Choice of Evil by Andrew Vachss

asked again.
    “If he’s in Cyberville, I can,” she said. Not bragging, confident. “But I can tell you, people are already looking.”
    “Looking?”
    “Posting open messages for him. On newsgroups, bulletin boards, like that.”
    “What kind of messages?” I asked her.
    “The whole range: journalists who want an interview, gays saying ‘Go for it!,’ threats, challenges, target suggestions. . . everything.”
    “And they think he’s going to answer them?”
    “Netizens are real naïve,” she replied. “Most of them are kids. In their minds, anyway. There’s over a thousand profiles with the name ‘Avenger’ in them on AOL alone. That’s what the papers called him. Until he wrote that last letter. So now the geeks will just search under this ‘Homo Erectus’ handle. And there’ll be a ton of matches there too.”
    “And they think he’s got an. . . address?”
    “Sure. Someplace. And it’s already happening—there’s messages posted that are
supposed
to be from him. As if the FBI isn’t watching all that traffic,” she said contemptuously.
    “So how could you find him?”
    “I think he’s on-line. I think he lurks.”
    “Lurks?”
    “Watches. Hops on the Net and visits these different places. As long as he doesn’t post, he’s pretty safe.”
    “Pretty. . .?”
    “If he stays on long enough, or hits a website with our software on it, we can finger him.”
    I looked a question over at her.
    “Locate him. His cyber-addy, anyway. That wouldn’t find him—he could be using any ISP, and the server could even be out of the country.”
    “So what good would—?”
    “If you found his addy. . . if it was really him, then, if you could hack into the ISP’s own files, you could get his billing info. You know, the credit card he uses—you can’t buy ISP services for cash, you need a credit card just to sign up.”
    “But anyone can get a phony credit card. As long as you pay the bills, they won’t care what name you use.”
    “Sure. And some of the ISPs give out e-mail addys for free just to build their lists too. That’s where. . . someone else comes in,” she said.
    “Okay. You’ll take a shot?”
    “I’m with Lorraine and the others,” she answered, like that was all the answer I needed. “But there’s something else too. Another way, maybe. I don’t know if he’s high-cyber or not. But if he is, I could send a message myself. Send it encrypted, so you’d need a program to open it.”
    “What happens if you don’t have this program?”
    “You just get a bunch of gibberish—numbers and symbols—it wouldn’t mean anything. But if he
is
lurking, he might be intrigued enough to open it up.”
    “And. . .?”
    “Then I could find him,” Xyla said, flashing a quick smile. “And you know what? I don’t think he’d mind.”
    “Huh?”
    “Look, he writes to the newspapers, doesn’t he? It’s not as if he’s being quiet about the whole thing. But he hasn’t posted to Cyberville yet. How come?”
    “I can answer that one for you,” I told her. “The newspapers are turning over everything to the cops before they print it. This many murders, even the tabloids wouldn’t screw around.”
    “So what?”
    “So he has to be authenticating his communications somehow. Telling them some detail about the crime that wasn’t in the papers, enclosing something from the crime scene. . . like that. No way he could get that done over the Internet.”
    “That’s true,” she said. “Cyberville is nothing but Impostor City. So I’d need something myself. . . some, what did you call it, authentication, right?”
    “Right.”
    “Can you get that for me?”
    “I’ll see,” I told her.
    But she wasn’t done. “You’re not trying to. . . catch this guy, are you?”
    “Why?”
    “Because, if you were, I wouldn’t help you.”
    “I thought you said—”
    “I said I was with the network. But I don’t know if anyone asked you that