"Well, as you might have guessed from what we heard from his neighbor, it was, hmm ... robust might be one word you could use to describe it. He dated a number of women. And he took photos, of some of them, at least, with a digital camera we found in his condo."
"What were they wearing?" asked Officer Flannery.
"Or what weren't they wearing?" Heath Robinson chimed in with a leer.
Allison shot Nicole a resigned look. She didn't know how Nic could stand to work with Heath. Nicole's face was impassive. Even though her expression hadn't changed, Allison saw that her friend's face had gone strangely flat, as if she had withdrawn deep into herself. Talking about photos must have dredged up memories of her work with Innocent Images. Online predators often used pornography to convince young girls that having sex with them would only be natural.
"The shots were actually kind of tasteful," Rod said. "Nothing hard-core. Negligees or strategically placed sheets." He looked over at Nicole.
"Oh, and Nic--that receipt you found for Oh Baby in Fate's desk? Turns out that's an upscale lingerie shop, not a baby store. He bought someone a, a--" He stumbled over the word. "A battier." He pronounced it buhst-ee-air. No one corrected him.
"Speaking of kids, were the women in these photos all adults?" Allison asked. "Did anyone look underage?"
Rod shook his head. "All what I would call age-appropriate eye candy. Late twenties to early forties."
"How many in total?"
"There's some question as to whether a couple of shots are of the same woman or not. My best guess would be nine."
"Any familiar faces?" Allison braced herself to hear Cassidy's name.
"Negative. And we isolated just their heads and showed them to the neighbor who saw a woman leaving his apartment the morning Fate died, and she didn't recognize any of them either. None of the photos were of Victoria Hanawa or any of Fate's female coworkers."
"Could you tell if the women knew they were being photographed?" Nicole's voice had a raspy edge.
"It was all pretty much 'smile for the camera."
"I can't believe anyone was that stupid. Let alone nine of them." Special Agent Karl Zehner shook his head. "In five minutes, he could have sent those photos all over the Internet."
Rod shrugged. "They must have trusted him."
"How about that hotel card from the Hilton?" Allison asked.
"They say the cards are automatically reprogrammed for each visitor, and they can't say when or who used it last," Karl said. "I'm guessing it was just a memento."
Nicole turned to Riley Lowell, who worked at the computer forensics laboratory. "What'd you find on Fate's computer?"
"No big surprises. But what was really useful was the memory stick you found in his desk. He had saved copies of a lot of threats that he had gotten by e-mail. Some of them weren't threats per se, just people who were angry at him." He patted a stack of paper. "I've made printouts for you so you can prioritize which ones you want us to try to get IP addresses on."
"And then there are the people Jim knew in real life," Leif said. "Nic and Allison, you guys handled the bulk of the interviews this morning. What do you think?"
Allison looked at Nicole, but when she didn't say anything, Allison went first. "I can see a number of angles. One is that if you read between the lines, ratings for his show have not been as strong as they wanted. They added Victoria Hanawa in the hopes that she would bring them more young female listeners, but it didn't work."
"So the solution was to rig up some kind of poisonous gas and kill Fate at work?" Karl's face wrinkled in disbelief. "Shoot, wouldn't it be a lot easier just to fire him, or both of them, and bring in someone new?"
"You would think so, but I just got off the phone with the station's insurer," Allison said. "They carried keyman insurance on Fate. Now that he's dead, they'll be getting five million dollars."
Karl whistled, but Leif said, "This still feels personal to me, not corporate. In every interview I conducted today, it seemed like Fate had managed to tick off that person at least Once."
There were nods around the table.
Nicole said, "Victoria disagreed with him about the direction of the show. And she said that Chris was bullied by Jim on an ongoing basis."
Rod nodded. "A couple of people I interviewed mentioned Fate picking on Chris."
"I think we need to look closely at Victoria," Nic said. "To me, she seems a much more likely suspect than Chris. Victoria certainly had the motive. Fate didn't listen to her ideas. He mocked her and cut off her mike. He didn't appreciate her suggestions for changing the show. And there could have been some kind of relationship that soured?'
"There weren't any photos of her on his camera," Karl said.
"All that means is that she's smart enough not to get talked into posing. And as for opportunity--we already have a witness saying that Victoria is the one who handed the package to Jim. She claims she found it in her box."