James Swain - The King Tides

“Tell me about your partner,” Daniels said.

“I don’t have a partner,” Rusty said.

“Then how about your friend. Tell me about him.”

“I have a lot of friends.”

“I want to know about one in particular. Tell me about the friend who’s into this stuff who you hang out with.”

“I run solo. I don’t hang out with anybody,” Rusty said.

Daniels stepped forward and dropped her voice. “If I check the calls logged on your cell phone and your emails, there won’t be one name that keeps popping up?”

“No, ma’am,” Rusty said.

“But you know other guys who are into this stuff,” she said.

“Sure. But I don’t socialize with them. You hang with other people, you inherit their problems. If another guy gets arrested and you’re with him, you’ll get arrested too.”

“You’ve been good at hiding your tracks, haven’t you?”

Rusty chose his words carefully. “I’m not going to apologize about who I am. I know these things are wrong, but I can’t stop it. So I try to be careful.”

The interrogation was starting out well. Rusty was saying the right things and also being respectful. His willingness to help also felt real.

“You’ve got hundreds of pornographic photographs and videos stored on your cell phone,” she said. “Where did you get them from?”

“Lots of places. I downloaded some, others were sent to me,” Rusty said.

“Sent to you by who?”

“Guys I met in chat rooms.”

“Do you know their names?”

“No, guys in chat rooms use aliases.”

“Really. What’s your alias?”

“Captain Rich. Richard’s my real name.”

“If I showed you particular images I found on your phone, would you remember where they came from?”

“I can try. My memory’s pretty good.”

Daniels removed her own cell phone from her jacket pocket and powered it up. She had transferred Rusty’s library to a file on her cell phone. She found a particular photograph and held the cell phone in Rusty’s face. The photo was of a naked teenage Mexican girl tied to a bed. She wore a shiny gold medallion around her neck, and looked like she would have preferred being dead to enduring any more abuse. Her torturers stood beside the bed wearing black leather masks.

“Does this look familiar?” the FBI agent asked.

Rusty’s face displayed no emotion. “Yeah, I remember that one.”

“Who sent it to you?”

“Guy named Creepie. Spelled with an ‘ie’ instead of a ‘y.’ Look, I only looked at that photo once. I’m not into torture.”

“No? Then why didn’t you erase it?”

“I must have forgotten.”

“You’re already in enough trouble, Rusty. Don’t compound your misery by lying to me. Your situation will only get worse if you do.”

Rusty had started to sweat. Looking at the torture photo hadn’t bothered him. But the thought of Daniels putting the screws to him did.

“All right, maybe I looked at it a couple of times,” he said.

Daniels returned the cell phone to her pocket. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and looked at Rusty like he was a rodent.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” the lifeguard said.

“The girl’s body was found in a field on the side of a highway in Houston seven years ago,” Daniels said. “She was an illegal immigrant who came across the border to find work. She was raped and strangled to death.”

Rusty shook his head in disbelief. “I asked Creepie when he sent the photo to me. I emailed him and said, ‘Did you kill her?’ Creepie emailed me back and said they’d let the girl go.”

“And you believed him.”

“Yes, I believed him. Guys into S&M like to boast about it. Creepie didn’t do that. He said the girl survived, and I believed him.”

“I found three other torture photos in the library on your phone. The FBI has these same photos. Guess what? The girls in all three ended up dead.”

Rusty’s eyes went wide, and his hands balled into fists.

“Fuck me,” he said under his breath.

“Did Creepie also send you these photos?” Daniels asked.

“Yeah. He told me the girls in them survived.”

“Do you see where this is headed, Rusty? You could be charged with being an accomplice to four murders if you’re not careful.”

“I didn’t know. You have to believe me.”

“I want to believe you, but you need to do more. Did Creepie send you any other images of girls being tortured? Think hard.”

Rusty scratched his chin and gave it some thought. “About six months ago, he emailed me a photo of a young black girl he was putting through the paces, and asked me if I wanted to see more. I said yes, so he sent me the rest and I downloaded them.”

“How old was this young woman?”

“She was young, maybe fifteen.”

“What else do you remember about her?”

“She was hog-tied and had a gag ball in her mouth. It was pretty graphic.”

“How many photographs of the black girl were there?”

“Five or six.”

“What else do you remember?”

“They were shot inside a house. There was furniture, and the floor was carpeted. The look on the girl’s face was pretty horrible. I decided to erase them.”

“If I showed you those photographs again, would you remember them?”

“Probably. Was she also killed?”

“Yes, she was killed.”

Daniels decided to take a break. She asked Rusty if he wanted a drink, and he said he’d like a Diet Pepsi. She went to the door and motioned for Lancaster to follow her.

They went into the hallway, and the door to the interrogation room locked itself behind them. The door had a square-shaped two-way mirror. Daniels gazed through it for a moment. When she was satisfied that Rusty wasn’t going to do something crazy, she walked to the end of the hallway and fed money into a vending machine.

“You want something?” she asked.

“A water would be good. My phone buzzed in my pocket three times while we were in the room. I’m guessing that’s your sister and brother-in-law checking in. What would you like me to tell them?”

Daniels bought two bottled waters and handed him one. They both had a long drink. He sensed that she was struggling for an answer. It was rare for a suspect to open up like Rusty was doing. She needed for him to keep talking for as long as she could.

“Want me to stall them?” he suggested.

“You don’t mind doing that?” she asked.

“You’ve got a head of steam going. No need for distractions.”

“Tell them I’ll call them tonight and give them the details.” She drained the water and tossed the empty in the trash. “I need to make a phone call and make sure that Rusty hasn’t turned up on any other databases. Would you mind going out to the rental, and getting my briefcase? It’s locked in the trunk.”

“Sure.”

Daniels handed him the keys, and he walked out of the building. The FBI had recently gotten a black eye courtesy of O. J. Simpson’s parole hearing, and he understood her desire to check other criminal databases to see if Rusty popped up. During Simpson’s hearing, the Nevada parole board had relied on the National Crime Information Center’s database of records to see if Simpson had any prior convictions. Outside of the acquittal in the murder of his ex-wife and her boyfriend, nothing had shown up, and the parole board had voted to let Simpson go free. Unfortunately, O. J. had been arrested for beating up his wife in 1989 and had pleaded no-contest to the charges. The omission of this crime from the NCIC’s database had highlighted a serious problem: There were major gaps in the information sent by the states to the feds.

While Rusty was being processed, a check had been run on his driver’s license, which had revealed that he’d previously lived on Cape Cod and on the south shore of Long Island in the town of Long Beach. Daniels would call the police departments in both areas and have them run a background check. It was the only way to be fully certain that Rusty was telling the truth when he said he had no prior arrests.