James Patterson - Double Cross

Bree had pulled together a small forensic team focusing on the blog leads she was chasing down. An agent named Brian Kitzmiller from the FBI’s Cyber Unit had been assigned to us and was more than willing to come on board. The Audience Killer case had already caught his attention.

Bree asked Kitzmiller for the earliest possible meeting after he’d had a chance to go over the blog. Kitzmiller gave us a four-hour turnaround, which meant he was fast. Another good sign that we had everybody’s attention on this case.

We showed up at the Hoover Building close to three. I certainly knew my way around there, though I’d never done much work with the Cyber Unit and had never met Kitzmiller-I’d heard of him, however, and knew he had a reputation as a puzzle-solver.

“Come on in.” Even seated in front of a work terminal, he was obviously very tall and gawky-looking, with the brightest orange hair I had ever seen in my life.

This part of the unit was a low-ceilinged room on the second floor, a few floors below my old office. Everyone sat in wide stall-like cubicles with their backs to the center, where a large octagonal conference table was strewn with papers, files, and laptop computers. People did work here -good sign.

A glass wall separated the unit from the busy corridor outside.

Bree, Sampson, and I grabbed chairs and sat down in Kitzmiller’s stall. He was about my age, fit, and with that blinding head of hair.

“I can’t really source any of the audio,” he said, “but I did compare the screams on what the blogger calls Channel Two against the videotape from the original crime scene. It’s almost definitely a match. But that’s not quite the same as a forensic link between the blog and the killer. Theoretically, anyone could have posted this.”

“You mean, if someone else had access to the recording,” I said. “We’re all in agreement that the audio is original, right?”

“Sure,” he said. “So it’s either your suspect or someone who was given access by the suspect. Hard to tell about that for sure yet.”

“Let’s focus on one thing at a time,” Bree said. “You told me on the phone that the blog was posted from Georgetown University? Is that right?”

“Or, at least, through Georgetown. That’s the basic problem I’m seeing already, Bree. Whoever put up the blog knew how to cover his or her tracks fairly well.”

“Proxy server?” Sampson asked. His little niches of expertise always surprised me.

Kitzmiller smiled appreciatively at Sampson, but then he shook his head. “Negative. Worse , actually. He used an open proxy. Universities are notoriously easy marks for this kind of thing. Any boob can remotely attach their IP address from anywhere, and wham-you’ve got an untraceable site. All I can get you is a location. Nothing about identity.”

“Any suggestions at all?” Bree asked. “We really need your help on this.”

“Sure. I understand your frustration, Detective. My suggestion is that you get totally involved on your end. Jump in the deep water with me. We’ll keep paddling around here, but you’ll be glad if you do some stirring of your own. Believe me, a whole lot of detritus turns up online. You’d be surprised what you might find.”

“Honestly, I don’t know the first thing about cyberforensics,” Bree said.

“You don’t have to. I’m not talking about cracking code, here. I’m talking about a large community that needs to be canvassed. The whole blogosphere.”

“Blogosphere?”

Kitzmiller started pulling up several new windows at once, layered over one another on the screen to show us what he was getting at.

“First of all, we’ve got everyone who posted responses to the original blog. There was the MY REALITY site, for example. It’s already been taken down, but there were more than three dozen separate screen names for people who had replied to at least one of his entries. So that’s a pretty good start. You remember the old shampoo commercial? ‘You tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on and so on’? Same thing here. Some number of people read this, then turn around and talk about it on their own blogs, and the scope goes up exponentially. Chat rooms too.

“Now add to that the fact that you’ve got a killer who apparently likes to be in the spotlight. There’s a good chance he’ll stay a part of the community in some way. People intersect. You find the right intersection, maybe you solve your case, find your killer, go into the Detectives’ Hall of Fame.”

“That’s a lot of ifs ,” Bree said. “I don’t like ifs and maybes .”

People had been talking about cyberspace as the new frontier in law enforcement for years now. It looked like I was about to get my first extensive taste of it.

Kitzmiller ran a simple Google blog search for us to illustrate his point. He searched Audience Killer and got a whole screenful of responses.

“Wow,” said Bree. “I’m kind of impressed already. Or maybe I should say depressed . That’s a lot of detritus.”

Sampson added, “Fuck! It’s an epidemic.”

“You notice he never uses that full title on his own site. That’s probably why you hadn’t found it earlier. Even so, right here you’ve got more than eighty other strands that mention him, and two specifically dedicated to the subject. And he presumably hasn’t even hit three homicides yet.”

“Does the fact that he’s courting the attention speed all this up?” I asked.

“Sure, it does. There’s a voracious audience for all this stuff on the Internet. Most people say they abhor the killing, and a lot of them actually do, I’m sure. What you end up with is a mix of folks with legitimate forensic interest, people who want to know more but maybe for the wrong reason, and then people who just plain get off on it all. This guy is their dream come true. No one’s ever been so accessible, not while he was still this active.”

Bree spoke quietly, working it out in her head. “So… he uses other people to help turn himself into the thing he wants to be.”

Kitzmiller nodded and pulled up another window, the “official” Jeffrey Dahmer fan club site. “Pick your poison. He wants to be Dahmer. He wants to be Ted Bundy. He wants to be the Zodiac Killer.”

“No. He wants to be a much bigger star,” I said. “I think he wants to be bigger than any of the others.”

Including Kyle Craig? I had to wonder. How the hell does Kyle fit in?

I WAS ALREADY FRUSTRATED about the case, plus I was suffering from Bree deprivation. I was concerned that I’d have trouble focusing at work that week, so I decided to tape my sessions. Just in case, just to be safe.

Anthony Demao, the Desert Storm vet, did something unusual for him, which was talk in depth about his combat experience. I sat and reviewed the tape again over lunch at my desk. As I listened, I could picture Anthony: ruggedly good-looking, still in shape-a quiet man, though.

“We didn’t have sufficient support on the ground. The CO didn’t give a rat’s ass. We had a mission . That’s all he cared about,” he said.

“How long had you been there at that point?”

Silence. Then, “Ground attack started end of the month, so a couple of weeks, I guess.”

I was becoming more and more convinced that something really bad had happened to him during Desert Storm, something that could be a key to Anthony’s difficulties, maybe even an incident he’d repressed. The balance in this case was between not wanting to push too hard and a gut feeling that he wasn’t going to stick with the therapy for long, especially if he didn’t think we were making enough progress.