“I talked Amy into going with me.”
Amy Grabe, the FBI’s special agent in charge in San Francisco.
“They decided there’d been enough federal copyright violations to justify a raid. Joint task force.”
Which meant it wasn’t very polite. “Feet apart, spread ’em” had probably been involved. Dance and O’Neil shared a smile. It was hard to say, given the optical mechanics of Skype, but it seemed to Dance that he winked at her.
Of course, he hadn’t.
Then she admonished herself again: Concentrate.
“Good job, sir,” Madigan said and enjoyed a bite of what Dance believed to be pistachio ice cream. She’d missed breakfast and was thinking of asking for a cup of her own.
The Monterey detective continued, “They did find some file sharing going on out of his house but Eberhardt was more of a researcher. He keeps track of hundreds of above-and underground fan sites for musicians. Looks like he’d comb through them and get potential customers for illegal downloads. It really wasn’t all file sharing—it was file stealing and selling too. They charged a fee for the songs. They’d ripped off albums of about a thousand artists.
“There’s this really … dark underground of websites out there. They have to do with cultural things, mostly: books, movies, TV shows, music. A lot of them are about stealing the artists’ work—bootlegs, for instance. But most of them are about the celebrities themselves: Stephen King, Lindsey Lohan, George Clooney, Carrie Underwood, Justin Bieber … and Kayleigh Towne.
“And it’s all off the radar. The people posting use proxies and portals … and anonymous accounts. None of this shows up on Google. They’ve worked around that.” O’Neil gave them the list of websites whose addresses were only numbers or letters: 299ek333.com was typical. Once inside them, there were various pages that seemed nonsensical—“The Seventh Level,” for instance. Or “Lessons Learned.”
But navigating through the links, he explained, you got to the true substance of the sites: the world of celebrities. TJ Scanlon had found none of these.
O’Neil said, “It looks like that’s where Edwin’s getting a lot of his information. In fact, he posted plenty about the file sharer who got killed—the vic in Fresno.”
Madigan asked, “Anything that’d implicate Edwin in the killing?”
“No. He just urged people not to use file sharing.”
Of course, he wouldn’t slip up. Not clever Mr. Edwin Sharp.
O’Neil turned away for a moment and typed. Dance received an email containing several URLs. Harutyun took her phone when she offered it to him and he set to work typing them into a computer nearby.
O’Neil asked the room, “You’re monitoring all her calls?”
“That’s right but we’re trying to buy some time, make it harder for him to contact her with another verse,” Harutyun said. “We’ve given her and her family new phones, all unlisted. He’ll probably find the numbers eventually but by then we hope we’ll nail him on the evidence or witnesses.”
“I’d dig through those sites,” O’Neil advised. “You should be able to get some good information about him. Looks like he spends a lot of time online.”
O’Neil took a brief call and turned back to the screen. He said he had to leave, an interrogation was on the schedule. His eyes crinkled with a smile and though Skype didn’t allow for a clear image of where he cast his gaze, Dance believed it was to her. “You need anything else, just let me know.”
Madigan thanked him and the screen went dark.
They turned to the second monitor, on which Miguel Lopez had called up one of the underground sites O’Neil had found.
“Lookit that,” Crystal Stanning said.
The site, which boasted more than 125,000 fans, was a stalker’s paradise. It had pages for several hundred celebrities in all areas of entertainment and politics. Kayleigh’s was one of the most popular, it seemed. Within her pages was one headed “Kayleigh Spotting,” and was a real-time hotline bulletin board about where she was at the moment. “She Can’t Fool Us!” contained pictures of Kayleigh in various outfits—disguises, almost—so fans could recognize her when she was trying to remain anonymous. Other pages contained extensive bios of the crew and band members, fans’ stories about concerts they’d attended, discussions of which venues were good and bad acoustically, who’d tried to scalp tickets.
Other pages gave details of Kayleigh’s personal life, down to her preferences about food and clothing.
The page “WWLK, We Who Love Kayleigh” offered information about famous fans—people who had commented in the press about their affection for her music. As Dance scrolled through she found Congressman Davis’s name mentioned. He’d been quoted at a campaign rally about how much he appreciated Kayleigh’s talent, and her stance on immigration in her song “Leaving Home.” Dance followed a hyperlink to his own page and noted that he had reproduced the lyrics in full—with Kayleigh’s permission. Dance remembered he’d thanked Kayleigh for this earlier at her house.
“In the Know” offered press information, thousands of photographs, announcements from Kayleigh’s record company and Barry Zeigler, her producer. There was also a feed from her official site, giving updates—for instance, about upcoming events, like Friday’s concert and the luncheon today at a local country club for the Fan of the Month. Dance read the press release, written by Kayleigh’s stepmother, Sheri, noting to her relief that Edwin was not the winner.
Other links led to even more troubling pages, which offered bootleg albums, recorded illegally at concerts, and links to file sharing services. One page gave gossip about disputes within celebrities’ families, Kayleigh’s included, though aside from tepid public spats with Bishop, Sheri and a few musicians, like the man who’d interrupted the award ceremony, her gossip page was pretty sparse.