Jack Hoffman confirmed our suspicions. He and Taylor did use cocaine that night but they were not involved in trafficking. He told us that they had celebrated that night by going out for an expensive dinner. When they returned, they both did a couple of lines and made love. They showered and Taylor took him to Dulles. We believed him, which meant we had come to another dead end.
“You ready to call it a night, Phoenix?”
“Yes, but we’re not going to,” I said. “We’re going back to the lab and opening Rappaport’s hard drive. We might find something there. I know it’s been a long disappointing day, but I want to see what’s there.”
We hadn’t found anything connecting Dwight Rappaport to drugs or to the killings. All we had was his address and the fact that his postal box received three bullwhips. There was something to that. I knew it.
I opened the hard drive and did some snooping. It occurred to me that Si Davey had been contacted via the Internet. Since Dwight Rappaport had ordered the whips online, and given his penchant for sexual bondage, there was a chance that the other man may be into the same things. If so, perhaps they kept in contact through email. That’s what I was really looking for. Someone he may have met in a chat room.
Lucky for us, Rappaport had kept a lot of his email. However, there was so much of it, it was going to take some time to track down all of the names and addresses. We started by disregarding all mail that came in after the Perkins murders. If Rappaport were one of the men we were looking for, he would have had the partner earlier. We concentrated on the previous email.
There were letters about the products he sold, but most were asking about bondage, offering to play sex games with him. I was thinking, there are some really sick people out there—lots of them. It occurred to me that most of the people were writing one letter so we eliminated them for the time being and concentrated on those he corresponded with at least three times. I wanted to know who these degenerates were and where they lived.
We had narrowed the search down to about two hundred screen names. It was time to call it a night. We were going to let the computer techs do their thing. By morning, we would have another lead. Problem was the other killer may not have been among the list of names we’d given the techs. And even if he was, he may not live in the D.C. area. But it was all we had, so we had to roll with it.