Unholy Messenger by Stephen Singular

Author:Stephen Singular
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2006-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

In late January, almost three weeks after Rader had dropped off “Communication #7” at the Home Depot, Edgar Bishop and Kelly Paul turned the Special K box over to Detective Otis. It contained a blue-beaded necklace and writing that described BTK’s home (he called it his “lair”) as a three-story house with an elevator. It had a bondage room, and in the basement he’d planted a bomb to go off if the police came to this residence. This last piece of information seemed false and misleading, but the WPD couldn’t ignore it. Through more legwork, detectives learned that Wichita had hundreds of homes with elevators and started doing background checks on them. If BTK could be connected to one of these addresses and the police closed in for the arrest, they’d flood the basement to disable the explosive. Because of the potential bomb threat, the WPD contacted the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and the federal agency joined the investigation.

The Special K box had one other thing inside: a simple question for the police from Rex.

“Can I communicate with Floppy,” the author wrote, “and not be traced to a computer. Be honest…”

Rex wanted to know if he spoke to the WPD through a computer diskette, could it be connected to an identifiable terminal? If he erased everything from the diskette except the message for the police, would all the other deleted material really be gone? It was an amazing inquiry, and because he’d misled the authorities so many times before, they couldn’t be certain that he was really posing such a naive question, but they could only hope he was. For the past decade, American law enforcement had been fighting cyber-crime from one end of the country to the other, gradually growing more and more sophisticated in its ability to track down information generated on computers and then apparently erased. Files “deleted” from hard drives or diskettes usually did not disappear until they had specifically been overwritten. That process could take as long as five or six years, and even writing over something might not erase it for good. Once created and stored electronically, data was far harder to get rid of than most people realized.

The police were eager to tell BTK that such information couldn’t be traced, but didn’t want to be too obvious or say anything to reveal their strategy. If the media publicized this development, the WPD might have blown a better opportunity than trying to find the Jeep Cherokee. Running down all twenty-five hundred trucks and owners in Sedgwick County was going to take a long time, and what if BTK had borrowed that vehicle and it belonged to someone else?

In “Communication #7,” Rader told the police to answer his computer question by running an advertisement in the classified section of theEagle and using his code name. It wasn’t the first time the newspaper had become part of the investigation. Back in 1974, law enforcement had placed an ad in the paper in the hope of flushing out BTK, but that hadn’t worked.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.