Redheads (25 page)

He sat next to her on the bed. The screen showed blocks of incomprehensible code. Julissa ran her finger under a line of type.

“This is clever. There’s a large file embedded in the email. It looks like a picture file, but a really big one, probably a photograph in raw data format. You get that from high-end digital cameras. Pro stuff. The file would’ve stayed on the Gmail server until you opened the email, and when you opened it, this line of code would have written over the stack buffer and installed the rest of the program.”

“I don’t get it.”

“The program is simple—it writes your computer’s unique ID number and your Internet server information onto the metadata of the sent email every time your computer connects to the Internet. So whoever sent this email can just continually check the email in his sent box, scroll down to the metadata, and get an update of what computer you’re using and where you’re logging into the net.”

“Is there any text to the email?”

“No. Just the picture file.”

“Can we look at it?”

“Yeah. Here.”

She typed a few lines of code. A pop-up screen appeared, slowly filling as the computer processed the photograph.

“Oh dear god,” Julissa said.

The image made Chris’s stomach churn. The half-cup of coffee he’d drunk lurched in his stomach, but he kept it in.

“Has he ever done anything like that before?” Julissa asked. Her voice was just a whisper.

“No.”

“I can’t look at it anymore.” She snapped the laptop screen shut. “I’m sorry.”

The killer, the thing, had sent them a high-resolution, full-color photograph of a murder scene. Two young women sat on a narrow bed with their backs against a white wall. Their arms were around each other, and they wore nothing but gags that looked like they had been made from a fuzzy pink bathrobe tie. One of the girls was missing her entire face and one eye; the other’s throat had been eaten all the way to her spinal column. Their stomachs had been ripped open and their intestines were piled in slick coils on the wooden floor. Their thighs had been stripped all the way to the bone. The flesh, what was left of it, was on the floor. A lot of it appeared to be missing. The mattress was soaked in blood. The photograph captured a long runner of blood as it fell towards the floor from one girl’s flayed ankle. Only their red hair had been untouched, and was, in fact, bloodless and clean. Chris thought the killer may have actually washed it before posing the bodies for the photograph.

But it was the wall behind the girls that Chris was thinking about after Julissa had closed the screen. The killer, dipping his hand into the ample pallet of the girls’ open abdomens, had written a very simple message on the wall in careful print that had only just started to drip when the photograph was taken.

WHO’S NEXT?

Chris went to the window. He was trembling. The girls died holding on to each other for help that neither could provide the other. He pressed his forehead against the window glass and felt the tropical heat outside.

“What now?” Julissa asked.

“Does he know where we are?” Chris asked. “Could his code have done its job?”

“No.”

“Then we stick to the plan. You work on the FBI. I’ll see what I can make of this picture. I need to figure out where this happened so we can keep track of his movements. I can try to get something like Mike’s old program up and running again to watch the news.”

“We’ve got to find him soon, Chris.”

“I know.”

“This can’t go on.”

Chris nodded. He wanted to keep them on track and keep the momentum up. He thought of Westfield again.

“Somewhere in all this we need to figure out a secure way to get in touch with Westfield. And if he got blind copied on that email we need to figure out a way right now to warn him not to open it.”

“As for warning him, the email’s only twenty minutes old so we might still have time. I can set up a random Hotmail account in my name and send an email to his address through a proxy server so that it can’t get traced to Boracay. I can just put a warning in the subject line telling him not to open any emails. He might notice it first.”

“If he has any reason to be suspicious, he’ll play it safe.”

Julissa went to work. When she was finished, she closed the computer and stood.

“I need some air,” she said.

“It’s going to storm out.”

“That’s okay with me.”

“You want to see if we can find a place to buy some new clothes? Also I need to buy a cheap laptop so I can do my work.”

Julissa hesitated, then said, “Yeah, I’d like that. But, Chris—I don’t have any money.”

“That’s not a problem.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“You don’t have to.”

They locked her room and walked into the rain. The wind was warm but the rain drops, now as big as dimes, were cold. They walked to the empty lobby and asked the girls at the reception desk where to go shopping.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Westfield just wanted to drive home to his own house. He had a glassed-in back porch overlooking Puget Sound. He liked to drink his coffee there in the mornings, reading the papers. He could watch ships making their way south to Seattle and Tacoma and could see submarines running on the surface to the base at the end of the Hood Canal. What little he’d patched together to call a life was in the house. Instead, he was at a motel on the edge of the desert outside of Carlsbad, New Mexico, watching the window-unit air conditioner drip water down the rotten plaster wall. The carpet smelled of mildew and the brown wallpaper in the bathroom was coming unglued. He’d stopped at a Bank of America in Midland, Texas, and had then paid cash for a new laptop at a Radio Shack. Then he’d driven without stopping again until seeing the motel. The motel had exactly one thing going for it: the sign on the highway said,
Free Wi-Fi
.

He spent two hours in the filthy bathroom, washing the wound on his knee and re-bandaging it with fresh gauze and antibiotic cream. He took three aspirin and considered driving to the liquor store on the highway and buying a bottle of whiskey. He was out of the habit of drinking but he’d never be out of the habit of thinking about drinking. That first glass of whiskey in the morning, when he was drinking more or less professionally after getting out of the Navy, that glass was his sacrament in the Church of Sour Mash. He used to pour it into whatever cup he could find, and stand in the window of whatever motel room he was then occupying, and drink it slowly while watching the sunrise. He’d add a handful of ice, if he had it. If he didn’t have ice, he’d drink it straight, letting it sit on his tongue before swallowing, then feeling it burn all the way down. Years later he would realize being an alcoholic was a lot like being religious. It took faith to believe if you kept doing the same thing over and over, things would eventually get better, despite all evidence to the contrary. Now he had stopped drinking and he didn’t think it was possible to make things better. But evening the score was about spreading pain, not erasing it. So he was a realist.

He sat on the bed in his undershorts and unpacked his new computer. Maybe if he had been less tired and in less pain he would have done what Chris had done. Maybe if he scrolled through his email all the way to the top, he would have seen Julissa’s email warning him, and he would have stopped. But he didn’t see Julissa’s email and he clicked on the other message. How could he not? The subject line called up all his rage and refused calm reflection.

I ATE TARA WESTFIELD

He clicked the email and watched the photograph slowly fill the screen. A million pixels of horror. He stared at the bloody message on the wall behind the poor girls. For a second, he could have gone either way. He could have stood, taken his keys from the end of the bed, driven down to the liquor store, and bought the biggest goddamned bottle of Jack Daniel’s they sold. He felt so alone and so empty, it wouldn’t have mattered if he kept on fighting or just fell flat on his back in his shithole room and drank until he blacked out. In desperation, he put his hand over his right knee and jammed his thumb into the bullet wound, digging through the gauze until his fingernail squeezed into the hole. The pain was as bright as noonday sun reflecting off broken glass. He closed his eyes and went with the pain, and when he opened them again, he stared at the picture for another five minutes. He closed the window, and the next email he saw was Julissa’s warning.

Westfield sat in the plastic chair outside his hotel room door and watched dust devils in the desert on the other side of the highway. Already, by using the bank in Midland, he’d let them know his general whereabouts. Now, he’d probably turned his computer into a homing device for the killer’s men. He’d turned it off and for good measure had taken out the battery. He sat in the heat, where at least the air didn’t reek of mildew and decaying wallpaper, and considered his options. He could pack his things back into the van, leave the new computer in the trash, and run. But to what end? He was trying to find the killer, not run away from him. Which left the second option: he could wait, and be ready. He’d been caught entirely by surprise in Galveston, but made out all right. They would be expecting to surprise him, not to walk into an ambush. Maybe he could find out more about them. If not, he could kill another one of the thing’s employees. Either option sounded better than just running blind. He limped back into the room, and got the Carlsbad phone book from the bedside table.

He still had twenty-five hundred in cash from his stop at the bank. That wouldn’t buy an arsenal in Carlsbad, New Mexico, but he suspected it would be enough to induce serious second thoughts about coming into his motel room.

He wondered how long he had. The nearest airport with commercial flights was hours away, in El Paso. By now they probably knew exactly where he was, but it would still take time to get here. Even if they came by jet, they would have to rent a car and drive the rest of the way. Unless they chartered a small plane and landed on a strip nearby, in which case they could be on top of him in half a day. He had his service side arm, the silenced .22 and switchblade he’d taken from the man he’d killed in Galveston, and his stun gun. But he wanted something with more reach. After what happened in Galveston, they wouldn’t bother knocking.

He limped back to the chair outside his door and looked at the desert on the other side of the highway. There was a low, boulder-strewn hill. Creosote and prickly pears and tufts of brown grass grew between the rocks. At the top, there was a stand of yucca with high flowering stems. Some of the boulders were as big as cars. The range wasn’t bad. Maybe a hundred yards from the top of the hill to his doorstep, the highway in between. The wind would probably be coming east to west, down the highway. He’d have to account for that.

This was as good a spot as he could ask for to make a stand.

At the moment, anyway, there was no one else staying in the motel. The clerk was an old man with hearing aids in both ears who sat in the room behind the counter watching a small television at full volume. The hill on the other side of the highway would have a view of both sides of the road for more than two miles. If he missed the men at his hotel room door, he could shoot at their car for two minutes, which ever direction they chose to run.

He went to his bed and put the battery back into his computer, then turned it on and let it automatically log itself onto the Internet.

The program he’d accidentally installed would take care of itself.

The gun shop was just outside what passed for downtown Carlsbad. Across the street was a gas station and a liquor store. The store stood alone in an asphalt parking lot crumbling back to gravel. It was built of sun-baked adobe bricks and had bars on the windows. Westfield parked in front and walked in just as the shop owner was reaching to flip the sign from
Open
to
Closed
.

“You stay open fifteen more minutes, I’ll make it worthwhile,” Westfield said.

The man nodded and held the door open. Westfield went to the back of the shop and looked at the rifles standing in the racks behind the counter. He leaned on the glass over the six shooters and automatic pistols and studied the rifles. As a boy he’d had a Winchester model .270 with a walnut stock. He and his father hunted in the dry hills of eastern Washington. Then, at the Naval Academy, he’d qualified with a Garand M-1 and had been the third best in his class.

“Looking for something in particular?”

“I’m gonna get a good long-distance piece. Get ready for antelope, come November.”

“What caliber you into?”

Westfield didn’t really care.

“In in the service, I learned with a .30-06. But what we mostly used was fifty caliber BMG.”

“Fifty caliber would just about blow an antelope to pieces.”

“Something smaller’s okay, long as it’s got the distance and some punch.”

“Bolt action or auto?”

“Auto.”

The man pulled a rifle off the rack. It had a black carbon fiber stock and a flat black barrel, and when he took it from the store owner and felt its weight, he could tell it was well made. He ejected the clip and turned the rifle upside down to look into the firing chamber. It was a .30-06 semiautomatic, made in Italy. He held it to his shoulder and sighted along the counter at the wall on the far end of the store. The rifle was heavy but had good balance; the barrel carried its width all the way to the muzzle. He would probably have it propped on a rock when he was shooting, so the weight wouldn’t be a problem. The clip held five rounds, but he could buy a couple of extra clips, just in case. It had the natural pointing, good feel of a rifle that shot in tight groups at long range.