Джеймс Паттерсон - The People vs. Alex Cross

“I still can’t believe this guy works for us,” said Special Agent in Charge Mahoney, my old partner at the FBI, who had taken over the missing-blondes case for the Bureau.

“I suffer the indignity of it every day,” Special Agent Batra said.

“This could have waited a few hours,” Sampson said, and he yawned.

I said, “He was excited enough about it to call us at five a.m.”

“This better be good,” Sampson said. “All I’m saying.”

Batra rolled her eyes and shouldered open the lab door. The music was blasting. Rawlins had Flo Rida’s music video playing on all screens. He spotted us and high-stepped our way, slinging his limp black Mohawk back and forth while singing, “‘Welcome to my house!’”

Mahoney and Batra looked like they’d spent the night sleeping on coarse sandpaper. I smiled and drew my finger across my throat.

Rawlins stopped dancing, pouted, picked up a remote, and froze the video. The lab got quiet.

“The best part was just coming,” he said. “Clay Pritchard lays down the best saxophone licks since—”

“You woke us up, called us in here,” Batra grumbled. “It wasn’t to dance, was it? Because if it was, I’m gonna be pissed.”

“Beyond pissed,” Mahoney said.

Rawlins sighed, said, “Sometimes I wonder if the academy’s training just squeezes the soul and celebration out of every agent who graduates Quantico.”

“Let’s see what you’ve got, Krazy Kat,” I said.

Rawlins fashioned his hair into a bun like a samurai’s top-knot, a style that appeared to give Mahoney and Batra indigestion. The computer scientist waved a finger at me with one hand and snatched up a towel with the other.

“Took me almost three days straight, but I was able to raise the dead.”

“You calling yourself the Messiah now?” Batra said.

“Just a miracle worker,” Rawlins said as he toweled his upper body dry.

He put on an FBI sweatshirt and a pair of black-and-white checkered sneakers before strolling over to the keyboard for the main screen array.

“A lot of the data was corrupted,” he said, typing. “But I was able to salvage a few things from the day Timmy Walker was killed.”

Rawlins hit Enter, and Flo Rida and his house disappeared on the screens, replaced by shaky video showing a wooded scene. The cameraman was sneaking through thick foliage.

I had no idea where it was shot until a boy’s hand came forward and pushed aside leafy vines and saplings to reveal the lip of a dirt bank. The camera tilted down the bank and out twenty feet toward a blue Toyota Camry in a familiar clearing. The windows of the car were down.

The camera trembled, and you could hear Timmy Walker breathing hard while Ginny Krauss and Alison Dane made love naked in the backseat.

“The little Peeping Tom creep,” Batra said.

“It is creepy,” Rawlins said. “But I think you’re going to like little peeping Timmy, God rest his soul, before it’s over.”

The camera settled and zoomed in. Alison Dane’s hand slid from her lover’s breast and trailed down over her belly, and then she seemed to hear something. The cameraman did too.

The focus went haywire for a moment before settling back on the girls, who were scrambling for their clothes. Then Ginny Krauss happened to look out the window and up the bank, straight at the camera.

She screamed, “There’s some pervo kid in camo out there! He’s filming us!”

Timmy apparently whirled around and took off back into the forest. The next twenty-seven seconds were herky-jerky, mostly flashes of green in a dim forest.

Then, over the croaking of tree frogs and the thrumming of crickets, you could hear a vehicle roar into the clearing and skid to a stop. One of the girls screamed.

The camera turned back and began moving again, going closer to the clearing, zooming in on a white Ford utility van idling in front of the Camry.

One of the girls started screaming again. “Please! Don’t do this! Help! Kid! Help us, kid!”

The screen went black.

Rawlins said, “Unfortunately, that’s all the video I could recover.”

“Shit,” Sampson said. “Can you give us a blown-up look at that van?”

“I don’t need to,” Rawlins said. “Timmy did.”

He gave the keyboard several more orders and the biggest screen was filled with a digital photograph showing a grainy zoomed-in view of the van. The windows were tinted, so we couldn’t get a look at the interior, but the signage on the side was clearly visible.

“Dish Network?” Mahoney said.

“And those are Maryland plates,” I said. “Five, seven, E, one... can’t make out the—”

“It’s a six,” Rawlins said. “You see it better in the other photographs.”

“How many other photographs?” Sampson said.

“Five. Timmy could have just kept running after the girls spotted him. But he heard them screaming and decided to take these pictures. I think he was going to go to the police with them. Otherwise, why take the risk? Why not do the natural thing for a twelve-year-old boy caught with his hand in the pervert cookie jar and just run?”

Judging from her body language, Batra seemed to have some issue with the theory, but Mahoney said, “I think you’re right.”

“I do too,” I said. “I also think those pictures got Timmy Walker killed.”

“Oh, I know they did,” Rawlins said. “The phone died less than twenty-five seconds after the last picture was taken.”

Just after dark that same day, Sampson, Mahoney, and I were watching FBI crime scene techs getting ready to tear apart a white Ford utility van with Dish Network signage on both sides. It was in the parking lot at the Dish authorized-seller store in Rockville, Maryland, and roped off with police tape.

The store manager, a small, cranelike man named Lester Potter, was rubbing his hands together and watching nervously.

“You know that van was stolen, right?” Potter said.

“When was that?” Sampson asked.

“Five, six months ago? One of my techs was out doing a residential satellite install in Gaithersburg. She’s in the house not ten minutes, comes out, and the van’s gone. Boosted in broad daylight. They disabled the tracking device. Six weeks go by, and the company’s written it off, figured it was looted and chopped up for parts. But then we get a call. Pennsylvania state troopers found it abandoned in long-term parking at the Harrisburg airport. It’s crazy, but they didn’t take a thing. That van was as clean and shipshape as it was when it was stolen. Someone just took it for a joyride.”

“No,” Sampson said. “Someone took it to kidnap two teenage girls who are still being held captive and terrorized to satisfy the twisted fantasies of Internet trolls.”

“Oh,” Potter said, his face turning pale. “I had no idea.”

“Who was the driver the day it was stolen?” I said.

“Lourdes Rodriguez,” he said. “One of my best employees ever.”

“Can we talk with Ms. Rodriguez?”

“She doesn’t work here anymore,” Potter said. “Lucky gal inherited a pile of money from a great-uncle and took this job and shoved it a few months ago.”

Sampson said, “I guess the glamour of being a satellite installer wasn’t enough to keep her on the Dish Network career path.”

The store manager gave him an odd look, said, “Who could blame her?”

“No one,” I said. “You have contact information for Ms. Rodriguez?”

“I’m sure I do somewhere.”

“Could you do us a solid and dig it up?”

Potter’s nose twitched as if he thought the task beneath him, but he went inside.

“Why take nothing?” I said.

“How many people without training know how to install satellites?” Sampson said. “And I can’t imagine they’re easy to sell on the black market. They say Dish all over—”