“All right, all right, don’t get picky.”
“I won’t if you won’t,” he said. “So back to the rules?”
“Yeah, okay. Back to the rules.”
“So why’d you call, really?”
He heard her take a breath and release it. She always did that when she thought she was going to say something significant. Women.
“A girl’s got needs,” she said.
He couldn’t help himself; he laughed.
“It’s not funny,” she said, but he knew she was smiling, too. They amused each other these days, which was almost as good as the sex. Almost.
“You gotta say the words. I’m a cop. Cops love their rules. Besides, you know what a busy social life I have.”
She groaned, but then said the magic words. “Can you come over tonight?”
“Now we’re talking,” he said.
“Talking’s not what I had in mind.”
8
Three months after the minimart case went off the tracks, Cam returned to his office from an interminable budget meeting and sent his notebook skidding across his desk and onto the floor, scattering papers like duckpins. Horace, recognizing the symptoms of bureaucratic overload, pretended to stare hard at his computer monitor, even though it wasn’t on. Cam swore out loud as he dropped into his chair. Kenny came in from next door, pulled up a straight-backed chair, and sat down in it backward, ready to hear Cam’s tale of fiscal woe.
“We lose?” he asked.
“We lost,” Cam said. “Narco-Vice got the augmentation money.” His phone rang. He picked it up and identified himself, listened for a moment, wrote down a string of letters and numbers on his blotter, and then hung up.
“That was Eddie Marsden over in Computer Crime,” he said to Kenny. “Says there’s something we need to see on some Web site. Here’s the Web address.” He turned his blotter around so Kenny could read it. Then Cam got up out of his chair so Kenny could get on Cam’s machine and find the Web site. Every time Cam tried to surf the Web, his machine would bring up a string of porn sites, which Kenny said meant somebody had been screwing around with his computer. Kenny rattled the keyboard and made the screen dance through several images before stopping at a totally black screen.
“Oh, great,” Cam said. “I recognize that. That’s what I usually get. This is a joke, right?”
“Don’t think so,” Kenny said. “Says it’s buffering a video.”
The screen remained totally blank. “Speak English,” Cam suggested. As far as he was concerned, buffering was what the cleaning crew did to the linoleum.
“Means it’s downloading a video stream from a Web site. Like a movie, or a TV clip.”
The screen remained black, but then Cam thought he could hear something coming from the computer’s speakers: a hissing sound, with a deep bass note underlying the hiss.
“Still buffering,” Kenny said, watching the screen. “It’s big, whatever it is. Eddie say where he got it?”
“He said it was an attachment on an e-mail from the Bureau’s Charlotte field office, but the Feebs say they didn’t send it. Whoa-what the hell is that?”
A picture was forming on the screen. The video camera was obviously sitting on a table, pointing across a long, narrow, darkened room. Perhaps ten feet away, a crudely hooded figure was sitting in what looked like a barber’s chair, or maybe it was a dentist’s chair. Whatever it was, it seemed to be made of shiny metal, with footrests, armrests, and a barely visible metal pedestal. There appeared to be metal clamps binding the figure’s forearms and bare feet to the structure of the chair, and there was a wide leather belt cinched around his middle. The deep humming sound grew louder, reminding Cam of one of those big pipes on a church organ. As the sound rose, another hooded figure appeared behind the one in the chair. Horace got up and came in to stand behind Cam’s desk when he heard that deep humming sound. The second figure had the physique of a man, and he was wearing a dark windbreaker and a hood that had vertical eye slits. His clothes revealed absolutely nothing about the face under the hood or the man’s size. Cam realized he was just assuming it was a man. Then an electronically distorted voice boomed out of the computer’s speakers, startling all three of them. Cam hadn’t been aware that his speakers were even capable of transmitting such a noise.
“All rise,” the voice commanded, the sound loud enough to be heard around the office. A detective from Major Crimes stuck his head in the door and asked, “What the hell was that?”
The standing figure reached over the figure in the chair and lifted the hood, which Cam recognized was probably just a pillowcase. The video was a little jerky, but it was clear enough to see who was in the chair, and Cam grunted in surprise. It was Kyle Simmonds, aka K-Dog, of minimart fame.
“Well, looky here,” Kenny murmured. “K-Dog, my man. What you doin’ there, dude?”
K-Dog’s tongue came out as he licked his lips for an instant and tried to look around. Then Cam saw the neck brace and realized that K-Dog’s head was also immobilized.
“Watch carefully, Officers,” the computer’s speakers intoned in sepulchral tones. “This man slaughtered three innocent people. You let him get away with it. I’m going to rectify that problem. I’m going to send him to hell until the end of time.”
K-Dog’s eyes got very wide and he appeared to be trying to speak, but then they saw that there was something in his mouth, some soft, wet, bulky object that appeared to be held in place by two shiny metal clamps on either side of his mouth. He was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, but no shoes or socks. Beads of perspiration stood on his forehead. They couldn’t see his teeth when he opened his mouth and began making increasingly frantic mewing sounds while his hands turned red as he fought against the steel restraints on his wrists. The hooded figure standing behind the chair withdrew from sight, and for a moment nothing happened.
“Oh my God,” Horace said. “You know what that is? That’s a fucking-”
The deep bass note coming from the speakers was replaced by the unmistakable sound of high voltage, a lethally urgent throbbing sound that transfixed K-Dog’s strappeddown body, making every one of his muscles suddenly visible and causing a sputtering cooking sound to come from his mouth. Cam found himself backing away from the computer screen as the electrocution gained in strength and ferocity, the volume rising now as K-Dog’s eyes bulged out to the size of golf balls and then began to change texture from clear to something more like hard-boiled eggs. The sputtering from his mouth became the sound of fat roasting in open flames, and it was accompanied by a brownish vapor. His hair began to smoke and his arms and legs were jerking furiously against the restraints as the neurons in his body responded to the current’s frequency, forcing every one of his muscles to expand and contract in time with some distant power plant’s turbogenerator. Finally, visible flames crackled around K-Dog’s neck and ears and his spine curved outward against the leather belt, bending his fuming corpse toward the camera as if in supplication, while an eerie blue aura formed around his extremities. Then came the sound of a huge electric arc, and all the sound stopped, along with the current, apparently. K-Dog’s body slumped down into the chair as if his skeleton had been rubberized. His eyes were still wide open, but they were just brownish white balls now, with only barely visible irises.
Cam swallowed and exhaled noisily, as did the other men, unaware that they’d been holding their collective breath. And then, to their horror, the current snapped back on. This time, the body jerked around in the chair like a puppet on springs as the relentless amperes coursed through what had to be a very dead body for another ten gruesome seconds.
Then the screen slowly dissolved to black again and the speakers subsided into that original deep bass note. Just as Cam was clearing his throat, the spectral voice boomed out again.
“That’s one,” it announced.
Then the screen went gray and the humming sound stopped.
Kenny whistled softly and then started banging away on t
he keyboard again.
“Mother fuck!” said the detective standing behind Cam, who hadn’t realized that all the noise had attracted an audience from the office next door. “I think I’m gonna puke.”
“What are you doing?” Cam asked Kenny.
“Trying to get a fix on the real source of that attachment,” he said, tongue between his teeth as he concentrated on the screen. The screen had turned blue, with white text and computer hieroglyphics scrolling down.
“Was that real or Memorex?” Horace asked.
“Looked real to me,” Kenny said, still typing. “Hope so anyway.”
The phone rang on Cam’s desk. He picked it up, the execution images still vivid in his mind. “MCAT, Lieutenant Richter.”
It was the sheriff, trumpeting on his speakerphone. “Lieutenant, I have Carol Hawes with me. Her office has been getting calls about a Web site that’s purportedly showing an electrocution of one those guys who did the minimart fire. You know anything about that?”
Carol Hawes was the Sheriff’s Office’s public relations officer. “We just saw it,” Cam said. “Puke city. Computer Crimes alerted us. I take it this is out there for the whole world to see?”
“I think that’s why they call it the World Wide Web, Lieutenant,” the sheriff said dryly. Cam’s reputation for being something of a Luddite when it came to computers was widespread. “What are we doing about it?”
“Watching it?” Cam said, rolling his eyes. Like what in the hell could they do about it? And why was the sheriff calling MCAT? This was definitely one for Major Crimes. “Sergeant Cox is trying to do an Internet trace on the attachment, see what he can find out about it. We need Computer Crimes to do the same, I guess.”
Cam heard a buzzer going off in the sheriff’s office. There was a moment of quiet mumbling as the he took a call. Then he was back on the speakerphone. “Meeting. My office in thirty,” he announced, and hung up.
Kenny swore as a black screen came up. He hit one final key with a dramatic flourish, which signaled he’d signed off for Cam, and got up from Cam’s chair. “Nada,” he said. “It was posted on one of those floating chat rooms. Kind of like a blog. Current events and shit. I Googled the name string from the attachment, found the site again, but on yet another floating box.”
“Oka-a-y,” Cam said. “I’m punching the ‘I believe’ button here. And?”
“No luck. I’d recommend getting the Bureau into this. Eddie’s going to agree, I think. Goddamn, boss. You thinking what I’m thinking?”
It took Cam a moment. “Marlor?” he said.
As Kenny nodded, Cam suddenly realized he needed some coffee. Actually, he needed a drink, but he didn’t keep booze in the office.
They had gone to see James Marlor a week after the media dust began to settle on the minimart case. His home was down in Lexington. His job required him to be on the road most of the time, so the company didn’t care where he parked his family, and he’d chosen Lexington over the much larger and more crowded city of Charlotte.
Marlor had been reserved, attentive, and not terribly surprised when Cam finally broached the real purpose of their visit. Marlor had told them simply that he was not going to introduce more tragedy into his life by hunting down those two. He said they’d probably die in prison, as Cam had suggested, and that that was a better fate than a bullet through the eye. Cam remembered that particular image now as he mixed sugar into his coffee. Marlor would have to be a very cool customer indeed to have done this, if it was indeed real. And that was the larger problem: This could well be just some more digital fraud zinging away out there on the Internet.
“We’ll have to look at him, I guess,” he said. “It’s been what-three months since we talked to him? He certainly has a motive.”
“What do you think?” Kenny asked.
“I think we need to let the Computer Crimes guys do their thing, you know, see if they can find out how that little drama got onto the Web.” He looked at Kenny. “Is that possible?”
Kenny fixed up his own coffee while he thought about that. “Again, that’s probably a Bureau labs project. It would take a hell of digital studio to do that from scratch using just ones and zeros. Only real way to find out is to chase down K-Dog; see if he’s still out there, alive and eating shit.”
“If he’s alive, that would settle it,” Cam said. “But if we can’t find him, we still don’t know. What’s your gut reaction?”
Kenny was nodding to himself. “I think it was real,” he said.
“He said ‘That’s one,’ right there at the end. That tells me he’s going to do it again. That black guy-what’s his name, Butts? He’s gotta be next.”
Kenny nodded again. “The media is gonna go to town on this thing,” he said.
“Gosh, you think?”
“Worse, actually,” Kenny replied. “Something like this can attain cult status on the Web, especially if he’s promising to do another one.”
“Maybe we should pick Butts up for his own protection.”
“On what grounds?” Kenny asked.
“Hell, I don’t know-show him the video?”
“And what would Commissar Bellamy say to that?”
Cam had no answer for that one.
“If we have to work on Marlor,” Kenny said, “maybe you should let me do it.”
“Why?” Cam asked.
“Because I’m more sympathetic to his cause than you are?”
9
An hour and a half later, Cam assembled the entire team in the office. Billy Mays and Pardee Bell had been on their day off and were not too thrilled, but having seen a rerun of the video, they now were at least interested.
“Okay, boys and girls,” Cam said, sitting sideways on the edge of his desk. “I’ve just been to a stimulating meeting with Bobby Lee, Hizzoner, and the usual suspects from Next Door, subject: the electric horror show now playing on the Internet. We have orders.”
“Achtung!” croaked Horace.
“Yeah, well, first: The sheriff wants MCAT to run with this one. It’s not exactly what we were formed up to do, but this hairball is going to play across a lot of jurisdictions, legal and otherwise, and we do that every day.”
“Internet is interstate,” Pardee said. “This is a Bureau deal.”
“Agreed,” Cam said. “And the sheriff has already made the call to the Charlotte field office. But in the meantime, we urgently need to put eyes on the dynamic duo of Simmonds and Butts. Kenny, you got something for us on that?”
“Yeah, boss.” He briefed the team on the usual hangouts of both individuals.
“And how do we know that?” Tony Martinelli wanted to know. “I thought Judge Red Banner put their evil asses offlimits.”
“Well…” Kenny said, looking over at Cam.
“I had proposed to the sheriff that we rebuild a case,” Cam explained. “Start from scratch, get a bag of circumstantial evidence, re-ring ’em. Sheriff said no, after checking with sister Klein. So instead, I had Kenny here do a little afterhours bird-dogging, mostly to establish where these guys hang out, known associates, daily routine. Just in case Bobby Lee ever changes his mind, or if we ever need to have a word. Like, for instance, now.”
Tony acknowledged that. Bird-dogging was something Kenny did very well, and better solo than with a partner.
“Horace, you and Tony see if you can produce one K-Dog Simmonds. Billy, you and Pardee go find brother Flash. Don’t apprehend. Just locate and report. If Simmonds is alive and drooling, then the Web show is bullshit and we can terminate this firefly.”
“And if we can’t find his ass?”
“I’m to report that fact to the sheriff, and then he’ll have some more decisions to make. Like whether or not to apprehend and put into protective custody one Mr. Deleon Butts.”
Horace cleared his throat and spat into a trash can. “Why bother?” he said, giving voice to a sentiment that they all felt to different degrees.
“Think of it this way, Horace,” Cam sa
id. “If the vigilantes dispose of all the bad guys, who needs us, right? So ride, cowboys, ride.”
The group broke up and Cam joined Kenny back at his desk. “What else?” Kenny asked.
“We need to figure out who the executioner is. Which means, for starters, you and I are going to go see James Marlor.”
“I already made a call; seems his phone’s disconnected.”
“That’s encouraging. Does Duke Energy say where his retirement checks are going?”
“Direct deposit into a BB and T branch bank in beautiful downtown Lexington, right where his regular paychecks used to go. We’ll need to paper up to find out if he’s cashing them or if they’re just piling up.”
“Okay,” Cam said. “Let’s go see Steven Klein, find out what we’ll need.”
“We might as well get domicile and vehicle search warrants, too,” Kenny said as they left the office to go next door.
“Why?”
“Marlor may not be there anymore.”
Cam stopped in the hallway. “That’s a point, but you know what? Before we go to all this trouble, why not call his sister, see if she knows where he is?”
“That’s no fun,” Kenny said.
10
James Marlor’s house was located in an upscale subdivision outside of Lexington. The house was a Southern Living number, with a wide carport on one end. As they pulled up in an unmarked Crown Vic, Cam noticed that the lawn had been mowed recently and the flower beds along the front of the house were being cared for. It was apparently trash-pickup day, because there were green Herby Kerbys up and down the streets. They parked the car in Marlor’s driveway and got out while the driver of the Davidson County cruiser, which had led them to the house, parked out on the street. Cam lifted the lid of Marlor’s trash can and discovered that it was full of what looked like junk mail. He picked up a couple of items and saw that the postmarks were fairly recent.
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