Michael Connelly - The Poet

"I'm fine. How are you?"

"A lot better since I heard the news this morning."

"Well, I'm glad, then."

"You did good, Jack, putting that guy in the hole. You did real good."

Then how come I don't feel so good, I thought but didn't say.

"Jack?"

"What?"

"I owe you one, buddy. And Johnny Mac owes you one."

"No you don't. We're even, Dan. You helped me."

"Well, just the same, you get back out here one day and we're going to go for crabs at the tavern. It'll go on my tab."

"Thanks, Dan. I'll be out."

"Hey, what about this G-girl who's been in the papers and TV? Agent Walling. She's a looker."

I looked over at Rachel.

"Yeah, she is."

"I seen the clip on CNN of her walking you out of that store last night. You be careful, young man."

He managed to get a smile out of me. I hung up and looked at the two messages from the publishers. I was tempted to return the calls but thought better of it. I didn't know much about the publishing industry, but back when I was writing my first novel-the one later left unfinished and hidden in a drawer-I'd done a little research and decided that if I ever finished the book I'd get an agent before I went to the publishers. I had even picked the agent I would seek to represent me. Only I had never finished a book to send to him. I decided I would look up his name and number again and call him later.

Next to consider was the call from Warren. The stenographer still had not arrived in the office so I hit the buttons for the number he had left. An operator answered and when I asked for Warren I saw Rachel immediately look up at me with quizzical eyes. I winked at her as the voice on the line told me Warren was out of the office. I told her my name but left no message or callback number. Warren would have to think about missing the call when he got that.

"Why were you calling him?" Rachel asked after I hung up. "I thought you two were enemies."

"I guess we are. I was probably going to tell him to go fuck himself."

It took me an hour and fifteen minutes to tell my story in full detail to Rachel with the stenographer taking it down. Rachel primarily asked leading questions, designed to move me along through the story in chronological order. When I got to the shooting, her questions were more specific and for the first time she asked what my thoughts were at the time of specific actions.

I told her I went for the gun to simply get it away from Gladden, nothing more. I told her of my idea to empty the weapon once the struggle ensued and how the second shot was not deliberate.

"It was more him pulling the gun than me pulling the trigger, you know? He just tried for it one more time and my thumb was still in the guard. When he pulled it, it went off. He kind of killed himself. It was like he knew what was going to happen."

We went a few more minutes after that, with Rachel asking some follow-up questions. She then told the stenographer she would need the transcript the next morning for inclusion in the charging package that would be submitted to the district attorney.

"What do you mean, 'charging package'?" I asked after the stenographer had left the room.

"It's just a term. We call it that whether we are seeking a charge or an indictment or not. Relax. We obviously aren't seeking anything here but a finding of self-defense, justifiable homicide. Don't worry, Jack."

It was early but we decided to get lunch. Rachel said she'd drop me by the hotel afterward. She had work to do back at the field office but I'd be done for the day. We were walking down the hallway when she noticed the door marked Group Three was open and she looked in. There were two men in the room, both sitting at computers, paperwork on the keyboards and on top of the terminals. I noticed a copy of the same book I had on Edgar Allan Poe on top of one of the agents' monitors. He was the first to notice us.

"Hi, I'm Rachel Walling, how is it going?"

The other looked up then and they said their hellos along with their names. Rachel then introduced me. The agent who had first looked up and had identified himself as Don Clearmountain spoke.

"We're doing good. End of the day we'll have a list of names and addresses. We'll ship them to the nearest FOs and they should have enough for search warrants."

I visualized teams of agents hitting doors and pulling the pedophiles who had bought digital photos of murdered children out of their beds. It would be a nationwide reckoning. I began to visualize the headlines. The Dead Poet's Society. That's what they'd call these men.

"But I've got something else working here that is really pretty special," Clearmountain said.

The computer agent had a hacker's smile on his face as he looked at us. It was an invitation and Rachel moved into the room, me right behind her.

"What is it?" she said.

"Well, what we have here are a bunch of numbers that Gladden shipped digital photos to. Then we also have the wire deposit records of the bank in Jacksonville. We collated it and it all fits together pretty well."

He took a stack of pages off the keyboard of the other agent, looked through it and selected a sheet.

"For example, on December fifth of last year there was a deposit of five hundred dollars made to the account. It was wired from the Minnesota National Bank in St. Paul. The sender was listed as Davis Smith. Probably a false name. The next day, Gladden's cellular modem placed a call to a number we've traced to a fellow named Dante Sherwood in St. Paul. The connection lasted four minutes, about what it takes to transmit and download a photograph. We've got literally dozens of transactions like this. One-day correlations between deposits and transmissions."

"Great."

"Now, the question all of this raises is, how did all these buyers know about Gladden and what he had to sell? In other words, where was the marketplace for these photos?"

"And you found it."

"Yes, we did. The number called most often on the cellular modem. It's a computer bulletin board. It's called the PTL Network."

Rachel's face showed her surprise.

"Praise The Lord?"

"You wish. Actually, we think it means Pre-Teen Love."

"Gross."

"Yeah. It was actually kind of easy to figure out. Not that original and most of these boards use these kinds of euphemisms. It was getting into the network that took us all morning."

"How'd you do it?"

"We came up with Gladden's passwords."

"Wait a minute," Rachel said. "What happened last night has been all over the news across the whole country. Wouldn't whoever was operating this bulletin board have wiped him out? You know, killed his access and his password before we got in?"

"He should've but he didn't." Then Clearmountain looked at the other agent and they shared conspiratorial smiles. There was something still not said. "Maybe the systems operator was sort of tied up and couldn't get to it in time."

"Okay, tell me the rest," Rachel said impatiently.

"Well, we tried everything to get in, variations on Gladden's name, DOB, social security, all the usual tricks. Nothing. We were thinking the same thing you were, that he was deleted from the system."

"But?"

"But then we went to Poe."

Clearmountain took the heavy book off his monitor and held it up.

"It's a two-password entry system. We got the first one easy. It was Edgar. But then the second, that's where we had trouble. We tried Raven, Eidolon, Usher, everything we could pull out of this book. Then we doubled back and went through Gladden's names and numbers again. Still nothing. Then-bingo!-we nailed it. Joe did while he was having coffee cake."

Clearmountain pointed to the other agent, Joe Perez, who smiled and took a bow in his seat. For computer cops, I guessed that what he had done was like making a felony arrest for a street cop. He looked as proud as a boy who scores in a hotel room on prom night.