The Poet

45

In the morning we found Backus already waiting in the conference room on the seventeenth floor of the federal building. It was another clear day and I could see the top of Catalina rising behind the marine layer of morning fog out on the Santa Monica Bay. It was eight-thirty but Backus had his jacket off and looked as though he had already been at it for several hours. His spot at the meeting table was cluttered with a spread of paperwork, two open laptops and a stack of pink phone message slips. His face was drawn and sad. It looked as though the loss of Thorson would leave a permanent mark on him.

"Rachel, Jack," he said by means of salutation. It wasn't a good morning and he didn't say that. "How's the hand?"

"It's okay."

We had brought containers of coffee with us but I saw he had none. I offered him mine but he said he'd already had too much.

"What have we got?" Rachel asked.

"Did you two check out? I tried to call you this morning, Rachel."

"Yes," she said. "Jack wanted something a little more comfortable. We moved over to the Chateau Marmont."

"Pretty comfortable."

"Don't worry. I won't submit it for reimbursement."

He nodded and I got the idea from the way he looked at her that he knew she hadn't gotten her own room and had nothing to submit anyway. It was the least of his worries, though.

"It's coming together," he said. "Another one for the studies, I suppose. These people-if you can call them that-never cease to amaze me. Every one of them, their stories… each one of them's a black hole. And there's never enough blood to fill it."

Rachel pulled out a chair and sat across from him. I sat next to her. We didn't say anything. We knew he wanted to go on. He reached over with a pen and tapped the side of one of the laptops.

"This was his," he said. "It was recovered from the trunk of his car last night."

"A Hertz car?" I asked.

"No. He arrived at Data Imaging in an eighty-four Plymouth registered to a Darlene Kugel, thirty-six, of North Hollywood. We went to her apartment last night, got no response and went in. She was in the bed. Her throat was cut, probably with the same knife he used on Gordon. She'd been dead for days. It looked like he'd burned incense, slopped perfume around to hide the smell."

"He stayed in there with her body?" Rachel asked.

"Looks like it."

"Were those her clothes he was wearing?" I asked.

"And the wig."

"What was he doing dressed like her, anyway?" Rachel asked.

"Don't know and never will now. My guess is he knew everybody was looking for him. Police, the bureau. He thought it was a way to leave her place, get the camera and then maybe get out of town."

"Probably. What did you get from her place?"

"There was nothing that was of much use inside, but her unit had two parking spaces assigned to it in the garage and we found an eighty-six Pontiac Firebird in one of them. Florida plate, it came back to Gladys Oliveros of Gainesville."

"His mother?" I asked.

"Yes. Moved there when he went to prison so she'd be close for visits, I guess. Remarried and changed her name. Anyway, we opened the trunk of the Pontiac and found the computer, some other things, including the books Brass found in the picture from the cell. There was an old sleeping bag. There's blood on it and the lab has it. The initial report is that there is kapok in the insulation."

"It means he put some of his victims in the trunk," I said.

"Which accounts for the hours they were missing," Rachel added.

"Wait a minute," I said. "If he had his mother's car, what about the car from Hertz in Phoenix? Why would he rent a car if he already had one?"

"Just another way of confusing the trail, Jack. Use mother's to move from city to city, but then he rents one when he moves in for the kill on the cop."

My confusion over the logic of that theory showed on my face. But Backus dismissed it.

"Anyway, we haven't gotten the Hertz records yet, so let's not get sidetracked. For the moment, the computer is what's important."

"What's in it?" Rachel asked.

"The office here has a computer unit, works with the group in Quantico. One of the agents, Don Clearmountain, took this last night and broke down the coding by about three this morning. He copied the hard disk to the mainframe here. Anyway, it's full of photographs. Fifty-seven of them."

Backus used his thumb and forefinger to pinch the bridge of his nose. He had aged since I'd last seen him at the hospital. Aged badly.

"Children?" Rachel asked.

Backus nodded.

"Jesus. The victims?"

"Yes… before and after. It's horrible stuff. Truly horrible."

"And he was transmitting these somewhere? Like we thought?"

"Yes, the computer has a cellular modem as Gordon… as he guessed. It, too, is registered out of Gainesville to Oliveros. We just got the records a little while ago."

He indicated some of the paperwork in front of him.

"There are a lot of calls," he said. "All over the place. He was into some kind of net. A network where the users were interested in these kinds of photographs."

He looked up from the papers at us, his eyes sick but defiant.

"We are tracing them all now. We're going to make a lot of arrests. A lot of people will pay for this. What happened to Gordon will not be for nothing."

He nodded more to himself than us.

"We can compare the transmissions and the users to the bank deposits I found in Jacksonville," Rachel said. "I bet we'll be able to know just how much they paid for the photos and when."

"Clearmountain and his people are already working on it. They're down the hall in the Group Three offices if you want to stop in."

"Bob?" I said. "Did they look at all fifty-seven photos?"

He looked at me a moment before answering.

"I did, Jack. I did."

"They were only the kids?"

I felt my chest tightening. Whatever I had told myself about being emotionally deadened to my brother and what had happened was a lie.

"No, Jack," Backus said. "There are no pictures of those victims. None of the police officers, none of the other adult victims. I guess…"

He didn't finish.

"What?" I asked.

"I guess those kinds of photos would not have been profitable to him."

I looked down at my hands on the table. My right hand was beginning to ache and felt clammy under the white bandages. I felt relief go through me. I think it was relief. What else is it that you feel when you learn that there are no photographs of your murdered brother's body out there all over the country, floating out there on the Internet and ready to be downloaded by any sick individual with a taste for it.

"I think when this gets out about this guy, there'll be a lot of people who'll want to throw a parade for you, Jack," Backus said. "Put you in a convertible and drive you down Madison Avenue."

I looked at him. I didn't know if it was an attempt at humor but I didn't smile.

"Maybe sometimes vengeance is just as good as justice," he said.

"They're pretty much the same if you ask me."

After a few moments of silence, Backus changed the subject.

"Jack, we have to get your formal statement. I've got one of the office's stenographers set up for nine-thirty. Are you ready?"

"Ready as I'll ever be."

"We just want the linear story. From A to B, don't leave any detail out. I thought, Rachel, you'd handle that, ask the questions."

"Sure, Bob."

"I'd like to get this wrapped up today and submitted to the DA tomorrow. Maybe we can all go home then."

"Who's doing the package for the DA?" Rachel asked.

"Carter."

He looked at his watch.

"Uh, you have a few minutes but why don't you go down the hall and ask for Sally Kimball. She might be ready to go now."

Dismissed, we stood and headed for the door. I watched Rachel, trying to judge whether she was annoyed at being assigned to taking my statement while the local agents were tracing Gladden's computer records, which seemed at the moment to be the more exciting branch of the investigation. She showed nothing and at the door of the conference room she turned and told Backus she'd be around if he needed anything else.

"Thanks, Rachel," he said. "Oh, and Jack, these are for you."

He held up the stack of pink message slips. I went back to the table and took them.

"And this."

He raised my computer satchel from the floor next to his seat and handed it across the table to me.

"You left that in the car yesterday."

"Thanks."

I studied the stack of pink slips. There must have been a dozen of them.

"You're a popular man," Backus said. "Don't let it go to your head."

"Only if they give me that parade."

He didn't smile.

While Rachel went to look for the stenographer I stood in the hallway and looked through the messages. They were mostly repeats from the networks but a few print reporters had called, even one from my hometown competition, the Denver Post. The tabloids, of both the print and television variety, had left messages. There was also a call from Michael Warren. I noted from the 213 callback number that he was still in town.

The three messages that intrigued me the most weren't from the news media. Dan Bledsoe had called just an hour earlier from Baltimore. And there were two messages from book publishers, one from a senior editor at a New York-based house and one from an assistant to the publisher at another house. I recognized both imprints and felt a mixture of trepidation and thrill course through my chest.

Rachel came up to me then.

"She's going to be a couple minutes. There's an office down here we're going to use. Let's wait there."

I followed her.

The room was a smaller version of the one we had met Backus in, with a round table and four chairs, a side counter with a phone, and a picture window with a view east toward downtown. I asked Rachel if it would be all right if I used the phone while we waited and she said go ahead. I keyed in the number Bledsoe had left and he picked up after one ring.

"Bledsoe Investigations."

"It's Jack McEvoy."

"Jack Mac, how you doing?"

"I'm fine. How are you?"

"A lot better since I heard the news this morning."

"Well, I'm glad, then."

"You did good, Jack, putting that guy in the hole. You did real good."

Then how come I don't feel so good, I thought but didn't say.

"Jack?"

"What?"

"I owe you one, buddy. And Johnny Mac owes you one."

"No you don't. We're even, Dan. You helped me."

"Well, just the same, you get back out here one day and we're going to go for crabs at the tavern. It'll go on my tab."

"Thanks, Dan. I'll be out."

"Hey, what about this G-girl who's been in the papers and TV? Agent Walling. She's a looker."

I looked over at Rachel.

"Yeah, she is."

"I seen the clip on CNN of her walking you out of that store last night. You be careful, young man."

He managed to get a smile out of me. I hung up and looked at the two messages from the publishers. I was tempted to return the calls but thought better of it. I didn't know much about the publishing industry, but back when I was writing my first novel-the one later left unfinished and hidden in a drawer-I'd done a little research and decided that if I ever finished the book I'd get an agent before I went to the publishers. I had even picked the agent I would seek to represent me. Only I had never finished a book to send to him. I decided I would look up his name and number again and call him later.

Next to consider was the call from Warren. The stenographer still had not arrived in the office so I hit the buttons for the number he had left. An operator answered and when I asked for Warren I saw Rachel immediately look up at me with quizzical eyes. I winked at her as the voice on the line told me Warren was out of the office. I told her my name but left no message or callback number. Warren would have to think about missing the call when he got that.

"Why were you calling him?" Rachel asked after I hung up. "I thought you two were enemies."

"I guess we are. I was probably going to tell him to go fuck himself."

It took me an hour and fifteen minutes to tell my story in full detail to Rachel with the stenographer taking it down. Rachel primarily asked leading questions, designed to move me along through the story in chronological order. When I got to the shooting, her questions were more specific and for the first time she asked what my thoughts were at the time of specific actions.

I told her I went for the gun to simply get it away from Gladden, nothing more. I told her of my idea to empty the weapon once the struggle ensued and how the second shot was not deliberate.

"It was more him pulling the gun than me pulling the trigger, you know? He just tried for it one more time and my thumb was still in the guard. When he pulled it, it went off. He kind of killed himself. It was like he knew what was going to happen."

We went a few more minutes after that, with Rachel asking some follow-up questions. She then told the stenographer she would need the transcript the next morning for inclusion in the charging package that would be submitted to the district attorney.

"What do you mean, 'charging package'?" I asked after the stenographer had left the room.

"It's just a term. We call it that whether we are seeking a charge or an indictment or not. Relax. We obviously aren't seeking anything here but a finding of self-defense, justifiable homicide. Don't worry, Jack."

It was early but we decided to get lunch. Rachel said she'd drop me by the hotel afterward. She had work to do back at the field office but I'd be done for the day. We were walking down the hallway when she noticed the door marked Group Three was open and she looked in. There were two men in the room, both sitting at computers, paperwork on the keyboards and on top of the terminals. I noticed a copy of the same book I had on Edgar Allan Poe on top of one of the agents' monitors. He was the first to notice us.

"Hi, I'm Rachel Walling, how is it going?"

The other looked up then and they said their hellos along with their names. Rachel then introduced me. The agent who had first looked up and had identified himself as Don Clearmountain spoke.

"We're doing good. End of the day we'll have a list of names and addresses. We'll ship them to the nearest FOs and they should have enough for search warrants."

I visualized teams of agents hitting doors and pulling the pedophiles who had bought digital photos of murdered children out of their beds. It would be a nationwide reckoning. I began to visualize the headlines. The Dead Poet's Society. That's what they'd call these men.

"But I've got something else working here that is really pretty special," Clearmountain said.

The computer agent had a hacker's smile on his face as he looked at us. It was an invitation and Rachel moved into the room, me right behind her.

"What is it?" she said.

"Well, what we have here are a bunch of numbers that Gladden shipped digital photos to. Then we also have the wire deposit records of the bank in Jacksonville. We collated it and it all fits together pretty well."

He took a stack of pages off the keyboard of the other agent, looked through it and selected a sheet.

"For example, on December fifth of last year there was a deposit of five hundred dollars made to the account. It was wired from the Minnesota National Bank in St. Paul. The sender was listed as Davis Smith. Probably a false name. The next day, Gladden's cellular modem placed a call to a number we've traced to a fellow named Dante Sherwood in St. Paul. The connection lasted four minutes, about what it takes to transmit and download a photograph. We've got literally dozens of transactions like this. One-day correlations between deposits and transmissions."

"Great."

"Now, the question all of this raises is, how did all these buyers know about Gladden and what he had to sell? In other words, where was the marketplace for these photos?"

"And you found it."

"Yes, we did. The number called most often on the cellular modem. It's a computer bulletin board. It's called the PTL Network."

Rachel's face showed her surprise.

"Praise The Lord?"

"You wish. Actually, we think it means Pre-Teen Love."

"Gross."

"Yeah. It was actually kind of easy to figure out. Not that original and most of these boards use these kinds of euphemisms. It was getting into the network that took us all morning."

"How'd you do it?"

"We came up with Gladden's passwords."

"Wait a minute," Rachel said. "What happened last night has been all over the news across the whole country. Wouldn't whoever was operating this bulletin board have wiped him out? You know, killed his access and his password before we got in?"

"He should've but he didn't." Then Clearmountain looked at the other agent and they shared conspiratorial smiles. There was something still not said. "Maybe the systems operator was sort of tied up and couldn't get to it in time."

"Okay, tell me the rest," Rachel said impatiently.

"Well, we tried everything to get in, variations on Gladden's name, DOB, social security, all the usual tricks. Nothing. We were thinking the same thing you were, that he was deleted from the system."

"But?"

"But then we went to Poe."

Clearmountain took the heavy book off his monitor and held it up.

"It's a two-password entry system. We got the first one easy. It was Edgar. But then the second, that's where we had trouble. We tried Raven, Eidolon, Usher, everything we could pull out of this book. Then we doubled back and went through Gladden's names and numbers again. Still nothing. Then-bingo!-we nailed it. Joe did while he was having coffee cake."

Clearmountain pointed to the other agent, Joe Perez, who smiled and took a bow in his seat. For computer cops, I guessed that what he had done was like making a felony arrest for a street cop. He looked as proud as a boy who scores in a hotel room on prom night.

"I was just reading about Poe while taking a break," Perez explained. "My eyes get tired looking at a monitor too long."

"Lucky for us he decided to rest them looking at a book," Clearmountain said, regaining the narrative. "Joe, in the biographical section, comes across a reference to Poe having once used an alias to enlist in the army or something. Edgar Perry. We stuck it in and like I said, bingo! We were in."

Clearmountain turned and exchanged a high five with Perez. They looked like a couple of nerds in heat. Today's FBI, I thought.

"What did you find?"

"There are twelve message boards. Most are for discussion about specific tastes. In other words, girls under twelve, boys under ten, that sort of thing. There is a lawyer referral board. We found Gladden's lawyer, Krasner, listed on it. Then there's also a kind of bio board with a lot of strange shit on it, essays and such. There's a few that have to be by our man. Look at this."

He looked through the stack of papers again and pulled out a printout. He started reading from it.

"This is from one of them. 'I think they know about me. My time in the light of public fascination and fear is near. I am ready.' Then further down he goes, 'My suffering is my passion, my religion. It never leaves me. It guides me. It is me.' It's full of that kind of stuff and the author at one point calls himself Eidolon. So we think it's gotta be him. You BSS people are going to get a lot of stuff for the research banks out of this."

"Good," Rachel said. "What else?"

"Well, one of the boards is a barter board. You know, where people post things to sell or buy."

"Like photos or IDs?"

"Yup. There's somebody on there selling Alabama DLs. I assume we're going to have to shut that sucker down in a hurry. And there was a file for selling what Gladden had in his computer. Minimum price was five hundred dollars per picture. Three for a grand. You wanted something, you left a message with a computer number. You wired the money to a bank account and your pictures showed up in your computer. On the barter board, this advertiser said he could provide photos to meet specific tastes and desires."

"Like he was taking orders and then he'd go out and…"

"Right."

"You tell Bob Backus about this yet?"

"Yeah, he was just in here."

Rachel looked at me.

"That parade is sounding better and better all the time."

"You're forgetting the neatest part," Clearmountain said. "And what parade?"

"It's nothing. What's the neatest part?"

"The bulletin board. We traced the number to a location."

"And?"

"Union Correctional Institution, Raiford, Florida."

"Oh, my God! Gomble?"

Clearmountain smiled and nodded.

"That's what Bob Backus thinks. He's going to have somebody check it out. I already called the prison and asked the captain of the day where that line went to. He said it was to the supplies office. And, see, I had noticed that all of Gladden's calls to that number were placed after five P.M. eastern time. The captain told me that the supply office was closed and locked up every day at five. Opens up at eight every morning. I also asked him if there was a computer in that office for keeping track of orders and supplies and such and he said there sure was. I said what about a phone and he said there was one but it wasn't connected to the computer. But believe me, this is not a guy who knows a modem from a hole in the ground. This is a guy who volunteers to go to prison every day. Think about that. I told him to check again on the phone line, like some night after the office is closed up and-"

"Wait a minute. He isn't-"

"Don't worry, he's not going to do anything. I told him not to mess with things until he hears from us. For now, the network should remain on line, after five in the East, that is. I asked him who works in there and he told me Horace Gomble. He's a trustee. I see you are already familiar with him. I guess each night he sticks the phone line into the computer before he locks up and goes back to his cell."

Rachel canceled lunch with me because of the new developments. She said I'd have to grab a cab back to the hotel and that she'd call me when she could. She said she might be going back to Florida but would let me know. I wanted to stay, too, but fatigue was finally setting in from my sleepless night.

I took the elevator down and was walking through the lobby of the federal building, thinking about calling Greg Glenn and checking my messages, when I heard a familiar voice behind me.

"Hey, hot shot, howzit hanging?"

I turned around and Michael Warren walked up to me.

"Warren. I just tried to call you at the Times. They said you were out."

"I was here. Supposed to be another press conference at two. Thought I'd come early and see what I could dig up."

"Like another source maybe?"

"I told you, Jack, I'm not talking to you about that."

"Yeah, well, I'm not talking to you either."

I turned and started away. He called after me.

"Then why'd you call me? To gloat?"

I looked back at him.

"Something like that. I guess. But you know, Warren, I'm not really mad at you. You went after a story that was given to you and that's cool. I can't blame you. Thorson had his own agenda and you didn't know about that. He used you but we all get used. I'll see you."

"Wait a minute, Jack. If you're not pissed off, why don't you talk to me?"

"Because we're still competitors."

"No we're not, man. You're not even on the story anymore. I had the front page of the Rocky faxed to me this morning. They gave it to somebody else. Only place your name appears is in the story. No bylines, Jack. You're not on the story. You are the story. So why don't we go on the record here and let me ask you a few questions?"

"Like 'How do you feel?' Is that what you want to ask?"

"That's one of them, yeah."

I looked at him a good long moment. No matter how much I didn't like him or what he had done, I couldn't deny the empathy I had for his position. He was doing what I had done so many times before. I looked at my watch and out at the parking circle beyond the lobby. There were none of the waiting cabs I had seen the day before.

"You got a car?"

"Yeah, a company car."

"Give me a ride to the Chateau Marmont. We'll talk on the way."

"On the record?"

"On the record."

He turned on a tape recorder and put it on the dashboard. He just wanted the basics from me. He wanted to quote me about what I had done the night before rather than rely on a secondhand source like an FBI spokesman. That was too easy and he was too good a reporter to settle for a spokesman. Whenever possible he went straight to the source. I understood this. I was the same way.

Telling him the story somehow made me feel good. I enjoyed it. It wasn't anything I hadn't already given Jackson at my own paper, so it wasn't like I was revealing company secrets. But Warren had been around at almost the start of the trail and I liked being the one who told him where it had led and how it had ended.

I didn't tell him about the latest developments, about the PTL network and Gomble running it from a prison. That was too good to give away. I planned on writing that one myself, whether it was for the Rocky or one of those publishers in New York.

Finally, Warren drove up the short hill to the entrance of the Chateau Marmont. A doorman opened the door but I didn't get out. I looked at Warren.

"Anything else?"

"No, I think I got it. I have to get back to the federal building for the press conference anyway. But this is going to be great."

"Well, you and the Rocky are the only ones that got it. I'm not planning to go to 'Hard Copy' unless it's six figures."

He looked at me, surprised.

"Just kidding, Warren. I'd break into the records room with you at the foundation but, hey, I draw the line at selling my story to the tabs."

"What about the publishers?"

"I'm working on it. You?"

"I gave up once your first story came out. My agent said the editors he talked to were more interested in you than me. You had the brother, you know? You were obviously on the inside. Only thing I'd be able to sell was one of those quick-and-dirty jobs. I'm not interested. I've got a reputation."

I nodded and turned to get out of the car.

"Thanks for the ride."

"Thanks for the story."

I was out and about to close the door when Warren started to say something but then stopped.

"What is it?"

"I was going… ah, hell, look, Jack, about the source on that story. If-"

"Forget it, man, it doesn't matter anymore. Like I said, the guy's dead and you did what any reporter would do."

"No, wait. That's not what I'm saying… I don't give up sources, Jack, but I can tell you who isn't a source. And Thorson wasn't my source, okay? I didn't even know the guy."

I just nodded, saying nothing. He didn't know that I had seen the hotel phone records and that I knew he was lying. A new Jaguar pulled under the parking overhang and a couple dressed head to toe in black started getting out. I looked back at Warren, wondering what he was trying to do. What scam could he be pulling by lying now?

"That it?"

Warren turned a hand upside down and nodded.

"Yeah, that's it. Being that he's dead and you were there, I thought you might want to know."

I looked at him for another moment.

"Okay, man," I said. "Thanks. I'll see you around."

I straightened up and closed the door, then bent down to look at Warren through the window and gave a wave. He snapped off a military-style salute and drove away.