Darkness on the Edge of Town (19 page)

Amber: I had a bf last year

“Bf?” asked Laura.

“Boyfriend.”

Gitmo: Did bf getta bj?

Amber: You sonud mean!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gitmo: can’t handle a joke LOL

More chimes, the board lighting up with suitors.  Jay opened another instant message box.

Smooth Talk: Amber u a little girl?

Amber:  im thrteen how old r u???????????????

Smooth Talk: let me see a pic

Amber: I have 1 at shchol  school – not here

Smooth Talk: where d you live

Amber: I live in az

Smooth Talk dropped out.  Back to Gitmo:

Gitmo:  I want a pic

Amber: not fair if u don send me pic toO

Gitmo: you playing games little girl

Amber: fairs fair my pic for yours

Gitmo:  if you don’t want to fuck your wasting m time

Gitmo’s name went from red to black. 

Jay sat up straighter, twisted, adjusted himself against the back of the chair.  “That’s what you’re dealing with. These creeps are on these boards all day, trolling for kids.”

Laura was about to say that she didn’t think any child would fall for that, and then shut her mouth. 

Children would fall for it. Teenagers would fall for it. Because they had not yet developed that distrust that life ground into you over the years, like grime into clothing.

“We did a survey,” Jay said.  “Among parents.  They think of computers as just another appliance, like a TV set.  They don’t realize it’s like leaving the back door to your house open. Anybody can come in, and some of these guys are really smart.  They know how to push the buttons.”

“How do you find someone like this?  Can you find his ISP?”

“Doubtful. Guy like that, he’d use one of the big servers, like earthlink, hotmail—it’s easy to be anonymous.  There are search engines that you can look on, but I’m pretty sure this guy wouldn’t have a local ISP.”

“Oh.”

“But there’s an easier way. That’s what’s so interesting about technology. Sometimes the best things are simple.  You know the photo you have of him?  We can probably trace him through that.”  He hit a couple of keys and a beach scene came up on the screen. 

“This is why you need me.” Sounding cocky.  “Not many people can get their hands on this kind of software.”

He explained that there was something called image recognition, software that could break up every photograph into its elements, then run each element against all kinds of data bases, looking for a match.  He zoomed in on a man on the beach. “See this guy’s t-shirt?  With the software I’m going to use, I can run a search for exact matches.  It’s like a search engine, instead of searching for like words, it searches for images. I’m going to need the original photo, though.”

“From what Endicott said, it was a digital photo, and the only thing we have is an inkjet picture.” She nodded to the black and white photocopy.  “It’s not all that much better than that.”

Jay looked troubled. “It might be harder, but we can still do it.  Where is the original?”

“Endicott’s FedExing it—I should get it today.”

 “What we’ll do,” Jay said, “Is rescan the picture, using high resolution.  Then I’ll compare it to the data bases. It might take a few days, though.”

“You sure you can’t find him with the ISP?”

“I’ll try that, too.  I’m warning you, though, this guy isn’t your average Internet user.  I think you know that.”

“But this image recognition software, it’ll take a few days?  That’s a long time.”

“How many days has it been so far?”

Too many, she thought.

 “This is what CloneImage came up with,” Jay Ramsey said, rolling his chair to the computer monitor. 

It turned out that Jay Ramsey’s image recognition program had been quicker than  expected; Laura had gotten the call this morning, not twenty-four hours after she last saw him.  Jay had already found two matches to the man in the picture.

Ramsey pulled up a site called TalentFish.com.  “For a small fee, actors and models can put their pictures online.  Kind of like a rogues’ gallery.  Lucky for us that young Petey is up on the latest technology.”

“Petey?”

“Peter Dorrance.  Actor, model, pretty boy around town.  This was a virtual cakewalk.” He laughed at his own joke—virtual.

The TalentFish home page opened up. There were several headings at the top of the page: Actors, Portraits, Head Shots, Actor and Model Composites.  Jay pulled up Peter Dorrance’s page under “Actor and Model Composites”. 

“CloneImage got this hit pretty quick, since one of these is the same picture he sent that little girl.”

And there it was.  The photo of the young man, the house behind him.  This was a three-quarters shot, showing his excellent physique, but there were others, including two headshots. 

Laura looked at the other photographs, the ones she’d never seen before.  Dorrance had three photos taken in front of the house. Two in black and white and one in color.  In the color photo, he leaned against a blue sportscar, arms folded over his chest.  He wore a cable-knit sweater and looked like a print ad from Land’s End.  The house behind him was yellow with white trim.

“Nice wheels,” Laura said.

“Hard to get into,” Jay said, “Unless you’re his age. I also found the house, if you’re interested.”

“In a minute.”

She looked at his resume.  Age 22.  Six foot three and a half.  40 regular.  Several acting roles in plays Laura did not recognize (she wasn’t a big patron of the theater). Print ads: Hair and Now; Leslie’s Department Store; Eat at Joes.  Television ad: Ralph’s Car Sales and Gulf Chiropractic.  Not a lot there, but he had gotten a crack at the big time, a cameo as a corpse on “CSI: Miami”. 

“Eat at Joes is in Panama City,” Freddy said. 

“Take a bow, Freddy,” Jay said.  “The Florida panhandle—just like you said it would be.  Prince Charming here lives on the Forgotten Coast, the Redneck Riviera, or—if you’re thinking red and blue states—Bush country.”

Freddy pointed to the bottom of the page.  “There’s the address of the Talent Agency.” The Strand Talent Agency, Panama City Beach, Florida.

“So there’s good reason to believe he lives in Panama City,” Laura said.

“Thereabouts.  I got another match, though.”  Jay clicked through to another site, the Franklin County Home Buyers Guide.

Laura found herself staring at the house.  “St. George Island?”

“Down the coast, east of Panama City,” Freddy explained. 

“An old listing,” Jay said.  “This site hasn’t been updated since 2002.”  He zoomed in on a pale plaque near the top of the steps.  It was blurry and hard to read, but Laura was able to make an educated guess: “Gull Cottage?”

“Shouldn’t be hard to find. St. George Island isn’t all that big.”  He clicked on Map Quest.  The barrier island looked like a narrow boomerang, bisected by one main road paralleled by a few ancillary streets.   “Twenty-nine miles in length, and no more than a mile across at any one place.”

He clicked onto some photographs of St. George Island. 

“It doesn’t look like a place Peter Dorrance could afford,” Laura said. “Unless he’s independently wealthy.”  Considering the sportscar he leaned so casually against, that was a possibility.

“I did a few searches on him.  The only times he comes up is in regards to acting jobs—and not very many of them.  But at least you’ve got a place to start.” 

Laura stared at Dorrance’s headshot. Was this her killer?  If she went strictly by the FBI profile, he skewed young for this kind of crime.  Usually, it took time to build up to precise ritual like dressing up of the girl and posing her that way.  It took time to develop that kind of self-confidence, time to become a full-fledged sexual predator.

“Something you might want to think about,” Ramsey said, as if he’d read her mind.  “You saw how easily I found this site.  Could be your killer looked for the best-looking hunk he could find and sent it to the girl to impress her.  Easy enough with gullible little girls.”

Laura thought he had a point.  But it had always been her experience that most people stayed within their comfort zones—including sexual predators.  Even if the man in the photo wasn’t her killer, she was willing to bet they had crossed paths sometime or other. 

A call into the Panama City Police Department revealed that there was no one by the name of Peter Dorrance in either Panama City or Bay County, Florida. While she had the detective on the phone, Laura described her own case and asked if he had anything similar.

“Nothing that comes to mind, and that one would.  But I’ll check around, see if anything like that’s turned up in the other counties up here.”

Next, she called Detective Endicott in Indio, the detective who had investigated Alison Burns’ murder. She laid out what she had and asked him if he wanted to accompany her to Florida.  He declined but asked her to keep him updated.

The rest of the afternoon she put her case together, wondering if she should go to Jerry Grimes or directly to Galaz.  She didn’t like the idea of going over Jerry Grimes’s head, but she also knew that Mike Galaz would be more enthusiastic.  After debating back and forth, she finally went to see Jerry.  She couldn’t leave him out of the loop.

He was gone for the day. She tried his cell, got a message and left one of her own.  Looked at her watch. She needed to make reservations if she was going to fly out there tomorrow.  She went looking for Mike Galaz. 

He was practicing his putting.  “How’d it go with Ramsey?” he asked her.

“That’s what I’m here to talk to you about.”

She ran it down for him.

Galaz didn’t take his eye from the ball.  “Jay has a point, don’t you think?  It could be the guy, or it could be someone else who got his picture off the Net.”

“Either way, I think he’s from around there.  Other than Lehman, it’s the only real lead we’ve got, and I think I should go and check it out.  This guy isn’t going to stop with Jessica Parris.”

Galaz tapped the ball, which rolled up to the lip of the cup and hung there.  He frowned.

Laura waited as he adjusted his stance and nudged the ball in.

Without looking at her, he started over.  She knew better than to say anything.   Lucky for her, the ball made it in right away this time.

He looked up at her and smiled.  “Ah, much better.” Then he retrieved the ball and set it up again. 

Laura contemplated grabbing the putter and whacking him on the shin with it. 

She wondered if he was getting a perverse pleasure out of making her wait.  He sure was milking it—the stance, the grip, the way he rocked back and forth before squatting down and stretching the putter out toward the cup before doing it all again.  At last she couldn’t take it anymore.  “Sir?  I’ve got to get moving if I’m going to go.”

He held up one hand: Just a minute. 

So she waited, the tasteful cherry and brass mantel clock on the shelf behind the desk ticking out her presence.  After another successful putt, he palmed the ball and studied her.  “Is this coming from logic or from your gut?”

“Both.”

“But if you had to choose.  You think this is woman’s intuition?”

Woman’s intuition? 
Jesus
.  She tried to figure out what he wanted, but couldn’t read him so she picked one.  “I have a real gut feeling about this, sir.  I think Jay does, too.”

He didn’t answer right away, but seemed to be weighing her answer—an answer she had tossed on a fifty-fifty throw.  At last he said, “ Go ahead.”

He was setting up the next putt when she left.

Next, she called Victor, who had been in Bisbee all day, working the case from there. 

“Don’t you think you’re jumping the gun?” he asked.

“I think it’s the guy.  Or he can lead me to the guy.”

“Are you that sure these killings are connected?”

“The similarities are pretty striking.” Feeling defensive.

“There’s a lot that doesn’t add up.”  He enumerated the same dissimilarities that had bothered her. “Shit, a twelve-year-old and a fourteen-year-old. That’s a big difference on the Tanner chart.  You know how choosy these guys can be.”

Thought about telling him her theory, but realizing that arguing would get her nowhere.

“There’s something I’d like you to do personally.  Check with Jessica’s friends again. I never did get a straight answer from Buddy about whether or not she used the computer at school. If she didn’t use it at school, find out if she used one at the public library.”

“Anything else?” His voice was cool.

“That should do it.” 

After he hung up, she stared off into space.  She realized she was skating on a very thin edge.  Going over Jerry Grimes’s head, working with Jay Ramsey, her less than enthusiastic investigation of Lehman.  Working just as hard, putting in the hours, but more and more certain that with Lehman, they were heading down the wrong road. 

Laura rented a car in Panama City and drove in the direction of The Strand Model and Talent Agency in Panama City Beach. 

Panama City gave Laura the impression of a beach town being swallowed whole by Wal-Mart and shopping malls—a battle of old versus new.  Fast food chains vying with mom and pop burger stands, bait shops and boat rentals in the shadow of superstores. Colored pennants and tacky signs marked mobile home sales and car dealerships adjacent to tracts of land marked for sale as “unimproved” property. 

As if you could improve on inviting lanes disappearing into stands of southern pine.

The Strand Model and Talent Agency was located three blocks from the beach.  Blue with gray trim, the modest saltbox was bordered by a row of immature banana trees and sat in one corner of a parking lot roped off by a giant, sand-encrusted hawser stretching from piling to piling. The plastic sign out front had stick-on letters, like many a drive-by church she’d seen on the way out here.

She was impressed by the pelican statue on one of the pilings—until it flew off.

The Strand Talent Agency must have been a doctor’s office at one time.  A partition divided the front office from the receptionist’s window, and next to the window was the door to inner offices. Posters of sullen-faced models lined the gray fabric walls. A blonde, equally sullen faced receptionist sat behind the window, concentrating on her nails. She would be pretty if not for her spoiled expression. Laura asked to see the owner of the agency.