him. He wanted to go home and go to sleep and forget everything he knew.
“People are the worst animals,” Rider said. “They will do anything to each other. Just to indulge their fantasies.”
Bosch got up and walked over to one of the other nearby desks. It belonged to a burglary detective named McGrath. He opened the drawers and started looking through them.
“Harry,” Rider said, “what are you looking for?”
“A cigarette. I thought Paul kept his smokes in his desk.”
“He used to. I told him to start taking them home with him.”
Bosch looked over at her, his hand still holding one of the drawers.
“You told him that?”
“I didn’t want you slipping, Harry.”
Bosch shoved the drawer closed and came back to his chair.
“Thanks a lot, Kizmin. You saved me.”
There wasn’t a drop of thanks in the tone he had used.
“You’ll get through this, Harry.”
Bosch gave her a look.
“You probably haven’t smoked an entire cigarette in your entire life and you’re going to tell me about quitting and how I’ll get through it?”
“Sorry. I’m just trying to help.”
“Like I said, thanks.”
He looked over at her computer and nodded.
“What else? What are you thinking about? How does that tie in Sam and Kate Kincaid to the point we should’ve advised them?”
“They had to know about this,” Rider said, amazed that Bosch didn’t see what she saw. “The man in the photos, that’s got to be Kincaid.”
“Whoah!” Edgar said. “How can you say that? You couldn’t see the guy’s face. We were just talking to the guy and he and his wife are still righteously fucked-up over this.”
It hit Bosch then. When he had first seen the photos on the computer he had thought they were taken by the girl’s abductor.
“You’re saying these photos are old,” he said. “That she was abused before she was abducted.”
“I’m saying there probably wasn’t an abduction at all. Stacey Kincaid was an abused child. My guess is that her stepfather defiled her and then probably killed her. And that doesn’t happen without tacit knowledge, if not approval, by the mother.”
Bosch was silent. Rider had spoken with such fervor and even pain that he couldn’t help but wonder if she was talking from some kind of personal experience.
“Look,” Rider said, apparently sensing the skepticism of her partners. “There was a time that I thought I wanted to move into child sex crimes. This was before I put in for homicide. There was an opening on the endangered-child team in Pacific and the job was mine if I wanted it. They first sent me to Quantico for a two- week training program the bureau puts on once a year on child sex crimes. I lasted eight days. I realized I couldn’t hack it. I came back and put in for homicide.”
She stopped there but neither Bosch nor Edgar said anything. They knew there was more.
“But before I left,” Rider continued, “I learned enough to know that most often sexual abuse of children comes from inside the family, relatives or close friends. The boogey monsters who climb through the window and abduct are few and far between.”
“It’s still not evidence in this specific case, Kiz,” Bosch said gently. “This could still be the rare exception. It wasn’t Harris who came through the window but this guy.”
He pointed to her computer, though the images of the headless man’s assault on Stacey Kincaid were thankfully not on the screen.
“Nobody came through the window,” Rider insisted.
She pulled a file over and opened it. Bosch saw it contained a copy of the protocol from the autopsy of Stacey Kincaid. She leafed through it until she came to the photos. She picked the one she wanted and handed it to Bosch. While he looked at it she started paging through the protocol.
The photo Bosch held was a shot of Stacey Kincaid’s body in situ – the position and place where it was found. Her arms were spread wide. Sheehan had been right. Her body was darkening with interior decomposition and the face was gaunt, but there was an angelic quality to her in repose. His heart ached from looking at the photos of her tortured and now dead.
“Look at the left knee,” Rider commanded.
He did so. He saw a round dark spot that appeared to be a scab.
“A scab?”
“Right. The protocol calls it premortem by five to six days. It happened before she was abducted. So she had that scab on her knee the entire time she was with her abductor – if there really was one. In the photos on the web site, she has no scab. I can go back in and show you if you like.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Bosch said.
“Yeah,” Edgar added. “Me, too.”
“So these photos on the web were taken well before she was supposedly kidnapped, well before she was murdered.”
Bosch nodded, then shook his head.
“What?” Rider asked.
“It’s just… I don’t know. Twenty-four hours ago we were working the Elias thing and thinking maybe we were looking for a cop. Now all of this…”
“It changes things all right,” Edgar said.
“Wait a minute, if that’s Sam Kincaid in those pictures with her, why the hell are they still on that web site? It doesn’t make sense that he would risk that.”
“I thought about that,” Rider said. “There are two possible explanations. One being that he doesn’t have editing access to the web site. In other words, he can’t take those photos off without going to the site administrator, raising suspicions and exposing himself. The second possibility, and it might be a combination of both, is that he felt he was safe. Harris was fingered as the killer and whether he was convicted or not that was the end of the story.”
“It’s still a risk leaving those photos out there to be seen,” Edgar said.
“Who’s going to see them?” Rider asked. “Who’s going to tell?”
Her voice was too defensive. She realized this and continued in a calmer tone.
“Don’t you see? The people with access to this site are pedophiles. Even if someone recognized Stacey, which is unlikely, what were they going to do? Call the police and say, ‘Uh, yes, I like fucking children but I don’t stand for murdering them. Could you get these photos off our web site?’ Not in a million years. Hell, maybe keeping the photos on there was a form of bragging. We don’t even know what we have here. Maybe every girl on that site is dead.”
Her voice was growing sharper as she tried to convince them.
“Okay, okay,” Bosch said. “You make good points, Kiz. Let’s stay on our case for now. What is your theory? You think Elias got this far along and it got him killed?”
“Absolutely. We know it did. The fourth note. ‘He knows you know.’ Elias went onto the secret web site and was found out.”
“How’d they know he was in there if he had the passwords from the third note?” Edgar asked.
“Good question,” Rider replied. “I asked the O’Connors the same thing. They did some snooping around after getting into the server. They found a cookie jar on the web site. What that means is that there is a program that captures data about each user who enters the site. It then analyzes the data to determine if someone has entered the site who should not have had access. Even if they have the passwords, their entry is still recorded and a data trail called an Internet protocol address is left behind. It’s like fingerprints. The IP, or the cookie, is left on the site you enter. The cookie jar program will then analyze the IP address and match it to a list of known users. If there is no match a flag is raised. The site’s manager sees the flag and can trace the intruder. Or he can set up a tripwire
