I saw a dark slashing motion across her neck. I heard a slick, slicing sound and a disturbing pah noise before the screen froze and that icon of the lock appeared above a link that read www.Itsoverblondie.org.co. “Tell me if it’s a fake or not,” Lindel said, crying again. “That’s all I want you to do. Stop this torture before it drives my wife and me mad.”
I didn’t have a private investigator’s license. I was suspended pending trial. I should have expressed my sympathy and turned him down flat.
But I was a father too, and I could see the turmoil the kidnapping and now this possible snuff film were churning up in him.
“You’re sure that’s Gretchen?” I asked.
“I’d know her voice anywhere,” he said, looking at me like I was his last best chance.
“I’ll do what I can,” I said.
His fists clenched, Lindel smiled through his tears and said, “Bless you, Dr. Cross. From the bottom of my heart, bless you.”
CHAPTER
31
FBI AGENT HENNA Batra crossed her arms and stared furiously at me from behind the main security station at Quantico.
When I cleared security, I said, “I’m sorry, but you weren’t picking up your phone, and I needed to talk to you.”
Agent Batra didn’t answer, just pivoted on her black high-heeled pumps and marched down the hallway. I hurried to keep up. When I was abreast of her, she hissed, “Coming here like this? Are you trying to get me fired, Cross?”
“I said it was critical. And I’m obviously not on a watch list. Sidney let me right through the front gate.”
“Sidney’s known you eighteen years.”
“Well, exactly. We’re on the same team.”
“You don’t get it, Cross. You’re being tried for murder in DC. That puts your case within the Bureau’s purview.”
“Believe me, I get it. But what if analyzing this video can save Gretchen Lindel’s life? Or at least put her parents’ fears to rest?”
She squinted at me. “I’m confused. Why didn’t Lindel give this drive to the agents investigating his daughter’s disappearance?”
“He was in rough shape, hadn’t slept in days when I saw him, and he was on his way to New York. His mother’s been hospitalized.”
Batra walked a few more steps without comment and then stopped. She bit her lip, looked at the ceiling for a moment.
“Video analysis isn’t exactly my thing,” she said at last. “For that we have to go to the basement. And Dr. Cross?”
“Agent Batra?”
She studied me with cold eyes and said, “Before we go downstairs, you need to swear, in writing and in the presence of two witnesses, that you’ll never tell a soul what you see down there.”
Ten minutes later, I got in a secure elevator outside the cybercrimes unit feeling like I’d just signed a little bit of my life away. Agent Batra stepped in beside me, put a digital keycard in the lock, and hit sb2.
“That made me feel quite the criminal,” I said as the doors closed.
“Close enough these days,” Batra said.
“Want to clue me in to the reason for all the secrecy?”
“You’re a bright guy, you’ll figure it out,” Batra said as the elevator passed the first subbasement and began to slow.
I noticed a throbbing and thumping sound that got louder and more distinct when we reached the second subbasement. The elevator doors opened and we were blasted with electronic techno-pop music. It was loud. It was pulsating. It oddly made me want to dance.
The music obviously had the same effect on the guy with the flaming-red Mohawk twerking and gyrating inside the glass-walled lab directly in front of us. He wore denim shorts, a denim vest over a sleeveless black tee, and nothing else. Barefoot, and in time with the beat, he was shaking his booty, pumping both fists, and slashing the air with his Mohawk.
I broke into a smile. Batra didn’t.
She exited the elevator and crossed the hall to the lab door. I followed her, saying, “Okay, who the hell is that?”
“Keith Karl Rawlins,” she said, sounding pained. “He calls himself KK or Krazy Kat, depending on the occasion.”
CHAPTER
32
SPECIAL AGENT BATRA stopped at the lab door and looked back at me in real discomfort.
I said, “He works for the Bureau? That’s why the no-disclosure?”
Batra glared at me. “Rawlins is as brilliant as they come if you want to analyze anything digital. Far better than me, as a matter of fact.”
That surprised me. I’d always thought Batra was one with the Internet. Then I realized the reason for Rawlins’s banishment to subbasement two.
“He doesn’t fit the conservative J. Edgar G-man image, does he?”
“No,” Batra said, twisting the doorknob. “KK definitely does not.”
The music was even louder inside the lab. Past benches clogged with electronic test equipment, on the far side of the room, Rawlins danced before an arced array of eight large computer screens. The screens all showed the same video: people dancing in urban streets, shaking their rear ends to the addictive beat of the music.
Batra got around in front of Rawlins and waved wildly at him.
Rawlins made his hands into pretend guns that he pointed at Batra, and then he punched a key on a control board that looked like it belonged in a recording studio. The lab went quiet. Rawlins stopped dancing.
He waved his fingers playfully at Batra and in a soft voice that reeked of New Orleans, he said, “I’ll forgive you this time for interrupting my daily Diplo fix. I was just about done regenerating my brain cells anyway.”
“My son told me about that,” I said before Batra could reply. “Exercising for brain regeneration.”
Rawlins saw me, studied me, and then smiled. He picked up a hand towel from the chair and came over to us, still smiling and patting his sweating skull on either side of the Mohawk. He had a gold hoop through his left nostril, and his earlobes featured stretched piercings. In shiny sequins across the chest of his T-shirt were the words GODDESS DANCES.
“You’re bigger in person, I must say,” Rawlins said coyly. “And your son must have read the same article. What are the odds of that, Dr. Cross?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do,” Rawlins said. “Two in one-point-six-four billion, unless you look at it from a string-theory perspective, in which case the chance of brain waves vibrating out and crossing others rises exponentially with every person who reads that article.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
“That’s a pity,” Rawlins said with a pout. “I so enjoy fiery brains and rippling brawn in a single package.”
CHAPTER
33
I CHUCKLED. “YOU’RE out of luck on both counts, Special Agent Rawlins, which is why I came to see you.”
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.