Angels Flight

photos of her tortured and now dead.
    “Look at the left knee,” Rider commanded.
    He did so. He saw a round dark spot that appeared to be a scab.
    “A scab?”
    “Right. The protocol calls it premortem by five to six days. It happened before she was abducted. So she had that scab on her knee the entire time she was with her abductor – if there really was one. In the photos on the web site, she has no scab. I can go back in and show you if you like.”
    “I’ll take your word for it,” Bosch said.
    “Yeah,” Edgar added. “Me, too.”
    “So these photos on the web were taken well before she was supposedly kidnapped, well before she was murdered.”
    Bosch nodded, then shook his head.
    “What?” Rider asked.
    “It’s just… I don’t know. Twenty-four hours ago we were working the Elias thing and thinking maybe we were looking for a cop. Now all of this…”
    “It changes things all right,” Edgar said.
    “Wait a minute, if that’s Sam Kincaid in those pictures with her, why the hell are they still on that web site? It doesn’t make sense that he would risk that.”
    “I thought about that,” Rider said. “There are two possible explanations. One being that he doesn’t have editing access to the web site. In other words, he can’t take those photos off without going to the site administrator, raising suspicions and exposing himself. The second possibility, and it might be a combination of both, is that he felt he was safe. Harris was fingered as the killer and whether he was convicted or not that was the end of the story.”
    “It’s still a risk leaving those photos out there to be seen,” Edgar said.
    “Who’s going to see them?” Rider asked. “Who’s going to tell?”
    Her voice was too defensive. She realized this and continued in a calmer tone.
    “Don’t you see? The people with access to this site are pedophiles. Even if someone recognized Stacey, which is unlikely, what were they going to do? Call the police and say, ‘Uh, yes, I like fucking children but I don’t stand for murdering them. Could you get these photos off our web site?’ Not in a million years. Hell, maybe keeping the photos on there was a form of bragging. We don’t even know what we have here. Maybe every girl on that site is dead.”
    Her voice was growing sharper as she tried to convince them.
    “Okay, okay,” Bosch said. “You make good points, Kiz. Let’s stay on our case for now. What is your theory? You think Elias got this far along and it got him killed?”
    “Absolutely. We know it did. The fourth note. ‘He knows you know.’ Elias went onto the secret web site and was found out.”
    “How’d they know he was in there if he had the passwords from the third note?” Edgar asked.
    “Good question,” Rider replied. “I asked the O’Connors the same thing. They did some snooping around after getting into the server. They found a cookie jar on the web site. What that means is that there is a program that captures data about each user who enters the site. It then analyzes the data to determine if someone has entered the site who should not have had access. Even if they have the passwords, their entry is still recorded and a data trail called an Internet protocol address is left behind. It’s like fingerprints. The IP, or the cookie, is left on the site you enter. The cookie jar program will then analyze the IP address and match it to a list of known users. If there is no match a flag is raised. The site’s manager sees the flag and can trace the intruder. Or he can set up a tripwire program that waits for a return visit from the intruder. When he comes back, the program will attach a tracer which will provide the site manager with the intruder’s E-mail address. And once you have that you have the intruder cold. You can identify him then. If it looks like a cop you close the elevator – the page you hijacked and were using as a secret gateway – and you go find a new web page to hijack. But in this case it wasn’t a cop. It was a lawyer.”
    “And they didn’t shut down,” Bosch said. “They sent someone out to kill him.”
    “Right.”
    “So you think this is what Elias did,” Bosch said. “He got these notes in the mail and followed the clues. He stumbled into this web site and set off an alarm. A flag. They then killed him.”
    “Yes, that would be my interpretation of what we know at this point, particularly in light of the fourth note. ‘He knows you know.’