The People vs. Alex Cross: (Alex Cross 25) Page 9

  “Want to clue me in to the reason for all the secrecy?”

  “You’re a bright guy, you’ll figure it out,” Batra said as the elevator passed the first subbasement and began to slow.

  I noticed a throbbing and thumping sound that got louder and more distinct when we reached the second subbasement. The elevator doors opened and we were blasted with electronic techno-pop music. It was loud. It was pulsating. It oddly made me want to dance.

  The music obviously had the same effect on the guy with the flaming-red Mohawk twerking and gyrating inside the glass-walled lab directly in front of us. He wore denim shorts, a denim vest over a sleeveless black tee, and nothing else. Barefoot, and in time with the beat, he was shaking his booty, pumping both fists, and slashing the air with his Mohawk.

  I broke into a smile. Batra didn’t.

  She exited the elevator and crossed the hall to the lab door. I followed her, saying, “Okay, who the hell is that?”

  “Keith Karl Rawlins,” she said, sounding pained. “He calls himself KK or Krazy Kat, depending on the occasion.”

  CHAPTER

  32

  SPECIAL AGENT BATRA stopped at the lab door and looked back at me in real discomfort.

  I said, “He works for the Bureau? That’s why the no-disclosure?”

  Batra glared at me. “Rawlins is as brilliant as they come if you want to analyze anything digital. Far better than me, as a matter of fact.”

  That surprised me. I’d always thought Batra was one with the Internet. Then I realized the reason for Rawlins’s banishment to subbasement two.

  “He doesn’t fit the conservative J. Edgar G-man image, does he?”

  “No,” Batra said, twisting the doorknob. “KK definitely does not.”

  The music was even louder inside the lab. Past benches clogged with electronic test equipment, on the far side of the room, Rawlins danced before an arced array of eight large computer screens. The screens all showed the same video: people dancing in urban streets, shaking their rear ends to the addictive beat of the music.

  Batra got around in front of Rawlins and waved wildly at him.

  Rawlins made his hands into pretend guns that he pointed at Batra, and then he punched a key on a control board that looked like it belonged in a recording studio. The lab went quiet. Rawlins stopped dancing.

  He waved his fingers playfully at Batra and in a soft voice that reeked of New Orleans, he said, “I’ll forgive you this time for interrupting my daily Diplo fix. I was just about done regenerating my brain cells anyway.”

  “My son told me about that,” I said before Batra could reply. “Exercising for brain regeneration.”

  Rawlins saw me, studied me, and then smiled. He picked up a hand towel from the chair and came over to us, still smiling and patting his sweating skull on either side of the Mohawk. He had a gold hoop through his left nostril, and his earlobes featured stretched piercings. In shiny sequins across the chest of his T-shirt were the words GODDESS DANCES.

  “You’re bigger in person, I must say,” Rawlins said coyly. “And your son must have read the same article. What are the odds of that, Dr. Cross?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do,” Rawlins said. “Two in one-point-six-four billion, unless you look at it from a string-theory perspective, in which case the chance of brain waves vibrating out and crossing others rises exponentially with every person who reads that article.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “That’s a pity,” Rawlins said with a pout. “I so enjoy fiery brains and rippling brawn in a single package.”

  CHAPTER

  33

  I CHUCKLED. “YOU’RE out of luck on both counts, Special Agent Rawlins, which is why I came to see you.”

  Rawlins glanced at Batra and laughed. “No special this or agent that, Dr. Cross. It’s just KK or Krazy Kat. I’m a contractor. The Federal Bureau of Investigation could never make me a sworn agent. Am I right, Big Baby B.?”

  Batra rolled her eyes, said, “We’re here to work, Kat, not wallow.”

  “I think I’d be quite a badass crime fighter.” Rawlins sniffed. “Despite appearances, I’m honest to a fault and expect the same from those with whom I work. Tell me, Dr. Cross, did you murder those Soneji followers for sport?”

  “No.”

  “Or to right some wrong?”

  “It was self-defense.”

  He studied me for tics and tells but saw none. “How can I help you?”

  “First, a little context.”

  I gave him a synopsis of the story the cyberpimp Neal Parks had told Sampson and me. Parks claimed he had been in Newport News, Virginia, several weeks before, scoping out the military town for an expansion of his business. Partying in a strip club there, the pimp met two men in their early thirties who went by Billy Ray and Carver.

  The three men hit it off and drank and snorted too much late into the night. Billy Ray, who was more a talker than Carver, told Neal Parks they were trolling for blondes to use in movies they produced for several profitable sites on the dark web. One of the most recent, and most successful, Billy Ray said, featured two young blond lesbians from Pennsylvania. He gave Parks the URL of one of the websites: www.Itsoverblondie.org.co. I dug in my pocket and came up with the Ziploc containing the Toshiba flash drive. “The same URL is featured on the video on this drive. I want to know if the video’s real or not.”

  Rawlins became all business at that point. He took the bag and asked where I’d gotten the drive, and I told him about Gretchen Lindel’s father.

  “He should have brought this directly to the agents on his daughter’s case,” Rawlins said, moving toward one of his workbenches.

  “It’s complicated,” I said.

  “You’ve watched what’s on the drive?”

  “If it’s real, it’s the first actual snuff film I’ve ever seen.”

  “You just want to know if it’s fake?”

  “He wants to know everything and anything,” Batra said. “So do I.”

  Rawlins said, “You make a copy?”

  “On my laptop at home,” I said.

  “No crashes?”

  “Worked fine.”

  “I’ll check it anyway,” he said, sitting down at a computer. He donned latex gloves, got out the drive, and inserted it into a USB port.

  A few moments later, I watched a scanning icon count down the minute and forty-five seconds it took to do a full inspection of the flash drive. At the end of the scan, a message appeared: No known anomaly detected.

  “Well, all righty, then,” Rawlins said.

  He disconnected the flash, took it to the larger control board below the eight big screens, and plugged it into a server linked to the internal FBI network.

  A digital index of the drive popped up on the large center screen; it showed the icon of the single MPEG movie file. Rawlins clicked on it. There was a brilliant flash, and then the clip played—the grainy video of the hysterical blonde running through the forest with the cameraman in hot pursuit.

  “What was that?” Batra asked. “That flash at the beginning there?”

  “I don’t know,” Rawlins said, freezing the video.

  I said, “You know, come to think of it, when I hit the icon on my laptop, it did the same thing, only my screen’s much smaller and older, so it wasn’t as bright as that.”

  Rawlins grunted and gave his computer orders to list all running processes and applications. The directory opened and showed them in a stack sorted by the time each was launched, beginning with the most recent app.

  “That’s what just flashed there?” Batra said with an arched eyebrow. “Porngrinder?”

  CHAPTER

  34

  RAWLINS LAUGHED AND said blithely, “Oh, no, Porngrinder is on me. What can I say? It’s a lonely life in the basement at times.”

  “My God,” Batra said, disgusted. “The Bureau frowns on that kind of thing.”

  “Have them
sue me, won’t you?” Rawlins said.

  “What was the flash?” Batra said.

  “I don’t know. A blip, a screen hiccup. They happen, you know.”

  “Or a bug in the plug-in that drives the video player?” Batra said.

  Rawlins held up a finger. “A momentous occasion. Special Agent Henna B. and I might agree.”

  Batra rolled her eyes. “Tell us about the video.”

  I won’t bore anyone with the details of Rawlins’s technological savvy and instincts, but they were shrewd and his results conclusive. At first, he used ordinary software to try to access the video file’s so-called dark data. No luck. The video had been run through an onion system similar to the one used to create the Killingblondechicks4fun website. The dark data had been stripped away.

  “Not surprising.” Rawlins sniffed. “But I’ve still got the dust rag.”

  The “dust rag” was software Rawlins had designed and coded himself to raise the faintest trace of old dark and metadata. He compared the software to the Hubble Space Telescope looking for cosmic debris a thousand miles behind a comet’s long tail.

  Sure enough, his screen was soon filled with fragments of code that played out in sync with the video. By focusing on the moments where the lighting was dimmest and the noise of the alleged killing most pronounced, Rawlins found evidence in the data dust that suggested an audio splice in the sound track roughly six seconds long. Those six seconds included the knife-across-the-throat slitting noise and the pah that sounded like air bursting out of a frightened and dying chest.

  “She’s alive,” Rawlins said barely fifteen minutes after starting his examination. “Or at least, those weren’t the sounds of her murder.”

  I sighed with relief. I wouldn’t have to give Alden Lindel or his wife more heartbreaking news. “Explain how you know. The parents will ask.”

  Rawlins said, “The sound patch itself is fairly sophisticated CGA. Computer-generated audio. So someone’s had advanced training in sound effects. You’re looking for a film-school grad or someone who worked in a special-effects company out in Hollywood, not a coder.”

  “Why’s that?” Batra asked.

  Rawlins gave his computer a command, and the video on the center screen rewound to the beginning of the six-second splice. A second screen showed the remnants of the dark data. He pointed out a jagged line of data that almost connected top to bottom.

  “That’s your digital splice,” Rawlins said. “A more adept coder would have hidden it better, sewn it up as clean as a plastic surgeon. There wouldn’t have been even a hint of a scar.”

  “So this is basic sound-editing work?” I said.

  Rawlins touched his Mohawk as if it were a high-fashion hairdo and said, “Three steps above butchery. And that’s all I can manage now. I have a lot to do before Goddess opens.”

  I was puzzled.

  “His favorite dance club,” Batra explained.

  “Do you dance, Dr. Cross?” Rawlins said.

  Before I could reply, my cell phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out, saw the number.

  “My son’s school,” I said. “I have to take this.”

  CHAPTER

  35

  ALI CROSS BELIEVED he was smarter than the average kid at Washington Latin but not brilliant, not a genius. The kids he considered supersmart were also the shyest and the most awkward. He decided within a month of starting at the charter school that brilliance was overrated. He’d take very bright, very hardworking, and very curious any day of the week.

  Ali was the youngest kid in fifth grade at Latin by at least a year. With his attitude and sense of humor, he fit in with most of his older classmates. But, as his father always said, there were jerks in every crowd.

  Ali met two of them shortly after the school bell rang to announce the end of classes. He had fifteen minutes before debate practice and decided to go sit outside. It was a nice sunny afternoon, not too cold.

  Ali stopped on the front steps and looked toward the plaza, remembering the hooded men who’d grabbed Gretchen Lindel and shot Ms. Petracek. Rather than dwell on those violent events, he sat up on the wall at the top of the stairs and started playing a game on his phone.

  He was aware of knots of kids walking past him, and he caught snatches of their conversation. Suddenly, someone grabbed him by the collar, right below his chin, and pushed as if to shove him backward off the wall. Then whoever it was yanked him forward again.

  Shocked, surprised, Ali felt his stomach go sick with adrenaline and fear before he’d fully realized what had happened. George Putnam, a burly sixth-grader, still held Ali so tight by the collar, he was having trouble getting his breath. The older boy laughed at his reaction.

  “Saved your life,” Putnam said. “You little turd, Cross.”

  “Let go!” Ali said. “You’re choking me!”

  Putnam’s buddy Coulter Tate was taller and already fighting acne. Tate leaned over, got right in Ali’s face, and gave him a crazed, zitty look.

  “How’s it feel to be a killer’s son, Cross?” Tate said. “How’s it feel to have murder in the genes?”

  Putnam tightened his hold, making Ali’s eyes feel like they were swelling. There was no thought, no consideration on Ali’s part after that. He just pulled back his head and then slammed it forward. His forehead connected with Tate’s nose, and he heard a distinct crunching noise.

  Tate screamed and stumbled back, holding his hand to his nose, which was gushing blood.

  “He broke it!” He sobbed in disbelief. “He broke my nose!”

  Putnam was still holding on, looking shocked as he stared at his bleeding buddy, and Ali punched him in the throat. Putnam let go of Ali’s collar and went down on the stairs, bug-eyed and coughing, his hands to his neck.

  Ali was still in a fighting stance and trembling head to toe when Mrs. Dalton, the headmistress at Washington Latin, came running out of the school.

  “My God, what’s happening?” she cried.

  Ali didn’t reply or move. He kept his attention on the two sixth-graders, as if daring them to get up.

  “He broke my nose, Mrs. D.!” Tate said, the blood dripping between his fingers. “And the little frickin’ insane-o hit George in the throat!”

  “Ali?” Mrs. Dalton said. “Why did you—”

  “I’m not talking until my dad’s here,” Ali said, trying to stay calm.

  “You will tell me now, young man,” she said, sounding angry and full of authority. “Right now.”

  “Sorry, Mrs. Dalton,” Ali said, feeling weak as he dropped his fists and turned to face her. “Please get my dad here, or a lawyer, and then I’ll tell you exactly what happened.”

  CHAPTER

  36

  TRAFFIC WAS SNARLED as I crossed back into the district, and I wondered what Ali had gotten himself into that was so bad it deserved an immediate meeting. The headmistress wouldn’t tell me a thing.

  Inching over the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, I decided to call Alden Lindel. He answered on the third ring.

  “This is Alex Cross, Mr. Lindel. I’m happy to tell you that Gretchen did not die in that video. It was a fake.”

  Her father made a noise partway between a cough and a cry.

  “Oh, good!” He gasped. “Oh, thank God! Are you sure? How do you know?”

  “Because a very talented FBI computer wizard said that the video’s audio was altered. The sounds weren’t real.”

  “But it was Gretchen’s voice,” he said.“ I’d swear it.”

  “I believe you, Mr. Lindel. But that wasn’t the sound of her dying. I wanted you to know. Please tell your wife.”

  “Yes. Yes, right away.”

  “I’ll be in touch if I hear more.”

  “Well, I could still use someone to talk to, Dr. Cross,” he said. “Eliza, Gretchen’s mother, and I … we were separated before Gretchen was taken, and this has been even more of a strain. And my mother’s not well, and we’re thinking about endings.”

  �
�I’m sorry to hear all that, Mr. Lindel. Give my office a call tomorrow. We’ll make an appointment.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Cross.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, and I clicked the phone off.

  Traffic was moving, finally. Fifteen minutes later I parked close to Washington Latin and hurried inside toward the waiting area outside the offices of the headmistress and the other school administrators.

  From well down the hallway I could see Coulter Tate sitting on the right side of the waiting room. He held an ice pack to his face. A woman I took to be his mother had her arm around his shoulders and was whispering in his ear.

  Two or three chairs away, George Putnam pressed a bag of ice to his throat. Sitting beside him was a man I figured was his father, a big dude with a wrestler’s build stuffed into a five-thousand-dollar suit. He was staring bullets across the room at Ali, who sat with his eyes closed.

  “Dr. Cross?”

  I looked behind me and spotted Mrs. Dalton hurrying over.

  “Dr. Cross,” the headmistress said with an exasperated sigh. “Before we get to the fight, I must speak to you first about your son’s insubordinate behavior. A school like Latin—”

  “Please, I’d like to speak to my son in private, right now.”

  “Dr. Cross,” she said, raising her chin. “I don’t think you—”

  “As far as I’m concerned, and with all due respect, I think Ali did the right thing by not talking, Mrs. Dalton. He’s a minor, but he has certain rights. Among those is his right to have a parent present during questioning.”

  “That’s with the police,” she said. “I run a school, and I wish to be present when he first tells his side of things.”

  “You really want to fight me on parental rights? Because you’ll waste a bunch of money on lawyers and you’ll lose.”

  Mrs. Dalton was a smart woman used to getting her way, a woman who hated losing. I could see it in her eyes.

  But she said, “Very well, Dr. Cross. You can use my office. Ten minutes. There are other parents and students to consider.”