“I’ll take your word for it,” Bosch said.

“Yeah,” Edgar added. “Me, too.”

“So these photos on the web were taken well before she was supposedly kidnapped, well before she was murdered.”

Bosch nodded, then shook his head.

“What?” Rider asked.

“It’s just… I don’t know. Twenty-four hours ago we were working the Elias thing and thinking maybe we were looking for a cop. Now all of this…”

“It changes things all right,” Edgar said.

“Wait a minute, if that’s Sam Kincaid in those pictures with her, why the hell are they still on that web site? It doesn’t make sense that he would risk that.”

“I thought about that,” Rider said. “There are two possible explanations. One being that he doesn’t have editing access to the web site. In other words, he can’t take those photos off without going to the site administrator, raising suspicions and exposing himself. The second possibility, and it might be a combination of both, is that he felt he was safe. Harris was fingered as the killer and whether he was convicted or not that was the end of the story.”

“It’s still a risk leaving those photos out there to be seen,” Edgar said.

“Who’s going to see them?” Rider asked. “Who’s going to tell?”

Her voice was too defensive. She realized this and continued in a calmer tone.

“Don’t you see? The people with access to this site are pedophiles. Even if someone recognized Stacey, which is unlikely, what were they going to do? Call the police and say, ‘Uh, yes, I like fucking children but I don’t stand for murdering them. Could you get these photos off our web site?’ Not in a million years. Hell, maybe keeping the photos on there was a form of bragging. We don’t even know what we have here. Maybe every girl on that site is dead.”

Her voice was growing sharper as she tried to convince them.

“Okay, okay,” Bosch said. “You make good points, Kiz. Let’s stay on our case for now. What is your theory? You think Elias got this far along and it got him killed?”

“Absolutely. We know it did. The fourth note. ‘He knows you know.’ Elias went onto the secret web site and was found out.”

“How’d they know he was in there if he had the passwords from the third note?” Edgar asked.

“Good question,” Rider replied. “I asked the O’Connors the same thing. They did some snooping around after getting into the server. They found a cookie jar on the web site. What that means is that there is a program that captures data about each user who enters the site. It then analyzes the data to determine if someone has entered the site who should not have had access. Even if they have the passwords, their entry is still recorded and a data trail called an Internet protocol address is left behind. It’s like fingerprints. The IP, or the cookie, is left on the site you enter. The cookie jar program will then analyze the IP address and match it to a list of known users. If there is no match a flag is raised. The site’s manager sees the flag and can trace the intruder. Or he can set up a tripwire program that waits for a return visit from the intruder. When he comes back, the program will attach a tracer which will provide the site manager with the intruder’s E-mail address. And once you have that you have the intruder cold. You can identify him then. If it looks like a cop you close the elevator – the page you hijacked and were using as a secret gateway – and you go find a new web page to hijack. But in this case it wasn’t a cop. It was a lawyer.”

“And they didn’t shut down,” Bosch said. “They sent someone out to kill him.”

“Right.”

“So you think this is what Elias did,” Bosch said. “He got these notes in the mail and followed the clues. He stumbled into this web site and set off an alarm. A flag. They then killed him.”

“Yes, that would be my interpretation of what we know at this point, particularly in light of the fourth note. ‘He knows you know.’ ”

Bosch shook his head, confused by his own extrapolations of the story.

“I’m still not getting this. Who is the ‘they’ we’re talking about here? That I just accused of murder.”

“The group. The users of the site. The site administrator – which might possibly be Kincaid – picked up on the intruder, realized it was Elias, and dispatched someone to take care of the problem in order to fend off exposure. Whether or not he polled all members of the group first doesn’t matter. They are all guilty because the web site is a criminal enterprise.”

Bosch held his hand up to slow her down.

“Slow down. We can leave the group and the bigger picture for the DA to worry about. Stay focused on the killer and Kincaid. We are assuming he was involved in all of this and somehow someone knew about it, then decided to inform Elias instead of the cops. Does that make sense?”

“Sure it does. We just don’t know all the details yet. But the notes speak for themselves. They clearly indicate someone tipped Elias to the site, then later warned him that he had been found out.”

Bosch nodded and thought about this for a moment.

“Wait a minute. If he set off a flag, then didn’t you just do the same?”

“No. Thanks to the O’Connors. When they were inside the server they added my IP as well as their own to the site’s good guy list. No alarms. The operators and users of the site won’t know we’ve been there unless they actually look at their good guy list and notice it has been altered. I think we’ve got the time to do what we need to do.”

Bosch nodded. He wanted to ask whether what the O’Connors had done had been legal but thought it best not to know.

“So who sent Elias the notes?” he asked instead.

“The wife,” Edgar said. “I think she got an attack of the guilts and wanted to help Elias rip Sam the car czar a new asshole. She sent the notes.”

“It fits,” Rider said. “Whoever sent the notes had knowledge of two separate things: Charlotte’s Web Site and the car-wash receipts. Actually, a third thing as well: that Elias had tripped an alarm. So my vote goes with the wife, too. What was she like today?”

Bosch spent the next ten minutes updating her on their activities during the day.

“And that’s just our work on the case,” Edgar added. “Harry didn’t even tell you how we got the back window of my car shot out.”

“What?”

Edgar told the story and Rider seemed mesmerized by it.

“They catch the shooter?”

“Not that we heard. We didn’t wait around.”

“You know, I’ve never been shot at,” she said. “Must be a rush.”

“Not the kind you want,” Bosch said. “I still have questions about all of this Internet stuff.”

“What are they?” Rider said. “If I can’t answer, one of the O’Connors can.”

“No, not technical questions. Logic questions. I still don’t understand how and why this stuff is still available for us to look at. I understand what you said about the users all being pedophiles and their seeming feeling of safety, but now we have Elias dead. If they killed him, why the hell didn’t they at least move to a new gateway?”

“Maybe they are in the process of trying to do just that. Elias hasn’t been dead forty-eight hours.”

“And what about Kincaid? We just told him we are reopening the case. Whether he was in danger of exposure or not, it seems he would have gotten on the computer the minute we left and either contacted the site administrator or tried to crash the site and those pictures himself.”

“Again, maybe it’s in process. And even if it is, it’s too late. The O’Connors backed everything onto a Zip drive. They can crash the site but we still have it. We’ll be able to trace every IP address and take down every one of those people – if you consider them people.”

Again the fervor and anger in her voice made Bosch wonder if something about what she had seen on the web site had touched something personal, something deep inside.

“So where do we go from here?” he asked. “Search warrants?”