“I guess.”
“You don’t know where he lives, or where these women live?”
“No. Well, I assume they live near him, wherever that is. He must have access to them.”
“You can’t tell me you were never curious as to this Bluebeard’s identity.”
“I was curious. Sure.”
“Well, you’re not exactly naive about computers. You know how to trace a visitor to your Web site.”
Gader shook his head. “Tried that. No good. He sends the video feed through a proxy server. I can trace it back that far and no farther.”
“With a court order,” Brand said, “we could force the proxy’s administrator to surrender their logs.”
“If they keep the logs in the first place,” Rawls mused. Some of those outfits routinely destroyed all information to defeat any possible subpoenas. He looked at Gader. “How about the e-mails he sent you? Were those untraceable too?”
“Sent through a remailer. Scrubbed.”
“You didn’t find that suspicious?”
“Hell, a lot of people use anonymizer services on the Web. Big Brother’s out there. As I guess you two ought to know, seeing as how you work for him.”
Rawls brushed aside the jibe. “Bluebeard shut off the other video streams? He keeps only one going at a time?”
“That’s right.”
“Did you capture the other streams, or parts of them? You know, highlight reels?”
“No, never did.”
Rawls leaned on Gader’s desk and made eye contact. “Don’t play games with me. You’ve got footage of naked women streaming into your computer, and you make no effort to save any of it for a rainy day?”
“Well… maybe some stills.”
“Maybe?”
Gader shrugged. “Stills. A few.”
“Where are they? On the site?”
“No, I posted a few of Miss November after she was off the site, but Bluebeard took ’em down. Guess he wanted to stay current. Funny, though. He seemed really upset about it-kind of flamed me. Said he wanted only that month’s playmate on display.”
“Playmate?” Brand asked with a smirk.
Gader was embarrassed. “That’s what he calls them. You know, playmate of the month.”
“He’s a real charmer, this friend of yours,” Brand said.
“Where are the stills?” Rawls asked.
“On the hard drive of my PC.”
“Show us.”
Gader kicked his swivel chair away from the server and rolled across the room to a Hewlett-Packard desktop system. He booted it up and activated a picture editing program, then loaded three. jpeg stills.
“Here’s a sample,” he said, waving his hand over the tiled images. “Miss November, December, January.”
The photos caught the women in medium shot or close-up. All were Caucasians, but otherwise they differed in appearance. Two were blondes, while Miss January, as Rawls had already noted, was a brunette. Their ages varied from early twenties to perhaps late thirties. All of them had been videotaped in their bedrooms.
“Are these the clearest facial shots you’ve got?” Rawls asked.
“I guess so. I don’t always concentrate on the faces, if you know what I mean.”
“Print them out. One photo per page, full sheet.”
Gader obeyed. His inkjet printer buzzed and whirred until all three sheets had been deposited in the tray. Rawls picked them up and shared them with Brand, farming out the pages like a hand of cards.
“What are we looking for, exactly?” Brand asked.
“I’m not sure. You know how something is on the tip of your tongue and you can’t quite remember?”
“You saying you may have seen these women before?”
“The first two, yes.”
“Where?”
“I’m not sure,” Rawls said again. He stared at the faces, ignoring Miss January, focusing on Miss November and Miss December. Two women with nothing obviously in common except the color of their hair.
They had been spied on, each for a separate month. When the month was over, the spying had stopped, and they had not been seen on the site again. Bluebeard had been very vocal about keeping them off the site. Why?
Because someone would recognize them? Someone who might have seen them?
Seen them where?
On TV. In the newspapers.
Crime stories.
Victims.
“Damn,” Rawls breathed, his voice so low and hoarse that both Gader and Brand turned to stare at him.
“Noah, you got something?” Brand asked.
“I’ve got him.” Rawls didn’t know if he was speaking to Brand or to himself. “I’ve got Bluebeard. That’s who he is, all right, Bluebeard-and this site is his locked room.”
22
It was odd. She was far away and yet very close. She was floating, weightless, yet she felt the limp heaviness of her body and the cold rigidity of the floor. She was not herself, but who else could she be?
There was no way of making sense of this. She concentrated on little things, single moments that were at least roughly comprehensible.
The hands moving over her. Gloved hands, she thought. Hands of leather.
They turned her on her stomach, pulled her arms behind her. She felt the brief, distant protest of the muscles in her shoulders-pops of pain that flared and vanished, unimportant.
Her wrists were pressed together in the small of her back, and something was wound around them. Rope, she thought, until she sensed its stickiness pulling at the soft down of her arms. Then she knew it was adhesive tape, thick and strong. Duct tape, probably.
For a moment she was a child again, laughing as her dad mended a sofa cushion with tape. She thought he called it “duck” tape, and the idea of duck tape was funny to her. She was five years old.
It was long before the boogeyman had come into her life, long before she had learned to be afraid.
The boogeyman-why think of him now? There seemed to be some relevance to the thought, some connection she could not grasp between the leather hands binding her wrists and the skinny, shadowy figure that had groped for her in the crawl space.
Her wrists were immobilized now. They twisted helplessly behind her back.
“No use, C.J.,” his voice breathed.
Whose voice? She ought to know it. She had recognized it before.
Next the leather hands moved to her ankles, applying tape to the bare skin above her sneakers.
He’s got me trussed like a turkey, she thought.
First ducks, now turkeys. Her mind was filled with birds. She liked birds, except for the mockingbirds that lived in the trees outside her bedroom window and kept her awake at night with their variety of songs.
Birds… She wondered if she could fly out of her body and be a bird in the sky, or a birdlike spirit, a thing no tape could bind, no leather hands could hold.
“This is the way I always wanted you,” he whispered. “Did you know that? Did you ever suspect?”
