female genitalia, and ending in “. net.”
“Huh.” Brand’s grunt, as always, signified new interest on his part. “Wish these hackers would learn how to spell.”
This was a joke. Hackers had their own rules of spelling. F became ph. The plural s became z. The rules were elastic and meaningless, rebellion for its own sake.
Of course, a great many of the hackers really couldn’t spell.
Anyway, it wasn’t the spelling that had caught Brand’s interest. Both he and Rawls had read hundreds of e-mailed tips. Hackers were not known for their loyalty to others who practiced their art. They frequently turned in rivals merely to settle a grudge. But when they sent these tips to the Baltimore field office, they used the general e-mail address listed on the office’s Web site. They never sent e-mail directly to Agent Rawls or Agent Brand, for the simple reason that neither agent’s personal e-mail address was public knowledge.
“This came right to you,” Brand said, looking at the routing information on the printout.
“Yup.”
“And it’s anonymous, of course.”
Rawls nodded. “Sent via a remailer. No log trail.”
“Somebody went to a fair amount of trouble to get this to you without being traced. But they didn’t give you the password.”
“Guess they want me to show a little ingenuity.”
“Could just be a prank.”
“Yeah. But there’s something about it I don’t like. That name Bluebeard-it’s got me worried. You know the story?”
“Vaguely. French guy, kills his wives. Right?”
“Right. I’m assuming the password has to be connected with the story somehow. Otherwise the tipster wouldn’t have expected me to figure it out.”
“We need more information.”
“Way ahead of you.” Rawls opened a new browser window and entered the address of an online encyclopedia, then searched for Bluebeard and found the article.
The story of Bluebeard, Le Barbe Bleu, was first published by a compiler of French folk tales named Charles Perrault. In Perrault’s telling, Bluebeard was a handsome lord whose six wives had died of a variety of common diseases-or so Bluebeard claimed. But when his seventh wife opened a locked room in the castle, she stumbled on the six corpses of the women, victims of Bluebeard’s psychopathy. He had strangled them, so the story went, “with his own hands.” The seventh wife was saved from the same fate by the providential appearance of rescuers.
Brand, reading over his partner’s shoulder, grunted again. “The message says you’ll have to find the key. As in the key to a lock.”
Rawls nodded. “And in the story, who opens the locked room? The seventh wife.”
He entered various passwords that came to mind- wife7, wife#7, wifeseven, 7thwife, and others. All were rejected.
“No good,” he said. “Unless it’s her name.”
“Which is?”
Rawls scanned the encyclopedia article again. “Not mentioned here.” He guided the browser to a search engine and entered the terms Bluebeard and wife. The search results took him to an online glossary of folklore, where he found the relevant listing.
“Fatima,” he said.
He returned to the original window and typed Fatima into the password space. When he hit the Enter key, the screen reported authorization accepted.
“Bingo.” That was Brand. He was always saying things like that, just like a TV cop.
The home page of the mystery site appeared. It consisted solely of text links against a white background, as plain-vanilla as any site could be. Rawls scanned the rows of print. “Chat room… bulletin boards… vidcaps… Here we go.” Rawls guided his mouse pointer to a hypertext link that read. Do you like to watch? The words from the e-mail message.
He clicked the link, and a new page came up, empty except for the small, blurred image of a bedroom. There were no windows in view, only a pair of abstract paintings on the walls. An unmade bed, flanked by twin nightstands, took up one corner of the room. A doorway framed a bathroom with a stall shower.
The room was unoccupied, and only the flicker of sunlight on the walls from an unseen window indicated that the image was a moving picture and not a still. Bright sunlight, Rawls noted, yet at 4:30 it was already nearly dark on the East Coast.
“Webcam in a bedroom,” Brand said, “oriented with a view of the bed and the shower.”
“Probably a woman’s bedroom.” Rawls tapped the screen. “That bedspread has a floral pattern. Not the kind of thing most men would own.”
“So she’s a nice girl who just happens to enjoy sharing her bedroom activities with online voyeurs. Kinky but not criminal. Lots of weirdos put their private lives on the Web for bored lookie-loos to watch. There are a thousand sites like that.”
“If this is a site like that.”
“You think it’s a little more serious? Maybe somebody’s spying on this lady?”
Rawls nodded. “Like that creep who was running pee-cam sites in Virginia.” He and Brand hadn’t handled the case personally, but they’d heard about it-a perv who’d installed hidden cameras in ladies’ toilets and uploaded the resulting footage to the Web.
“It’s possible,” Brand conceded. “But there’s an equal chance that she set it up herself. She gets off on people watching her.”
“Then why keep the site password-protected?”
“She might want to perform in front of a select audience. Or it could be a subscription-based service. Or maybe she and her boyfriend set this up so they can have a little cyber-nookie. They don’t want strangers looking in.”
“Could be.”
“But you don’t think so,” Brand commented.
“No. I don’t.”
“Any particular reason?”
“Just one. That name-Bluebeard.”
Brand had no answer to that.
6
At 3:30 P.M., in the women’s locker room at Newton Station, C.J. changed out of her uniform. She stowed her boots, belt, gun, PR24 side-handle baton, and other
accessories inside the locker, then donned civilian clothes-Nikes and a blue jumpsuit, along with a handbag that concealed her off-duty weapon, a J-frame Smith amp; Wesson. 38.
She clanged shut the door of her locker, then leaned against the cold metal, her eyes closed. Again she saw it-the gun in her face, Ramon Sanchez’s angry glare.
She hadn’t told Walt Brasco or any other cop about that part of her adventure. The way she’d related the story, she had disarmed Sanchez without incident. Sanchez, of course, would say nothing to contradict her version of events. Pointing a gun at a police officer was a felony charge he could live without.
Her reason for hiding the truth was simple enough. She didn’t want to be pushed into therapy for posttraumatic stress. Let a shrink get hold of a thing like that, and she would be on a couch for six months spilling her guts about every little thing… and eventually about things that were not so little.
Things like the boogeyman.
No one in the department knew about that. And no one would ever know.
Every cop had a private reason for wearing the uniform, she supposed. Hers was probably no weirder than
