.

“They can go to a page on the site and use it as a front for their own intentions. Think of it as it is on my screen here. They can come up behind the image you see here and add all kinds of hidden doors and commands, whatever they want. They can then use the page as a gateway to anything they want.”

“And that’s what they did with her page?” Bosch asked.

“Exactly. I had O’Connor/O’Connor run a uniform resource locator. In effect they traced this page back to the web server. They checked it out. There are indeed some firewalls – security blocks – but the default passwords are still valid. They, in effect, render the firewalls invalid.”

“You lost me,” Bosch said.

“When a web server is first set up, there are default passwords necessary for first getting inside. In other words, standard log-on names and passwords. Guest/guest, for example. Or administrator/administrator. Once the server is up and running these should be eliminated to prevent compromise but quite often it is forgotten about and these become back doors, ways to sneak in. It was forgotten here. Lisa got in using administrator/administrator. And if she was able to do it, then any hacker worth his salt could have gotten in and then hijacked the Mistress Regina page. And somebody did.”

“What did they do?” Bosch asked.

“They put in a hidden hypertext link. A hot button. When located and pushed, it will take the user to another web site all together.”

“In English,” Edgar said.

Rider thought for a moment.

“Think of it as a tall building – the Empire State building. You are on one floor. The Mistress Regina floor. And you find a hidden button on the wall. You push it and an elevator door you didn’t even see before opens and you get on. The elevator takes you to another floor and opens. You step out. You are someplace completely new. But you couldn’t have gotten there if you hadn’t been on Mistress Regina’s floor and stumbled onto that hidden button.”

“Or been told where it was,” Bosch said.

“Exactly,” Rider said. “Those in the know can go.”

Bosch nodded at her computer.

“Show us.”

“Well, remember, the first note to Elias was the web page address and the image of Regina. The second one said, ‘dot the i humbert humbert.’ The mystery writer was simply telling Elias what to do with the web page.”

“Dot the i in Regina?” Edgar asked. “Click the mouse on the dot?”

“That’s what I thought but O’Connor/O’Connor said a hot button can only be hidden behind an image. Something about pixel redefinition that I don’t need to get into.”

“So you dot the eye?” Bosch said, pointing to his eye.

“Right.”

She turned to her laptop, to which she had attached a mouse. She now moved it with her hand and Bosch watched the arrow on the screen move to Mistress Regina’s left eye. Rider double-clicked the mouse button and the screen went blank.

“Okay, we’re on that elevator.”

After a few seconds a field of blue sky and clouds appeared on the screen. Then tiny angels with wings and halos appeared sitting on the clouds. Then a password template appeared.

“Humbert humbert,” Bosch said.

“See, Harry, you get this stuff. You’re just acting like you don’t.”

She typed in the name humbert in the user name and password slots and the screen went blank once again. A few seconds later there was a welcome message.

WELCOME TO CHARLOTTE’S WEB SITE

Below the message a moving cartoon image formed. A spider crawled along the bottom of the page and then began weaving a web across the screen, shooting back and forth until the web was formed. Then tiny photographic images of young girls’ faces appeared in the web, as if caught there. When the image of the web and its captives was complete, the spider took a position at the top of the web.

“This is sick,” Edgar said. “I’m getting a bad feeling here.”

“It’s a pedophile site,” Rider said. With a fingernail she tapped the screen below one of the photos in the web. “And that is Stacey Kincaid. You click on the photo you like and you get a full spread of photos and videos. It is truly, truly horrible stuff. That poor little angel, she might be better off dead.”

Rider moved the arrow to the photo of the blond girl. It was too small for Bosch to identify the girl as Stacey Kincaid. He wished he could just take Rider’s word for it.

“Are you ready for this?” Rider asked. “I can’t run videos on my laptop but the photos give you the idea.”

She didn’t wait for a reply and she didn’t get one. She double-clicked the mouse and a new screen appeared. A photo appeared on the screen. It was a young girl standing naked in front of a hedge. She was smiling in a forced, seemingly unnatural way. Despite the smile she still had a lost-in-the-woods look on her face. Her hands were on her hips. Bosch could tell it was Stacey Kincaid. He tried to breathe but it felt like his lungs were collapsing. He folded his arms across his chest. Rider started scrolling the screen and a series of photos came up featuring the girl in several poses by herself and then finally with a man. Only the man’s naked torso was shown, never his face. The last photos were the girl and the man engaged in various sex acts. Then they came to the final photo. It showed Stacey Kincaid in a white dress with little semaphore flags on it. She was waving at the camera. The photo seemed somehow to be the worst one even though it was the most innocent.

“Okay, go back or forward or whatever you do to get that off there,” Bosch said.

He watched Rider move the cursor to a button below the final photo that said HOME on it. It seemed sadly ironic to Bosch that clicking HOME was the way out. Rider clicked the mouse and the screen went back to the spider’s web. Bosch pulled his chair back to his spot and dropped down into it. Fatigue and depression suddenly hit him. He wanted to go home and go to sleep and forget everything he knew.

“People are the worst animals,” Rider said. “They will do anything to each other. Just to indulge their fantasies.”

Bosch got up and walked over to one of the other nearby desks. It belonged to a burglary detective named McGrath. He opened the drawers and started looking through them.

“Harry,” Rider said, “what are you looking for?”

“A cigarette. I thought Paul kept his smokes in his desk.”

“He used to. I told him to start taking them home with him.”

Bosch looked over at her, his hand still holding one of the drawers.

“You told him that?”

“I didn’t want you slipping, Harry.”

Bosch shoved the drawer closed and came back to his chair.

“Thanks a lot, Kizmin. You saved me.”

There wasn’t a drop of thanks in the tone he had used.

“You’ll get through this, Harry.”

Bosch gave her a look.

“You probably haven’t smoked an entire cigarette in your entire life and you’re going to tell me about quitting and how I’ll get through it?”

“Sorry. I’m just trying to help.”

“Like I said, thanks.”

He looked over at her computer and nodded.

“What else? What are you thinking about? How does that tie in Sam and Kate Kincaid to the point we should’ve advised them?”

“They had to know about this,” Rider said, amazed that Bosch didn’t see what she saw. “The man in the photos, that’s got to be Kincaid.”

“Whoah!” Edgar said. “How can you say that? You couldn’t see the guy’s face. We were just talking to the guy and he and his wife are still righteously fucked-up over this.”

It hit Bosch then. When he had first seen the photos on the computer he had thought they were taken by the girl’s abductor.

“You’re saying these photos are old,” he said. “That she was abused before she was abducted.”

“I’m saying there probably wasn’t an abduction at all. Stacey Kincaid was an abused child. My guess is that her stepfather defiled her and then probably killed her. And that doesn’t happen without tacit knowledge, if not approval, by the mother.”

Bosch was silent. Rider had spoken with such fervor and even pain that he couldn’t help but wonder if she was talking from some kind of personal experience.

“Look,” Rider said, apparently sensing the skepticism of her partners. “There was a time that I thought I wanted to move into child sex crimes. This was before I put in for homicide. There was an opening on the endangered-child team in Pacific and the job was mine if I wanted it. They first sent me to Quantico for a two-week training program the bureau puts on once a year on child sex crimes. I lasted eight days. I realized I couldn’t hack it. I came back and put in for homicide.”

She stopped there but neither Bosch nor Edgar said anything. They knew there was more.

“But before I left,” Rider continued, “I learned enough to know that most often sexual abuse of children comes from inside the family, relatives or close friends. The boogey monsters who climb through the window and abduct are few and far between.”

“It’s still not evidence in this specific case, Kiz,” Bosch said gently. “This could still be the rare exception. It wasn’t Harris who came through the window but this guy.”

He pointed to her computer, though the images of the headless man’s assault on Stacey Kincaid were thankfully not on the screen.

“Nobody came through the window,” Rider insisted.

She pulled a file over and opened it. Bosch saw it contained a copy of the protocol from the autopsy of Stacey Kincaid. She leafed through it until she came to the photos. She picked the one she wanted and handed it to Bosch. While he looked at it she started paging through the protocol.

The photo Bosch held was a shot of Stacey Kincaid’s body in situ – the position and place where it was found. Her arms were spread wide. Sheehan had been right. Her body was darkening with interior decomposition and the face was gaunt, but there was an angelic quality to her in repose. His heart ached from looking at the photos of her tortured and now dead.

“Look at the left knee,” Rider commanded.

He did so. He saw a round dark spot that appeared to be a scab.

“A scab?”

“Right. The protocol calls it premortem by five to six days. It happened before she was abducted. So she had that scab on her knee the entire time she was with her abductor – if there really was one. In the photos on the web site, she has no scab. I can go back in and show you if you like.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” Bosch said.

“Yeah,” Edgar added. “Me, too.”

“So these photos on the web were taken well before she was supposedly kidnapped, well before she was murdered.”

Bosch nodded, then shook his head.

“What?” Rider asked.

“It’s just… I don’t know. Twenty-four hours ago we were working the Elias thing and thinking maybe we were looking for a cop. Now all of this…”

“It changes things all right,” Edgar said.

“Wait a minute, if that’s Sam Kincaid in those pictures with her, why the hell are they still on that web site? It doesn’t make sense that he would risk that.”

“I thought about that,” Rider said. “There are two possible explanations. One being that he doesn’t have editing access to the web site. In other words, he can’t take those photos off without going to the site administrator, raising suspicions and exposing himself. The second possibility, and it might be a combination of both, is that he felt he was safe. Harris was fingered as the killer and whether he was convicted or not that was the end of the story.”

“It’s still a risk leaving those photos out there to be seen,” Edgar said.

“Who’s going to see them?” Rider asked. “Who’s going to tell?”

Her voice was too defensive. She realized this and continued in a calmer tone.

“Don’t you see? The people with access to this site are pedophiles. Even if someone recognized Stacey, which is unlikely, what were they going to do? Call the police and say, ‘Uh, yes, I like fucking children but I don’t stand for murdering them. Could you get these photos off our web site?’ Not in a million years. Hell, maybe keeping the photos on there was a form of bragging. We don’t even know what we have here. Maybe every girl on that site is dead.”

Her voice was growing sharper as she tried to convince them.

“Okay, okay,” Bosch said. “You make good points, Kiz. Let’s stay on our case for now. What is your theory? You think Elias got this far along and it got him killed?”

“Absolutely. We know it did. The fourth note. ‘He knows you know.’ Elias went onto the secret web site and was found out.”

“How’d they know he was in there if he had the passwords from the third note?” Edgar asked.

“Good question,” Rider replied. “I asked the O’Connors the same thing. They did some snooping around after getting into the server. They found a cookie jar on the web site. What that means is that there is a program that captures data about each user who enters the site. It then analyzes the data to determine if someone has entered the site who should not have had access. Even if they have the passwords, their entry is still recorded and a data trail called an Internet protocol address is left behind. It’s like fingerprints. The IP, or the cookie, is left on the site you enter. The cookie jar program will then analyze the IP address and match it to a list of known users. If there is no match a flag is raised. The site’s manager sees the flag and can trace the intruder. Or he can set up a tripwire program that waits for a return visit from the intruder. When he comes back, the program will attach a tracer which will provide the site manager with the intruder’s E-mail address. And once you have that you have the intruder cold. You can identify him then. If it looks like a cop you close the elevator – the page you hijacked and were using as a secret gateway – and you go find a new web page to hijack. But in this case it wasn’t a cop. It was a lawyer.”

“And they didn’t shut down,” Bosch said. “They sent someone out to kill him.”

“Right.”

“So you think this is what Elias did,” Bosch said. “He got these notes in the mail and followed the clues. He stumbled into this web site and set off an alarm. A flag. They then killed him.”

“Yes, that would be my interpretation of what we know at this point, particularly in light of the fourth note. ‘He knows you know.’ ”

Bosch shook his head, confused by his own extrapolations of the story.

“I’m still not getting this. Who is the ‘they’ we’re talking about here? That I just accused of murder.”

“The group. The users of the site. The site administrator – which might possibly be Kincaid – picked up on the intruder, realized it was Elias, and dispatched someone to take care of the problem in order to fend off exposure. Whether or not he polled all members of the group first doesn’t matter. They are all guilty because the web site is a criminal enterprise.”

Bosch held his hand up to slow her down.

“Slow down. We can leave the group and the bigger picture for the DA to worry about. Stay focused on the killer and Kincaid. We are assuming he was involved in all of this and somehow someone knew about it, then decided to inform Elias instead of the cops. Does that make sense?”

“Sure it does. We just don’t know all the details yet. But the notes speak for themselves. They clearly indicate someone tipped Elias to the site, then later warned him that he had been found out.”

Bosch nodded and thought about this for a moment.

“Wait a minute. If he set off a flag, then didn’t you just do the same?”

“No. Thanks to the O’Connors. When they were inside the server they added my IP as well as their own to the site’s good guy list. No alarms. The operators and users of the site won’t know we’ve been there unless they actually look at their good guy list and notice it has been altered. I think we’ve got the time to do what we need to do.”

Bosch nodded. He wanted to ask whether what the O’Connors had done had been legal but thought it best not to know.

“So who sent Elias the notes?” he asked instead.

“The wife,” Edgar said. “I think she got an attack of the guilts and wanted to help Elias rip Sam the car czar a new asshole. She sent the notes.”

“It fits,” Rider said. “Whoever sent the notes had knowledge of two separate things: Charlotte’s Web Site and the car-wash receipts. Actually, a third thing as well: that Elias had tripped an alarm. So my vote goes with the wife, too. What was she like today?”

Bosch spent the next ten minutes updating her on their activities during the day.

“And that’s just our work on the case,” Edgar added. “Harry didn’t even tell you how we got the back window of my car shot out.”

“What?”

Edgar told the story and Rider seemed mesmerized by it.

“They catch the shooter?”

“Not that we heard. We didn’t wait around.”

“You know, I’ve never been shot at,” she said. “Must be a rush.”

“Not the kind you want,” Bosch said. “I still have questions about all of this Internet stuff.”

“What are they?” Rider said. “If I can’t answer, one of the O’Connors can.”

“No, not technical questions. Logic questions. I still don’t understand how and why this stuff is still available for us to look at. I understand what you said about the users all being pedophiles and their seeming feeling of safety, but now we have Elias dead. If they killed him, why the hell didn’t they at least move to a new gateway?”

“Maybe they are in the process of trying to do just that. Elias hasn’t been dead forty-eight hours.”

“And what about Kincaid? We just told him we are reopening the case. Whether he was in danger of exposure or not, it seems he would have gotten on the computer the minute we left and either contacted the site administrator or tried to crash the site and those pictures himself.”

“Again, maybe it’s in process. And even if it is, it’s too late. The O’Connors backed everything onto a Zip drive. They can crash the site but we still have it. We’ll be able to trace every IP address and take down every one of those people – if you consider them people.”

Again the fervor and anger in her voice made Bosch wonder if something about what she had seen on the web site had touched something personal, something deep inside.

“So where do we go from here?” he asked. “Search warrants?”

“Yep,” Rider said. “And we bring in the Kincaids. Fuck their big mansion on the hill. We have enough already to bring them in for questioning on the child abuse. We separate them and sweat them in the rooms. We go for the wife and get a confession. Get her to waive spousal privilege and give us her husband, that rat bastard.”

“You’re talking about a very powerful and politically connected family.”

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of the car czar.”

Bosch checked her look to make sure she was kidding.

“I’m afraid of moving too fast and blowing it. We’ve got nothing that directly links anybody to Stacey Kincaid or Howard Elias. If we bring mom down here and don’t turn her, then we watch the car czar drive away. That’s what I’m afraid of, okay?”

Rider nodded.

“She’s dying to be turned,” Edgar said. “Why else send those notes to Elias?”

Bosch put his elbows on the desk and washed his face with his hands as he thought about things. He had to make a decision.

“What about Charlotte’s Web Site?” he asked, his face still covered by his hands. “What do we do with that?”

“We give that to Inglert and the O’Connors,” Rider said. “They’ll jump all over it. Like I said, they’ll be able to trace the good guy list to the users. They’ll identify them and take them down. We’re talking multiple arrests of an Internet pedophile ring. That’s just for starters. The DA might want to try to link them all to the homicides.”

“They’re probably all over the country,” Edgar said. “Not just L.A.”

“They might be all over the world but it won’t matter. Our people will work with the bureau on it.”

More silence passed by and Bosch finally dropped his hands to the desk. He’d made his decision.

“Okay,” he said. “You two stay here and work on the search warrants. I want them ready to go tonight, in case we decide to move. We want all weapons, computer equipment – you know what to do. I want warrants for the old house, which they still own, as well as the new house, all cars and Kincaid’s office. Also, Jerry, see what you can find out about the security guy.”

“D.C. Richter, will do. What – ”

“In fact, on the warrants, write up one for his car.”

“What’s the PC?” Rider asked.

Bosch thought a moment. He knew what he wanted but he needed a legal means of getting there.

“Just say that as Kincaid’s director of security it is believed that his vehicle may have been used in the commission of crimes relating to Stacey Kincaid.”

“That’s not probable cause, Harry.”

“We stick the warrant in with the other ones,” he said. “Maybe the judge won’t care after he’s read what is in them. In fact, check the judge list. Let’s take these to a woman.”

Rider smiled and said, “Aren’t we sly?”

“What are you going to be doing, Harry?” Edgar asked.

“I’m going downtown to talk to Irving and Lindell, tell them what we got and see how they want to play it.”

Bosch looked at Rider and now saw disappointment.

“Harry, this isn’t like you,” she said. “You know that if you go to Irving he’ll take the conservative route. He won’t let us move until we’ve nailed down every possibility.”

Bosch nodded and said, “Normally, that would be true. But these aren’t normal times. He wants to prevent the city from burning. Going with this, and going fast, might be the way. Irving’s smart enough to see that.”

“You have too much faith in human nature,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“The best way of cooling this city off is to arrest a cop. Irving’s already down there with Sheehan in the box. He isn’t going to want to hear this, Harry.”

“You think that if you arrest the car czar and say he did Elias that everybody will believe you and be cool,” Edgar added. “You don’t understand. There are people out there who need this to be a cop and they won’t listen to anything else. Irving’s smart enough to see that, too.”

Bosch thought of Sheehan downtown at Parker Center in a room. He was being measured as the department’s sacrificial lamb.

“Just work on the warrants,” he said. “I’ll worry about the rest.”