The screen was black, blank, chillingly void of content.
"Are you sure we're on the right website?" Byrne asked.
Mateo retyped the IP address into the address line of the web browser. The screen refreshed. Still black. "Nothing yet."
Byrne and Jessica walked from the editing bay into the studio room at the AV Unit. In the 1980s, the large, high-ceilinged room in the basement of the Roundhouse was home to the taping of a local-access show called Police Perspectives. The ceiling still held a number of large spotlights.
The lab had rushed preliminary tests on the blood found at the train station. They had typed it A negative. A call to Ian Whitestone's physician confirmed that A negative was Whitestone's type. Although it was unlikely that Whitestone had suffered the same fate as the victim in Witness- had his jugular been cut, there would have been pools of blood-that he was injured was almost a certainty.
"Detectives," Mateo said.
Byrne and Jessica ran back into the editing bay. The screen now had three words on it. A title. White letters centered on black. Somehow, the image was even more unsettling than the blank screen. The screen read:
THE SKIN GODS
"What does it mean?" Jessica asked.
"I don't know," Mateo said. He turned to his laptop. He typed the words into the Google text box. Only a few hits. Nothing promising or revealing. Again, at imdb.com. Nothing.
"Do we know where it's coming from?" Byrne asked.
"Working on it."
Mateo got on the phone, trying to track down the ISP, the Internet service provider to which the website was registered.
Suddenly the image changed. Now they were looking at a blank wall. White plaster. Brightly lit. The floor was dusty, made of hardwood planks. There was no clue within the frame as to where this might be. There was no sound.
The camera then panned slightly to the right to reveal a young girl in a yellow teddy. She wore a hood. She was slight, pale, delicate. She stood close to the wall, not moving. Her posture spoke of fear. It was impossible to tell her age, but she appeared to be a young teenager.
"What is this?" Byrne asked.
"It looks like a live webcam shot," Mateo said. "Not a high-resolution camera, though."
A man walked onto the set, approaching the girl. He wore the costume of one of the extras of The Palace-a red monk's robe and a full-face mask. He handed the girl something. It looked shiny, metallic. The girl held it for a few moments. The light was harsh, saturating the figures, bathing them in an eerie silver glow, so it was hard to see exactly what she was doing. She handed the item back to the man.
Within a few seconds, Kevin Byrne's cell phone beeped. Everyone looked at him. It was the sound his phone made when he received a text message, not a phone call. His heart began to slam in his chest. Hands trembling, he took out his phone, navigated to the text message screen. Before he read it, he looked up, at the laptop. The man on the screen pulled the hood off the young girl.
"Oh my God," Jessica said.
Byrne looked at his phone. Everything he had ever feared in life was contained in those five letters:
CBOAO.