Michael Prescott: Last Breath

“Hey, Ned,” Rawls muttered. “Take a look at this.”

Brand did not look up from his monitor. “I’m busy.” His fingers clacked on his keyboard with the monotony of falling rain.

“Are you? Sorry. Say, you want me to get you that chamber pot? I think Baltimore PD’s still got it in evidence.”

This obtained the desired reaction-the squeal of the casters on Brand’s office chair as he pushed away from his desk. “Okay, okay. Don’t go comparing me to Tomlinson, damn it.”

Rawls only smiled. Eddie Tomlinson was a phone-code thief who, in a remarkable feat of endurance captured by an FBI trap-and-trace, had remained online, typing continuously, for seventy-two hours straight. When his home was raided, he was found hunched over his keyboard, seated in a chair with a hole cut in the seat and an overflowing chamber pot underneath. Empty beverage bottles and discarded snack food wrappers littered the floor. Tomlinson put up no resistance to arrest, but it was observed that his fingers continued to go through the motions of typing even as he was led away in handcuffs.

Rawls had suggested the chamber pot option to Brand on several previous occasions, and it never failed to rouse him from his chair. There was something in Tomlinson’s dogged determination to continue entering code string after code string, for days on end, that came a little too close to the reality of the agents’ own lives.

“Whassup, bro?” Brand asked, leaning over Rawls’s shoulder. Adopting an urban black patois was one of Brand’s quirks, which he exercised even though he was not black and had been brought up as far from the mean streets as possible, in the very affluent, very white enclave of Stamford, Connecticut.

Rawls, on the other hand, was black, and moreover was a product of the urban hell of East St. Louis, rescued from a hopeless future by the nuns at the local parochial school, who had taught him self-discipline, the only lesson that really mattered. They had also taught him grammar. Rawls would never say whassup. Such an undignified expression was beneath him.

“This is what’s up,” Rawls said. He tapped his monitor, which displayed a dialogue box requesting authentication information-user name and password. The user name Rawls had typed was Bluebeard. The password line was blank.

“Bluebeard?” Brand asked.

“I’m pretty sure that’s the user ID, but I don’t have the password.”

“You lost me, buddy. Where’d the name Bluebeard come from?”

Rawls pulled a sheet of paper out of his printer and showed it to Brand. “This arrived in my Inbox a few minutes ago.”

The printout was the text of an e-mail message.

Agent Rawlz,

Something phunny going on. Do you like to watch? Say you’re Bluebeard. You have to phind the key.

A Web site’s URL had been listed below-a “www” prefix followed by several crude slang terms for the female genitalia, and ending in “. net.”

“Huh.” Brand’s grunt, as always, signified new interest on his part. “Wish these hackers would learn how to spell.”

This was a joke. Hackers had their own rules of spelling. F became ph. The plural s became z. The rules were elastic and meaningless, rebellion for its own sake.

Of course, a great many of the hackers really couldn’t spell.

Anyway, it wasn’t the spelling that had caught Brand’s interest. Both he and Rawls had read hundreds of e-mailed tips. Hackers were not known for their loyalty to others who practiced their art. They frequently turned in rivals merely to settle a grudge. But when they sent these tips to the Baltimore field office, they used the general e-mail address listed on the office’s Web site. They never sent e-mail directly to Agent Rawls or Agent Brand, for the simple reason that neither agent’s personal e-mail address was public knowledge.

“This came right to you,” Brand said, looking at the routing information on the printout.

“Yup.”

“And it’s anonymous, of course.”

Rawls nodded. “Sent via a remailer. No log trail.”

“Somebody went to a fair amount of trouble to get this to you without being traced. But they didn’t give you the password.”

“Guess they want me to show a little ingenuity.”

“Could just be a prank.”

“Yeah. But there’s something about it I don’t like. That name Bluebeard-it’s got me worried. You know the story?”

“Vaguely. French guy, kills his wives. Right?”

“Right. I’m assuming the password has to be connected with the story somehow. Otherwise the tipster wouldn’t have expected me to figure it out.”

“We need more information.”

“Way ahead of you.” Rawls opened a new browser window and entered the address of an online encyclopedia, then searched for Bluebeard and found the article.

The story of Bluebeard, Le Barbe Bleu, was first published by a compiler of French folk tales named Charles Perrault. In Perrault’s telling, Bluebeard was a handsome lord whose six wives had died of a variety of common diseases-or so Bluebeard claimed. But when his seventh wife opened a locked room in the castle, she stumbled on the six corpses of the women, victims of Bluebeard’s psychopathy. He had strangled them, so the story went, “with his own hands.” The seventh wife was saved from the same fate by the providential appearance of rescuers.

Brand, reading over his partner’s shoulder, grunted again. “The message says you’ll have to find the key. As in the key to a lock.”

Rawls nodded. “And in the story, who opens the locked room? The seventh wife.”

He entered various passwords that came to mind- wife7, wife#7, wifeseven, 7thwife, and others. All were rejected.

“No good,” he said. “Unless it’s her name.”

“Which is?”

Rawls scanned the encyclopedia article again. “Not mentioned here.” He guided the browser to a search engine and entered the terms Bluebeard and wife. The search results took him to an online glossary of folklore, where he found the relevant listing.

“Fatima,” he said.

He returned to the original window and typed Fatima into the password space. When he hit the Enter key, the screen reported authorization accepted.

“Bingo.” That was Brand. He was always saying things like that, just like a TV cop.

The home page of the mystery site appeared. It consisted solely of text links against a white background, as plain-vanilla as any site could be. Rawls scanned the rows of print. “Chat room… bulletin boards… vidcaps… Here we go.” Rawls guided his mouse pointer to a hypertext link that read. Do you like to watch? The words from the e-mail message.

He clicked the link, and a new page came up, empty except for the small, blurred image of a bedroom. There were no windows in view, only a pair of abstract paintings on the walls. An unmade bed, flanked by twin nightstands, took up one corner of the room. A doorway framed a bathroom with a stall shower.

The room was unoccupied, and only the flicker of sunlight on the walls from an unseen window indicated that the image was a moving picture and not a still. Bright sunlight, Rawls noted, yet at 4:30 it was already nearly dark on the East Coast.

“Webcam in a bedroom,” Brand said, “oriented with a view of the bed and the shower.”

“Probably a woman’s bedroom.” Rawls tapped the screen. “That bedspread has a floral pattern. Not the kind of thing most men would own.”

“So she’s a nice girl who just happens to enjoy sharing her bedroom activities with online voyeurs. Kinky but not criminal. Lots of weirdos put their private lives on the Web for bored lookie-loos to watch. There are a thousand sites like that.”

“If this is a site like that.”

“You think it’s a little more serious? Maybe somebody’s spying on this lady?”