I studied the Review-Journal’s trial stories that came before and after the one I had just read, and none gripped me like the report on the autopsy. The missing hours and the plastic bag and slow asphyxiation were descriptions that matched the murder of Denise Babbit. And, of course, the car trunk was the strongest match of all.

I pushed back from the desk but stayed in my seat, thinking. Could there be a connection here or was I engaged in a reporter’s fantasy, seeing innocent people accused of crimes they did not commit? Had Angela, in her industrious but naive manner, stumbled onto something that was under the radar of all of law enforcement?

I didn’t know-yet. But there was one way to find out. I had to go to Las Vegas.

I stood up and headed toward the raft. I had to inform Prendo and get a travel authorization. But when I got there his seat was empty.

“Anybody seen Prendo?” I asked the other aces on the raft.

“He took early dinner,” said one. “He should be back in an hour.”

I checked my watch. It was after four and I needed to get moving, first home to pack a bag, and then to the airport. If I couldn’t get a flight on short notice, I’d drive to Vegas. I glanced over at Angela Cook’s cubicle and saw it was empty, too. I walked over to the switchboard and looked up at Lorene. She pulled one earphone back.

“Did Angela Cook check out?”

“She said she was going out for a bite to eat with her editor but that she’d be back after. You want her cell number?”

“No, thanks, I’ve got it.”

I headed back to my desk with suspicion and anger growing inside in equal parts. My ace and my replacement had gone off together to break bread and I was not informed or invited. To me it only meant one thing. They were planning their next assault on my story.

That was okay, I decided. I was a giant step ahead of them and planned to stay that way. While they were off scheming I would be off chasing the real story. And I would get there first.

Carver had been busy all day routing and opening the final gateways that would allow for a test run of data transmission from Mercer and Gissal in St. Louis. It had consumed him and he had not made his appointed rounds until late in the day. He checked his traps and a charge shot through his chest when he saw he had caught something in one of his cages. The screen avatar displayed it as a fat gray rat running on a wheel inside the cage labeled TRUNK MURDER.

Using his mouse, Carver opened the cage and took out the rat. Its eyes were ruby red and its sharp teeth gleamed with ice-blue saliva. The animal wore a collar with a silver identity tag on it. He clicked on the tag and brought up the rat’s information. The date and time of the visit had occurred the night before, just after he had last checked his traps. A ten-digit Internet protocol address had been captured. The visit to his www.trunkmurder.com site had lasted only twelve seconds. But it was enough. It meant someone out there had plugged the words trunk murder into a search engine. Now he would try to find out who and why.

Two minutes later Carver’s breath caught in his throat as he followed the IP-a basic computer address-back to an Internet service provider. There was good and bad news. The good news: it wasn’t a huge provider like Yahoo, which had traffic gateways all over the world and was time-consuming as hell to trace. The bad news: it was a small private provider with the domain name of LATimes.com.

The Los Angeles Times, he thought, as something inside clutched his chest. A reporter from Los Angeles had gone to his trunk murder website. Carver leaned back in his chair and thought about how he should approach this. He had the IP address but no name to go with it. He couldn’t even be sure it was a reporter who had made the visit. A lot of non-reporters work at newspapers.

He rolled his chair down to the next workstation. He logged on as McGinnis, having broken his codes long ago. He went to the Los Angeles Times website and in the search window of the online archive typed trunk murder.

He got three hits on stories containing the phrase in the last three weeks, including one published on the website just that evening and due to go into the next morning’s paper. He pulled the latest story up on screen first and read it.

LAPD Drug Crackdown Draws Community Fire

By Angela Cook and Jack McEvoy

Times Staff Writers

A drug crackdown at a housing project in Watts has drawn fire from local activists who complained Tuesday that the LAPD only paid attention to the problem in the minority-populated complex when a white woman was allegedly murdered there.

Police announced the arrest of 16 residents of Rodia Gardens on drug charges and the seizure of a small amount of drugs following a one-week investigation. Police spokesmen said the “peep and sweep” operation was in response to the murder of Denise Babbit, 23, of Hollywood.

A 16-year-old alleged gang member who is a resident of Rodia Gardens was arrested in the slaying. Babbit’s body was found two weeks ago in the trunk of her car at a beachside parking lot in Santa Monica. The investigation traced the crime back to Rodia Gardens, where Santa Monica police believe Babbit, an exotic dancer, went to buy drugs. Instead, she was abducted, held for several hours and repeatedly sexually assaulted before being strangled.

Several community activists questioned why efforts to stem the tide of drug dealing and related crime in the projects did not come before the murder. They were quick to point out that the victim of the trunk murder was white while the members of the community are almost 100 percent African American.

“Look, let’s face it,” said Rev. William Treacher, head of a group called South Los Angeles Ministers, also known as SLAM, “this is just another form of police racism. They ignore Rodia Gardens and let it become a stew of drugs and gang crime. Then this white woman who puts drugs in her body and takes her clothes off for a living goes down and gets herself killed there and what do you get? A task force. Where were the police before this? Where was the task force? Why does it take a crime against a white person to draw attention to problems in the black community?”

A police spokesman denied that race had anything to do with the anti-drug operation and said similar operations have occurred in Rodia Gardens numerous times before.

“Who complains about getting drug dealers and gangbangers off the street?” asked Capt. Art Grossman, who directed the operation.

Carver stopped reading the story. He didn’t sense any threat to him. Still, it didn’t explain why someone from the Times-presumably Cook or McEvoy-had put trunk murder into a search engine. Were they just being thorough, covering all the bases? Or was there something else? He looked at the two previous stories in the archives that mentioned trunk murder and found they had been written by McEvoy. They were straight news stories about the Denise Babbit case, one about the discovery of her body, and the second-a day later-about the arrest of the young gangbanger in her murder.

Carver couldn’t help but smile to himself as he read about the kid getting tagged for the murder. But his humor didn’t let him drop his caution. He plugged McEvoy into the archive search and soon found hundreds of stories, all related to crime in Los Angeles. He was the crime beat reporter. At the bottom of each of his stories was his e-mail address: JackMcEvoy@LATimes.com.

Carver then put Angela Cook into the search engine and got far fewer stories. She had been writing for the Times for less than six months and only in the past week had she written any crime stories. Before that, she wrote a variety of stories on events ranging from a garbage strike to a competitive eating contest. She seemed to have no specific beat until this week when she shared two bylines with McEvoy.