Karin Slaughter - Fractured

She asked, "What about e-mail?"

"There are two addresses on here. One is through the cable company for Internet service. All that's on there is spam-Viagra offers, Nigerian money laundering, that sort of thing. There's no address book, no sent mails, nothing. The other one looks like his school e-mail. I read through everything; they're just correspondences with parents, memos from the principal. Nothing suspicious and nothing personal."

"Could he have kept a new e-mail address on the hard drive?"

"You'd have to ask someone who knows more about computers than me," Charlie said. "Blood and guts I can tell you about. Computers are just a hobby."

Will said, "He wouldn't put a camera in that room unless he was taping himself so he could watch it later. We need to find that hard drive."

"I didn't find anything in Adam's room," Faith reminded him. "His computer was stolen a week before the crime was committed."

"What about Gabe Cohen?"

"Nothing jumped out," Faith told him. "I checked his computer, but like Charlie said, I'm not an expert."

"It'd be a stretch asking to see it again."

She wondered if that was some kind of dig at her for not arresting Gabe Cohen. They were both frustrated and angry. She decided to let the comment pass. "Did you find anything in Bernard's desk at school?"

"Nothing," Will answered. "Maybe the accomplice is keeping the hard drive or a computer for him? Maybe there's a laptop?"

"What about his car?"

"Cleaner than the house," Will said. "Smells like bleach and vinegar."

Charlie stated the obvious. "If you find the video files, that's the smoking gun."

Will said, "I'll get copies of all his phone records, landline and cell."

"This guy is smart," Faith pointed out. "He'd have one of those pay-as-you-go lines. There's no way we can trace them."

"We've already fucked this up twice from making assumptions. Bernard is smart, but he can't think of everything." Will asked, "Charlie, can you check his Internet history?"

Charlie clicked the icon for the Internet browser. A page popped up with a scantily clad teenager doing a split over the words, "Barely Legal." He opened the root directory. "Looks like he emptied the cache, but I can still recover some of the pages." After a few more clicks, he found Bernard's recently viewed pages. The first linked to Westfield Academy's grading program. The next few were retail outlets you would expect a teacher to be interested in-Barnes amp;Noble, Wal-Mart. Apparently, Bernard had been searching for a copy of Wuthering Heights .

"Here we go," Charlie said, pulling up a chat room. Faith leaned in for a closer look, but the site was one intended for teachers who were looking to retire. Another chat room was for West Highland terrier lovers.

Will asked, "What about the first site?"

Charlie went back to Barely Legal. "It's got a disclaimer on the front that says all the girls are of age. As far as the Internet is concerned, as long as they're not obviously underage, like, children, then that's all you need."

Faith looked around the room, feeling a slight sense of disgust as she thought about Evan Bernard sleeping here. She went to the bedside table and opened the drawer from the bottom with her foot. "More porn," she said, not touching the magazines. There was a girl on the front cover who looked about twelve, but the masthead insisted otherwise, proclaiming, Legal Horny Honeys .

Will had slipped on a pair of gloves. He pulled out the magazines. All of them had teenage-looking covergirls. All of them implied that the girls were of legal age. "Perfectly legal."

"Detective?" Ivan Sambor's large frame filled the doorway. He held a couple of plastic evidence bags in his meaty hands. Faith saw a large pink vibrator and a set of fur-lined handcuffs, also pink. "Found these in the other room."

Will said, "Tell the lab those have priority."

Ivan nodded, leaving the room.

Faith told Will, "Bernard doesn't have any other properties in his name either in the state of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee or Alabama."

"Let's broaden the search," Will said, though Faith thought that was a shot in the dark. Bernard would not use his real name if he had a silent partner to act as a front.

She said, "I've got a team calling all the storage rental places within a thirty-mile area."

"Check under the names of any family members," Will told her. "We need to know who his friends are. Maybe there's an address book." He glanced around the room, scanning every piece of furniture, every painting on the wall. "The judge limited the scope of our search warrant to evidence tying Kayla Alexander to Bernard. We could argue that we're looking for names of other victims. Even if he's convicted for Kayla, Bernard could be out in two to three with good behavior."

"He'll be a registered sex offender. He'll never teach again." "That's a small price to pay for kidnapping and murder." "You're sure he's involved in the other crimes, that it's not just what he said: he had sex with her, she went her way, he went back to school?"

"You saw that bedroom, Faith. He's into young girls." "All that means is that he is into raping them, not murdering them."

"He learned in Savannah that it's dangerous to leave witnesses." "Sorry to interrupt," Charlie said, "but maybe you should consider the fact that he was also looking into retiring." Will seemed puzzled. "How do you know that?" "The Web site?" Faith asked, wondering how he had forgotten about it so quickly. "Charlie, pull it up again."

Charlie did as she asked, finding the correct Web page. He scrolled through the list of questions and responses. "I'm not sure what screen name he went by. They're all pretty innocuous." He clicked to the next page. "Basically, they're talking about what benefits they retain after retirement, consultancy jobs to help pay the bills-that sort of thing." The screen changed as he selected a new link. "Georgia's teacher retirement program." He leaned closer to the screen to read the details. "All right, this deals with private versus public school teaching. With the state retirement program, you have to have a certain number of years vested to qualify for a pension. Private, you're on your own." He scrolled down, skimming the text. "It says here that they have to go thirty years to get full retirement."

"Maybe he decided he couldn't wait it out," Faith said. "A million dollars would certainly help pave the way toward a comfortable early retirement."

Will told her, "Bernard's only been at Westfield for twelve years. He told us he was teaching in the public school system at one point. Let's find out where he taught before that."

"He would've left in the mid-nineties," Faith said, doing the math in her head. "Maybe there was some impropriety they swept under the rug."

"I know teachers don't make a lot of money, but don't you think it's odd that he's living in this crappy apartment at his age?"

Charlie suggested, "Maybe he's been spending all his spare cash on flights to Thailand to pick up underage girls."

Faith asked, "Do you think we have enough cause to look at his financial records?"

Will shook his head. "We didn't list financial documents in the search warrant."

Charlie cleared his throat. Faith looked at the computer screen. He had pulled up Evan Bernard's accounts at the local credit union. "Let this be a lesson not to store your passwords in your key-chains."

Will said, "Check to see if he made any payments to storage facilities."

Charlie moved the mouse around, highlighting each account as he read through the details. "Nothing's popping up. He pays twelve hundred a month for this place. His utilities are about what you'd expect. Groceries, dry cleaners, car payments, a couple of PayPal payments." He read through the rest. "It looks like most of his money goes into his 401-K. The guy's socking it away for retirement."