“Rachel, Jack,” he said by means of salutation. It wasn’t a good morning and he didn’t say that. “How’s the hand?”
“It’s okay.”
We had brought containers of coffee with us but I saw he had none. I offered him mine but he said he’d already had too much.
“What have we got?” Rachel asked.
“Did you two check out? I tried to call you this morning, Rachel.”
“Yes,” she said. “Jack wanted something a little more comfortable. We moved over to the Chateau Marmont.”
“Pretty comfortable.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t submit it for reimbursement.”
He nodded and I got the idea from the way he looked at her that he knew she hadn’t gotten her own room and had nothing to submit anyway. It was the least of his worries, though.
“It’s coming together,” he said. “Another one for the studies, I suppose. These people—if you can call them that—never cease to amaze me. Every one of them, their stories. . . each one of them’s a black hole. And there’s never enough blood to fill it.”
Rachel pulled out a chair and sat across from him. I sat next to her. We didn’t say anything. We knew he wanted to go on. He reached over with a pen and tapped the side of one of the laptops.
“This was his,” he said. “It was recovered from the trunk of his car last night.”
“A Hertz car?” I asked.
“No. He arrived at Data Imaging in an eighty-four Plymouth registered to a Darlene Kugel, thirty-six, of North Hollywood. We went to her apartment last night, got no response and went in. She was in the bed. Her throat was cut, probably with the same knife he used on Gordon. She’d been dead for days. It looked like he’d burned incense, slopped perfume around to hide the smell.”
“He stayed in there with her body?” Rachel asked.
“Looks like it.”
“Were those her clothes he was wearing?” I asked.
“And the wig.”
“What was he doing dressed like her, anyway?” Rachel asked.
“Don’t know and never will now. My guess is he knew everybody was looking for him. Police, the bureau. He thought it was a way to leave her place, get the camera and then maybe get out of town.”
“Probably. What did you get from her place?”
“There was nothing that was of much use inside, but her unit had two parking spaces assigned to it in the garage and we found an eighty-six Pontiac Firebird in one of them. Florida plate, it came back to Gladys Oliveros of Gainesville.”
“His mother?” I asked.
“Yes. Moved there when he went to prison so she’d be close for visits, I guess. Remarried and changed her name. Anyway, we opened the trunk of the Pontiac and found the computer, some other things, including the books Brass found in the picture from the cell. There was an old sleeping bag. There’s blood on it and the lab has it. The initial report is that there is kapok in the insulation.”
“It means he put some of his victims in the trunk,” I said.
“Which accounts for the hours they were missing,” Rachel added.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “If he had his mother’s car, what about the car from Hertz in Phoenix? Why would he rent a car if he already had one?”
“Just another way of confusing the trail, Jack. Use mother’s to move from city to city, but then he rents one when he moves in for the kill on the cop.”
My confusion over the logic of that theory showed on my face. But Backus dismissed it.
“Anyway, we haven’t gotten the Hertz records yet, so let’s not get sidetracked. For the moment, the computer is what’s important.”
“What’s in it?” Rachel asked.
“The office here has a computer unit, works with the group in Quantico. One of the agents, Don Clearmountain, took this last night and broke down the coding by about three this morning. He copied the hard disk to the mainframe here. Anyway, it’s full of photographs. Fifty-seven of them.”
Backus used his thumb and forefinger to pinch the bridge of his nose. He had aged since I’d last seen him at the hospital. Aged badly.
“Children?” Rachel asked.
Backus nodded.
“Jesus. The victims?”
“Yes. . . before and after. It’s horrible stuff. Truly horrible.”
“And he was transmitting these somewhere? Like we thought?”
“Yes, the computer has a cellular modem as Gordon. . . as he guessed. It, too, is registered out of Gainesville to Oliveros. We just got the records a little while ago.”
He indicated some of the paperwork in front of him.
“There are a lot of calls,” he said. “All over the place. He was into some kind of net. A network where the users were interested in these kinds of photographs.”
He looked up from the papers at us, his eyes sick but defiant.
“We are tracing them all now. We’re going to make a lot of arrests. A lot of people will pay for this. What happened to Gordon will not be for nothing.”
He nodded more to himself than us.
“We can compare the transmissions and the users to the bank deposits I found in Jacksonville,” Rachel said. “I bet we’ll be able to know just how much they paid for the photos and when.”
“Clearmountain and his people are already working on it. They’re down the hall in the Group Three offices if you want to stop in.”
“Bob?” I said. “Did they look at all fifty-seven photos?”
He looked at me a moment before answering.
“I did, Jack. I did.”
“They were only the kids?”
I felt my chest tightening. Whatever I had told myself about being emotionally deadened to my brother and what had happened was a lie.
“No, Jack,” Backus said. “There are no pictures of those victims. None of the police officers, none of the other adult victims. I guess. . .”
He didn’t finish.
“What?” I asked.
“I guess those kinds of photos would not have been profitable to him.”
I looked down at my hands on the table. My right hand was beginning to ache and felt clammy under the white bandages. I felt relief go through me. I think it was relief. What else is it that you feel when you learn that there are no photographs of your murdered brother’s body out there all over the country, floating out there on the Internet and ready to be downloaded by any sick individual with a taste for it.
“I think when this gets out about this guy, there’ll be a lot of people who’ll want to throw a parade for you, Jack,” Backus said. “Put you in a convertible and drive you down Madison Avenue.”
I looked at him. I didn’t know if it was an attempt at humor but I didn’t smile.
“Maybe sometimes vengeance is just as good as justice,” he said.
“They’re pretty much the same if you ask me.”
After a few moments of silence, Backus changed the subject.
“Jack, we have to get your formal statement. I’ve got one of the office’s stenographers set up for nine-thirty. Are you ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
“We just want the linear story. From A to B, don’t leave any detail out. I thought, Rachel, you’d handle that, ask the questions.”