Jovita snarled, baring her teeth. “You were raised up the street from me,” she said. “I remember you cheatin’ off o’ Lydia Newton’s tests in fifth grade! I was goin’ to church back when you got that disease—what was it, uh, uh, uhhhhh, spinal somethin’.”
“Spinal meningitis,” he said.
“Yeah, that! The church took donations an’ my mama was one o’ them that got that started so you could get all the medical shit you needed,” Jovita said. Lies came easily to her these days, but this one was partially tinged in truth. “Yo mama didn’t have the money to help you so we did! You wouldn’t even be alive if it wasn’t fo’ us! You hear me, boy? An’ I babysat fuh yo black ass when yo mama got sick an’ yo daddy ran out—”
“All right, all right, just…God damn it, shut up, will ya?” Sam sighed heavily and looked about the lobby. Officer Tyler gave him a look that, to Jovita, seemed to ask, Do you want me to escort the crazy lady out of the building? Sam gave an almost imperceptible look that told Tyler to stay back, that he would handle this. “Look, if I tell you a little bit about these people, will you promise to stay calm for the remainder of the night? Will you go home and sit and wait for us to give you a call when we know something solid?”
Jovita nodded, but wasn’t sure she could keep her promise. She reached into her purse and pulled out a tissue, shoved it up her nostrils, and stopped the leaks.
Sam glanced around the lobby once more and then leaned in close, whispering. “There’s, uh, there’s a chance that the girls might’ve been taken by a group of Russians called the vory v zakone. That’s the rumor right now, okay?”
Jovita couldn’t even pronounced their name. “Russians?” she said.
“Yeah, I know. It sounds—”
“What…who the fuck are they?”
“Russian organized crime. A weird group of thieves, got started back in old Russia, back in, like, 1917 or something. Back in Stalin’s Gulag.”
“Who the fuck is Stalin?”
Sam made a face. “Joseph Stalin,” he said, as if this was some very important person Jovita really ought to know. “Premier of the Soviet Union back in…never mind. The important thing is these guys got started up way back then, and they’re still active today. We’ve never seen them very active in America until the last decade or so. A bit of stuff here and in New York, but that’s about it. Nothing like this. And, uh…well, there have been reports of people being snatched up off the streets, uh, young kids mostly, some prostitutes, anyone that the vor don’t think will be missed.”
The indignation in Jovita Dupré threatened to become volcanic. “Wait, what, you don’t think I take care o’ my kids?”
“That’s not what I said, Jo,” he said, holding up his hands in a sign of peace. “But if the girls were out alone in the streets at night, there’s a chance that they thought the girls were, I dunno, homeless? Orphans? Something like that? They might’ve targeted Kaley and Shannon because of their perceived neglect.” Jovita saw it in his eyes. The man was dancing around with words that masked his own true belief.
He became a cop. He’s one o’ them now. He thinks like them. Well, I caught him jerkin’ off to an Ebony magazine in my best friend’s living room when he was twelve, an’ I remember him slinging crack with his brothers when he was fifteen, so I know this nigga better than he know himself. I remember where he come from, even if he don’t.
And there was something else. Jovita’s mind might have been mush these days, but she knew when somebody was holding something back. She knew this because she had spent the last twelve years watching her oldest daughter’s face. Kaley Alexandria Dupré had been a strange young girl, there was no denying that. Besides her constant debilitating vertigo, which freaked all the kids and most adults out, she had also been a careful manipulator. She knew how to ask Ricky for things in a way that would convince him to convince Jovita, and vise versa. It usually had to do with convincing others to do something for Shannon, who Kaley was intent on spoiling. It might be to get Shan a new pair of pants or some fancy new toy.
Kaley was a careful girl, and she rarely spoke to her mother these days. Jovita had come to think it had to do with her brief but intense (and strange) relationship with her grandmother. They had gotten very close for a time, then after her grandmother’s death something had changed inside of Kaley. She wanted to be left alone a lot, with just herself or with Shan. They never got into any real trouble, but the two of them were as thick as thieves, leaving Jovita out of their play, always laughing and getting along until she stumbled into the room.
“What else?” she said.
“What do you mean?” Sam asked, lying badly.
“What…else?”
He considered her for a moment. Then to her surprise, he was very forthcoming. “Interpol—that’s the International Criminal Police Organization—they’ve been called. Uh, Gary, a friend o’ mine in Missing and Exploited Children, said he’s been talking with a detective works here name o’ Hulsey. He says there’s some FBI guys just showed up a few hours ago, and them and Hulsey are asking questions about a group called the Rainbow Room. Jovita, have you ever heard of them? Anything at all?”
“No,” she said. “Who are they, Sam?”
“Interpol’s been after them for some time. Years, sounds like. They’re one of these secretive groups, have people all over the planet, and they have this website where They…they abduct kids and… take the kids, and they…um…”
Jovita leaned in, digging her eyes into his. “An’ they what, Sam?”
“Jo…listen, you really don’t wanna know.”
“They’re my babies, Sam. I wanna know.”
The boy she knew returned with his next sigh, and he folded, just as he had folded for Lydia when she said he had to be her boyfriend if he was going to cheat off her test. “The Rainbow Room,” he began, “has a website that they change, move to other servers, and keep on the go. None of them have ever been caught. They’re hackers and, uh, and…well, compilers. They compile pictures of different stuff. They change IP addresses, they move around, very organized. They’re not the first. Interpol’s busted groups like this for years. That’s their big thing these days, human trafficking and child porn…” He trailed off.
“An’ what does this Rainbow Room do? What do they compile?” On some level, she knew exactly what he was saying, because he had basically laid it all out. But Jovita’s mind wasn’t just foggy, it was the mind of a mother, and no matter how bad of a mother one could be, imagining cruelty like she was being told here didn’t quite register. Surely there was something else Sam meant by his words. Surely there had to be.
“They, um, they upload pictures of naked children, and of, um,” he swallowed briefly, “of children being raped and—hey!” Jovita had gasped despite the fact that she believed she had prepared herself for the worst. Wide-eyed, she fell from the chair to her knees and stared at the tile floor. Sam leaned down and hugged her. “God damn it, I told you you didn’t wanna know! I shouldn’t have told you! Hey, it’s okay. Listen, it’s okay. We’re gonna find them, hear? We’re on it. We’re gonna find them.”
Jovita heard little more than her heart beating in her ears.
“My babies…my babies…my babies…”
There was no corneal abrasion. At least, that’s what David kept telling the medics to get them to leave him the hell alone. His eyes hurt, especially his left, which stung and watered every time he blinked. He swore up and down that he could still drive, that it would be no problem. There was only a few cuts to his face, and none that needed stitches. Jeffrey Banks, one of the medics he’d known for years, had plucked the two splinters from his cheeks and swabbed them before putting on tufts of cotton with clear tape.
“How’s Bee?” he asked Jeffrey.
“Half her hand is gone,” Jeff said. “How do you think she is?”
“I’m good to go, though, right?”
“I’d recommend that you take the rest of the night to—”
<
br /> “They caught him yet?”
Jeff sighed. “Nope.”
“My car still here?”
“Yep.”
“Then I’m helping to hunt the bastard.” He pushed himself up off the top step, where he’d been sitting ever since backup had arrived. Chalk outlines, some yellow evidence tags and the yellow crime scene tape now decorated a mostly forgotten part of town. Three detectives from Robbery/Homicide had been brought in to start in with the scene, and forensics specialists were still arriving by the truckload. The street of Townsley Drive was fast becoming crowded.
Ahead of him a forensic photographer was taking pics of the scene. David staggered around the photographer and waved back to Jeff. “Thanks, Jeff. You’re an eye saver.”
“I’m telling you, man, get some rest. They’ve got everyone out there searching for this guy. They’re going to find him sooner or later.”
“Another set of eyes can’t hurt.”
“If you had a set,” Jeff said. So, he knew that David’s left eye had a bad abrasion, but he wasn’t going stop the cop from going back on duty. David supposed if cops let firefighters and medics get away with driving drunk, then the medics felt it was their obligation to let the cops get away with a few items of indiscretion from time to time, as well. He also imagined that the AAR, or after action review, would probably be forty-eight hours from now, which was standard. He didn’t need to do much more than file a bit of paperwork at the end of his shift. Until then, no one was going to begrudge him for going out after the man who’d shot his partner.
The fire truck was backing out when David hopped inside his patrol car. Less than thirty minutes ago Beatrice had been sitting here, driving the car.
It was my decision, he told himself. I told her that we needed to go and check it out. And Bee had said nothing. She hadn’t questioned him, hadn’t given him a look of disapproval, nothing. And because of it, we’re out another good cop in Zone One.
Zone One cops were hard to keep. Nobody wanted to stay in the trenches of the Bluff and the areas surrounding it. Cops got out as quickly as they could, took a sergeant’s test or an investigator’s test and then started trying to move their way on out after a couple years of experience. Beatrice had made a pledge to hang around for the long haul.
Those words on the wind came back to him. “Fast as fast can be, you’ll never catch me!”
Why were those words so familiar? Where did they come from? David found a bottle of Advil in the glove compartment, popped two of them for the pain in his eye and gave it some thought. It came to him out of nowhere, a memory from his teenage years. It was from the jackalope on America’s Funniest People, a TV show hosted by Dave Coulier and Arleen Sorkin. He remembered Coulier had voiced the little rabbit with the antlers—the jackalope—and recalled of all the times he’d thwarted some idiotic lumberjack or an uptight businessman. The jackalope would hit them in their groin, or make them step on a rake that smashed them in the center of their face. Afterwards, the ever-elusive jackalope would dart off to parts unknown, shouting in mordant pleasure, “Fast as fast can be, you’ll never catch me!”
Later, as he recalled, the jackalope got renamed “Jack Ching Bada-Bing” in a Name the Jackalope Contest.
“Fuck you, Jack Ching,” David Emerson swore. He found the keys were still in the ignition, and turned them. “Yeah. It’s jackalope season, motherfucker.” He pulled around yet another forensics van that was coming up the street. The ballistics and blood spatter experts had a long night ahead of them.
Leon checked the time on his iPhone: 3:04 AM.
About fifty yards away someone was shouting. He turned and looked out his window. A girl no older than fifteen was walking down the street arguing with a man at least twice her age. The girl’s belly was swollen. Knocked up before her sixteenth birthday, and angry at her baby’s daddy? Hard to say, but Leon figured his guess was probably close.
The rain had started in again, then stopped, then started again, and then stopped. It seemed that would be the way of the night.
“Yo, dawg!” someone shouted. Leon looked. It was some guy sticking his head out of a window half a block up. He was hollering down to his buddy in the street, who was waving up. They had had a brief conversation, the man in the window reminding him to say something to his sister about something or other. There were laughs, and they went their separate ways.
The parking lot behind Grady’s Bar had no painted lines. All around, wild tufts of grass had started pushing their way up through cracks in the pavement. An entire piece of the parking lot on the east end had been washed away and a row of wild sages were growing there. Vines clung desperately to the edge of Grady’s. To Leon, places like this always reminded him of images he’d seen of Chernobyl after the big nuclear disaster. Strange to think that if mankind were to die that Nature would just reclaim it all again. The estimates he’d heard had it that it would take 10,000 years—just a thousand decades—for there to be no evidence that mankind had ever lived. At least, not on Earth. Ironically, the longest lasting evidence for mankind’s existence would be the flags and rovers left on the moon; silent monuments to all that we were, and ever could be.
He’d let his mind wander a bit. He did this whenever he got nervous. Gracen was late, and even if he showed up Leon wasn’t sure the fool could play his part.
“So this Rainbow Room,” Leon said. “You say Interpol’s got a beat on them in Germany and Australia? That matches up with what the Yeti said.”
Agent Porter was still sitting in the front seat, conferring with someone on his smartphone. That, or playing Angry Birds. “Yeah. Berlin, Sydney, Dublin, Hong Kong, Belfast, Moscow, and some middle-of-nowhere place out in Wyoming. They’re everywhere. The people in Lyon said they busted into a house in Dublin six months ago, but by the time they got there the apartment had been cleared out, just a computer and a desk was all that was left, and the computer had been completely scrubbed.”
“Lyon?”
“France. Interpol headquarters. The agents there are the ones that work as liaisons, I’m sure you know. They try to time hits against international cells all at once, before the media can get a hold of it. That way, if the FBI busts someone in a child porn ring over here, the others in the child porn ring in Germany don’t get wind of it and take off. They coordinate, hit all these places at once, take as many down as possible.”
“But not the Rainbow Room?”
“Not the Rainbow Room,” Porter confirmed. “Least, that’s what my friends at the bureau are saying right now. Interpol’s damn interested in Atlanta tonight. They’ll be watching us. They’re saying that they didn’t think the Rainbow Room had roots here.” He scratched at his beard, and shook his head. “They say the Room’s like weeds, they’re growing everywhere now.”
“How do they work?”
“Far as what they tell me, they put out requests. A website was originally started, nobody knows what it was called now, but it got together the original members,” Porter said, lifting his head up from his phone to scan outside the window. “Your boy gonna show?”
“He’ll show,” Leon said, sounding more confident than he felt.
Porter accepted it. “Anyways, before they shut down they always have a few backup sites to retreat to, confer a bit, and then hop, skip, and jump to another server, IP address, all that. They use proxy servers so no one can track them, and Interpol thinks they communicate through fire-and-forget e-mail accounts. They probably also do recruiting through sites where anyone can put up any homemade porn movies they want. X-vids-dot-com, you know, shit like that?
“In places they’ve left behind, Interpol has found all sorts o’ computer drives that the Rainbow Room uses to hide things in code, pretty much just gibberish unless the person has the right cipher. Sneaky bastards, tech wizards. Phantoms. You know the kind these days.” He rolled down his window, breathed the fresh air. “Skip-tracing these kinds of fuckers is almost impossible. You can only join the Rainbow Room by bei
ng recommended by one of the highly respected members, and you’re put on a one-year probationary membership kind of thing. If you submit enough pictures and donate enough to the community, either money or tips, you can become a full member. Then, the more pics and vids you submit, and the greater the quality, and the higher people rate your pics an’ videos, the higher up you go. That means you get more access to child porn.”
“People do this?” Leon asked, knowing the answer. He wasn’t naïve, one couldn’t be if you wanted to be a detective in Atlanta, but his worldview and moral compass demanded he ask the question, almost rhetorically and yet still wanting to verify the absurdity.
“Full-time, my friend,” said Agent Stone, speaking for the first time in a while. “They go years without getting caught. Kids getting raped in a basement, it all gets taped, the bodies get dumped, the tapes go online, and the neighbors don’t know shit because nobody knows their neighbors anymore. People peek from their windows, but they don’t knock on doors and greet the new folks in town. Who the fuck knows who’s living next to you these days?”
Leon glanced anxiously out the window. Where the fuck are you, Cee-gray? “You ever brought people like that in?”
Porter said, “Like what? The Rainbow Room?” He shook his head. “No. I track serial killers, sometimes chase fugitives on the run. Rainbow Room types get passed on to the guys at Migrant and Domestic Trafficking. I’m just here for Pelletier. But, I’ll do my part until the MDTs get here, I guess, much as I can. And who knows? Might be Pelletier has a hand in this shit, too. Wouldn’t surprise me.”
Leon wasn’t convinced. He didn’t know Pelletier as well as Porter did, but this didn’t seem to fit. “How would he have gotten hooked up with people like the Rainbow Room?” he asked.
“Who knows? The man’s a recidivist. Maybe heard about it somewhere in the joint? We know he’s criminally diverse and has a black hole where his moral compass ought to be, so anything’s possible.” He pointed out the window. “This your guy?”
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