Last Breath

45

Gader had made good on his threat to call an attorney. Around 1:30 A.M., a grim, bearded, bespectacled young man arrived at the house and ordered Rawls and Brand to leave. His client did not wish to extend further cooperation to the federal authorities until they returned with a search warrant.

“It could be an arrest warrant,” Rawls said, getting in a parting shot. Gader paled, but the attorney was unmoved.

So now, at twenty minutes before two in the morning, Rawls and Brand were speeding back to the FBI field office. Rawls was at the wheel of the sedan. Brand in the passenger seat with his notebook computer on his lap. He had pulled up a copy of the tip-off e-mail message, which he had stored on a floppy disk.

Agent Rawlz,

Something phunny going on. Do you like to watch? Say you’re Bluebeard. You have to find the key.

“Any ideas?” Rawls asked as they pulled onto 1-695.

“Maybe. I don’t see any clues to who he is. But there may be a clue to who he isn’t.”

“Translation?”

“This hackerspeak he uses-it seems kind of phony, like it’s a persona he’s putting on.”

“He isn’t a real hacker?”

“Well, he found a way inside Gader’s server. Got Bluebeard’s user name and password. He must have some skills. But it’s not who he is, if you get my drift. It’s not what he’s all about.”

“You’re saying he probably isn’t a teenage kid hanging out in chat rooms, bragging about his latest hack.”

“Right. He just wants to be seen that way.”

“How does that help us?”

“I wonder.” Rawls lapsed into silence as the car sped through the frigid night.

It was Brand’s comment about coincidence that had turned their attention to the anonymous e-mail message. If a visitor to the Web site had figured out what was going on, why wait until the day of the next abduction before alerting the authorities? It was almost as if the e-mail was part of a game someone was playing. But who? The killer himself? Or somebody close to him?

No way to know. But Rawls and Brand were now convinced that the tipster must not be allowed to remain anonymous.

Rawls thought about what Brand had said. The informer wasn’t a true hacker. He was only masquerading as one. Yet he’d known enough to send the e-mail through a remailing service that scrubbed off all routing information and made a trace impossible. And he’d known enough to bypass the field office’s email address in favor of Rawls’s personal account His personal account.

“We’ve been going at this backward,” Rawls said.

“How so?”

“It’s not the message that matters. It’s how he got it to me.”

“Sure, but we can’t trace-”

“We don’t have to. He obtained my e-mail address. Now, how would he do that? How would you do it?”

Brand considered the problem. “First I’d have to get your name. It’s not listed on the field office’s Web site, so I’d probably have to look in archived newspaper stories. The Baltimore Sun ran a story on the Myers case a few months ago. You were mentioned.”

Rawls nodded. “And identified as part of the computer crime squad.”

“He could have found that article in a database search. Okay, so he’s got the name of an agent in Baltimore who knows computers. Now he needs the e-mail account to go with it. So he searches e-mail directories-”

“Right. That’s how he got to me. And that’s how we’ll get to him.”

“Will we?”

“Those directories keep logs of searches and hits. We can find out who’s searched for my name-”

“And with any luck, the search will be linked to the searcher’s IP address. But maybe he thought of that. He might have used a public terminal or routed his search request through an anonymizer.”

“I don’t think so. If he’s just playacting as a hacker, he won’t know all the ins and outs. He’ll think he’s more anonymous on the Web than he really is.”

“Worth a shot, anyway.” Brand was already hooking his data-capable cell phone to the laptop to get online.

By the time the sedan pulled into the parking lot of the field office. Brand had searched for his partner’s name on the half-dozen largest e-mail directories. Only two listed a Noah Rawls.

In the office, Rawls got on the phone to the first directory’s technical assistance number, identifying himself as a federal agent, while Brand used his own phone line to contact the other service.

Strictly speaking, a warrant was required to force the system operator to relinquish private information to law enforcement agents. But the directory services were mainstream, commercial operations, and unlike remailers and anonymizers, they were not eager to force a confrontation with the FBI. The sysop at the first service checked his logs immediately, no questions asked.

“Sorry, sir,” he reported. “I see zero hits on the name Noah Rawls during the past three weeks. We don’t keep records longer than that.”

“Thanks anyway.” Rawls hung up, wondering if they’d reached another dead end.

Then he saw Brand scribbling on his desk blotter, and he knew they had something from the second service.

“The FBI appreciates your cooperation,” Brand said into the phone, then cradled the handset. “One hit, ten days ago. We got the IP address.”

“Trace it.”

“Will do.” Brand searched a CD-ROM containing millions of known Internet Protocol addresses. He reported that it was a dynamic IP address assigned by a major Internet service provider.

Most providers maintained huge blocks of IP addresses and assigned a new address to the user whenever he dialed in. The addresses were doled out at random, and the same user would have a different address every time he established a new connection.

Even so, the specific user could be traced, if the date and time of the connection were known.

“We’ve got the date stamp and the time stamp on the e-mail directory search,” Brand said in response to Rawls’s unvoiced question. “If the ISP will open up their logs, we’re golden.”

Brand phoned the provider and got through to the sysop. Rawls waited, wondering if they would encounter resistance. The big providers were sensitive to protecting customer privacy. Sometimes they demanded a warrant.

Then Brand covered the phone’s mouthpiece and said, “They’re cooperating.”

“Hallelujah,” Rawls breathed, and for a moment he was back inside the hot, overcrowded church in East St. Louis where his mother had dragged him every Sunday, wearing his only suit, a threadbare hand-me-down from his cousin Theo.

Praise be to God, the congregation would announce. Hallelujah, oh, hallelujah!

He asked himself if God was watching over him now-and over C.J. Osborn.