know they never have anything to do with real life.”
Kate nodded as if Roz had actually told her something, and then abruptly stood up, thanked Roz, and left. She was not certain just what she had accomplished—other than severely disconcerting the woman behind the desk. Still, it was not easy to throw Roz Hall, and surely having done so counted for something.
Chapter 17
OVER THE COURSE OF that damp morning, the FBI’s information came dutifully in, as trickles or in undigested lumps. Five additional men on the Web site list that Kate had uncovered had died in the last few months, and several others were simply missing. Late in the afternoon came news of a cluster of three men, from Georgia up through the Carolinas, that gave Kate a nasty feeling, since all of them just disappeared from their daily lives into thin air. In one case a badly decomposed body had been found out in the woods by the first hikers of spring. It was suspected to be the missing man from South Carolina; DNA testing was under way.
Of the five known dead, three had clearly been murdered, two of those gunned down in New York a month apart by the same gun, and no suspects identified. There was one accident on the list (and reading the faxed report of the man’s blood alcohol level and the absence of skid marks or mechanical failure, Kate had to agree that he had simply passed out at the wheel and gone off the road and into a bridge support at high speed) and another man had committed suicide, but if the suicide was not actually assisted, his family swore he had been more or less driven to death’s door and handed a gun. For weeks before he had put a bullet in his head, the convicted child abuser had been the object of a barrage of letters, photos, and phone calls, threatening, taunting, and merciless. At home and at work, his colleagues and his neighbors included, the pressure had been unrelenting and around the clock. Until he killed himself.
In the three weeks since his death, his family had received nothing further.
The fifth death, the third confirmed murder victim, was close to home, both physically and in regards to their investigation. His name was Larry Goff, and he had died in Sacramento, less than three hours from downtown San Francisco, with strapping tape on his wrists.
Goff’s wife, Tamara, according to the Web site and the Sacramento detective Kate talked to, had been to the hospital emergency room five times in two years for treatment of chronic “accidents,” and had separated from her husband, with a restraining order in place. In early November, Goff was accused of kidnapping their two children— picking them up from school on a Friday afternoon and taking them for the weekend without telling his wife. He brought them back to her on the Sunday, and when arrested he claimed that she had given him permission, but the kidnap charges stood. He was granted bail, and the subsequent investigation had been wending its slow way through the court system when Tamara was found in her bedroom one morning in December, dead of an overdose of prescription pain pills. At the time of death, she had a fresh plaster cast on one arm and two broken teeth in the left side of her jaw. There was no indication of suicide, and nothing to show that she had been force-fed the pills. She was simply in pain, and she made a mistake.
Tamara’s sister claimed the children, and with the pending kidnap charge hanging over their father, the courts granted her temporary custody. Then two weeks later, a few days before New Year’s, Goff was found in a hotel frequented by prostitutes, bound, gagged, and strangled to death. His wallet and watch had been missing, though not his gold wedding band. Police investigators determined that he had been lured to the room by a woman the manager had not seen before, although he surmised her profession by her clothing. Once in the room, she and possibly an accomplice had overpowered Goff, killed, and robbed him.
“Do you have a copy of the autopsy report in front of you?” Kate asked the Sacramento detective over the phone.
“Sure. You want me to fax it to you?”
“That would be helpful. I’m looking for any red mark on the torso. A taser burn.”
A minute of silence broken only by distant voices and the sound of pages turning was ended with a “Nope. Don’t see anything like that here. There were some marks—you can see them in the photographs— but they looked more like immediately premortem bruising.”
“Okay. You haven’t seen anything else with that MO?”
“No, and we’ve been watching, since it’s such an oddity. I mean, how many hookers use strapping tape for bondage games? Hairy guy like Goff, he’d have little bald patches all over him. Imagine explaining that to your girlfriend back home.”
Kate had to laugh at the image.
“You’ll see when you get the photos that his beard’s kinda mangy looking. That’s from cutting away the tape. In fact, I heard about your duct-tape guys the other day, and I was going to call you—different stuff, I know, but close. Then something came up and I forgot about it.”
“That happens,” Kate said. Not to her, damn it, but she tried to keep the irritation from her voice; there was no point in alienating a colleague, particularly one who had a file she wanted to see. “Did you develop any suspects?”
“Nada. We thought at first it might be revenge, you know, since the wife died, but as far as anyone knew, Tamara had no contact with prostitutes, was never arrested, our informants had never seen her on the streets, so it wasn’t some friends doing a little payback. This was Tamara’s second marriage, so we looked at her first husband, just in case, but he’s out of the picture, happily remarried and living in Miami, no indication that he was away at the time of the murder. No brother or father around that we could find, not even a mother, though a friend of Tamara’s said there is one somewhere. The two kids are with Tamara’s sister now, she’s looking to adopt if she can talk the ex-husband in Florida into it. His wife doesn’t want them, and only one of them is his, the other’s Goff’s.”
Kate thanked the detective, and when the fax came through a while later she studied the face with the small blue eyes, trimmed beard, and dark mole on the left side of the nose, but neither the picture nor the report told her much. No sign of candy on the body, not in the report at any rate. She filed it away, and went back to her phone calls.
Of the 200 or so living (presumably living) members of the abuser’s hit list, by the end of the day, the team had succeeded in making contact with just over half. The others had either moved or had their phones disconnected, and the investigators were forced to wait for the local departments and regional agents to report back. Two of the deaths came to light in this way, but for most of the remaining names it would be days before the locals got a chance to check the individuals out and get back to them.
In the meantime, of the 127 men the team had found, men scattered from Key Biscayne to Seattle, nearly all said that they had received some form of threatening communication, and three-quarters of them had gotten a dozen or more letters, faxes, three a.m. phone calls, or anonymous e-mail messages. Due to their own legal entanglements, the men on the list were less likely than the general population to complain to the police, but a number of them had, although neither police nor telephone companies had been able to identify the anonymous senders. Even the e-mail had come from public computers in libraries and Internet cafes.
The Web site did prove to be operated by a woman in Nebraska, which struck Kate as incongruous, for some reason. Still, remote or not, Stella DeVries knew her rights and her high-powered lawyer refused to let her say anything aside from a public declaration that she had not advocated any act of harassment or violence, and that freedom of speech included listing the names of accused offenders with the disclaimer that they were innocent until found guilty in a court of law—which disclaimer was indeed prominently displayed on the Web site, albeit at the very end.
The entire Internet side of the investigation was now the property of the federal authorities, and Kate had no choice but to let other law enforcement agencies deal with Ms. DeVries and her well-prepared law team. Kate and Al could only walk around the edges and try to see how their cases tied in.
Finally, late that evening, Al laid his hand on Kate’s collar and dragged her away from her computer terminal to a late-night diner much beloved of the cops who worked out of the Hall of Justice. Kate’s back felt permanently hunched, her fingers crabbed into the typing position. She couldn’t remember when she had last eaten, or what.
They had been living on coffee for all that long day and craving a strong drink for the last half of it, so they both compromised and had a beer with their hamburgers. Kate swallowed deeply and closed her eyes in appreciation; following that brief vacation she sat forward and returned to work.
“I can’t believe how long it takes sometimes for things like this Web site to come to light,” she groaned.
“It’s only been up for, what was it, twelve weeks?”
