by Chris Carter
The way Hunter looked at Garcia suppressed the need for any words.
‘No way,’ Garcia said, hurrying back to his desk. Within seconds he was on the phone to Operations. ‘I need you guys to try to trace a phone call that’s being made to Detective Robert Hunter’s cellphone, right now.’ He gave them the number.
‘How did you get this number?’ Hunter asked and pressed the loudspeaker button on his phone so Garcia could hear it as well.
The caller laughed. ‘Information, information, Detective Hunter. It’s all out there. You just have to know how to grab it. But guess what?’ There was a hint of amusement in his voice.
‘You called me to give me your name and address?’ Hunter said.
The caller laughed more animatedly this time. ‘Not quite, but I do have something for you.’
Hunter waited.
‘Your favorite website is back online.’
Twenty-Two
Hunter’s eyes immediately sought the phone on his desk. He knew that Dennis Baxter at the LAPD Computer Crimes Unit was still tracking that infamous IP address. If the website was back online, he should’ve picked it up. There were no lights flashing on his desk phone. No calls.
Hunter moved purposefully toward the computer on his desk and brought up his browser application. He still remembered the IP address. He typed it into the address bar and hit ‘enter’.
ERROR 404 – PAGE CANNOT BE FOUND.
Hunter frowned.
‘This time I decided to do things a little differently, Detective,’ the caller said. ‘You were no fun the first time around, refusing to choose until I picked fire. And even then you tried to trick me. I didn’t like that very much. So I’ve been thinking. You don’t get to choose anymore. I decided to expand.’ A short, tense pause. ‘Have you seen any of those reality TV shows where the public get to vote for which artist they like best?’
Hunter felt adrenaline rushing through his body.
‘Detective?’ the caller insisted.
‘No, I haven’t watched any of them.’
‘But you are aware that such shows exist, right? C’mon, Detective, I thought you were supposed to be an informed man.’
Hunter said nothing.
‘Well, I decided that it would be real fun if I turned this into a web show.’
Hunter looked at Garcia, who had just typed the old IP address into his address bar and gotten the error page too.
‘Are you at your office?’ the caller asked.
‘Yes.’
‘OK. I want you to check this website out. Are you ready for it?’
Silence.
‘www.pickadeath.com.’ He chuckled. ‘Isn’t that a great name?’
Hunter and Garcia both quickly typed the address into their address bars and hit the ‘enter’ key.
The screen flashed once. The website loaded in three seconds flat.
There was nothing on the screen. It was completely dark. Hunter checked the web address again to see if he had mistyped it. He hadn’t.
Garcia looked up from his screen, lifted both of his palms up in frustration and shook his head. His screen was also dark.
‘Do you have it?’ the caller asked.
‘I’ve got nothing but a dark screen,’ Hunter replied.
‘Patience, Detective Hunter. You have the right page.’
Suddenly, in the top left-hand corner of the screen, three small white letters appeared – SSV.
‘What the hell?’ Garcia sighed.
Hunter squinted at the letters, as his brain searched for a meaning. He looked at Garcia and shook his head. ‘I don’t think it’s a chemical formula this time,’ he whispered.
Then, in the top right-hand corner, three small white numbers appeared – 678.
‘Do you see it now?’ the caller asked.
‘I see it,’ Hunter said calmly. ‘What does it mean?’
The caller chuckled. ‘You’ll have to figure that out for yourself, Detective. But that is secondary. Here’s the main attraction.’
All of a sudden, darkness dissipated from the screen. The familiar green tint of images being broadcast through night-vision lenses took over.
Hunter and Garcia were expecting to see the same reinforced glass structure they saw just a couple of days ago. They were expecting to see a new victim tied down to a metal chair and stripped of his clothes. They were expecting the caller to play the same sadistic game he did the first time around – a choice between drowning and burning the victim alive.
That was not what they saw.
What they saw chilled them even further to the bone.
Twenty-Three
Michelle Kelly, the head of the FBI Cybercrime Division in Los Angeles, sat behind her computer screen, typing frantically on her keyboard. Standing behind her, reading every word she typed, was Harry Mills, a Cybercrime Division agent and engineering genius. He’d joined the FBI CCD three years ago, after obtaining his PhD with honors in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
Michelle and Harry had been involved in a sting operation for seven months now. They’d been tracking a serial pedophile, who’d been grooming ten to thirteen-year-olds via Internet chat rooms for years. The guy was a real scumbag. He knew how to identify the lonely kids. The ones who felt they didn’t fit in. The outcasts. The vulnerable. He was very patient. He would chat with them for months, gaining their trust. At first he would tell them he was thirteen, but as their virtual relationship strengthened, he would reveal he was in his early twenties and that he was a university student. The truth was, he was in his late thirties.
He was always charming, understanding, supportive and very flattering, and to any teenage girl who felt she was misunderstood by everyone, including her parents, that was a very powerful wall breaker. It worked every time, and soon they’d be infatuated with someone they’d never met. After that, it was almost impossible for them to say no to a meeting.
To the FBI’s knowledge, he’d seduced and had sex with six girls so far. Two of them were only ten.
But this predator was far from dumb. He was also very good with computers. He was always mobile. He used a laptop, and he only chatted from free Wi-Fi spots, like cafés, bars and hotel lobbies. He never purchased a Wi-Fi connection password, either hijacking them from other users or hacking the system. Most free Wi-Fi spots aren’t best known for their unbreachable Internet security.
He also kept on jumping from chat room to chat room, sometimes even creating his own. He used different aliases, and he never chatted for more than ten to fifteen minutes at a time.
Four months ago, almost by chance, Michelle found him chatting out of a chat room set up in Guatemala. The FBI CCD had run hundreds of these operations. They all knew that the easiest way to reel these types of sickos in was to fool them into believing they were chatting with a potential victim. Michelle jumped at the chance, and in a blink of an eye she became ‘Lucy’, a thirteen-year-old girl from Culver City. He bought it, and they’d been chatting almost every day since. He’d been using the alias ‘Bobby’.
‘Bobby’ was indeed very charming and supportive. It was very easy for Michelle to see how any teenage girl with low self-esteem would be completely swept off her feet by ‘Bobby’.
‘Lucy’ and ‘Bobby’ had been talking about a meeting for weeks now, and yesterday morning ‘Lucy’ finally gave in. She told him that she could skip school on Monday. She’d done it before. They could meet somewhere not too far, and spend the day together, but they had to be careful. If her parents found out, she would be in a lot of trouble. ‘Bobby’ promised her that they would never find out.
Right now, they’d been chatting for seven minutes, making the final arrangements for where and when they’d meet on Monday.
‘We could meet in Venice Beach,’ Michelle typed. ‘Do u know it?’
‘Yes, of course I know it [smiley face],’ ‘Bobby’ replied.
Venice Beach was just a bus
ride away from Culver City. It was a wide-open space where the FBI could easily set up long-distance cameras with powerful lenses, and pack the entire area with undercover agents and dogs.
‘[Smiley face] I can meet u there at 10,’ Michelle typed. ‘Do you know where the sk8 park is?’
‘I do. By the sk8 park sounds great. Can’t w8.’
‘[Smiley face with a tongue out] But I have to b back home b4 3, or else I’ll b in BIG trouble.’
‘Don’t worry, Lucy,’ ‘Bobby’ replied. ‘No one will know. It will be our little secret [face with a zipped-up lip].’
‘K. LOL. Bye, Bobby. C U Monday.’
‘[Four smiley faces] C U Monday, Lucy xxx.’
They disconnected.
‘Urghhhh,’ Michelle said, rolling her chair back from her desk and shaking her arms in the air as if having a seizure. She always did that when she disconnected from a chat with ‘Bobby’. ‘What a fucking creep.’
Harry smiled. ‘Are you OK, though?’
She nodded. ‘I’m fine. I’m glad that this one is coming to an end.’
‘You can say that again.’
‘I want to be there on Monday. I want to look straight into his eyes when they cuff this sack o’ shit,’ Michelle said.
‘You and me both.’
‘I want to see the look on his face when he finds out I’m “Lucy”.’
‘Um, Boss, can you come and have a look at this?’ Another CCD agent, who’d been monitoring some of their web crawlers, called from his desk.
‘What is it, Jamie?’ Michelle replied.
‘I’m not sure, but I’m pretty certain you’re going to want to see it.’
Twenty-Four
The woman looked to be in her early thirties, with long, straight, dyed blonde hair, which looked damp, probably from sweat. Her oval-shaped face was accented by plump lips and deep-set blue eyes that had undoubtedly been crying. There was a small black mole just below her bottom lip, at the right-hand corner of her mouth. She was average size and had nothing on except for a pair of purple panties and a matching bra.
Garcia felt his heartbeat pick up speed.
The woman looked absolutely petrified. Her eyes were open as wide as they would go, moving constantly, as if searching for something. She kept on turning her head from side to side, clearly trying to understand where she was, or what was happening to her. Her lips were trembling and it looked like she was having trouble breathing. She seemed to be lying down, but her movements were limited, not because she was tied up, but because she was locked inside a confined enclosure. Some sort of transparent box made out of glass, or Perspex, or a similar material. But it was much smaller than the one the killer had used for the first victim. The woman only had about five inches of space on each side, and maybe three inches above her head.
‘Is she in a glass coffin?’ Garcia looked at Hunter, who gave him an almost imperceptible shrug.
Hunter quickly opened the screen recording application he had asked IT to install on his computer and started recording the broadcast.
If the glass coffin was lying flat on the floor, the camera streaming the images seemed to be directly above it, positioned at a slight diagonal angle. But they could only see down to her waist. Her legs didn’t make the shot.
Panic erupted inside the woman and she started to frantically hammer her fists and seemingly kick her feet against the glass walls, but they were way too thick for her feeble efforts to make any impression. She was screaming as loud as she could. The veins on her neck looked like they were about to pop, but neither Hunter nor Garcia could hear a sound.
‘What is this?’ Hunter asked, pointing at his screen.
Only then Garcia noticed the end of what looked like a large dark tube, about five inches in diameter, attached to one of the sides of the glass box.
Garcia squinted at his screen. ‘I don’t know,’ he finally said. ‘Ventilation, maybe?’
‘OK,’ the caller said, his voice booming out of the speakerphone and filling the room with even more tension. ‘What do you say we get this little show started, Detective? But this time the rules have changed. Keep your eyes on the screen.’
Suddenly the word GUILTY appeared in capital letters, centralized at the bottom of the image. A second later, about halfway down the right-hand edge of the screen, the word BURIED appeared, followed by the number zero and a green button. Directly underneath it, the word EATEN appeared, also followed by the number zero and a second green button. At the top of the screen, the letters SSV and the number sequence 678 flickered twice like a warning before disappearing.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Garcia asked.
Hunter almost stopped breathing. ‘It’s a vote.’
‘What?’
The caller laughed. He could hear them talking to each other. ‘Wow, you’re very quick on the uptake, Detective Hunter. Your reputation is well deserved. It is a vote. Because this time we are live over the internet.’
Garcia ran an anxious hand through his long hair.
‘I gave it some thought,’ the caller carried on. ‘And decided that this would be much more fun if we allowed others to participate, don’t you think? So today, anyone watching out there can vote. All they have to do is click a button.’ He paused for effect. ‘And this is how it’s going to work, Detective: the first of the two death methods to reach a thousand votes wins. That sounds like fun, doesn’t it?’
‘Why are you doing this?’ Hunter asked.
‘I just told you. Because it sounds like fun, don’t you agree? But I’ll tell you what, Detective Hunter: to make this even more fun, I’ll give her a chance to live. Let’s make this into a race against the clock, what do you say? If I don’t get a thousand votes for one method in . . . let’s say . . . ten minutes . . . I give you my word that I will set her free, unharmed. How does that sound?’
Hunter breathed out.
‘I think that sounds like a pretty fair deal, don’t you?’
‘Please don’t do this,’ Hunter pleaded, but the caller simply ignored him.
‘Would you like to be the first one to vote, Detective Hunter?’ The caller laughed, not waiting for an answer. ‘I didn’t think so. But there’s hope for her yet. The site has just gone online. Maybe no one will see it, or even if they do, maybe no one will vote. Who knows? But at least we’re about to have ourselves ten very exciting minutes.’
In the bottom left-hand corner of the screen a blue digital clock appeared and began counting down – 10:00, 9:59, 9:58 . . .
Suddenly the zero under the word BURIED changed to 1, and then very quickly to 2.
The caller laughed loudly. ‘Oops, that wasn’t me. I promise you. I’m not cheating. I guess the race is on.’
The line went dead.
Twenty-Five
Hunter immediately reached for the phone on his desk and called Dennis Baxter at the LAPD Computer Crimes Unit. He answered it after the second ring.
‘Dennis, it’s Robert Hunter in Homicide Special. The website is back online.’
‘What?’
Hunter heard a hurried shuffle followed by keyboard clicks.
‘No, it’s not,’ Baxter replied.
‘He’s not using the same IP address. He’s got a web domain this time.’
‘You’re kidding.’
‘www.pickadeath.com.’
More keyboard clicks. Hunter heard Baxter breathe out heavily.
‘Sonofabitch.’ Baxter paused a beat. ‘What the hell is all that on the screen?’
As quickly as he could, Hunter explained what he knew.
‘So if he gets a thousand votes in ten minutes she’s either going to be BURIED alive or EATEN alive?’
‘That’s what I gathered,’ Hunter replied.
‘Eaten by what?’
The number besides the word BURIED reached 22. EATEN was at 19.
‘Don’t think about that right now,’ Hunter replied. ‘Click whatever buttons you need to click. Do whatever you need to do.
Trace this transmission or find a way to interrupt it so people can’t vote. Call your buddies at the FBI Cybercrime Division, I don’t care what you do, but get me something.’
‘I’ll do all I can.’
The countdown clock on the bottom left-hand side of the screen read 8:42, 8:41, 8:40 . . .
BURIED – 47.
EATEN – 49.
‘This is just fucked up,’ Garcia said, running both hands through his hair.
The woman in the box was sobbing so heavily it looked like she was running out of air. She had stopped hammering the glass walls with her fists and feet, and had started clawing at them like a crazed animal. Blood smears started to color the glass.
A moment later she gave up and brought her bleeding and trembling hands to her face. Her lips started moving, and though Hunter could lip-read, everyone watching could easily understand what she was saying.
‘HELP ME. HELP ME.’
‘C’mon,’ Hunter said through gritted teeth. ‘Hang in there.’ Both of his hands had locked into tight fists.
CLOCK – 7:05, 7:04, 7:03 . . .
BURIED – 189.
EATEN – 201.
‘How is this happening?’ Garcia asked, shaking his hands in the air. ‘How are people coming across this website so fast?’
Hunter just shook his head. His eyes were glued to his screen, his expression grave.
Without knocking, Captain Blake opened Hunter and Garcia’s office door and stepped inside. ‘Did you guys get . . .’ She paused mid-sentence as she saw the way they were both staring at their computer screens. ‘What’s going on?’ She started moving toward Hunter’s desk.
No one answered.
Her gaze moved to the computer screen and her breath caught in her throat. ‘Oh my God. He’s back?’
Garcia nodded and quickly explained what was going on.
‘Computer Crimes Unit is trying to do what they can,’ Hunter said. ‘I told Baxter to get in touch with the FBI Cybercrime Division and see if they can help.’ He didn’t glance over to see the captain scowl at him. He didn’t have to. He could feel it. ‘Right now, I’ll take any help I can get to stop this.’ He pointed at his computer screen.