The Devil's Punchbowl

CHAPTER 64

As I feared, the data on Ben Li’s SD cards were encrypted. Normally, this would have stopped me for at least a couple of days while I located an expert, but Kelly is accustomed to such challenges. Three and a half hours ago, he transmitted the data to a retired buddy from the Army Signal Corps.

Caitlin has spent that time reading the file Peter Lutjens FedEx’d to my father yesterday. Dad had dressed her hands and feet with bandages after treating the lacerations, but she insisted on keeping her fingers free to turn pages. Apparently the detailed history of Edward Po, his extended family, and his worldwide criminal operations is the only thing capable of taking Caitlin’s mind off the horrors she endured while being held prisoner. She’s still sitting cross-legged on the sofa in the den when Kelly comes running in from my study.

“Decryption’s coming through. And from the sound of Joey’s e-mail, it’s hot stuff.”

Caitlin sets the file aside and hobbles toward the study. Soon the three of us are gathered around my computer to review the result of Joey’s efforts.

Caitlin presses a button on my trackball, and over a hundred tiny thumbnail images appear on my display. Some of them represent data files, but others are clearly JPEG images.

“Do I see frontal nudity?” asks Kelly, leaning closer and squinting.

“You do,” says Caitlin, double-clicking on one image. “Oh my God…look.”

On the screen, Linda Church leans over a bathroom counter, bracing herself on her forearms while Jonathan Sands thrusts into her from behind. Sands’s left hand seems to be yanking her head back by the hair, while his right holds a digital camera high to capture the scene. The camera’s flash is a bright star in the mirror of what looks like a hotel bathroom.

Caitlin turns away. “I’m sorry. It’s not the sex, I just can’t look at her, knowing what I know.”

“There’s one question answered,” I say. “Sands shot the nude pictures of Linda that were planted in Tim’s house.”

“Can I change the picture?” Caitlin asks in a distressed voice.

“Sorry, yeah, go.”

She clicks the trackball again, and a photo of Sands having sex with a different woman fills the screen.

“Ben Li couldn’t have taken these, could he?” asks Kelly.

“No. He must have hacked into Sands’s private computer and copied whatever he found. Keep going. Skip down a ways.”

“There’s a lot more folders,” Caitlin says, scrolling through the contents of the disc. “They’re mostly pictures too.”

I’m beginning to understand. “Ben Li shot the cell phone pictures that Tim showed me in the cemetery that first night. I’ll bet those pictures are in here too. Stuff from the dogfights. I think Ben Li liked pictures.”

“I don’t get this,” Caitlin says in a puzzled voice.

“What?”

“If Ben Li had all these pictures of Sands, why didn’t he use them to save his life? Why sit there and be tortured and yell elliptical clues? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Think about it,” I tell her, having solved this riddle during my drive back from Li’s burned house. “He has these pictures stashed. When he wakes up and figures out Tim has been using him, he calls Sands or Quinn and reports what happened, probably thinking he has no choice. Next thing he knows, they’ve got him strapped in a chair with an electrode up his behind. Aside from the obvious stupidity of calling Quinn, this kid was a genius. Simply telling Sands and Quinn that he had these pictures-or anything else that might be on these discs-wasn’t going to save him. They’d just retrieve the discs from the birdhouse and kill him anyway. He needed to figure out a way to barter the discs for his life. He probably passed out while he was trying to do that. And he was high as a kite, remember, from whatever Tim had given him. He probably didn’t wake up until he was in Quinn’s boat.”

Caitlin is nodding slowly. “And when he tried to stop Quinn from getting Linda, Quinn shot him.”

“Right. So the discs stayed hidden.”

Caitlin lowers her head for a few moments, then raises it and clicks on another thumbnail image. Now we’re looking at a well-known local attorney-a very married attorney-having sex with a Chinese girl who looks barely sixteen.

“Is that who I think it is?” asks Caitlin.

“It is.”

“Jesus.”

“Keep going. This is important, but it’s not what we need.”

She clicks through several more images of people having sex, mostly Sands with a variety of women. But several familiar local faces pop up, as well, most of them of people with political or financial influence.

“What are we looking for here?” Kelly asks.

“How about this?” asks Caitlin, pulling up an image of a group of men gathered around two bloody dogs savaging each other in a pit.

She clicks through this sequence, which depicts what appears to be three or four different dogfights. The dogs and the people change in the pictures, but here too I recognize quite a few locals. When one image pops up, I seize Caitlin’s shoulder. It’s the photo I saw on Shad Johnson’s wall yesterday: Shad and Darius Jones standing beside a dead boar hog hanging from a hoist.

“I see him,” Caitlin says. “Son of a bitch.”

“Keep going,” I tell her, my hand flexing with hopeful tension.

Three more shots of Shad and the wide receiver follow. Two show the hog, while in the third the two men stand arm in arm with drunk grins on their faces. But Caitlin gasps when the next photo fills the screen. In it, a blood-soaked pit bull hangs from its neck from a tree branch while three men look on. The dog’s spine is bowed from the animal jerking its hindquarters away from something in one of the men’s hands. A cattle prod. The man holding it is Darius Jones. But to Jones’s right, staring with what appears to be primal fascination, is District Attorney Shadrach Johnson.

“Holy God,” Caitlin breathes.

I squeeze her shoulder again. “That’s it. That’s what we needed.”

“Do you know what that is?” she says in a stunned voice.

“What?” asks Kelly.

“That’s two black men at a lynching. Only they’re not the ones being lynched.”

I’m shaking my head in disbelief, but after so many days of feeling helpless, a bracing surge of power is rising in me.

“You own Shad Johnson,” Caitlin says. “The question is…what are you going to buy with that picture?”

“Anybody want to guess?”

“Thumb drive,” says Kelly.

I smile and nod with satisfaction. “For a start.”