Angels Flight

using administrator/administrator. And if she was able to do it, then any hacker worth his salt could have gotten in and then hijacked the Mistress Regina page. And somebody did.”
    “What did they do?” Bosch asked.
    “They put in a hidden hypertext link. A hot button. When located and pushed, it will take the user to another web site all together.”
    “In English,” Edgar said.
    Rider thought for a moment.
    “Think of it as a tall building – the Empire State building. You are on one floor. The Mistress Regina floor. And you find a hidden button on the wall. You push it and an elevator door you didn’t even see before opens and you get on. The elevator takes you to another floor and opens. You step out. You are someplace completely new. But you couldn’t have gotten there if you hadn’t been on Mistress Regina’s floor and stumbled onto that hidden button.”
    “Or been told where it was,” Bosch said.
    “Exactly,” Rider said. “Those in the know can go.”
    Bosch nodded at her computer.
    “Show us.”
    “Well, remember, the first note to Elias was the web page address and the image of Regina. The second one said, ‘dot the i humbert humbert.’ The mystery writer was simply telling Elias what to do with the web page.”
    “Dot the i in Regina?” Edgar asked. “Click the mouse on the dot?”
    “That’s what I thought but O’Connor/O’Connor said a hot button can only be hidden behind an image. Something about pixel redefinition that I don’t need to get into.”
    “So you dot the eye?” Bosch said, pointing to his eye.
    “Right.”
    She turned to her laptop, to which she had attached a mouse. She now moved it with her hand and Bosch watched the arrow on the screen move to Mistress Regina’s left eye. Rider double-clicked the mouse button and the screen went blank.
    “Okay, we’re on that elevator.”
    After a few seconds a field of blue sky and clouds appeared on the screen. Then tiny angels with wings and halos appeared sitting on the clouds. Then a password template appeared.
    “Humbert humbert,” Bosch said.
    “See, Harry, you get this stuff. You’re just acting like you don’t.”
    She typed in the name humbert in the user name and password slots and the screen went blank once again. A few seconds later there was a welcome message.

    WELCOME TO CHARLOTTE’S WEB SITE

    Below the message a moving cartoon image formed. A spider crawled along the bottom of the page and then began weaving a web across the screen, shooting back and forth until the web was formed. Then tiny photographic images of young girls’ faces appeared in the web, as if caught there. When the image of the web and its captives was complete, the spider took a position at the top of the web.
    “This is sick,” Edgar said. “I’m getting a bad feeling here.”
    “It’s a pedophile site,” Rider said. With a fingernail she tapped the screen below one of the photos in the web. “And that is Stacey Kincaid. You click on the photo you like and you get a full spread of photos and videos. It is truly, truly horrible stuff. That poor little angel, she might be better off dead.”
    Rider moved the arrow to the photo of the blond girl. It was too small for Bosch to identify the girl as Stacey Kincaid. He wished he could just take Rider’s word for it.
    “Are you ready for this?” Rider asked. “I can’t run videos on my laptop but the photos give you the idea.”
    She didn’t wait for a reply and she didn’t get one. She double-clicked the mouse and a new screen appeared. A photo appeared on the screen. It was a young girl standing naked in front of a hedge. She was smiling in a forced, seemingly unnatural way. Despite the smile she still had a lost-in-the-woods look on her face. Her hands were on her hips. Bosch could tell it was Stacey Kincaid. He tried to breathe but it felt like his lungs were collapsing. He folded his arms across his chest. Rider started scrolling the screen and a series of photos came up featuring the girl in several poses by herself and then finally with a man. Only the man’s naked torso was shown, never his face. The last photos were the girl and the man engaged in various sex acts. Then they came to the final photo. It showed Stacey Kincaid in a white dress with little semaphore flags on it. She was waving at the camera. The photo seemed somehow to be the worst one even though it was the most innocent.
    “Okay, go back or forward or whatever you do to get that off