Nobody Cares, page 11
“He’s military intel,” Dace said. “I don’t know if you picked up on that. He’s NSA — National Security Agency,” she amplified when Sarah frowned. “Sarah, he knows how to break you down, because it’s his job to know. If he’s in intel? He knows what we’ve done in secret sites around the world. What other countries have done to our soldiers. And he’s using those techniques here. Because he gets off on it.”
“Oh!” she said. “Not because I’m weak, but because he’s got knowledge and experience to make it work?”
Dace nodded, watching her carefully as she absorbed that bit of information. Sarah frowned, and nodded slowly. “The shovel is by the house,” she said, and they walked back up the slope.
“Have you been inside?” Dace asked looking at the small cabin.
Sarah shook her head. “He took a woman inside for the night once since I’ve been here,” she said. She shook her head again. “I don’t want to be the next woman who goes inside. We talk, you know? We’re not supposed to, and he’ll punish us if we’re caught. And if he’s going to punish someone? And they tell on another woman? He punishes the second woman instead. So you never know if someone is going to rat you out. But, still, we talk.”
Dace nodded. Pitting them against each other for control, she thought.
“And I think he videos us, somehow,” Sarah said slowly. “I think there’s a camera in the corner.”
“Let’s go in the cabin,” Dace said suddenly. “He’s gone. Let’s look.”
Sarah hesitated. Dace looked at her sympathetically. “It’s OK,” she said. “Stay out here and keep watch for the plane to come back.”
“You’re brave,” she whispered.
Dace shook her head. “No,” she said. “I haven’t been here, for one thing. But also? This isn’t my first psychopathic nutjob.”
Sarah laughed, a genuine giggle. And Dace grinned at her. She thought Sarah was someone she would like and they could become friends, if — when — they made it out.
“I’ll watch,” she promised. “If you hear a whistle, get the hell out of there — and not on this side where he might see you. I’m going to have the shovel in hand, so that I can head back to the graveyard, if I see the plane. You meet me there.”
“Good,” Dace said, glad to see her starting to think, not just feel.
The cabin wasn’t locked. Why would he? Nobody locked cabins out here like this. Dace slipped inside, her hands in fists so that she wouldn’t touch anything. She stopped just inside the door. What the hell?
Damn right, he has a camera on the kennels, she thought, looking at the computer system that dominated the big open space. There was a kitchen along the back wall. Spotted two doors on the back wall, one to the bathroom, she thought, which made her wonder about the kennel. Were they housebroken? Exactly how far did he take the whole bitches in kennels thing? The other was probably a storage room; maybe a back door.
A bed and dresser to her left. And a couch and chair — and a big screen TV — to her right.
She hadn’t noticed a satellite dish; did he just watch videos?
Well, possibly yes, she thought, sickened. Videos he was making. And in the center of the room was a computer set up. It was one of those corner style desks that extended in both directions. A computer in the center. A printer. A scanner. A comfortable desk-chair.
His command center, she thought.
She carefully looked around for a camera in here. She didn’t see one. But there had to be more than just one in the kennel to warrant this kind of setup, she thought. Probably several in the kennel. Where else? A security perimeter? Probably. Down by the graveyard? Maybe.
So, he just filmed himself killing a woman while getting a blow job, she thought.
Her smile wasn’t a nice one.
She backed out of the cabin, and looked at Sarah. “Can you bury that woman by yourself?” she asked.
Sarah nodded. “What are you going to do?”
“Best you don’t know,” Dace said grimly. “All you know is that I disappeared after I helped you carry the body down there. OK?”
Sarah nodded again. “Sarah?” Dace called softly. “We’re going home. All of us.”
Sarah just kept walking toward the graveyard.
Dace walked around the perimeter of the cabin, studying it. There was a big satellite dish on the mountain further up from the cabin, she thought. She didn’t go out to check, but she’d caught a flash of white through the trees. Made sense. He’d been able to get on the task force. And an intel guy wouldn’t want to be cut off from the world, even if he primarily used it to watch sports. So, he was connected.
At the back of the cabin was a second entrance. It must lead to the storage door she’d seen. She went inside. The generator. Must be a sound-proofed room, because she hadn’t heard it when she was inside the cabin. A pallet of 50-pound sacks of dog food. She winced. He really did feed the women dog food. People probably thought he did have a sled-dog team out here somewhere.
She kept her hands in her pockets as she looked, and she used the thin material of her shift to open the doors. Living with a cop had been an education, she thought with a snort.
Back inside she walked around the one room. And then she sat down at his command station and just looked at it. The key question... was it password protected? And that, she thought, depended on how arrogant he was. And how paranoid. Was her captor/pilot his only visitor? How was he getting others to cooperate? Did they come out here? Or was he using other methods?
She tapped the space bar to see if the computer woke up. It did.
Chapter 14
Joe Bob Dixon had his laptop and Jason Tremont’s desktop computer — which wasn’t a half-bad one, he conceded, probably because it needed a fair amount of power to be able to monitor surveillance cameras. And the Sheraton apparently had a safety-conscious surveillance systems designer. They seemed to be in the right locations. What was slowing him down was that the facial recognition software he’d tweaked to his satisfaction was on his laptop. He couldn’t move it to the desktop. And the surveillance camera footage couldn’t be ported to his laptop either.
With a lot of swearing, he figured out a work-around, but it was even slower than usual, and facial recognition work was damn slow to begin with. Still, he was a night owl. And during the quiet of the middle of the night was when he got his best work done.
Computer work had always been just a fun geeky thing, a hobby. No one had ever told him he could go to school and do something with it. Probably just as well, he thought. Someone might have told him how to hack at 13, and he’d be serving time instead. But he’d grown up following his dad around the oil fields, from job to job. And computers, and computer games, was how he had any friends at all. But what he knew was oil fields. And so, when he turned 18, and graduated from high school, he decided working in Alaska in the oil fields would be an adventure.
It was that, he thought wryly. But for a southern boy like him? The North Slope was just too damn cold. Still it was good money, and the schedule allowed for a lot of play time in Anchorage — a city that saw to it that the men who worked the Slope had a good time when they were on leave.
But one day he saw an ad for becoming a state trooper. He liked the notion of not having to go back to 30 below weather — he might never have made the change if he’d seen the ad in the summer — but the cut in pay was a bit off-putting. Then he thought, what the hell, he could always turn it down.
He took it. He still wasn’t completely sure why. He’d been at work in the Talkeetna office for about six months, when he got exasperated with his partner’s complete cluelessness for using a computer, and did a search for him.
And now? Three years later, he was respected statewide for what he could do with a computer. Computer forensics, they called it. It made him laugh. Because that was what you did to dead bodies — and for him, computers were alive, and they talked to him. He was better with computers than with people. He understood computers. People? He didn’t understand people.
He knew Paul hadn’t liked him at first. Didn’t like the invasion of Okies and Texans, and Joe Bob just shrugged it off, because it wasn’t personal. He thought Paul looked at him differently now. As a friend, as well as colleague. And he respected his computer skills.
Still hated his name and accent, though, and Joe Bob admitted to himself Paul’s irritation was one of the reasons he didn’t shorten the name or lose the accent. He grinned. But let’s face it, he thought, he was a self-taught computer geek from Oklahoma, the son of an oil roustabout, grandson, too, for that matter. He had none of the polish that Paul Kitka did, thanks to his mother, the English professor. And meeting her last spring had explained a lot about his partner. Meeting his grandfather had explained more.
His family might lack education and fine manners, but Joe Bob never doubted that he was accepted and loved. Still was. If he showed up on their doorstep — if he could find them on whatever oilfield his dad was working — they’d welcome him with hugs and put another plate on the supper table.
But he respected his partner. Paul Kitka was smart. He cared about people. And damn, he knew how to woo the ladies! Observing him had been like a tutorial in getting laid. He was much more successful now. He grinned. Some day he was going to tell Paul Kitka that and watch him lose his shit.
He thought Paul and Dace were finally getting things worked out. They were good for each other. And damn it, he was going to find the bastard who took her, and make him give her back.
But whoever the guy was, he was good, Joe Bob thought. So far, he’d yet to get a clearer picture than the one in the spa. Yet, the room had been rented to Paul Smith all week? And there was no clear picture of Paul Smith in the hallway, or at the 15th floor elevator. He was pretty sure, however, the man in the spa with Dace was not Paul Smith. But he hadn’t seen Paul Smith at all. And Clyde Jones and the man he’d claimed was the assailant who hit Mary Ayek? They’d been in the hallway for the first time this evening when they grabbed Dace, and left Mary on the floor.
That made no sense, Joe Bob thought, frustrated. They had to have gotten there somehow, right?
And then it dawned on him. They’d erased and looped the tape of that floor’s hallway. Tremont had a mole.
So, knowing that, he might look and see if it had been replaced in the computer, or looped at the camera. But a more interesting puzzle was why leave the scene at the elevator in place?
Joe Bob tapped his fingers and thought about that. Well, if that scene was missing, even his computer-challenged partner would realize someone had futzed with the computer, he thought with a snort. And he thought it was interesting that only Jones and the man he’d escorted out were pictured. There was a third man, but he managed to only be a figure, mostly seen from the back. So, he knew they were being filmed. And he was willing to hang the other two men out to dry, but still stayed out of the camera’s range.
He examined the footage around the door to the stairs when he knew the man had to go through them, and there was nothing.
But upstairs? There he was — because it was on a separate system, he thought. So, who had access to the main system but not the spa? Finding Tremont’s mole just might be doable.
His traitor.
Joe Bob sat down at Tremont’s desktop to see if the original footage of the hallway was recoverable. The history of the files in question showed they’d been reviewed and edited.
Joe Bob smiled. The mole — traitor — had just enough computer skills to get away with it as long as no one looked.
But he looked. And with a bit of the grace of the Lord, as his mother said, he was going to have some restored files. He glanced at the computer clock — 5 a.m. Good enough. The task force was resuming at 6 a.m.
He was humming as he started working on the doctored files.
Paul Kitka was kicked back in the easy chair upstairs, beer in hand, watching Tremont prowl around the suite.
“What’s bugging you?” he asked the security chief.
“National security interest,” he said. “I’ve always thought the predator had to be a cop. But what if he’s military? Or even more narrowly, NSA, or a contractor?”
“Cop was a narrower field,” Paul observed. “There’s 20,000 military.”
“Fewer NSA.”
“Why?”
“Why am I thinking that way? Because someone futzed with the radios. Someone has futzed with my surveillance tapes. Someone has some pull in both APD and State Patrol, and let’s face it, interagency cooperation isn’t all that great.”
Paul snorted. He’d worked in Anchorage. And the politics at the ground level was why he’d leaped to take the job in Talkeetna. And he didn’t plan to move up the ladder where he had to deal with politics either, because it only got worse, and the stakes just got higher.
“OK,” Paul agreed. “There’s something else, I’ve noticed. The people we know are involved in some way? They’re alike. They’re of an age. And they have military background.”
“You think they may have served together once?” Jason said, looking at him with interest. “Served up here together?”
“Maybe,” Paul said. “And then the predator goes away. For decades. But he’s back up here. And he’s connected. Because in those 20 years he’s gone, those old buddies are now in positions of power. Some at least. Some more than others.”
Jason Tremont grinned. He pulled out his phone, and called a number. “Hey Deena,” he said. “No, I’m not at home. We had a situation at work.”
“Yes. That one.”
He listened, nodding along. Paul grinned.
“Look, sweetie, I need a favor. I need some resumes pulled. Your friend Carolyn still in the press office? Could I get her to get them for me?”
He listened again.
“I know it’s 4 a.m.,” he said. “But you’re up. I’m up.”
“Thanks, sweetie,” he said. He ended the call. “She’s going to send her a text. If she’s awake, she’ll call me. When she wakes up, if not.”
“Not going to get her in trouble?”
Tremont shook his head. “No, they’re public information,” he said. “That’s why she has them — so the press and others can get them from her. I’m just jumping to the front of the line.”
His phone rang.
“Hey Carolyn,” he said. “Yes, you’re right. I will owe you. Forever. And dinner for you and your husband at the Sheraton will be just the start. A weekend stay? Done.”
He laughed.
“Here’s my list,” he said, and started rattling off some names. “Email them to me?”
“Thank you,” he said. “Give my best to that lazy husband of yours. And tell me when you want that weekend getaway.”
He got off the phone and paced some more. “They’re mostly my age, mid-late 40s,” he said. “But I didn’t serve. I was starting out in the Fairbanks PD.”
Paul just watched him.
“Predators don’t start this late,” Jason said finally. “He would have been active in his 20s. Twenty-five years ago? Mid 1990s.”
Paul sighed. “If you’re not going to drink? And I’m not going to sleep? Let’s go back down to your office and do some research.”
Jason was out the door before Paul had even managed to get out of his chair.
The two of them didn’t speak as they took the elevator to the ground floor. Jason nodded pleasantly at the attendant covering the front desk. “Any problems?”
He shook his head.
They went behind the front desk, back into Tremont’s office. He locked the door behind them. Joe Bob looked up at them, his eyes narrowed. “No, you cannot have your desk back,” he said. “You can’t have my laptop either. Why are you here?”
Tremont rolled his eyes, went over to the second desk in the office, and turned on the computer there. Paul sat in the guest chair. “Find anything?”
“You do have someone inside the Sheraton,” Joe Bob said, and Tremont looked up at that comment. “And more than just someone doing a favor for a cop. They did the electronic version of looping an empty hallway over the images of the 15th floor. It stopped shortly before they kidnapped Dace.”
He explained his theory. “I watched you come down, for instance,” he said.
“What about when Dace and I checked in?” Paul asked.
“It’s gone. But it was all edited after you checked in. So, they had the room for some reason beyond you. Maybe Kevin Smith really was running an investigation. But between 4 p.m. yesterday and midnight, someone erased everything in that hallway except the attack.”
“But they left the attack,” Tremont said slowly.
“They did, because it’s the first thing you’d look for, right?” Joe Bob repeated.
“And because it set up those two? How clear is it that there is even a third man involved?” Tremont asked.
Joe Bob pulled up the clip and took a look at it again. “No, clearly a third person is there, although it could be anyone,” he said. “So maybe a set up, but most likely just buying time. But Jason? It was someone on your staff. And it was someone who had access to the main security system, but not the spa system. You said it was separate right?”
Jason nodded. He logged into the scheduling system and looked at who was on duty. “A guy named Peter Daou,” he said at last.
“How old is he?” Paul asked. Joe Bob looked at him and frowned.
“About 45 with military experience.”
“Here?”
Jason nodded. “Flyboy,” he said.
“Fill me in?” Joe Bob asked.
Jason did so and at the same time he printed the resumes of the men he’d requested.
Joe Bob chewed on his lip. “I need another computer,” he muttered.
Jason turned the one he was using around to face him and got up to get the resumes out of the printer. He handed half of them to Paul. Paul grabbed a pen and started down through them.
