Double Cross

Chapter 91

IN OUR VERY STRANGE and strangely powerful session together, Anthony Demao had asked me if I was a cop, and it struck me now that I hadn’t answered him. I wasn’t quite sure myself these days. I was still settling back in with Metro, and my situation was a special one. I knew one thing for sure: I hadn’t ever worked any harder on a case-one that seemed more complex and difficult every day.

Frustrating to all of us, but not that unusual under the circumstances, our hands were tied in the investigation of Brian Kitzmiller’s death. The Cyber Unit at the Bureau had promised a new contact soon and a full report on everything Kitz had been doing before he died, but in the meantime, it was basically “We’ll get back to you.”

Which is why Sampson and I showed up on Beth Kitzmiller’s doorstep in Silver Spring, Maryland, a day later. We didn’t want to bother the family, to intrude on their grief, but we didn’t have much choice.

“Thanks for letting us come over,” I said as Beth let the two of us into the foyer of the house.

Her face was drawn, and she looked deeply tired-but there was strength and resolve in her voice. “Brian died looking for this terrible, terrible man. You do whatever you need to do. Stay here as long as you have to. We need closure, Alex. I need it. So do my kids.”

Six-year-old Emily hovered at the top of the stairs, wide-eyed and silent, watching us. I gave her a wink and a quick smile, and finally she smiled back. Brave little girl, but just seeing her put a pain in my heart. I needed closure too.

“We were hoping to take a look in his office,” I told Beth. “I know he did a lot of work at home.” And if anyone had crossed paths with our killer online, it would have been Kitz, I thought, though I didn’t say that part out loud.

“Of course. Let me show you the Lair.”

Beth led us through a pair of sliding pocket doors at the rear of the homey Colonial that Kitz would never see again. His office looked out onto a backyard with a swing set and a sunflower garden. Life goes on. For some of us, anyway. Not for Kitz, though.

Beth lingered in the doorway. “I don’t know if you’ll find anything worthwhile or not, but please, look anywhere you like. Nothing in our house is off-limits.”

“Is this the only computer he used at home?” Sampson asked from where he sat at a large, cluttered desk. I noted that the system was surprisingly low-tech, just a Dell CPU and monitor.

“He had a laptop from the Bureau,” Beth said. “I don’t think it’s here, though. I haven’t come across it anywhere.”

I looked over at Sampson. We hadn’t found a laptop in Kitz’s office or his car. “How about passwords? Any idea?” I asked Beth.

She blew out a mouthful of air. This was difficult, but Beth Kitzmiller was making it a lot easier for us. “Try Gummi Worm, with an i. He used that one sometimes.”

The three of us exchanged a kind of shy, painful smile.

“It was his nickname for Emily,” she offered. “And occasionally for me.”

Sampson tapped in Gummi Worm.

Chapter 92

IT WAS KITZ’S PASSWORD-at least, on the computer at home-and while Sampson feverishly worked the keyboard, I started in on the desk drawers.

I turned up a thick stack of pending case files, most of them serial-related, and all filled with Xeroxes of original material. I had to wonder if these were “unauthorized” copies he’d brought home from work. Kitz had been a “fan” of this kind of stuff, right? If he was a little obsessed, it was part of what made him good at his job. Of course, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help thinking, Kitz was FBI, and Kyle Craig had been too. Unfortunately, that particular line of thinking also made me a suspect.

The first case I looked at was one I’d heard about before. Someone was breaking into suburban Maryland homes at night and strangling women in their beds. No theft, no vandalism-just the vicious murders themselves. So far, there had been three in a span of five months, one every seven weeks.

The next file was coded “Mapmaker,” and outlined a series of shootings, always with the same gun. The victims were apparently random, the only consistency being their location. The shootings, four so far, had taken place on street corners along a straight line ru

Then I discovered a file Kitz had put together on Kyle Craig. It even included information on how I had taken Kyle down. Plus, Kitz had been going through all of Kyle’s old case notes, including the ongoing investigations at the time he was arrested.

When I found the DCAK file, it was mostly old information on the Washington-area murders: copies of crime reports, map sections, lab results, interviews-hundreds of them, all tied to the known homicides. Not much that was new or helpful. And nothing directly linking DCAK to Craig.

“How’s it going over there?” I asked Sampson. “Any luck so far? Good or bad?”

“There’s a lot to look at,” he said. “He’s got Technorati, Blogdex, PubSub… tracking software, Alex. With the right setup, he could ping anyone who commented on a blog or surfed a site.”

“So how do we find out what Kitz knew? Where did he keep it?”

Sampson thrummed his fingers on the desk. “I could check his Internet history, see if there were sites he went to a lot. Guess I’ll start there.”

A few minutes later, Sampson suddenly sat back in Kitz’s desk chair. He whistled through his teeth. “I’ll be damned. Come over here, Alex.”

I peered over his shoulder.

“Look familiar?” Sampson asked. “It should.”

He’d pulled up a long list of sites, many of them with names I recognized from my own surf-sleuthing. But that’s not what had my attention now. In addition to the named sites, the list included dozens of numbers. As I looked closer, I saw that it was actually the same number, repeated over and over, subdivided in different ways with periods and slashes.

344.19.204.411

34.41.920.441/1

34.419.20.44/11

344.192.04.411

The list continued beyond the figures on the screen, but what we had was our mystery number-the one from the side of the mailbag at the Smithsonian.

“It’s an IP address, Alex. A Web site. At least, Kitz seemed to think so.”

“Why didn’t he tell us about it?” I asked. “What’s going on here, Sampson?”

“Maybe he hadn’t found the right combination. Maybe he hadn’t gotten around to checking it yet. Or the site could be inactive.”

“One way to find out,” I said. “Let’s start at the top and work our way down the list.”

Chapter 93

BREE STONE STOOD ALL ALONE on the roof of the Nineteenth Street house, staring at the spot where the sun had baked Brian Kitzmiller’s blood to a cracked black stain. All the wrong questions were ru

They were inevitable questions, human ones, but also unhelpful to this investigation. She needed to focus on the killer’s methods and then trace any evidence he might have left here.

Tonight, Bio-Tec was coming in to clean the “yellow house.” The homeowners would be back in town tomorrow. This was the last walk-through, her final chance to find some shred of evidence that everyday life would soon erase.

Every indication was that the killer had come up through the roof hatch and had exited by the scaffold in the back, two houses over. Kitz’s postmortem had shown abrasions under the arms and fibers on his shirt where he’d been hauled up with a strong nylon rope, or a cord of some kind. Nonfatal levels of chloral hydrate were in his bloodstream, indicating he’d been unconscious, which was the only good news so far.