'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.'
