The Straw Men 3-Book Thriller Collection: The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead, Blood of Angels

‘Why would someone put up fake home pages?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘that’s what I wondered. I followed most of the links down into dead ends and 404s. But the line kept on going, through pages of links – and on each page only one of the links seemed to lead more than a couple of pages away. Then I started hitting passwords. At first, easy Java stuff that I could hack myself, using a few goodies I found stashed on your disk. Incidentally, you need more RAM. Fucker crashed on me about five times. Then – hope you don’t mind, there’s a few long-distance calls on your room – I got some help from specialist friends. I had to get down to wedge tracing and UNIX backdoors and shit. Someone who really knew what they were doing had set up a lot of obfuscation.’

‘But what’s the point?’ I said. ‘Surely anyone could just bookmark the end site, whatever it is, and go straight there the next time. Why screw around setting up a paper trail when the whole point of the Web is nonlinear access?’

‘My guess is that the destination address changes regularly,’ Bobby said. ‘Anyway, finally I got through to the end.’

‘And what was there?’

‘Nothing.’

I stared at him. ‘Say again?’

‘Nothing. There was nothing there.’

‘Bobby,’ I said, ‘that’s a shit story. It sucks. What do you mean, “nothing”?’

He shoved the sheaf of papers toward me. The top sheet was blank apart from a short sentence centred in the middle of the page. It said: WE RISE.

‘That’s all there was,’ he said. ‘A couple of hours’ worth of subterfuge to hide a page with no links and just two words. The other sheets are just printouts of the route I took to get there, along with some of the hacks required. Plus I got the IP address of the final page and did a trace on it.’

Most Web addresses are known by a format that, while often not exactly something that trips off the tongue, can at least be understood as words. In fact, the Internet’s computers regard them as purely numerical addresses – 118.152.1.54, for example. By using this more basic form of address you can track the page down to a rough geographical location. ‘So where was it?’

‘Alaska,’ he said.

‘Whereabouts? Anchorage?’

He shook his head. ‘That’s it. Just Alaska. Then Paris. Then Germany. Then California.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘It moved. Kept blipping all over the place, and I don’t think it was ever really in any of those places at all. It was ghosted. I’m not King Nerd, but I know what I’m doing and I’ve never seen anything quite like it. I’ve got a couple of friends looking into it, but either way, something weird is going down.’

‘No shit.’

‘Not just what’s happening to you. This kind of thing is my job. I need to know how they’re doing it. And who they are.’ He took a long pull on his drink, and looked at me seriously. ‘What about you? What are you going to do now? Aside from more drinking.’

‘There’s three sections on the tape. I can’t do anything about the last one, about finding … the other child.’ I’d been intending to say ‘my twin’, but shied away at the last moment. ‘I don’t know what city it was, and it’s over thirty years ago anyhow. He or she could be anywhere in the world. Or dead. The second section doesn’t seem to lead anywhere. So I’m going to go looking for the place in the mountains.’

‘Sound thinking,’ he said. ‘And I’m going to help you.’

‘Bobby …’

He shook his head. ‘Don’t be an asshole, Ward. Your parents didn’t die in any accident. You know that.’

I guess I did, and had done for a little while, though I hadn’t really allowed the thought to settle, to say it to myself in words.

Bobby did it for me. ‘They were murdered,’ he said.

Chapter 12 (#ulink_1455d8aa-1171-5660-9443-dd74e81de15c)

Nina sat in the yard with Zoë Becker. The night was cool and she wished she’d accepted the tea she had been absently offered. Zandt had already spoken with the woman, and stood in her daughter’s room, and was now inside with her husband. Neither Becker had seemed surprised to find two investigators on their doorstep, even this late in the evening. Their lives were already too far divorced from what they were prepared to accept as reality. The two women talked fitfully for a while, but soon lapsed into silence. Zoë was watching her foot as it jogged up and down at the end of her crossed leg. That at least was the direction in which her eyes were directed. Nina doubted she was seeing anything at all, but rather floating in a void in which the movement of her foot was as meaningful an event as any other. She was glad of the silence, because she knew the only thing the woman would want to talk about. Was her daughter still alive? Did Nina think they would ever get her back? Or would there, in this house that Zoë had spent so much time getting just so, now always be a room whose emptiness and silence would darken until it was a black crystal at the centre of their lives? On the wall of this room was a poster for a band that none of the rest of them had ever heard except by accident. So what was the point of it now?

Nina had no answer to this question or others like it, and when the woman appeared about to speak she looked up with dread. Instead she found that Zoë had started to cry, exhausted tears that seemed neither the beginning of anything nor its end. Nina didn’t reach out for her. Some people would accept comfort from strangers, and some would not. Mrs Becker was one of the latter.

Instead she leaned back in her chair, and looked across through the French doors to the sitting room. Michael Becker was perched on the edge of an armchair. Zandt was standing behind the couch. Nina had spent the entire day with Zandt without hearing more than five sentences that did not relate to the case. They had walked the ground of the disappearance early in the day, before the shopping crowds gathered. They had visited Sarah Becker’s school, so that Zandt could see how it fit into its environment. He had observed the sight lines and access points, the places where someone might wait, looking for someone to love. He spent a long while over it, as if believing there was some new view he might chance upon that would enable him to glimpse a man’s shadow in the daylight. He had been irritable when they left.

They had not visited any of the families from The Upright Man’s previous murders. They had the files of the original interviews, and it was very unlikely there would be anything new to be learned. Nina knew he held their interviews in his head, and could have told the families things they had themselves forgotten. Talking to them could only confuse matters. She also privately believed that if Zandt was able to lead them closer to the killer, it would be little to do with something he had learned, and much more to do with something he felt.

Nina had another reason for keeping Zandt away from the families. She did not want any of the relatives stirred up enough that they might call the police or the Bureau to check how the investigation was going. No one knew she had reinvolved John Zandt in the case again. If anyone found out, all hell would break loose. This time it wouldn’t just be disciplinary: it would be the end of her career. Allowing him to talk to the Beckers was a risk she had to take. The parents had seen so many police and Bureau men since the disappearance that it was unlikely they would remember one in particular, or mention him to someone else. Or so she hoped. She also hoped that whatever the men were talking about, it might spark something in Zandt’s mind.

And that he would tell her about it if it did.

‘I’ll go through it again if you want.’

Michael Becker had already recounted his movements twice, responding quickly and concisely to questions. Zandt knew that the man had nothing helpful to tell him. He had also gathered that, in the weeks leading up to the disappearance, Becker had been so involved in his work that he would have noticed very little about the outside world. He shook his head.

Becker abruptly looked down at the floor and put his head in his hands. ‘Don’t you have anything else to ask? There must be something else. There has to be something.’

‘There’s no magic question. Or if there is, I don’t know what it might be.’

Becker looked up. This was not the kind of thing the other policemen had said to him. ‘Do you think she’s still alive?’

‘Yes,’ Zandt said.

Becker was surprised by the confidence he saw in the policeman’s face. ‘Everyone else is acting as if she’s dead,’ he said. ‘They don’t say it. But they think it.’

‘They’re wrong. For the time being.’

‘Why?’ The man’s voice was dry, the breathing wrong, the sound of a man caught wanting to believe.

‘When a killer of this type disposes of a victim, he usually hides the body and does what he can to obfuscate its identity. Partly just to make it harder for the police. But also because many of these people are seeking to hide their activities from themselves. The three previous victims were found in open ground, wearing the remains of their own clothes and still with their personal effects. This man isn’t hiding from anybody. He wanted us to know who they were, and that he had finished with them. Finishing implies a period in which he requires them to be alive.’

‘Requires them …’

‘Only one of the previous victims was sexually abused. Apart from minor head injuries, the others showed no abuse apart from the shaving of their heads.’

‘And their murder, of course.’

Zandt shook his head. ‘Murder is not abuse in this kind of situation. Murder is what ends the abuse. Forensics can only show so much, but it suggests that all of the girls were alive for over a week after their abductions.’

‘A week,’ the man said, bleakly. ‘It’s been five days already.’

There was a pause before Zandt answered. During the interview, his eyes had covered most corners of the room, but now he saw something he hadn’t noticed before. A small pile of schoolbooks, on a side table. They were too advanced to belong to the younger daughter. He became conscious that the other man was looking at him. ‘I’m aware of that.’

‘You sounded like you had another reason.’

‘I just don’t believe he will have killed her yet.’