The Darker Side

those were bad, but the worst thing is agreeing with him on anything.'

'If you do what I do, you're going to run into that a lot. Actions--

the things people do, like murder or rape--can be in black and white. But people themselves? All kinds of shades of gray there, babe. That's why it's actions that matter the most.'

'What do you mean?'

'You can have a guy say that he believes that being a good father is the most important quality that a man can have, who then goes home and beats his kids. Or, even more complicated--maybe that same guy counsels other people's children, perhaps he's a therapist. He's done that for years, and maybe he's even helped a lot of kids. But the only thing that matters, from the perspective of my job, is that he goes home and beats his own children.'

She's quiet, mulling this over.

'I need to think about that some more.'

And she will. Bonnie is like a waveless lake, placid and still. But there's a lot happening underneath, where the sun can't reach and the crayfish hide.

'Will you talk to me about this some more? When you're done thinking?'

'Okay.'

'Promise?'

'I promise, Momma-Smoky. I feel better now. I'm sorry for doing something you wouldn't want me to do.'

I note the bending of phrase to her will. She's not apologizing for the action itself, she's apologizing for the fact that the action upset me. I let it pass.

'Apology accepted. But remember--two weeks.'

'I will.'

'Now let me talk to Elaina. Too much.'

'Way, way too much,' she replies.

A moment passes and Elaina comes on the line.

'Oh, Smoky.' She sounds so miserable, I want to reach through the phone and hug her.

'Don't beat yourself up, Elaina. We've been lucky up to now with Bonnie. I think we were due.'

'I suppose you're right, but still--I feel so guilty. She was on her laptop, using the wireless Internet connection. I haven't been sleeping well, and I decided to take a nap and it really got away from me. I slept for a few hours. She watched the clips while I was sleeping. I'm so sorry, Smoky.'

'Elaina, please. You're her second mother. You've taken on her homeschooling, you keep her there when my hours get crazy--you do a lot. Don't be so hard on yourself.'

'Appreciated, but how would you feel if you were in my position?'

I'd feel like crap.

'Point taken. You know, Bonnie's not a baby. It's not like we for got to lock up the laundry detergent when she was a toddler and she ate it or something. She knew we wouldn't approve of what she was doing, and she deliberately hid it from us.' I tell her about the twoweek moratorium on Internet usage.

'I'll help enforce that, you can be sure.'

'Somehow I don't think it'll be an issue. She didn't raise a fuss about it. Not a peep.'

'Hmmm.' I'm happy to hear some amusement leak into Elaina's voice. 'Maybe that should worry us more than anything else.'

'Good point. Now stop beating yourself up. I love you.'

She sighs in agreement. 'I love you too. Give my husband a kiss for me. Bonnie wants to talk to you again.'

'Put her on.'

'I forgot to tell you something,' Bonnie says, a little breathless.

'What's that?'

'That man? The one who calls himself the Preacher?'

'Yes?'

'Catch him and put him in jail forever. I want him to die there.'

It's not a request, it's a pronouncement. Bonnie saw what he's done, and whatever else she's wrangling with about it, the blacks and the grays, the moral maybes, one certainty has arrived: his freedom is unacceptable.

'I will, sweetheart.'

'Good.'

She hangs up without another word. I stare at the phone for a moment, bemused and disturbed. Bonnie has always been both a simplicity and a complexity in my life. The simplicity is my love for her. It's unfettered, it's depthless, it's pure. The complexity is Bonnie herself. She's got the brightness of a child, but she's also layered like an adult, full of private places I'm not sure I'll ever get to see. She's learned how to keep her own secrets and, perhaps more significant, how to be comfortable about it. Sometimes this bothers me, most times it doesn't. It just is.

Now she's about to turn into a teen, like a werewolf under a full moon, and with that, it seems, comes the ability to sneak and the willingness to lie. This by itself wouldn't bother me; it's the way of things. The problem is Bonnie hasn't chosen to sneak or lie about smoking or kissing or driving too fast; she applied her stealth to viewing the last, terrible moments of all those poor women.

There's nothing, I reflect, quite like motherhood to make you feel more helpless or inept.

I head out of my office. The maelstrom awaits.

'THIS KIND OF CASE REALLY exposes all the holes in our missing persons system,' Alan grouses. 'Did you know that NCIC contains about a hundred thousand missing persons cases, but AFIS has less than one hundred of those on file?'

NCIC is the National Crime Information Center. AFIS is the Automated Fingerprint Identification System. The other two major databases that figure into what we do are CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System for missing persons, and VICAP.

'You only got about fifteen percent of unidentified human remains that have been entered into NCIC. CODIS has been around since 1990, and it's growing, but it's still just a drop in the ocean.'

CODIS was a stroke of brilliance. If someone goes missing and has not turned up within thirty days, a DNA reference sample is obtained. This can be either a direct sample from something belonging to the missing person (hair, saliva from a toothbrush) or a comparison sample from a blood relation. The DNA gets analyzed and the profile is loaded into the database. If a body turns up, it can often be identified via CODIS. There have also been cases of a child missing for years being located alive because of CODIS.

The problem with all of these databases comes down to cooperation, time, and money. They're all voluntary. If the local departments don't fill out the forms or collect the DNA, it doesn't end up in the right database. Even when the information is provided, someone has to enter it.

It's a flawed and incomplete system, but it's better than nothing for sure. We've broken cases using these various databases. They might be limping, but they're still assets.

'What have we found?'

'We have name matches on forty so far. Computer crimes is assisting on this flat out. They're extracting still images of the victims' faces from the clips, which we'll then shoot to the respective local lawenforcement agencies. They'll take the photo and name to the families and get positive IDs. My guess is we'll be looking at ten out of ten on that. Too big a coincidence that the name from one of these videos would match up with a missing persons case.'

'I agree. By the way, your wife says to give you a kiss.'

'Thanks.'

'Keep on it. We're going to go till about eleven.'

'Joy.'

I head over to James, who is just hanging up the phone.

'The tips Jezebel is fielding to us are paying off,' he says. 'We've had almost eighty people come forward to identify victims on the clips.'

'Wow.'