Double Cross

Chapter 36

FOR THE NEXT FEW HOURS, I sat and studied tapes of some of the early meetings between Kyle and Mason Wainwright. The lawyer hadn’t invoked his lawyer-client privilege until the third week he’d spent with his client. Why was that? Because Kyle wanted us to see something? Or maybe because the lawyer did.

What, though? The first visit was virtually the same as the others that were taped.

Wainwright entered the meeting room wearing a very memorable outfit, which no doubt helped with the eventual escape: cowboy hat and boots, buckskin jacket, horn-rimmed eyeglasses that clashed with everything else he had on.

He and Kyle hugged as soon as they met. Kyle said something that wasn’t caught on tape.

Then came a series of eight questions-always the same ones, or very close.

Some kind of code? Or was Kyle playing games? Or simply crazy-he and the lawyer? I couldn’t tell at this point. About anything, really. Except that Kyle Craig was the first prisoner ever to escape from ADX Florence. The Mastermind had done the impossible.

Finally Kyle and the lawyer hugged each other again. Wainwright said something to Kyle that wasn’t picked up on tape. Was this how they exchanged information-whether they were taped or not?

I expected that it was. We would certainly try to find out.

Next, I went to Kyle’s cell, but there wasn’t much to see in there. Prisoners weren’t allowed many personal possessions at ADX. The small room was neat and orderly, as Kyle was himself.

Then I saw the message he’d left.

A greeting card was propped on the table that was bolted down next to his bed.

It was a Hallmark-unsigned-just like the ones at Tess Olsen’s penthouse.

Minutes later, I was back at Warden Krock’s office. I needed some answers to questions that had developed in the past few hours.

“Visitors?” I asked. “We know about the lawyer, though we have no idea what his real relationship to Craig was. Were there other visitors? Anyone who came around more than once?”

Krock didn’t have to consult his files to answer. “In the first year, there was a persistent reporter from the Los Angeles Times named Joseph Wizan, whom Craig refused to see. Repeatedly. Several others contacted Craig through my office but didn’t bother to come out here because he wouldn’t see them either.

“The only one who did visit, and this was just a few months ago, was the author Tess Olsen. You know, the woman who was killed in Washington recently? Kyle surprised us. He agreed to meet with her. She came here three times. She planned to do a book on Craig, another In Cold Blood, if you listened to her talk about it.”

“You spoke with her, then?” I asked.

“I did. On all three of her visits. Half an hour or so the first time.”

“How did she seem to you? What was your impression?”

Warden Krock moved his head back and forth as if he were weighing his answer. Finally he spoke. “She seemed like a fan. Honestly, I wondered if she and Craig had something going before he was caught.”

Chapter 37

I RETURNED TO WASHINGTON early the following morning, having already passed along the news about Tess Olsen, the Hallmark card in Craig’s cell, and the possibility that Kyle may have had a relationship with Olsen, or even with the killer in DC. But more than anything else, I wondered what Kyle was planning.

Bree had pulled together a small forensic team focusing on the blog leads she was chasing down. An agent named Brian Kitzmiller from the FBI’s Cyber Unit had been assigned to us and was more than willing to come on board. The Audience Killer case had already caught his attention.

Bree asked Kitzmiller for the earliest possible meeting after he’d had a chance to go over the blog. Kitzmiller gave us a four-hour turnaround, which meant he was fast. Another good sign that we had everybody’s attention on this case.

We showed up at the Hoover Building close to three. I certainly knew my way around there, though I’d never done much work with the Cyber Unit and had never met Kitzmiller-I’d heard of him, however, and knew he had a reputation as a puzzle-solver.

“Come on in.” Even seated in front of a work terminal, he was obviously very tall and gawky-looking, with the brightest orange hair I had ever seen in my life.

This part of the unit was a low-ceilinged room on the second floor, a few floors below my old office. Everyone sat in wide stall-like cubicles with their backs to the center, where a large octagonal conference table was strewn with papers, files, and laptop computers. People did work here-good sign.

A glass wall separated the unit from the busy corridor outside.

Bree, Sampson, and I grabbed chairs and sat down in Kitzmiller’s stall. He was about my age, fit, and with that blinding head of hair.

“I can’t really source any of the audio,” he said, “but I did compare the screams on what the blogger calls Channel Two against the videotape from the original crime scene. It’s almost definitely a match. But that’s not quite the same as a forensic link between the blog and the killer. Theoretically, anyone could have posted this.”

“You mean, if someone else had access to the recording,” I said. “We’re all in agreement that the audio is original, right?”

“Sure,” he said. “So it’s either your suspect or someone who was given access by the suspect. Hard to tell about that for sure yet.”

“Let’s focus on one thing at a time,” Bree said. “You told me on the phone that the blog was posted from Georgetown University? Is that right?”

“Or, at least, through Georgetown. That’s the basic problem I’m seeing already, Bree. Whoever put up the blog knew how to cover his or her tracks fairly well.”

“Proxy server?” Sampson asked. His little niches of expertise always surprised me.

Kitzmiller smiled appreciatively at Sampson, but then he shook his head. “Negative. Worse, actually. He used an open proxy. Universities are notoriously easy marks for this kind of thing. Any boob can remotely attach their IP address from anywhere, and wham-you’ve got an untraceable site. All I can get you is a location. Nothing about identity.”

“Any suggestions at all?” Bree asked. “We really need your help on this.”

“Sure. I understand your frustration, Detective. My suggestion is that you get totally involved on your end. Jump in the deep water with me. We’ll keep paddling around here, but you’ll be glad if you do some stirring of your own. Believe me, a whole lot of detritus turns up online. You’d be surprised what you might find.”

“Honestly, I don’t know the first thing about cyberforensics,” Bree said.

“You don’t have to. I’m not talking about cracking code, here. I’m talking about a large community that needs to be canvassed. The whole blogosphere.”

“Blogosphere?”

Kitzmiller started pulling up several new windows at once, layered over one another on the screen to show us what he was getting at.

“First of all, we’ve got everyone who posted responses to the original blog. There was the MY REALITY site, for example. It’s already been taken down, but there were more than three dozen separate screen names for people who had replied to at least one of his entries. So that’s a pretty good start. You remember the old shampoo commercial? ‘You tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on and so on’? Same thing here. Some number of people read this, then turn around and talk about it on their own blogs, and the scope goes up exponentially.