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“It’s my case.”
“It’s my family.”
Noah wasn’t going to win this battle. “Abigail spoke to the regional vice-president at the rental company, faxed him the administrative subpoena, and he said he would give us the GPS logs tomorrow morning if possible—it’s a holiday, but he’s working on it.”
“Good.”
Kate was back staring at the computer. “I have something, too. I have a list of every email address in Morton’s address book. I still haven’t recovered the messages themselves, but I’m getting closer.”
“How do we match those up to real people?”
“Some are easy—names attached to the emails. Some are harder, but I know some tricks.”
“What about going to the ISP?”
She glanced at him, eyebrow raised. “So you’re not as technically incompetent as you act.”
“I know the basics.”
“Internet service providers are less likely to turn over any private customer information without a warrant—they’re not as friendly as the rental company. So we need probable cause, such as an email exchange that is obviously criminal in nature, or that we can show is criminal based on other evidence. Here’s a list of everyone I’ve found so far—I highlighted those who are in Morton’s file as being a known associate.”
“I’ll pull addresses and see who’s local,” Noah said, feeling the familiar excitement in his gut telling him this was a turning point in the investigation.
“I have dozens I haven’t identified yet. The second list are those I have names for but aren’t on Morton’s associate list. That’s a little longer. My guess, those are the people who sent in disks for his porn site.”
“Why are they doing it? Morton didn’t have money to pay them.”
“Some people send in for free—those are usually amateurs who do the up-skirt videos or home movies. Some people have a deal with the site to be paid per view, so when someone watches the video they get paid. Trask had recorded more than half of his own material—he used prostitutes, drug addicts, anyone who’d do anything for a couple hundred dollars. But he’d make tens of thousands of dollars off the recording.”
Noah shook his head. “And that’s all legal.”
“Most of it is, and he worked damn hard to keep Trask Enterprises off the radar. But Adam Scott was a sick bastard, and he couldn’t help himself—he killed women for pleasure, and that’s what tripped him up. It was when he started killing online that we could finally pursue him.” Kate rubbed her temples. “Sometimes, the system is fucked,” she mumbled.
Noah didn’t exactly disagree with her but still thought their system was the best in the world. In his ten years in the Air Force, most of it in the Ravens security force, he’d been in dozens of countries and had seen the worst governments and justice systems in existence.
Noah sat at an extra terminal and pulled up the names Kate had identified. “There are only two who are local—both with criminal records. And one is already dead.”
Noah looked at Andrew “Ace” Shuman, who’d been in and out of prison most of his life. Prostitution, racketeering, assault. According to Morton’s file, Shuman had been a bodyguard. His official title with Trask Enterprises was “Head of Security.” He’d been out of prison for three years and seemed to have kept his nose clean, but as Noah knew, most were criminals for life: career criminals—few changed their stripes, they just got better at hiding.
“I’ll talk to Shuman,” Noah said. “He knew Ralston and Morton.”
“Shuman is a piece of work, and dangerous,” Kate said. “I had a couple of run-ins with him, but couldn’t nail him for anything substantive. He was in prison before Trask went into hiding—assault, I think. I tried to get him to turn on Trask, and he wouldn’t.”
“Good to know. He sounds like a possible.”
“Oh yeah, if Morton pissed Shuman off, there’s no doubt Shuman could kill him. But why?”
“That’s the million-dollar question.”
“Anything on Ralston?”
“ERT is processing the evidence. His computer was trashed, the hard drive destroyed.”
“The killer didn’t want us to find anything.”
“They haven’t narrowed time of death. The autopsy is scheduled for later this afternoon. The killer left the windows open; the apartment was a friggin’ icebox. But the ERT said he’d been dead for more than forty-eight hours, and the last witness we spoke to saw him coming home Friday night at approximately six-thirty in the evening.”
“So the big question is whether he was killed before or after Morton,” Kate said.
