She opened the rental and shoved her prisoner in the back seat. She slammed the door and came around to the front of the car. Lancaster joined her. They turned their backs on the lifeguard so he couldn’t read their lips while they spoke.
“We make a good team,” she said.
“Is that supposed to be an apology?” he asked.
“You still angry with me? Get over it.”
“Only if you help me solve Nicki’s problem.”
“We’ll get that fixed. But first I need to put this asshole’s feet to the fire and find out what he knows. Care to join me?”
“You haven’t said what you’re looking for. Why do you think he has a partner?”
Daniels gave him a long look. He thought back to the question he’d posed to her earlier. How many sickos had downloaded the Cassandra videos? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? The number had to be huge, way too many for the FBI to track down every single person who’d done so. Something else was in play here, and he realized that Daniels was chasing a much bigger monster.
“I’m in,” he said.
She flashed a smile. It was the first time she’d done that. It made her look even prettier, and he broke into a grin. It was the wrong thing to do. Her smile vanished, and she turned and got in the car.
Chapter 30
Creepie
Lancaster told Daniels to drive to the sheriff’s office on Eller Drive. He’d worked out of this office for several years and was on a first-name basis with the staff. Business was booming, and there was a wait to get their suspect booked.
Being an FBI agent had its privileges. Daniels found the desk sergeant and got the lifeguard moved to the head of the line, where he was fingerprinted, had a mug shot taken, and had his arrest report filled out. The lifeguard’s name was Richard “Rusty” Newman and he was forty-nine years old. Rusty sat in a chair with his wrist handcuffed to its leg and answered the desk sergeant’s questions. When asked if he’d like to call a lawyer, he declined. This was significant, for it meant Rusty might be willing to share information with Daniels and perhaps strike a deal.
Interrogations were done in a cramped room on the second floor that reeked of cigarettes. Smoking in the building was forbidden, but suspects were sometimes allowed to light up in the hopes it would lead to their cooperation. His handcuffs removed, Rusty sat with his back to the wall and stared into space. He’d been treated with contempt by every cop he’d encountered, and had to know that it was only going to get worse. Adults who abused children were not treated well by the system. This was especially true in prison, where they were often forced to live in solitary confinement for their own safety.
Daniels and Lancaster stood on the other side of the room. Daniels had reviewed the library of porn stored on Rusty’s cell phone and told Lancaster there was enough sick stuff to send the lifeguard away for twenty years.
“Tell me about your partner,” Daniels said.
“I don’t have a partner,” Rusty said.
“Then how about your friend. Tell me about him.”
“I have a lot of friends.”
“I want to know about one in particular. Tell me about the friend who’s into this stuff who you hang out with.”
“I run solo. I don’t hang out with anybody,” Rusty said.
Daniels stepped forward and dropped her voice. “If I check the calls logged on your cell phone and your emails, there won’t be one name that keeps popping up?”
“No, ma’am,” Rusty said.
“But you know other guys who are into this stuff,” she said.
“Sure. But I don’t socialize with them. You hang with other people, you inherit their problems. If another guy gets arrested and you’re with him, you’ll get arrested too.”
“You’ve been good at hiding your tracks, haven’t you?”
Rusty chose his words carefully. “I’m not going to apologize about who I am. I know these things are wrong, but I can’t stop it. So I try to be careful.”
The interrogation was starting out well. Rusty was saying the right things and also being respectful. His willingness to help also felt real.
“You’ve got hundreds of pornographic photographs and videos stored on your cell phone,” she said. “Where did you get them from?”
“Lots of places. I downloaded some, others were sent to me,” Rusty said.
“Sent to you by who?”
“Guys I met in chat rooms.”
“Do you know their names?”
“No, guys in chat rooms use aliases.”
“Really. What’s your alias?”
“Captain Rich. Richard’s my real name.”
“If I showed you particular images I found on your phone, would you remember where they came from?”
“I can try. My memory’s pretty good.”
Daniels removed her own cell phone from her jacket pocket and powered it up. She had transferred Rusty’s library to a file on her cell phone. She found a particular photograph and held the cell phone in Rusty’s face. The photo was of a naked teenage Mexican girl tied to a bed. She wore a shiny gold medallion around her neck, and looked like she would have preferred being dead to enduring any more abuse. Her torturers stood beside the bed wearing black leather masks.
“Does this look familiar?” the FBI agent asked.
Rusty’s face displayed no emotion. “Yeah, I remember that one.”
“Who sent it to you?”
“Guy named Creepie. Spelled with an ‘ie’ instead of a ‘y.’ Look, I only looked at that photo once. I’m not into torture.”
“No? Then why didn’t you erase it?”
“I must have forgotten.”
“You’re already in enough trouble, Rusty. Don’t compound your misery by lying to me. Your situation will only get worse if you do.”
Rusty had started to sweat. Looking at the torture photo hadn’t bothered him. But the thought of Daniels putting the screws to him did.
“All right, maybe I looked at it a couple of times,” he said.
Daniels returned the cell phone to her pocket. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and looked at Rusty like he was a rodent.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” the lifeguard said.
“The girl’s body was found in a field on the side of a highway in Houston seven years ago,” Daniels said. “She was an illegal immigrant who came across the border to find work. She was raped and strangled to death.”
Rusty shook his head in disbelief. “I asked Creepie when he sent the photo to me. I emailed him and said, ‘Did you kill her?’ Creepie emailed me back and said they’d let the girl go.”
“And you believed him.”
“Yes, I believed him. Guys into S&M like to boast about it. Creepie didn’t do that. He said the girl survived, and I believed him.”
“I found three other torture photos in the library on your phone. The FBI has these same photos. Guess what? The girls in all three ended up dead.”
Rusty’s eyes went wide, and his hands balled into fists.
“Fuck me,” he said under his breath.
“Did Creepie also send you these photos?” Daniels asked.
“Yeah. He told me the girls in them survived.”
“Do you see where this is headed, Rusty? You could be charged with being an accomplice to four murders if you’re not careful.”
“I didn’t know. You have to believe me.”
“I want to believe you, but you need to do more. Did Creepie send you any other images of girls being tortured? Think hard.”
Rusty scratched his chin and gave it some thought. “About six months ago, he emailed me a photo of a young black girl he was putting through the paces, and asked me if I wanted to see more. I said yes, so he sent me the rest and I downloaded them.”
“How old was this young woman?”
“She was young, maybe fifteen.”