It was Rachel.
“Hey,” I said.
“You sound down. What’s wrong?”
What a profiler. She had read me with one word. I decided not to bring up what Detective Bynum had said about Angela’s torturous end.
“Nothing. I’m just… nothing. What’s going on with you? Are you working?”
“Yeah.”
“Want to take a break and get some coffee or something? I’m downtown.”
“No, I can’t.”
I had not seen her since we had been split apart by the detectives after we’d found and reported Angela’s body. As with everything else, the separation, though only forty-eight hours, was not going well for me. I stood up and started pacing in the small confines of the room.
“Well, when will I get to see you?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Jack. Have some patience with me. I’m under the gun here.”
I felt embarrassed and changed the subject.
“Speaking of under the gun, I could use an armed escort.”
“For what?”
“The LAPD says I have access to my house again. They said I could go home but I don’t think I can stay there. I just want to get some clothes but it’s going to be sort of creepy being in there by myself.”
“I’m sorry, Jack, I can’t take you. If you are truly worried, though, I can make a call.”
I was beginning to get the picture. This had happened to me with her once before. I had to resign myself to the fact that Rachel was like a feral cat. She was intrigued by what could be and hovered close to the touch of another, but ultimately she jumped back and away from it. If you pushed it, her claws came out.
“Never mind, Rachel, I was just trying to get you to come out.”
“I am really sorry, Jack, but I can’t do it.”
“Why did you call?”
There was a silence before she answered.
“To check in and to update you on a few things. If you wanted to hear them.”
“Down to business. Sure, go ahead.”
I sat back down on the bed and opened a notebook to write in.
“Yesterday they confirmed that the trunk murder website Angela visited was indeed the trip wire she stepped on,” Rachel said. “But so far it’s a dead end.”
“A dead end? I thought everything can be traced on the Internet.”
“The physical location of the site is a web-hosting facility in Mesa, Arizona, called Western Data Consultants. Agents went there with a warrant and were able to pull the details about the site setup and operation. It was registered through a company in Seattle called See Jane Run, which registers, designs and maintains numerous sites through Western Data. It’s kind of a go-between company. It doesn’t have the physical plant where websites are hosted on servers. That’s what Western Data does. See Jane Run builds and maintains websites for clients and pays a company like Western Data to host them. Kind of a middle man.”
“So did they go to Seattle?”
“Agents from the Seattle field office are handling it.”
“And?”
“The trunk murder site was set up and paid for entirely over the Internet. No one at See Jane Run ever met the man who paid for it. The physical address given two years ago when the sites were set up was a mail drop near SeaTac that is no longer valid. We’re trying to trace that but that will be a dead end, too. This guy is good.”
“You just said ‘sites’—plural. Were there more than one?”
“You noticed that. Yes, two sites. Trunk murder dot com was the first site and the second is called Denslow Data. That was the name he used in setting these up. Bill Denslow. Both sites are on a five-year plan that he paid for in advance. He used a money order—untraceable except back to the point of purchase. Another dead end.”
I took a couple moments to write some notes down.
“Okay,” I finally said. “So is Denslow the Unsub?”
“The man posing as Denslow is the Unsub but we’re not dumb enough to think he would put his real name on a website.”
“Then what does it mean? D-E-N-slow. Is it like half an acronym or something?”
“It could be. We’re working on it. So far we haven’t found the connection. We’re working on the possible acronym and the name itself. But we haven’t come up with a Bill Denslow with any sort of criminal record that would approach this.”
“Maybe it’s just a guy the Unsub hated, growing up. Like a neighbor or a teacher.”
“Could be.”
“So why the two websites?”
“One was the capture site and one was the OP site.”
“OP?”
“Observation point.”
“You’re completely losing me.”
“Okay, the trunk murder site was set up to collect the IP—the computer address—of anybody who visited the site. This is what happened with Angela. You understand?”
“Right. She did a search and it brought her to the site.”
“Right. The site collected IPs but was built so that those addresses were automatically forwarded to another dot com site. This one was called Denslow Data. This is a common practice. You go to a site and your ID is captured and sent on for marketing use elsewhere. It’s essentially the origin of spam.”
“Okay. So now Denslow Data has Angela’s ID. What happened to it there?”
“Nothing. It stayed there.”
“Then how did—”
“Look, here’s the trick. Denslow Data was built with a function that was completely the opposite of the trunk murder site. It captures no data of visitors. You see what I’m getting at?”
“Nope.”
“Okay, look at it from the Unsub’s point of view. He has set up trunk murder dot com to capture the computer ID of anybody who might be onto him and looking for him. The only problem with that is if he went to the site to check it, then his own ID would be captured. And sure he could use somebody else’s computer to run the check, but it would still help fix location. He could be tracked to a high degree through his own site.”
I nodded as I finally understood the setup.
“I see,” I said. “So he has the captured IP address forwarded to another site where there is no capture mechanism and he can check it without fear of being tracked.”
“Exactly.”
“So after Angela hit on the trunk murder site he went to the Denslow site and got her IP. He traced it back to the Times and figured this might be more than a morbid curiosity about trunk murders. He breaches the Times system and that leads him to me and Angela and our stories. He reads my e-mails and he knows that we are onto something. That I’m onto something and heading to Vegas.”
“That’s right. So he concocted the scheme to take you both out in a murder-suicide.”
I was silent for a moment as I spun it once more. It added up, even though I didn’t like the total.
“It was my e-mail that got her killed.”
“No, Jack. You can’t look at it that way. If anything, her fate was sealed when she checked out trunk murder dot com. You can’t blame yourself for an e-mail you sent to an editor.”
I didn’t respond. I tried to put the question of guilt out of my head for a while and to concentrate on the Unsub.