Final Victim (1995) Read Online Free PDF Page B

races away from getting her NASCAR license and had a black belt in some kind of Oriental kick fighting . . . all in all, a dizzying resume. He'd been expecting a bull-necked, short-haired woman with pug-nosed determination. The thing that instantly struck him as strange was tha t n obody had mentioned she was a knockout. He immediately calculated it must be a tribute to her immense skills, that beauty was so far down her list of assets it didn't even rate a mention.
    "You're in my light," she said, pointing to a Tensor lamp that he was standing in front of.
    "You need light to swear at this stuff?"
    "Hey . . . please. Okay? I know we've been assigned to work together, but spare me the breezy bullshit."
    The computer got a "timed-out" signal and she turned to try it again.
    He leaned over, picked up her crib sheet, and glanced at it for a moment. Written on the top was "Pennet." "What's Pennet?" he asked.
    "It's a remailer computer program in Oslo, Norway. You know what a remailer is?"
    "Yeah. It's a computer that masks the identity of the senders. You can send a message to somebody through a remailer and it will encode your name and then send it on, hiding your identity from the receiver."
    "Not exactly." Her tone seemed to say she was already tired of him.
    "I thought you were supposed to be updating data for a new program for sex offenders on the VICAP computer. . . ."
    "I'm caught up to everything Operations gave me. They're sending down some new packets. So until they come, VICAP can wait."
    VICAP--the Violent Criminals Apprehension Program--was a computer system originally designed by an L . A . cop named John St. John. St. John had reasoned that since serial criminals often had fractured personalities, they might also be nomads and wander. With that in mind, he had convinced police departments all over the country to put any unsolved, brutal, ritualistic sex killings into a computer data bank. The idea was that if these killers were wandering around, committing murders all across the country, then maybe the similarities in their assaults would go undetected. The computer would match them up and see a serial crime where local police might not. Because of VICAP, serial murderers like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy had been discovered.
    "What're ya doing, messing around with a remailer computer in Oslo?" Lockwood finally asked.
    She looked at him with her jaw set and no apparent intention of answenng.
    "That's an official question posed by your new shit-for-brains Fort Nowhere teammate."
    She seemed to be evaluating him; then her body language changed slightly.
    "Okay, look . . . I'm sorry. I'm mad, but not at you. I'm mad at the situation. They've got me updating old cases. I'm a doctor of abnormal psychology and criminal profiling. I didn't agree to a job here so I could update old computer data. I thought this remailer might be more challenging, so I'm free-lancing it. Don't burn me, okay?"
    "How you doing?" Lockwood asked, not really caring but looking for friendly ground.
    "I can't get through password security. I'm trying to crack in, but they've got some kind of three-try limit on passwords. At this rate, it's gonna take me fifty years."
    Lockwood didn't know much about computers, but that wasn't something he shared with many people. In the new age of law enforcement, computers were a growing tool. Computer illiteracy all but disqualified you from the hunt. He had picked up some rudimentary stuff, but it was mostly camouflage. He was still what the chipheads called a bagbiter--somebody who created problems on the system. So he lef t t he hacking and cracking to other people, while he stood on the sidelines and tried to look wise. He pulled out his handbook of limited knowledge and asked a few ground-level questions.
    "Are you using your own username?" he asked.
    "No . . . I'm Redwitch, but I'm not using it. For this, I'm DarkStar--it's a name of one of our informants--and I'm using the U . S . Customs host