One by One (Роберт Хантер 5 Поодиночке) - Carter Chris (2) - Страница 18

Twenty-Three

Michelle Kelly, the head of the FBI Cybercrime Division in Los Angeles, sat behind her computer screen, typing frantically on her keyboard. Standing behind her, reading every word she typed, was Harry Mills, a Cybercrime Division agent and engineering genius. He’d joined the FBI CCD three years ago, after obtaining his PhD with honors in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Michelle and Harry had been involved in a sting operation for seven months now. They’d been tracking a serial pedophile, who’d been grooming ten to thirteen-year-olds via Internet chat rooms for years. The guy was a real scumbag. He knew how to identify the lonely kids. The ones who felt they didn’t fit in. The outcasts. The vulnerable. He was very patient. He would chat with them for months, gaining their trust. At first he would tell them he was thirteen, but as their virtual relationship strengthened, he would reveal he was in his early twenties and that he was a university student. The truth was, he was in his late thirties.

He was always charming, understanding, supportive and very flattering, and to any teenage girl who felt she was misunderstood by everyone, including her parents, that was a very powerful wall breaker. It worked every time, and soon they’d be infatuated with someone they’d never met. After that, it was almost impossible for them to say no to a meeting.

To the FBI’s knowledge, he’d seduced and had sex with six girls so far. Two of them were only ten.

But this predator was far from dumb. He was also very good with computers. He was always mobile. He used a laptop, and he only chatted from free Wi-Fi spots, like cafes, bars and hotel lobbies. He never purchased a Wi-Fi connection password, either hijacking them from other users or hacking the system. Most free Wi-Fi spots aren’t best known for their unbreachable Internet security.

He also kept on jumping from chat room to chat room, sometimes even creating his own. He used different aliases, and he never chatted for more than ten to fifteen minutes at a time.

Four months ago, almost by chance, Michelle found him chatting out of a chat room set up in Guatemala. The FBI CCD had run hundreds of these operations. They all knew that the easiest way to reel these types of sickos in was to fool them into believing they were chatting with a potential victim. Michelle jumped at the chance, and in a blink of an eye she became ‘Lucy’, a thirteen-year-old girl from Culver City. He bought it, and they’d been chatting almost every day since. He’d been using the alias ‘Bobby’.

‘Bobby’ was indeed very charming and supportive. It was very easy for Michelle to see how any teenage girl with low self-esteem would be completely swept off her feet by ‘Bobby’.

‘Lucy’ and ‘Bobby’ had been talking about a meeting for weeks now, and yesterday morning ‘Lucy’ finally gave in. She told him that she could skip school on Monday. She’d done it before. They could meet somewhere not too far, and spend the day together, but they had to be careful. If her parents found out, she would be in a lot of trouble. ‘Bobby’ promised her that they would never find out.

Right now, they’d been chatting for seven minutes, making the final arrangements for where and when they’d meet on Monday.

‘We could meet in Venice Beach,’ Michelle typed. ‘Do u know it?’

‘Yes, of course I know it [smiley face],’ ‘Bobby’ replied.

Venice Beach was just a bus ride away from Culver City. It was a wide-open space where the FBI could easily set up long-distance cameras with powerful lenses, and pack the entire area with undercover agents and dogs.

‘[Smiley face] I can meet u there at 10,’ Michelle typed. ‘Do you know where the sk8 park is?’

‘I do. By the sk8 park sounds great. Can’t w8.’

‘[Smiley face with a tongue out] But I have to b back home b4 3, or else I’ll b in BIG trouble.’

‘Don’t worry, Lucy,’ ‘Bobby’ replied. ‘No one will know. It will be our little secret [face with a zipped-up lip].’

‘K. LOL. Bye, Bobby. C U Monday.’

‘[Four smiley faces] C U Monday, Lucy xxx.’

They disconnected.

‘Urghhhh,’ Michelle said, rolling her chair back from her desk and shaking her arms in the air as if having a seizure. She always did that when she disconnected from a chat with ‘Bobby’. ‘What a fucking creep.’

Harry smiled. ‘Are you OK, though?’

She nodded. ‘I’m fine. I’m glad that this one is coming to an end.’

‘You can say that again.’

‘I want to be there on Monday. I want to look straight into his eyes when they cuff this sack o’ shit,’ Michelle said.

‘You and me both.’

‘I want to see the look on his face when he finds out I’m “Lucy”.’

‘Um, Boss, can you come and have a look at this?’ Another CCD agent, who’d been monitoring some of their web crawlers, called from his desk.

‘What is it, Jamie?’ Michelle replied.

‘I’m not sure, but I’m pretty certain you’re going to want to see it.’

Twenty-Four

The woman looked to be in her early thirties, with long, straight, dyed blonde hair, which looked damp, probably from sweat. Her oval-shaped face was accented by plump lips and deep-set blue eyes that had undoubtedly been crying. There was a small black mole just below her bottom lip, at the right-hand corner of her mouth. She was average size and had nothing on except for a pair of purple panties and a matching bra.

Garcia felt his heartbeat pick up speed.

The woman looked absolutely petrified. Her eyes were open as wide as they would go, moving constantly, as if searching for something. She kept on turning her head from side to side, clearly trying to understand where she was, or what was happening to her. Her lips were trembling and it looked like she was having trouble breathing. She seemed to be lying down, but her movements were limited, not because she was tied up, but because she was locked inside a confined enclosure. Some sort of transparent box made out of glass, or Perspex, or a similar material. But it was much smaller than the one the killer had used for the first victim. The woman only had about five inches of space on each side, and maybe three inches above her head.

‘Is she in a glass coffin?’ Garcia looked at Hunter, who gave him an almost imperceptible shrug.

Hunter quickly opened the screen recording application he had asked IT to install on his computer and started recording the broadcast.

If the glass coffin was lying flat on the floor, the camera streaming the images seemed to be directly above it, positioned at a slight diagonal angle. But they could only see down to her waist. Her legs didn’t make the shot.

Panic erupted inside the woman and she started to frantically hammer her fists and seemingly kick her feet against the glass walls, but they were way too thick for her feeble efforts to make any impression. She was screaming as loud as she could. The veins on her neck looked like they were about to pop, but neither Hunter nor Garcia could hear a sound.

‘What is this?’ Hunter asked, pointing at his screen.

Only then Garcia noticed the end of what looked like a large dark tube, about five inches in diameter, attached to one of the sides of the glass box.

Garcia squinted at his screen. ‘I don’t know,’ he finally said. ‘Ventilation, maybe?’