“That’s it?” he asked.
“That’s it,” Ballard said.
Bosch picked the laptop up off the desk and tossed it, more at Denning than to him.
“Easy,” Denning protested.
He carefully slid it back into the cushioned compartment of his backpack and stood up.
“We’re going to get my car now, right?”
“You can walk,” Ballard said. “I don’t want to be anywhere near you.”
“Wait, you — ”
Bosch stepped into a punch that hit Denning in the gut with a force that belied his years. Denning dropped the backpack to the floor with a hard thud and fell back on the couch, gasping for air.
Ballard headed for the door while Bosch delayed a moment to see if Denning would get up. But it became clear he would not be getting up for a while.
Bosch followed Ballard out of the room into the hallway. He caught up halfway to the elevators.
“That last part was unscripted,” she said.
“Yeah,” Bosch said. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “I’m not sorry about that at all.”
46
Bosch drove because Ballard asked him to. As dark as her thoughts were she didn’t want any distractions from them. Bosch handed back her mini-recorder. He’d had it in the breast pocket of his suit jacket. Ballard tested the sound of the recording and it was good. They had Denning on tape. She then started a new recording and repeated the site and password numbers Denning had provided. She then leaned against the passenger door and thought about what she had seen on his computer. After a while, she took out her phone. She had dropped Pinto off at the Dog House that morning. She pulled up the kennel camera and saw him in the familiar spot under the bench. Alert and watching the others. She put the phone away and was better braced for her dark thoughts.
“So … ,” Bosch finally said. “What are you thinking?”
“That we have front-row seats on a pretty fucked-up world,” she said.
“The abyss. But you can’t let it get you down, partner. Being in the front row means you get to try to do something about it.”
“Even without a badge?”
“Even without a badge.”
They were on the 405 freeway going north and coming up on the 10 interchange. Bosch took his left hand off the wheel and rotated his wrist.
“What?” Ballard asked.
“Came in at a bad angle on that punch,” he said.
“Well,” Ballard said. “I hope you Houdinied him.”
She had read somewhere that Houdini had died from a punch to the gut.
Bosch put his hand back on the wheel.
“What are we going to do with this?” he asked.
“I’m still thinking the FBI is the best bet,” Ballard said. “They have the skills to deal with all the encryption and masking. Much better than the LAPD.”
“I didn’t really get any of that Dark Web stuff,” Bosch said. “Tell you the truth, I don’t even know how it works.”
Ballard smiled and looked over at him.
“You don’t have to know,” she said. “You’ve got me for that now.”
Bosch nodded.
“Well, how about the shorthand, then?” he asked.
“In the Dark Web, nothing is indexed,” Ballard began. “There’s no Google or anything like that. You sort of have to know your destination, and then one thing can lead to another. That’s what happened with Denning. He found like-minded and totally warped people, and that brought him eventually to the Midnight Men.”
“Okay.”
“The problem is that the Dark Web offers anonymity. He said he has a VPN. That’s a virtual private network that masks his computer ID when he’s prowling around on websites. Then he also uses Tor as a browser. It’s like the dot-com of the Dark Web and it encrypts his moves and bounces them all over the world to further defy tracing them. So he’s anonymous in the Dark Web, can’t be traced. Supposedly.”
“Supposedly?”
“The FBI is plugged in with the NSA and the whole federal alphabet soup of agencies. They’re cutting-edge when it comes to this. They’re doing things the public has no idea about. So I say we go to them, I give them the site where all that horrible stuff is and the password that’ll get them in. That’s all they need. They take it from there. They’ll be able to identify the three known victims on there. That last one we saw was my case, Cindy Carpenter. And I got the mojo on her ex as soon as I talked to him. He’s gotta go down for this. They’ll squeeze Denning and make him a witness, but he won’t walk. I’ll make sure of that. They let him walk, and I know the name of the Times reporter that would love that story.”