The People vs. Alex Cross (Alex Cross #25)(27)

Rawlins glanced at Batra and laughed. “No special this or agent that, Dr. Cross. It’s just KK or Krazy Kat. I’m a contractor. The Federal Bureau of Investigation could never make me a sworn agent. Am I right, Big Baby B.?”

Batra rolled her eyes, said, “We’re here to work, Kat, not wallow.”

“I think I’d be quite a badass crime fighter.” Rawlins sniffed. “Despite appearances, I’m honest to a fault and expect the same from those with whom I work. Tell me, Dr. Cross, did you murder those Soneji followers for sport?”

“No.”

“Or to right some wrong?”

“It was self-defense.”

He studied me for tics and tells but saw none. “How can I help you?”

“First, a little context.”

I gave him a synopsis of the story the cyberpimp Neal Parks had told Sampson and me. Parks claimed he had been in Newport News, Virginia, several weeks before, scoping out the military town for an expansion of his business. Partying in a strip club there, the pimp met two men in their early thirties who went by Billy Ray and Carver.

The three men hit it off and drank and snorted too much late into the night. Billy Ray, who was more a talker than Carver, told Neal Parks they were trolling for blondes to use in movies they produced for several profitable sites on the dark web. One of the most recent, and most successful, Billy Ray said, featured two young blond lesbians from Pennsylvania. He gave Parks the URL of one of the websites: www.Itsoverblondie.org.co. I dug in my pocket and came up with the Ziploc containing the Toshiba flash drive. “The same URL is featured on the video on this drive. I want to know if the video’s real or not.”

Rawlins became all business at that point. He took the bag and asked where I’d gotten the drive, and I told him about Gretchen Lindel’s father.

“He should have brought this directly to the agents on his daughter’s case,” Rawlins said, moving toward one of his workbenches.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“You’ve watched what’s on the drive?”

“If it’s real, it’s the first actual snuff film I’ve ever seen.”

“You just want to know if it’s fake?”

“He wants to know everything and anything,” Batra said. “So do I.”

Rawlins said, “You make a copy?”

“On my laptop at home,” I said.

“No crashes?”

“Worked fine.”

“I’ll check it anyway,” he said, sitting down at a computer. He donned latex gloves, got out the drive, and inserted it into a USB port.

A few moments later, I watched a scanning icon count down the minute and forty-five seconds it took to do a full inspection of the flash drive. At the end of the scan, a message appeared: No known anomaly detected.

“Well, all righty, then,” Rawlins said.

He disconnected the flash, took it to the larger control board below the eight big screens, and plugged it into a server linked to the internal FBI network.

A digital index of the drive popped up on the large center screen; it showed the icon of the single MPEG movie file. Rawlins clicked on it. There was a brilliant flash, and then the clip played—the grainy video of the hysterical blonde running through the forest with the cameraman in hot pursuit.

“What was that?” Batra asked. “That flash at the beginning there?”

“I don’t know,” Rawlins said, freezing the video.

I said, “You know, come to think of it, when I hit the icon on my laptop, it did the same thing, only my screen’s much smaller and older, so it wasn’t as bright as that.”

Rawlins grunted and gave his computer orders to list all running processes and applications. The directory opened and showed them in a stack sorted by the time each was launched, beginning with the most recent app.

“That’s what just flashed there?” Batra said with an arched eyebrow. “Porngrinder?”





CHAPTER


34


RAWLINS LAUGHED AND said blithely, “Oh, no, Porngrinder is on me. What can I say? It’s a lonely life in the basement at times.”

“My God,” Batra said, disgusted. “The Bureau frowns on that kind of thing.”

“Have them sue me, won’t you?” Rawlins said.

“What was the flash?” Batra said.

“I don’t know. A blip, a screen hiccup. They happen, you know.”

“Or a bug in the plug-in that drives the video player?” Batra said.

Rawlins held up a finger. “A momentous occasion. Special Agent Henna B. and I might agree.”

Batra rolled her eyes. “Tell us about the video.”

I won’t bore anyone with the details of Rawlins’s technological savvy and instincts, but they were shrewd and his results conclusive. At first, he used ordinary software to try to access the video file’s so-called dark data. No luck. The video had been run through an onion system similar to the one used to create the Killingblondechicks4fun website. The dark data had been stripped away.

“Not surprising.” Rawlins sniffed. “But I’ve still got the dust rag.”

The “dust rag” was software Rawlins had designed and coded himself to raise the faintest trace of old dark and metadata. He compared the software to the Hubble Space Telescope looking for cosmic debris a thousand miles behind a comet’s long tail.