Last Call

screams. The notepad in front of her had not a single notation on it. Andie simply watched the filmed frenzy unfold on the computer.

It went on for several minutes. Close-ups of the penetration, close-ups of the terror in Portia's eyes. The men's faces, of course, had been carefully edited out. When it was over, the red letters tumbled back onto the screen to spell out a final message in lieu of credits. It read: 'Reality Bitches get what they deserve.'

Jack closed the website.

Andie was silent. Then she looked at Jack and said, 'I'm glad Theo didn't watch.'

'So you see it like I do? This is not acting. 'Reality Bitches' means it's real?'

'No doubt about it,' she said. 'Theo's mother was raped. Before she was his mother.'

Chapter 38

Andie ate dinner at her desk. This was becoming a bad habit. Nearly four months had passed since her last date with Jack. Fifteen weeks since he'd wigged out over her remark about Theo and called it quits. One-hundred- something days without another date of any promise. Two-thousand-plus hours without any hope of… 'it.'

Suddenly she was counting minutes as the theme song from Rent played in her head.

She popped open another diet soda and unwrapped her spicy tuna roll from the local sushi-on-wheels. The bright side was that she was impressing her supervisors and proving herself worthy of advancement to the elite criminal profiling unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico. With every dinner alone at the office, however, the computer dating option seemed less absurd. That so-called cyber expert she'd blown off on Miami Beach had been dead right about one thing: it was hard for a female FBI agent to find love outside of law enforcement. Andie got plenty of interest from men who wore badges. That was one reason she'd been so attracted to Jack. That and… 'it.'

Funny how with certain people you just knew 'it' would be good.

She glanced at the phone. Every now and then, she felt the urge to call her former supervisor to see if returning to Seattle was an option. Jack, however, had made that impossible. Even though he was in and out of her life in the span of two weeks, people would have said she jumped on a plane and flew across the country after getting dumped by the former governor's son.

A few more dates with Jack, and maybe it would have been true.

Good thing he wigged out.

Her appetite was gone. The files on the floor called out to her. Each stack was its own case, another investigation, a different victim. Andie had one of those filing systems where the work piled up – literally. Even so, she couldn't stop herself from going back to her computer and that movie again.

The FBI's tech experts had cleaned up the downloadable version of the film and burned it onto a disk, which she now inserted into her PC. It still had its shortcomings – shaky frames, grainy images, poor lighting. The geek masters were good, but they weren't magicians.

Andie let the frames advance in slow motion. It was like laying out the pieces to a puzzle with two parts. One, who raped Theo's mother? Two, why did Isaac want Theo to see it? So far she had the faces of two drunks – the heckler and his friend – in a dark room somewhere in the early 1970s. Those guys were in their fifties now, and it would be impossible to find and identify them if she didn't nail down the location. The answer had to be on this disk, and Andie was determined to dissect it from every angle. Portia's striptease in the darkness. Her argument with the drunks. The ensuing frenzy, the mad chase down hall, the -

Andie hit pause. Something had caught her eye.

She rewound several frames, still in slow motion, and watched even more intently. A flash of light brightened the screen, and she hit pause to freeze the image. The white flash had been the camera's spotlight reflecting in a mirror on the wall. She advanced one more frame – and there he was.

The cameraman.

Whoever had posted this film on the Internet had gone to some effort to protect the guilty, carefully editing out frames that would reveal the attackers' identity. Apparently they'd missed this split-second appearance of the cameraman in the mirror. Andie burned the image to a separate CD and took it upstairs to the tech floor. By definition, these guys had no life, and of course someone was still there after hours.

'Benny, can you help me again?' she said, catching her breath.

Crumpled candy wrappers and empty soda cans littered the work area around Benny's computer monitor. He swiveled in his chair to face Andie, but his mouth was too full to respond. He held a half-eaten Twinkie in one hand and a soda can in the other.

'What…now?' he said, swallowing.

Andie showed him the disk. 'Can you clean up a still image for me?'

'Right this minute?'

'Pretty please?'

Bennie washed down his Twinkie with a hit of caffeine and sugar. 'Okay,' he said. 'But first: in the television series Star Trek, who was originally offered the role of Spock, but declined?'

Andie felt a headache coming on. She liked Star Trek, but this was the price she paid for pretending to love it just to stay in the good graces of the all-important tech guys. 'I don't know. Martin Landau?'

'Corrrr-ect!'

'Really?'

'Yup. And then in a truly interesting twist, after Landau left Mission Impossible, Leonard Nimoy joined that show to play the role of disguise expert-'

'Benny, please. The disk?'

He took it and inserted it into the computer. 'Sure.'

The image popped onto the screen. Benny worked on a monitor much larger than Andie's, and it looked even worse on the big screen. 'Well, that could use some work,' said Benny.

'Can you fix it?'

'Let's see.' Benny zoomed on his face, sharpening the features, darkening the background, adjusting the color. Two minutes and several dozen mouse clicks later, the face was almost as clear as the other two images Andie had pulled from the movie.

'How's that?' said Benny.

'Great. Can you do anything with his shirt?'

'What about it?'

Andie pointed. 'There's some kind of artwork on it, I think.'

He trained the zoom onto the man's chest, and after another round of computerized adjustments, the shirt started to come into focus.

'It's a frat house,' said Andie.

'What?' he said, still tinkering with the image.

'Those are Greek letters on his shirt. This was a fraternity party.'

Benny tightened the zoom, and with another series of clicks the front of the man's shirt filled the screen. 'That's the best I can do,' he said.

Andie studied it. 'Pi Alpha Delta,' she said.

'Hope that helps,' he said.

'More than you know,' she said. She thanked him, brought the disk back to her office, and printed out the still images of the cameraman, the heckler, and his friend. Then she called university information to find out if there was a Pi Alpha Delta fraternity on campus.

There was.

Andie tucked the printed photographs into her purse and bolted out of the office.

It took twenty minutes of dodging speeding motorcycles on the expressway and another ten of winding through residential neighborhoods to reach the university's main campus. Pi Alpha Delta was actually located off-campus, one of five fraternity houses directly across from the intramural athletic fields on a busy four-lane boulevard. Andie