“Not a bad business concept.”
“That’s what I thought. So when he asked to come speak to the kids, I saw it as an opportunity. And he checked out completely. I mean, his company has a legitimate website. Here, come into my office, I’ll show you.”
We went to the front doors of the school. She opened them and we went inside, turning on lights. The odors in the hallway were so familiar and so intertwined with memories of my children that I stopped breathing through my nose.
In her office, Dawson got on her desktop computer, typed, and then frowned before typing again. With a sinking expression, she said, “Either I’ve got it wrong or the website’s gone offline.”
The principal started rummaging in her desk, said, “But I’ve got his business card here some—here it is!”
“Don’t touch it!” I yelled, coming around the desk quickly as she shrank back. “I’m sorry. It’s just that we’ll want to fingerprint it.”
In a thin voice, she said, “He wore thin white gloves.”
“Of course he did,” I said, wanting to punch a wall. “But just the same. Do you have a plastic sandwich bag?”
“Will an envelope do?”
“Yes.”
She got me an envelope and I used a pair of tweezers to pluck the business card from the drawer and place it on her desk.
“I’ve got a photocopy of his driver’s license too,” she said.
“We’ve already got one of those, but thanks,” I replied, studying the card and then taking a picture of it with my smartphone.
Thierry Mulch, President, TMI Entertainment, Beverly Hills. It gave a phone number in the 213 area code and an address on Wilshire Boulevard. It also had a web address—www.TMIE1.info—and an e-mail address, [email protected]
I was about to drop the card into the envelope and take it with me downtown for processing when something about the URL and the e-mail pinged deep in my recent memory.
“Try www.TMIE.com on your computer.”
Principal Dawson frowned, typed the URL in, and struck Return. The screen blinked, and up came the home page of TMI Enterprises, a multimedia and social-networking company.
“This is it,” she said. “This is his website.”
“Click on ‘Corporate Officers.’”
She did and the screen jumped to another page that featured pictures and short bios of the people running the company. At the top of the heap was someone I’d seen when I’d visited the website two weeks before: a blond surfer-type guy in his late twenties wearing thick black glasses and a black hoodie.
“That’s not the picture of Mulch I saw on the other version of the website,” Dawson said. “I saw the guy who came here, red hair, re
d beard, everything.”
“Will the real Thierry Mulch please stand up?” I said, and I felt the throbbing in my head start up all over again.
CHAPTER
11
MY HEAD WAS STILL pounding when I reached the sealed-off construction area on the third floor of Metro headquarters. Men in hard hats and respirator masks were using sledgehammers to bust down drywall. The air was full of gypsum dust as I went to the plastic sheeting that sealed off the destructing from the already destructed.
I started to cough and that only made the pain in my head worse. A part of me wanted to shut down then, to curl up in a fetal position right there in the dust and let it settle on me as I mourned my wife. But a greater part of me needed to keep pushing on. If I was to have any hope of saving the rest of my family, I had to keep moving, keep asking questions, keep fighting as long and as hard as possible.
I tore open the flap and stepped inside a large space already stripped down to the cement floors. In the middle, under a bank of fluorescent shop lights, stood eight desks. At them or around them, good men and women were working.
Ned Mahoney, my old partner at the FBI, was talking with Sampson. Mahoney spotted me and jumped up. “Jesus, Alex, I just heard. And I’m so goddamn … I don’t know what to say except I promise you, we’re moving heaven and earth to find this bastard.”
I swallowed hard, patted him on the shoulder. Mahoney and I had worked together in Behavioral Sciences at Quantico. We’d toiled on too many cases involving the criminally insane to bullshit each other with psychological nuances and false premises.