Pitch Black Page 5

  Her tone had gone from conversational to hard, verging on bitter. The tautness in her form told him even more about her—like exposing fraud online might be a personal crusade, rather than a professional one. She was emotionally affected by the issue, not a bit detached.

  He had a feeling she was going to take Ryan Smith’s murder very hard.

  “Did he forward you the actual e-mail?”

  She shook her head, pushing back a few long strands of silky hair, which had escaped the ponytail. “No. He told me about it and I responded.” A tiny furrow appeared on her brow, and she added, “Oh, I just remembered: He also asked about certified checks. Whether the scheme ever included them.”

  Alec leaned forward, leafing quickly through the copies of the e-mails. “Where?”

  Frowning in concentration, she said, “It was . . . Wait, actually I think it was in an instant message.”

  That surprised him. “Strangers can IM you?”

  “He was a bright kid with a lot of potential, so when he figured out my ID, I was impressed enough to chat with him on occasion.”

  The investigative team already had Ryan Smith’s computer and would find the history, but going to the source was quicker. “Can you tell me what you remember?”

  As she closed her eyes to concentrate, Alec couldn’t help noticing the long sweep of the woman’s lashes brushing against her high cheekbones. He shifted in his chair, uncomfortably aware of his attraction to her. To a potential witness. Which was not only a no-no, but in his case, possibly a career killer.

  Not that attraction had been the problem in Atlanta. Sympathy and misplaced trust had been his downfall there. But the lesson was the same: No mixing it up with witnesses. Emotionally or physically.

  “I’d responded to his e-mail”—she glanced at the printed version, checking the time—“at around five. I told him it was a scam and I was shocked he didn’t know about it.” She nibbled her bottom lip. “I told him he wasn’t much of a fan if he hadn’t noticed I’d written a whole chapter about it in my book. Then I suggested he print out the articles I linked to, roll them up, and smack his buddy in the head with them for even considering going along.”

  She managed a weak smile. Alec couldn’t bring himself to return it. Judging by what he knew of the boys, he suspected there was nothing Ryan wouldn’t have done to try to stop his friend. Yet, in the end, he’d gone with him to his death.

  Tragic. So damned tragic.

  “And the instant messages?”

  “I had run down to the corner market, and didn’t log off. When I came back, I saw he had IM’d me a couple of times.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He was asking if any of these scams ever included getting a certified check, and if those checks could bounce. Which, of course, they can, if they’re faked. It’s happening all the time, especially to people who sell stuff on Craigslist and Internet auction sites. Or those who respond to ads for ‘mystery shoppers’ or work-at-home opportunities.”

  Alec made a note to look into the certified-check angle. There’d been no mention of it in the crime scene report, or in any of the interviews with Jason’s or Ry an’s parents. He also wanted to know more about those work-at-home ads she’d mentioned, given the other murder five weeks ago.

  “I tried to respond, but he was offline by then. It was the night of the big snowstorm, and my Internet connection went out, and I forgot about it.”

  The night of the snowstorm. The night the boys had disappeared. Would they have gone through with the meeting, driven to their deaths, if the scam expert Ryan so trusted had personally warned him of the danger? From what the computer guys could tell, Ryan had not opened Samantha’s return e-mail. It had been hung up in one of those cyberspace black holes and hadn’t shown up in his e-mail account until the next morning.

  But the IMs . . . If Samantha Dalton had been sitting at her desk to receive them and respond right away, how different might things be today?

  She was definitely going to take the news of Ryan Smith’s murder very hard.

  And though she was a perfect stranger, Alec already dreaded having to tell her.

  They’d discovered the bodies right on schedule.

  He’d been watching for the story on the news, knowing that as the weather warmed back up to above-normal temperatures, the chances of the car being spotted in the thawing pond would improve. And that once the car was found, the water would be searched for its occupants.

  He laughed softly, wondering how the state police divers had enjoyed dipping beneath the frigid surface.

  How had the boys looked after their winter dip? Had their toes snapped off like the tips of delicate icicles? Had their eyes become glittering glass marbles? Was the skin as fine as porcelain or veined like marble? Did their hair float about their heads before freezing, forming beautiful, crystallized halos of white?

  He would have enjoyed seeing them. Two fools frozen in a pose of eternal stupidity.

  “Not two fools,” he reminded himself. “Not the second boy.”

  No, Jason’s unfortunate friend had exhibited a modicum of intelligence. But not enough to keep him from riding along to a cold and dark final destination.

  “Ahh, well.” He shrugged off the unease. Because misplaced loyalty was nearly as damning as outright stupidity. The world had no place for it.

  He studied the article on his computer screen for a moment longer, looking for nuances in the tone or quotes from the investigators that might hint at whether they had determined his involvement. The moment the FBI became part of the investigation, he’d know for sure, but there was no mention of that particular entity.

  Not yet, anyway. But there would be. His last taunting message to the boys’ parents, sent after he’d seen the story on the Wilmington news station’s Web site, had ensured it.

  Having studied every word of the article, and being unable to contact his latest project, the dull and unimaginative Wndygrl1, from here at work, he skipped over to another familiar site. The newest weekly “rant” column wouldn’t go up until late tomorrow night, and he would be alert and awake, hungering for her words, her thoughts, the entrée into her beautiful mind.

  Until then, he couldn’t resist reading over the entry from last Wednesday night. And the one from the week before. And the week before that. All the way back to the article warning about so-called finance ministers offering to make people rich.

  He tsked. “They really should listen to you, darling.”

  He’d certainly paid close attention. Close enough to know how to word his lure and cast his reel. He’d hooked quite a few prospects, but only one, young Mr. Todd, had followed the bait all the way into the net.

  “Youngsters. Can’t teach them anything.”

  Ahh, well. If the fools were incapable of appreciating the advice to be gained and the lessons to be learned on this, his favorite Web site, he himself was not. After all, how better to test the intelligence of his prey than by seducing them with a promise that could be easily disproved with a few flicks of the fingers on a keyboard?

  Those too gullible to spend two minutes searching for the information that could save their lives didn’t deserve to live.

  As he gathered his things to leave for the day, he smiled in anticipation of tomorrow night’s column. The “deposed royalty” dating scheme was progressing nicely, but should be coming to its inevitable conclusion soon.

  After that it was anyone’s guess. He mightn’t find anything to amuse him for weeks, perhaps months. Or he could receive inspiration for his next project tomorrow at midnight. Not knowing simply heightened the excitement.

  Carefully choosing his destination to ensure safe distance from his real life, so he could cast his lures and toy with his online friend, Wendy, he drove into the cold winter evening. Though the car radio remained off, his fingers tapped on the steering wheel in time to an internal melody. It was classical and refined, nothing like the filth the people around him every day chose to listen to.
The kind of music a woman with a brain would appreciate. Too bad he knew so few.

  Except her. A woman both smart and beautiful, she had become his muse, providing inspiration, quietly whispering suggestions through her articles.

  She was a kindred spirit, an inquisitive mind in a lovely physical package.

  He found himself thinking about her often. Dwelling in the memory of the softness of her skin when they touched. The slenderness of her hand in his own. The sheen of her hair. The lyrical sound of her voice.

  He knew everything about her—where she lived, whom she socialized with. Knew she was often alone, intelligent enough to know she needed no company. Oh, yes, he knew it all. He would, in fact, call himself her number-one fan. A devotee.

  She had but one fault: her girlish desire to do good. But she could be cured of that, reformed. He knew a bit about curing the soul without crushing the spirit. He didn’t want to crush her; he wanted to free her. Release her from all the societal constraints that said she had to be nice, had to be good, had to help those who were too stupid to help themselves.

  He would mold her until they became a perfect pair, an ideal couple.

  It would happen. Someday he’d teach her. With his help, she would escape from her bonds and she would realize, as he already had, that she was his. The one woman he had ever really wanted.

  Samantha Dalton belonged to him.

  Chapter 3

  In the five months since members of her own team had stopped the monster known as the Reaper from murdering an innocent child, IT specialist Lily Fletcher’s nightmares had grown more violent. More extreme. Much more disturbing.

  The Reaper, Seth Covey, had added a new dimension to the horror taking place in her head every night as she slept, but he wasn’t entirely responsible. She had been tormented long before that case, the first she’d worked after joining Blackstone’s team.

  Lily’s dreams had grown dark on the night she’d caught a fleeting glimpse of her nephew’s face through the window of a stranger’s van as it disappeared down the street.

  They’d become bloody on the night his body was discovered.

  And vicious when her sister, her only other living relative, had killed herself rather than live with the loss of her little boy.

  There was no befriending the dead. No whispers of love and sorrow could make their bodies any less brutalized, their expressions any less terrified. No matter how many happy memories she focused on, or smiling pictures she cherished, at night, her loved ones always appeared the same. Ravaged victims who lived in her subconscious, emerging the moment she fell into a restless sleep.

  Now the horrific crimes Covey had committed played out in her head too. She’d seen them firsthand, witnessed the atrocities he’d recorded and uploaded to the Internet for the viewing pleasure of his sick, deviant friends at a sick, deviant Web site.

  The site was gone now. And so was Covey, dead by his own hand. Yet she still saw him night after night. Just a young punk, barely more than a kid himself, but so filled with hatred and rage he’d become a monster in human skin.

  Sometimes his face replaced the one of the bastard who’d killed Zachary. Or she beheld her nephew in place of the little boy who’d been saved. Saving Zach was a common theme. She always came so close, only to be devastated all over again when she failed.

  Those dreams broke her heart.

  They said you could withstand anything if you prayed enough, hoped enough, loved enough. But Lily no longer believed it. Prayer, hope, and love could never bring Zach or Laura back. Nor could they give her the kind of peace she longed for during the sweat-filled nights when she twisted and writhed in her bed, running, chasing, trying to stop the insane sequence of events before it started.

  She never could. She never would. The result would always be a dead child in her arms and her sister’s thin, wasted body in a bathtub full of reddish water, blood still slowly trickling from her slashed wrists.

  “Stop,” she told herself. She needed to get her mind off last night’s torment and back into the here and now. There were other things to worry about. Namely, the one thing she had left to live for. Because, even though she’d realized love, prayer, and hope weren’t enough to ease the pain, with the help of a pretty good therapist, she’d found other things that were.

  A thirst for justice. The need to stop any other family from going through what hers had. Stopping one monster from luring another boy like Zach into his van.

  Those things helped. They were enough to live for. Enough for her to get up every morning and put on her clothes and walk through yet another lonely day.

  The job was enough.

  “Did you say something?”

  Lily shook her head, flushing as she realized she’d lapsed into such dark musings right in the middle of a case. She and Brandon—the coworker and office mate who had also become a friend—were at the computer forensics lab. Hoping Jason Todd’s hard drive might hold a clue to the identity of his killer, they were watching while a computer forensics expert ran it through ACES, the Automated Computer Examination System.

  “Sorry. Guess I was muttering to myself.”

  “Okay, but make sure nobody answers. You know the bureau frowns on agents who hear voices in their heads,” he said with a grin.

  She managed a weak smile. “Deal.”

  Usually Brandon could tease her out of her darkest moods. There was something irresistibly charming about his big green eyes and spiky bleached-blond hair. He looked more like an underwear model than an FBI cyber nerd, and she suspected, judging by some of his hacker knowledge, that he’d had a little larceny in his soul as a teenager.

  Today, though, she could find nothing to smile about. Her heart was heavy, filled with sadness for the families of Jason Todd and Ryan Smith. She was also a bit uncomfortable being here. Though she trusted Brandon, she didn’t want to have to answer his inevitable questions if they ran into any of the forensics guys she’d been working with on another case.

  He said you could work on it.

  Months ago, Wyatt Blackstone had told her she could offer assistance in the investigation into Satan’s Playground, the now defunct Internet world where the Reaper had aired his videos. There he had hooked up with a perverted client with the handle Lovesprettyboys who had paid to have a young boy raped and murdered for his viewing pleasure. That was the boy they’d saved. The boy who sometimes wore Zach’s face.

  But while he hadn’t forbidden her to assist, Blackstone hadn’t been enthusiastic about it, either. He’d insisted that it not interfere with her current job. So she’d done it quietly. She’d offered after-hours assistance to the child-protection CAT trying to track down Lovesprettyboys and others like him.

  She had no choice. Because since the moment she’d first seen the pedophile’s vicious avatar having his fun in the cyber world, she had known he had to be stopped before he could move his crimes to the real one. If he hadn’t already.

  “You know this is probably a waste of time,” she said to Brandon as she glanced at her watch, wondering how much longer they would have to be here.

  “I know. Unless this guy is some kind of idiot, he didn’t write from an IP address that might actually lead back to him.”

  Judging from what she’d learned about their unsub in the past thirty-six hours, he most definitely wasn’t an idiot. He’d never be careless enough to use an easily traceable computer.

  “Okay, I’ve isolated all the individual e-mails between Jason and this Dr. Waffi,” said the specialist, Parker, who sat before a state-of-the-art terminal. “They came from three areas: Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Trenton. I’ve been able to determine via some hidden software coding that they all came from the same computer. But the IP addresses come from a half dozen different servers, one of which, I can already tell you, is from a fast-food restaurant chain offering free wifi.”

  “Playing terrorize-the-teen while scarfing a burger,” Brandon said. “Nice.”

  Lily sighed. “So he p
acked up his laptop, cruised around to find hot spots in a tristate area, jumped online, and then moved on before writing again.”

  “Looks like it,” Parker said. “As for the original message opening contact with Jason Todd, it looks like he used a ’bot net. Probably generated thousands of these ‘former finance minister’ letters, spammed them all over the place, and Jason was gullible enough to respond.”

  Gullible enough. Or just a kid dreaming big.

  The specialist continued going over his findings. As they’d supposed, the Professor hadn’t been stupid. He certainly wouldn’t have written from his home or work computer, and he would never have paid for Internet service at a café or a hotel, where there would be some record of his presence. Not when it was so easy to cruise around and steal access from any unsecured system. Sure, if they ever found a suspect, they would be able to link his computer to all the messages. But first they needed to find him.

  Smothering her disappointment, Lily listened to the report, even while wishing Parker would hurry. When she spied a familiar face, she knew the wishes hadn’t helped. Damn.

  “Hey, Fletcher, back so soon?”

  Cursing her luck, she offered a brisk nod to the agent—Anspaugh—who was heading up the very investigation she’d been helping on.

  “Caught another case,” she explained, hoping Brandon was paying careful attention to their own tech, and not her conversation.

  “Is it a big one?”

  She wasn’t sure how much Blackstone had shared beyond the walls of the Black CATs’ den. The BAU had to know they’d gotten a lead on the Professor, but that might be as far as it had gone. “Possibly.”

  Anspaugh smirked, reminding her of how little she liked the man. He had a big bully’s personality and a big bully’s body, and, unfortunately, a big bully’s tiny brain to go with the package.

  She liked him even less when he added, “So, did Blackstone manage to find another Reaper to justify his team’s existence?”