Abandoned

this one.”

Leo considers this. “He could write a program, have it do searches against a set of regular keywords within the chat. For example, bitch, cunt, dead, kill her—anything that might point to an interest in or intent to harm. He could also put out bait—forum posts or, in the live chat, hints that he wishes he could do away with his spouse, and wait for kindred spirits to reply.”

“Possible, but unlikely,” I say. “That leaves too much of a trail.”

“Then I’d go with the ’bot concept,” he says.

“’bot?”

“Sorry. Short for robot. In this case, an automated software program. It runs on its own, either on a timer, being told to perform a specific function every x seconds, or in response to input. For example, you can insert a ’bot into a chat room. It’ll look like a live person, but it’s not. It’s just a program. It can be set up to give a response to a query, so that if someone initiates contact, the ’bot would have a canned reply ready.”

“Like?”

“It’s been popular in promoting porn sites. You create a profile for a hot twenty-year-old with big gazoongas.” He reddens. “Sorry.”

“No, I think ‘gazoongas’ is the technical term,” Callie says. “Please continue.”

He clears his throat. “You create a profile for an attractive young woman. She’s not real. It’s fiction. The ’bot is inserted into a chat room full of single guys looking for girls, and you assign that profile to the ’bot.”

“They think the program is the girl,” Alan says, catching on.

“That’s right. So, of course, all eighty of the guys in the chat room send her a hey, you come here often? instant message. The ’bot is programmed to respond to any query with: Hi, sorry, I’m away from my computer for a sec, but you can come and see my naked pics and chat with me live at… You see?”

“Men are stupid, that’s what you’re saying?” Callie asks. “A sound hypothesis.”

“How would that approach benefit our guy?” Alan asks. “Well, it wouldn’t, not really,” Leo allows, “but there are other things the ’bot can do once it’s in the chat room.”

“Searches,” James supplies.

“Exactly. Back to the timer concept. The ’bot is inserted into the chat room and told to search every five milliseconds for any of the following terms: bitch, cunt, whore, hit man, death, and to alert the program operator if one is used by anyone in chat. If he really wanted to be advanced about it, he could have the ’bot send a generic reply to the originator of the keyword. Something like I hear that. It’s not that hard.”

“How secure would that be for him?” I ask.

“If you do it right? Very. If we’re watching and waiting and the ISP is cooperative, maybe we could trace something like that—maybe. But you have to understand, most providers don’t keep any logs of chats at all. Privacy is a huge issue, and you can’t be competitive if you’re not providing it. Many providers who have instant-messaging services, for example, have option settings for full encryption, and these days, full usually means full, as in government grade.”

“But we can wiretap if we need to, right?” Alan asks.

“Not necessarily. There are two different services out right now in the instant-messaging arena that are essentially impossible to, quote, ‘wiretap.’ They use a combination of encryption and peer-to-peer architecture—” He waves his hands in a gesture of dismissal. “I don’t need to get too technical. Suffice it to say that in those two cases, even if the company wanted to cooperate with us, they wouldn’t be able to.”

“Let me guess,” I say. “Those two are the most popular.”

He nods. “Anonymity is everything. Most of it isn’t illicit. People just like their privacy. They want to talk and not worry about Big Brother—us—listening in on them. The problem is, the pedophiles and terrorists support it too.”

“What about before the Internet?” James says.

Leo shrugs. “Not my area, sorry. But he could have been using the Net for a long time, anyway. Chat rooms have been around for a while, and BBS’s—electronic bulletin board systems—were already popular in the late seventies. He could have been operating on a primitive version of what we’re talking about for the last twenty-five years if he was really tech-savvy. A little longer, even.”

Monsters, casting nets into the information sea. Pulling the nets back in, filled with their catch of the hate- filled and the hungry.

“Good, Leo,” I say. “Now I need you to follow up on this hypothesis of yours.”

“Shoot.”

“The LAPD Computer Crimes Unit has taken Douglas Hollister’s computer. I want you there, peeking over their shoulders. Fill them in on your theory and scour his computer for evidence to back it up. I want the name of the website he used to visit.”

“That shouldn’t be a problem. LAPD CCU is a good unit. They know what they’re doing, and I’m on good terms with them. Geeks are competitive but not all that territorial.”

“We also have three other abduction victims who were … returned. We’re pretty sure it’s the same perp. We’re going to be liaising with the departments involved, and this may lead us to other Douglas Hollisters. If so, we’ll need to fine-tooth their systems too.”

“Just let me know. Is that it?”

“We work here,” Callie chides. “Real work. We don’t get to sit around all day parked on our posteriors, sipping coffee and perusing Internet porn. Chop chop.”

Leo gives her a sympathetic smile. “Envy is tough.”

“So I was thinking,” Alan says.

Leo has left, and we are back to the whiteboard, back to our list, scrawls in black and blue marker that look disconnected, maybe a little bit deranged, like puzzle pieces cast onto a coffee table. We stare at them and talk about them and fumble to find and add new pieces. A finished puzzle is always the same: a face, with a name written below it.

“Our perp keeps things simple. He searches for men who want their significant others taken out of the way,” he says.

“What about unsatisfied wives who want their husbands gone?” Callie interjects.

“Possible,” I allow, “but not really pragmatic. Roughly sixty percent of spousal murders are committed by men, so they’re the largest demographic.” I smile at Alan. “Skewed target group acknowledged, no man-hating intended.”

“No problem. Back to my thinking. He finds guys who want to take that extra step. A divorce won’t do it either, because they don’t want to split the money, or they don’t want to share the kids, or just because they hate the wife so much. He cuts a deal with the husbands: Take out life insurance on her, if you haven’t already, and I’ll grab her and hold her. No one will ever find a body because there’s no body to be found, and seven years later, you declare her dead, collect the insurance money, and give me my split.”

“That sounds right,” I agree.

“So what does he do with them after the seven year period is up?”

James’s sigh is both dismissive and derisive. “He kills them, of course. He kills them and disposes of the bodies in a decisive way, so they’ll never be found. Maybe he cremates them, or cuts them up and feeds them to pigs, but whatever he does, it’s not a productive line of questioning.”

“Really, smart-ass? Then what is?”

“The same as before: methodology. We have an idea now of how he selects his victims. We know from Heather Hollister’s interview how he treats them. The next logical question is: Where would he keep them?”

“Well …” I say, thinking. “We have three mutilated victims in three different states: California, Nevada, and Oregon. Do we think he has different holding houses in each state?”

“Absolutely,” James says.

“Why?”

“Because it’s the most pragmatic solution. The longer he travels with his victims, the greater the risk of