“So you dot the eye?” Bosch said, pointing to his eye.

“Right.”

She turned to her laptop, to which she had attached a mouse. She now moved it with her hand and Bosch watched the arrow on the screen move to Mistress Regina’s left eye. Rider double-clicked the mouse button and the screen went blank.

“Okay, we’re on that elevator.”

After a few seconds a field of blue sky and clouds appeared on the screen. Then tiny angels with wings and halos appeared sitting on the clouds. Then a password template appeared.

“Humbert humbert,” Bosch said.

“See, Harry, you get this stuff. You’re just acting like you don’t.”

She typed in the name humbert in the user name and password slots and the screen went blank once again. A few seconds later there was a welcome message.

WELCOME TO CHARLOTTE’S WEB SITE

Below the message a moving cartoon image formed. A spider crawled along the bottom of the page and then began weaving a web across the screen, shooting back and forth until the web was formed. Then tiny photographic images of young girls’ faces appeared in the web, as if caught there. When the image of the web and its captives was complete, the spider took a position at the top of the web.

“This is sick,” Edgar said. “I’m getting a bad feeling here.”

“It’s a pedophile site,” Rider said. With a fingernail she tapped the screen below one of the photos in the web. “And that is Stacey Kincaid. You click on the photo you like and you get a full spread of photos and videos. It is truly, truly horrible stuff. That poor little angel, she might be better off dead.”

Rider moved the arrow to the photo of the blond girl. It was too small for Bosch to identify the girl as Stacey Kincaid. He wished he could just take Rider’s word for it.

“Are you ready for this?” Rider asked. “I can’t run videos on my laptop but the photos give you the idea.”

She didn’t wait for a reply and she didn’t get one. She double-clicked the mouse and a new screen appeared. A photo appeared on the screen. It was a young girl standing naked in front of a hedge. She was smiling in a forced, seemingly unnatural way. Despite the smile she still had a lost-in-the-woods look on her face. Her hands were on her hips. Bosch could tell it was Stacey Kincaid. He tried to breathe but it felt like his lungs were collapsing. He folded his arms across his chest. Rider started scrolling the screen and a series of photos came up featuring the girl in several poses by herself and then finally with a man. Only the man’s naked torso was shown, never his face. The last photos were the girl and the man engaged in various sex acts. Then they came to the final photo. It showed Stacey Kincaid in a white dress with little semaphore flags on it. She was waving at the camera. The photo seemed somehow to be the worst one even though it was the most innocent.

“Okay, go back or forward or whatever you do to get that off there,” Bosch said.

He watched Rider move the cursor to a button below the final photo that said HOME on it. It seemed sadly ironic to Bosch that clicking HOME was the way out. Rider clicked the mouse and the screen went back to the spider’s web. Bosch pulled his chair back to his spot and dropped down into it. Fatigue and depression suddenly hit him. He wanted to go home and go to sleep and forget everything he knew.

“People are the worst animals,” Rider said. “They will do anything to each other. Just to indulge their fantasies.”

Bosch got up and walked over to one of the other nearby desks. It belonged to a burglary detective named McGrath. He opened the drawers and started looking through them.

“Harry,” Rider said, “what are you looking for?”

“A cigarette. I thought Paul kept his smokes in his desk.”

“He used to. I told him to start taking them home with him.”

Bosch looked over at her, his hand still holding one of the drawers.

“You told him that?”

“I didn’t want you slipping, Harry.”

Bosch shoved the drawer closed and came back to his chair.

“Thanks a lot, Kizmin. You saved me.”

There wasn’t a drop of thanks in the tone he had used.

“You’ll get through this, Harry.”

Bosch gave her a look.

“You probably haven’t smoked an entire cigarette in your entire life and you’re going to tell me about quitting and how I’ll get through it?”

“Sorry. I’m just trying to help.”

“Like I said, thanks.”

He looked over at her computer and nodded.

“What else? What are you thinking about? How does that tie in Sam and Kate Kincaid to the point we should’ve advised them?”

“They had to know about this,” Rider said, amazed that Bosch didn’t see what she saw. “The man in the photos, that’s got to be Kincaid.”

“Whoah!” Edgar said. “How can you say that? You couldn’t see the guy’s face. We were just talking to the guy and he and his wife are still righteously fucked-up over this.”

It hit Bosch then. When he had first seen the photos on the computer he had thought they were taken by the girl’s abductor.

“You’re saying these photos are old,” he said. “That she was abused before she was abducted.”

“I’m saying there probably wasn’t an abduction at all. Stacey Kincaid was an abused child. My guess is that her stepfather defiled her and then probably killed her. And that doesn’t happen without tacit knowledge, if not approval, by the mother.”

Bosch was silent. Rider had spoken with such fervor and even pain that he couldn’t help but wonder if she was talking from some kind of personal experience.

“Look,” Rider said, apparently sensing the skepticism of her partners. “There was a time that I thought I wanted to move into child sex crimes. This was before I put in for homicide. There was an opening on the endangered-child team in Pacific and the job was mine if I wanted it. They first sent me to Quantico for a two-week training program the bureau puts on once a year on child sex crimes. I lasted eight days. I realized I couldn’t hack it. I came back and put in for homicide.”

She stopped there but neither Bosch nor Edgar said anything. They knew there was more.

“But before I left,” Rider continued, “I learned enough to know that most often sexual abuse of children comes from inside the family, relatives or close friends. The boogey monsters who climb through the window and abduct are few and far between.”

“It’s still not evidence in this specific case, Kiz,” Bosch said gently. “This could still be the rare exception. It wasn’t Harris who came through the window but this guy.”

He pointed to her computer, though the images of the headless man’s assault on Stacey Kincaid were thankfully not on the screen.

“Nobody came through the window,” Rider insisted.

She pulled a file over and opened it. Bosch saw it contained a copy of the protocol from the autopsy of Stacey Kincaid. She leafed through it until she came to the photos. She picked the one she wanted and handed it to Bosch. While he looked at it she started paging through the protocol.

The photo Bosch held was a shot of Stacey Kincaid’s body in situ – the position and place where it was found. Her arms were spread wide. Sheehan had been right. Her body was darkening with interior decomposition and the face was gaunt, but there was an angelic quality to her in repose. His heart ached from looking at the photos of her tortured and now dead.

“Look at the left knee,” Rider commanded.

He did so. He saw a round dark spot that appeared to be a scab.

“A scab?”

“Right. The protocol calls it premortem by five to six days. It happened before she was abducted. So she had that scab on her knee the entire time she was with her abductor – if there really was one. In the photos on the web site, she has no scab. I can go back in and show you if you like.”