Thomas O`Callaghan - The Screaming Room

“I knew it. Abigail Shewster.”

A broader grin formed on Thomlinson’s face.

“Here comes the best part,” said Driscoll.

“Gweneth Shewster,” said Thomlinson.

“Who the hell is Gweneth Shewster?” Margaret searched his eyes for an answer.

“Gweneth Shewster. Date of birth August 12, 1976. Daughter to Malcolm and Penny Shewster of Holmby Hills.”

“Whoa!”

“That’s an excerpt from her obituary,” said Thomlinson. “Made all the noteworthy papers. Even the New York Times. Sunday edition! Very modest funeral, though. Attended only by family. Gave daddy an immediate excuse to have the little darling’s name deleted from the sex offenders registry. No sir. There was no further need to renew this lady’s subscription.”

“May I take it from here?” Driscoll asked.

“By all means.”

“Malcolm Shewster slipped. I’m sure he isn’t even aware of it. When I first met him in Sully Reirdon’s office, he boasted that he was prepared to offer a large sum of money to the man who delivered the psychopath that killed his daughter, an only daughter. And he was correct. He only had one daughter. But no man buries an only daughter twice.”

“Unless you’re Malcolm Shewster,” said Margaret.

“Precisely. He was powerless to force Gweneth’s crime to go unpunished. Part of that punishment included her name appearing on the sexual offenders registry. I’m sure he fought that armed with a bazooka. I’m guessing neither his money nor influence could sway the courts. But he’s Malcolm Shewster. Orchestrating a fabricated death was not beneath him.”

“Shortly after the burial, the Shewster clan, diminished though they were in number, relocated to San Luis Obispo,” said Thomlinson. “Got themselves a new house, new surroundings, new neighbors.”

“And gave birth to a twenty-two-year-old daughter. They called the newborn Abigail.”

“Shewster was good at the game,” added Thomlinson. “He had Abigail visit a plastic surgeon, pick out a new look, do something with her hair. Hell, he even threw in a boob job! The birth records were made to appear like any run-of-the-mill adoption. He might not have been able to stop the authorities from posting Gweneth’s nom de famille.”

“But he’d be damned if he couldn’t remove it,” said Driscoll.

“That’s why California’s penal code, section two-nine-zero, subdivision f-three is my favorite. It’s the one that mandates the Department of Justice be informed of any name change.” Thomlinson smiled and unpocketed a cigar.

Margaret hurried into Driscoll’s office to bring him up to speed on her ongoing investigation involving the duplicitous, somewhat clonelike, Shewster woman.

“Your boy Shewster shoulda been a bricklayer,” said Margaret, using a dampened finger to blot out a stain on her skirt.

“Why’s that?” said Driscoll, distracted by the flash of thigh her action produced.

“Because the son of a bitch who managed to have his daughter’s dental records, from when she was six, mind you, come back with Abigail’s name on them is also good at building walls. No problem getting at Abigail’s, excuse me, Gweneth’s cell phone. It was retrieved at the zoo. A tad banged up. The overgrown chimps must have played Frisbee with it. But her computer? That’s a story unto itself. Despite the fact that the detective we flew to California was armed with enough paper to warrant the seizure of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Valley Ranch, his efforts to retrieve the computer were stymied by a wall of high-priced lawyers. At one point, he toyed with the idea of getting Tom Cruise to do his Mission: Impossible dangling-from-the-ceiling trick to get his hands on it.”

“You catch Mission: Impossible III?”

“Nope.” Jesus! Is he about to ask me out?

“Me neither. Tell me he got the computer.”

“Yep. It’s on its way to Technical Support.”

“And the phone?”

“Ah, the phone. Appears this West Coast socialite wasn’t much of a chatterbox. A few numbers led back to California. Never more than two minutes. We’re tracking them down. But the interesting calls, three actually, were made to and received from an eight-five-eight exchange. One outgoing six days before her body was found, followed by an incoming, three and a half hours later. The third call, outgoing, was placed the day before they found her in the cave.”

“If the ME’s right about the time of death, that last one was placed the day she was murdered. Let me guess. The eight-five-eight exchange is a disposable.”

“You got it. The number-one choice of drug dealers from coast to coast. Who knows? These crazies may have one of those World GSM phones with an International Sim card. They are hooking up with globe-trotters.”

“We’re a long way from rotary dialing.”

“Mr. San Antonio? Aka the guy who got whacked at the aquarium? Communications says he also called the eight-five-eight number. Once.”

“They couldn’t have both picked the number out of thin air. I’m thinking Web site.”

“Me, too. But I’m be willing to bet when we get our hands on his hard drive, it’s gonna show a lot of shopping at Disney. com. Remember, he was caught surfing rent-a-ho sites and got fired for it. And according to his resume he took up designing Web sites for a living. He’d know how to cover his tracks.”

“Probably used a laptop that’s buried deeper than he is.”

“Have Tech Support use industrial-sized crowbars on Miss Shewster’s computer. We need to know her cyber secrets yesterday!”

Cassie’s body looked like the letter C. With her ass pressed against the worn couch in their new lodgings, she was digging at an ingrown toenail with a corkscrew. She had watched as Angus’s inner demons took hold of him. The malaise could last a few minutes. Or upward of an hour. She would always try to keep him engaged. “We both knew the chance of them backing off was at minus-a-zillion. Even making it seem like you were a retard in the e-mail didn’t help. To them we’re still the bad guys. It’s not like we were asking for a goddamn medal-pinning ceremony. But we did rid the world of a lot of degenerates.”

“And we ain’t done yet.”

Angus felt as though he’d been swallowed whole; the walls of their refuge, becoming the hollow of the creature that had consumed him, making him feel trapped and vulnerable. He imagined he was under the scrutiny of an unseen snake, coiled and ready to strike. The predicament put the killing spree on hold. Others would likely resign themselves to their fate, praying that a mask of anonymity would shield them from further peril. But not Angus. Every fiber of his body demanded he exorcise himself, reclaim his weapon, and continue his righteous undertaking. His vengeance had become insatiable.

“Our game board. We shouldn’t’a left it. Now we’re gonna need a new one,” said Cassie.

“Gaming is over.”

“We’re gonna stop?”

“Hell no.”

“Jeeez! I thought ya really lost it. We’ll hafta forget about the Web site. They’ll be all over that. TwoNaughtyFreaks is officially shut down. Outta business. It’s gotta show up on one of the stiffs’ Favorites Lists. I’m thinkin’ chat rooms.”

Angus stood. That was a sign he was coming out of it. Hang on, Angus. Fight it!

“No chat rooms!” he said. “They’re crawlin’ with monitors. Ya think you’re talkin’ to a deserving target and it turns out to be J. Edgar Hoover.”

“He died.”

“Whatever.”

“We can still use the phone, right?”

“Yeah, but we can’t go out and hire one of those freakin’ planes to write the number in the sky. That means another Web site. New name. New menu. No twins. You can bet your ass they’re swarmin’ around every twin site on the planet. I’ll get ours routed through Nigeria. Driscoll tries to trace the IP address, he’ll end up on Mars.”