Chat

Chapter 16

Lester Spinney craned over his steering wheel to better appreciate what he was approaching-a huge, modern, spread-out house crowning a slight rise, overlooking the southern narrowing of Lake Champlain below, and New York's Adirondack Mountains off in the distance. The driveway had already prepared him for something-off Route 7 somewhere south of Shelburne Village, it cut through a sheltering copse of trees and extended a quarter mile before revealing this monster house-but he still hadn't expected the total package of the view. The lake looked almost like a planned part of the landscaping.

He pulled to a stop in the immaculately plowed parking area near the four-car garage-he suspected that the driveway was heated-and slowly climbed out from behind the wheel.

The building's front door opened, and a woman in her mid-twenties greeted him with a wave. "Hi. Are you Agent Spinney?"

"Yes, ma'am."

She burst out laughing. "That would be my mother. I'm Wendy. Come on in. Dad's in the office."

Spinney grabbed hold of a box from his backseat, containing a laptop and the hard drive with all the Steve's Garage data that Rob Barrows had sent him days earlier, and crossed the asphalt to the girl at the door. He stuck out a couple of fingers from under the box in greeting. "Lester's my name," he said. "Glad to meet you."

She carefully squeezed his fingers and pointed down a long hallway. "Wendy Leppman-Gartner, officially, that is. My pleasure. Go right on down there. Last door on the left. It's open. Would you like some coffee or something?"

He looked over his shoulder as he started off. "Nope. Thanks. All set."

Halfway through his journey, the hallway opened up to a truly enormous vaulted room, with wooden beams overhead and a far wall constructed solely of glass. He suddenly felt there was nothing, aside from the building's own heat, separating him from the wide-open spaces he'd admired on the drive in.

He blinked against the glare, noticing a figure shifting on the couch in the middle distance.

"Hello?" he asked cautiously.

"I'm the wife," came the cheerful reply. "Sandy Gartner. Sandra Stillman Gartner, MD, if you're taking notes, which would be a neat trick, given your load. Just keep on going. John's all set up for you."

Nodding at the shape, which by now had assumed an elegant slimness, Lester marched on, disappearing into the dark hallway beyond.

At the end, as promised, he found another room, lower-ceilinged and slightly darkened by broad wooden blinds that still allowed for the view, along with a man-tall, patrician, and lean like his wife-who rose from an imposing cherrywood desk and crossed the floor to relieve him of his box.

"Agent Spinney?" he echoed his daughter, placing the box on a corner of the table and shaking hands. "I'm John Leppman. Delighted to meet you."

Spinney looked around quickly. The wood motif of the blinds was carried throughout the room, including the ceiling and a parquet floor, making the half-hidden wall of glass an anomaly in what would otherwise have been a good Hollywood stand-in for an ancient, manly British lord's study.

"Wow," he said.

His host laughed. "Yeah-a little over the top. Have a seat. I think I heard Wendy offer you a drink already."

"Yes, sir."

"John, please." Leppman indicated a chair next to his own, both of which faced a bank of oversized computer screens, hard drives, printers, and assorted other paraphernalia. Leppman set about removing Lester's paltry equipment and connecting it to his own, speaking as he did so.

"I gather Tim Giordi steered you my way. Terrific guy."

"Actually, it was Chief Giordi and my boss, Joe Gunther," Lester admitted.

"Right. Gunther." Leppman nodded as he worked. "Famous name. Good to work for?"

"The best."

Leppman laughed. "There are no recorders running, Agent Spinney."

Lester protested, "No, no. Really. And call me Lester, or Les. Doesn't matter."

John Leppman quickly finished up and settled into the seat beside Lester's, making the latter feel as though the room should now take flight toward some galaxy far, far away.

In tune with the metaphor, their captain rapidly began typing commands onto the keyboard before him, still speaking. "I guess you know by now that I do this a lot for the police," he said, his eyes on one of the screens. "Locals, state, even the odd fed, now and then."

"So I heard," Les commented. "I might have guessed, too, from the way your wife and daughter introduced themselves."

Leppman laughed. "Yeah. Cops are in here all the time. This has become a bit of a passion, ever since I realized you guys didn't have the equipment or the money to compete with the bad guys out there."

Lester simply nodded.

"Not to mention," Leppman added with a self-deprecating snort, "that I've even become a member of the family, if you stretch things a little. I'm the new town constable, and a part-time certified police officer." He cast a sideways look at his companion, adding, "Not that it means much around here, and certainly not to you guys, but it's fun and interesting to do."

"Every bit helps," Lester commented supportively, although constables-or, more precisely, the vague controls overseeing them-made him nervous.

Leppman was back running the computer, his fingertips flying across the keys. "Anyhow," he continued, "it was more of a gesture. This is where I can really help, and certainly Tim's been great about using me whenever he can."

"Internet predators mostly, I heard," Lester said conversationally, watching two of the screens before them come alive.

Leppman tilted his head equivocally. "Mostly, just because of the volume involved-I helped identify eight men in three days about six months ago, and that was only in a twenty-five-mile radius around the PD. But I do other things, too. I did a wire transfer embezzlement case not long ago for a bank that didn't want any bad publicity. And there was a drug deal using e-mails that I just helped Tim and his guys with."

Lester nodded toward the screens. "That's what got us going with this. The sheriff's department is running with it, but the guy had pictures of the stuff and everything."

Leppman shrugged. "It's a shame, really. Chat rooms and the Internet are mostly wonderful outlets-real extensions to how people naturally mingle, while easing the potential social burdens of appearance or social awkwardness. People can be so much more honest there, plus, you can get information, products, services, a few laughs, and even find that special someone. Sad that it's mostly the bad aspects that attract all the headlines.

"Still," he added with an incredulous look, "when people do screw up online, they certainly can do it with style. It's amazing to me-everyone thinks they're all alone when they're on the Net. Totally crazy. I tell people it's like taking your clothes off in a crowded room and thinking you're by yourself just because your eyes are shut… Okay, here we are."

Spinney sat straighter in his chair, recognizing the contents of the garage's hard drive. He worked with computers routinely, was young enough to consider them a standard piece of office equipment, and played with them with his two kids at home. They were as natural to him as a typewriter was, or used to be, to Joe Gunther-just as Leppman had been saying.

But this was different-a freeze-frame, forensic snapshot of an entire hard drive's moment in time. It was the computer equivalent of stopping a stage production in mid-motion and then wandering among the motionless, mute actors from all angles, studying their positions relative to one another and the audience, including angles that wouldn't be otherwise available.

Of course, instead of actual people and a stage, here you had screen-mounted data, only some of it readable. But to Spinney the impression was similar, and he sat transfixed as his host moved the cursor among the serried lines of type.

"This is the main chat room," Leppman was saying. "It's going to be a bit messy. The data is overwritten all the time, kind of like conversations are at a noisy dinner party. What did you say the name was we're interested in?"

Lester paused before answering, thinking of all the various labels they'd attached to the man, including the uniquely descriptive Wet Bald Rocky. "Rockwell," he said.

Leppman typed in a search inquiry with that name and hit "Enter." Instantly it reappeared on the screen, floating clearly among the garbled letters.

"Well, he's here, all right," Leppman murmured, still working the cursor. "Let's see if he's chatting with anyone in particular."

He was. Just below his name, they noticed Mandi144, which Leppman copied down on a pad by his hand. Searching for Rockwell a second time, Mandi was once more right beside him. This trend continued several more times.

"So," Leppman announced, "we've got an ongoing conversation. That's good-means a relationship is building. You already know about Rockwell, right?"

Spinney was caught by surprise. "What? No, I mean, we think he's a dead man we found in Brattleboro, but that's about it. That's why we're doing this."

Leppman took his eyes off the screen to look at him. "Not Mandi? She's probably the one in trouble here."

Lester's brow furrowed. He felt he was missing something. "In trouble? How?"

Leppman looked incredulous. "Child predation. Rockwell's going after her."

"Why do you say that?" Lester asked. "I mean, I know it's all over the place, so I'm not saying you're wrong. But what did you see?"

Leppman hesitated, blinked a couple of times, and returned to studying the screen before admitting in an abashed tone, "Nothing. I guess you're right. Just jumping to conclusions. Let's dig around some more." He stopped again abruptly to ask, "You do have a way to secure subpoenas as we go, right?"

Spinney nodded. "By phone and fax." He pointed to a fax machine in one corner of the large office, adding, "If that's all right."

Leppman nodded enthusiastically. "No, no. That's great. Done it before with other agencies. I just wanted to make sure. Don't want any loopholes."

Spinney glanced at him covertly, wondering if this civilian's enthusiasm wasn't maybe getting a little too much stoking by association. He made a note to ask Joe later. It was a common enough sight to see consultants become more aggressive bloodhounds than the actual hunters-and pay a psychological price as a result.

Leppman had returned to the hunt. "We've got snippets of exchange here and there-usual introductory chitchat. Bingo," he finally said, straightening. "What did I tell you?" He tapped the screen with his fingertip. "Right there. She says, '14. U?' See that?"

Spinney was already reading the next line. "And Rocky says, '19.' There's a crock."

Leppman was shaking his head, continuing to scroll the lines before them. "I knew it. There's so much of this out there-guys preying on children." He fixed Lester with a determined look. "That's one of the biggest reasons I do this work."

Lester nodded, figuring the man needed some kind of response.

But Leppman wasn't watching. "These are tricky cases to prosecute-you ever done one before?"

"Nope," Spinney acknowledged.

"The bad guys-or their lawyers, at least-hide behind all sorts of excuses. And they're getting better and better as they get more knowledgeable about this high-tech world. They can make the claim that what the police find on their clients' computers was put there by a cookie or a virus or Christ knows what else, and then they convince the jury of it. I mean, who hasn't gotten spam in their e-mail? Or all those pop-up ads-where do those come from? Juries absolutely believe that complete strangers can put whatever they want onto your computer, no problem. Blame TV for that-there's no technical wizardry that can't be done if you know how to do it, right? Mostly baloney, of course, but these are paranoid times."

He added a few more notes to his pad. "Okay, I got the date and time stamp for this chat. That'll come in handy when you figure out what Rocky was doing when and where. The biggest catch here, though-since you seem a little vague on everyone's identity-will be the chat room profiles of both Mandi and Rockwell. From there, we should be able to get their IP addresses, which will finally-after you get those subpoenas I mentioned-land us the home addresses through their Internet service provider records. Their monthly bills, in other words."

Lester didn't bother pointing out that he actually understood a great deal of this already.

Leppman had by now switched over to another computer, so that he could access the Internet rather than merely study the static contents of the Steve's Garage clone.

"Huh," he grunted. "Rockwell put a block on his chat room profile. No surprise there. Being a kid, though, Mandi was a little less cagey. She lied about her age-you can't log in, supposedly, unless you're over eighteen-but all the rest looks legit."

He scribbled down her particulars onto his pad. "Okay, so far, so good. She even gave us an address, which is unusual-the standard profile is hobbies, age, gender, general location, and the rest. I guess Mandi's still used to filling out forms correctly. Great for us."

He sat back and rested his hands for a moment, not bothering to turn his head as he spoke. "One last step before we get legal-this is just something I've learned through habit. So far, all this has been pretty much public domain information-something anyone can do with a computer and a connection. I do one more thing along similar lines: I check that address I just got against one of the mapping programs, just to make sure it's not in the middle of the Hudson River, or Lake Champlain, or Christ knows where."

He put his hands back over the keyboard and began typing. Lester watched as the screen did its version of scratching its head-portrayed by a small ticking-clock icon-before finally flashing, "Address not found."

Leppman tried a couple of variations, equally unsuccessfully, and then sat back in his chair again. "Nothing. Well, so much for good little Mandi. I guess she saw me coming after all." Lester watched his profile, again caught by the man's level of engagement. "No sweat," he said. "I'll get on those subpoenas."

JMAN: U there?

JMAN: Mandi144. U there?

Mandi144: hey

JMAN: thot I got the wrong time

Mandi144: nop. Probs w/ my mom

JMAN: wat?

Mandi144: she got fired. At home a lot

JMAN: bummer

Mandi144: ur telling me. R plans r messed up now

JMAN: I cant cum up?

Mandi144: Ill tell u when