Sex and Murder.com

by Zubro, Mark Richard

  “Better find out,” Turner said. He reported all this to Fenwick. “Whatever you do, Buck, don’t say this investigation is starting to piss you off.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “There could be more than one dead cop in this city.”

  “I am offended. The thought crossed my mind, but I was holding back.”

  “You don’t usually.”

  “I’m learning restraint.”

  Turner said, “That would probably be a bigger headline than Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell naked, holding hands, and running down the middle of an expressway.”

  “That’s disgusting.”

  “But accurate.”

  Fenwick said, “We have a killer or killers pissing on people. It’s a start, but I want more connections—zillions of connections—or I want to know which of these killings is not connected to bodily functions.”

  24

  I wish I was a knife. If I were, the moment I would enjoy the best would be the instant I entered a body. The millisecond when rushing through air changes to penetrating flesh, that’s what I’d like to experience.

  The phone on Turner’s desk rang again. A voice said, “One down, and you’re next.” Then there was a dial tone. Turner immediately called the department’s communications center. “Where did the call come from that I just received on this line?”

  “Lemme check.” The clerk didn’t sound anywhere near as hurried and anxious as Turner wanted him to. Half a minute later the casual voice got back on the line. “Is this some kind of joke?” it asked.

  “Where did it come from?” Turner demanded.

  “The pay phone in the lobby of the police station you’re in. Downstairs from where you are now.”

  Turner banged the phone down. He rushed for the stairs. Fenwick called out as he followed his partner. “What the hell is going on?”

  Halfway down the stairs, Turner stopped. Huffing and puffing, Fenwick pulled up beside him. Turner gazed at the large crush of reporters, along with the usual hangers-on, the people coming in to complain, the criminals being taken into custody, the cops on duty. He could see the pay phones. All three of them were in use: a woman who looked to be in her twenties, another woman in her fifties or sixties, and a teenage boy.

  Turner said, “I got another threatening call. Communications said it originated from the pay phones in here.”

  “Urban legend time,” Fenwick said. “The killer’s in the house.” He hummed a few notes from the “Twilight Zone” television theme.

  Turner and Fenwick hurried through the mob. They waited for all three callers to finish. The older woman was in tears. They asked to speak to each of them in turn as they finished their conversations. None of the voices was remotely like the one Turner had heard.

  “We got another pay phone in this dump?” Turner asked.

  “Not that I know about,” Fenwick said.

  They asked everyone in the vicinity if they’d noticed anyone making a call in the past few minutes. The woman who was crying said, “I waited for a man in a dark outfit. I wasn’t paying much attention to him. He was kind of muffled from the cold. I guess he was white. I’m not sure about much else. He was taller than me, but I’m not sure by how much. I didn’t see where he went.”

  No one else reported seeing this man.

  Turner and Fenwick went back upstairs. “That takes one hell of a nerve,” Fenwick said.

  Turner had a mixed feeling of dread and anticipation as he turned on his computer monitor. There was a new icon on his desktop: a red question mark.

  “Am I going to click on this?” Turner asked.

  “Get Micetic up here first,” Fenwick advised. “Don’t touch anything.”

  They sent for Micetic. They made more phone calls to the other cities with cop murders and caught up on paperwork. Since it was early Sunday evening, their calls were less successful than usual.

  When Micetic arrived, he worked his magic and said, “There is a message connected with this question mark.”

  “What is it?” Turner asked.

  Micetic pressed a couple of buttons.

  In bright red, the message said, “More cops need to die.” Turner called up his e-mail. A new note said, “More fear.”

  “Take the damn machine apart if you have to,” Turner said. “Find out where the goddamn message came from.”

  “We may never know,” Micetic said. “I know you don’t want to hear that, but it’s true.”

  Fenwick said, “I wish we had a computer shredder, just like we have paper shredders. I’d get great satisfaction out of watching the things die.”

  “It’s not the computer’s fault,” Micetic said. “A human sent these notes. For some reason an electronic message on a screen seems more imposing than a simple hand-written note. I’ll keep on it.”

  They adjourned to the conference room for the next few interviews. Rian Davis, the head of creativity at Lenzati and Werberg’s company was next.

  “This is hideous!” she said. “Hideous! I got into computers because it wasn’t violent. I never had any of those stupid games that are all about shooting and dying. I just wanted to create new vistas and make the world easier to live in. This is just hideous. How can someone want these people to die?”

  “We learned they had some odd hiring practices,” Turner said.

  “You mean that suit from Nancy Korleski?” Davis asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It was bogus. I knew her from before when she and her husband were working on their little company. They had no business sense. They tried to take it public, but they made every mistake you possibly could when putting together a technology business. They were lucky the two of them didn’t starve to death. They’d have both been hired if they were among the best. They weren’t.”

  Turner said, “You mentioned Eddie Homan in our first interview.”

  “The rat,” Davis grumbled.

  “He’s dead,” Fenwick said.

  “What?”

  “Do you know anything about a work place Mr. Lenzati and Mr. Werberg had on Grand Avenue?”

  “No. I’ve never heard of such a thing. Eddie is dead?”

  “He was stabbed to death,” Turner said. “We found evidence there that Lenzati and Werberg were engaged in significant criminal activity based from that location.”

  “I know nothing about that place.”

  “They never mentioned it?” Turner asked.

  “Never.”

  “You talked about security and hackers and crackers,” Turner said. “It seems that they were heavily engaged in hacking themselves.”

  “Whatever on earth for? They didn’t need to.”

  “They had hacked into companies that were smaller, or were possible rivals. They didn’t necessarily ruin them or take them over when they hacked in. When a company bought the anti-hacker devices from your company, Lenzati and Werberg planted programs in them so that they could break into that company’s computers any time they wanted.”

  “The cops were the crooks,” Davis said.

  “You knew nothing about any of this?” Fenwick asked.

  “Most certainly not. I dealt with creativity. Security is not creativity.”

  “You and your husband’s company fit the profile, a small firm they could have hacked into and ruined.”

  “I’m afraid we did that all by ourselves. Our incompetence needed no assistance.”

  The Davis’s company had not been among those listed as broken into in the records.

  She could account for her whereabouts at the time of the murders; spent with her husband, but uncorroborated by anyone else.

  Turner stopped at his desk as the next person entered the third floor to be interviewed.

  Micetic said, “You’re not gonna like this.”

  “What?” Turner asked.

  “You’re getting inundated with e-mail.”

  Turner said, “Before this week, half the time the e-mail didn’t even work.”

  “W
ell, it’s working now. You’re getting literally hundreds of these every second.” Micetic pointed to the stark, black, seventy-two point size message: “YOU’RE NEXT.”

  “Shut it down,” Turner said.

  “It’s probably going to crash in a few seconds anyway,” Micetic said. “You’ve got too much data coming in. This thing is going to be overwhelmed.” Before Micetic could press the escape button or close the computer down in any way, the screen completely froze.

  Turner reached down and pulled the plug. He said, “Sometimes Fenwick has the right idea.”

  Nancy and Charley Korleski strode into the room. Mr. Korleski was short and thin, the type Werberg often seemed sexually interested in.

  Turner ushered them into the conference room. He said, “You were known to harbor resentments against Mr. Lenzati.”

  Nancy Korleski said, “We filed a suit against Mr. Lenzati. If everyone who filed a suit was suspected of murder, there’d have to be even more lawyers than we have now.”

  “We were told you started rumors about them on the Internet,” Turner said.

  “We didn’t need to start them,” she said. “They were already there and well established.”

  “That maybe you yourselves were into hacking,” Turner added.

  “No way,” Nancy Korleski said. “Never. No way.” Her husband nodded agreement.

  Turner said, “Eddie Homan is dead. Did you know him?”

  “We knew of him. He’s one of the most famous hackers in the world. He worked for Lenzati and Werberg. That’s all we know. I never met him.”

  Turner said, “On our list of sexual conquests, we have you as well Mr. Korleski.”

  He said, “It was miserable.”

  “What happened?” Turner asked.

  Charley Korleski said, “He made me do sexual stuff. Not much, really.” Korleski described the same general pattern the other men had been asked to perform.

  “We need to ask you about your business as well,” Turner said. “We have evidence that Lenzati and Werberg, possibly in league with Eddie Homan, set about destroying their competition.”

  “How?” Nancy Korleski asked.

  “They were crackers of the first order. Sometimes they sold security programs to companies which contained bugs that allowed them to hack into companies whenever they wished. They could get huge jumps on the competition that way.”

  “Wouldn’t someone have noticed a pattern of failures?” Nancy Korleski asked.

  “As far as we can figure out,” Turner said, “just because they had access didn’t mean they used it. They didn’t do any raids on products or services or programs or games that would lead directly back to them. Or they timed their attacks so there would be no suspicion aroused. Sometimes they altered other’s work to increase frustration, sometimes to cause direct failure. On other occasions they just delayed the competition’s product until they could get their own on the market. Were you aware of Lenzati and Werberg committing industrial sabotage to your business?”

  “They ruined us,” Charley Korleski said. “I knew we didn’t fail just because we were inexperienced. I knew there was something behind it. We worked so hard, and they ruined us. Why? What shits they were.”

  After five minutes Turner interrupted their fulminating about Lenzati and Werberg. He asked the Korleskis to provide their whereabouts at the times of the murders. Their alibis were bland and unverifiable outside their two person unit; twice at home, this Sunday, at an afternoon movie.

  25

  What I’m really looking forward to is when they catch me. The moment I crave is the one where they parade me out of the station in front of the cameras. I’ve been practicing my superior smirk. They won’t catch me for a while, though. I’ve got a lot of cops to kill.

  While sitting in the conference room waiting for the next witness, Fenwick said, “I’m ready to go with a scenario where they all did it. We throw the lot of them in jail, and the computer age comes to an end.”

  “Would that it could be that easy.”

  “I’m the poet in this relationship,” Fenwick snapped.

  “For which I am grateful,” Turner responded.

  Molton marched into the conference room. “Your next interview is here, but I’ve got other news first. The detectives in Area One have the uncle of the kid Dwayne and Ashley shot in custody. They think he’s going to be charged.”

  “No serial killer on Dwayne?” Fenwick asked.

  “No.”

  Turner mentioned the new messages he’d been getting on his computer.

  “That could be significant,” Molton said, “but I’m getting reports that at least one detective in each squad in the city is getting similar crap. It seems that some loon has broken into the department’s server. We’re going to shut nonessential parts of the system down. After Micetic is done working with you, he’ll join the team of experts that we’ve got working on it.”

  “We didn’t buy our security from Lenzati and Werberg, did we?” Fenwick asked.

  “I have no idea,” Molton replied.

  Turner explained the process by which Lenzati and Werberg sabotaged rivals, or at least discovered their secrets.

  “Holy hell,” Molton said, “and clever to boot. If Micetic knows about it, I’m sure he’ll be taking that into account. I’ll check to be sure.” He left.

  Fenwick repeated, “No serial killer for Dwayne.”

  Turner said, “I was feeling less vulnerable when I thought it might be him.”

  “Me too. I don’t want to think about being vulnerable again.” Fenwick might have a tough exterior but being blind to genuine fear was not one of his or Turner’s faults.

  Before the next interview, they were able to ascertain that a number of cops in three of the six previous cities got warnings, but it wasn’t always the same cop that was eventually killed. Packages did come for some of the cops in all the squads of those who were killed. Anonymous packages that were not always sent to the victims.

  “A random pattern,” Turner commented. “This is a very clever and determined killer.”

  “Too good by half,” Fenwick said.

  Warren Fortesque, head engineer from Lenzati’s and Werberg’s company, was their next interview.

  Turner asked, “Who was the engineer in charge of the anti-hacker and security devices at the company?”

  “Mostly Lenzati and Werberg handled those accounts. I had a team that worked with them. I was in charge of developing the programs, usually after they designed them.”

  Turner said, “We have reason to believe they were using their security systems to break into other companies.”

  He gaped in astonishment. “You’re kidding?”

  “No,” Turner said.

  “I know nothing about that,” Fortesque insisted.

  “How could you not?” Fenwick asked. “You were in charge.”

  “Of a team of developers. I don’t know about any sabotage. I tried to make sure companies were secure. I had nothing to do with breaking into anything.”

  Fenwick asked, “Were you ever in their offices at Damen and Grand Avenue?”

  “Never.”

  “How could you not have been?” Fenwick asked. “Wasn’t that where all the work was done on the security systems?”

  Fortesque said, “That’s where all the work must have been done on adding illegal or unwarranted changes.”

  “How would you not know about that?” Turner asked.

  “Because nothing illegal was ever done at our offices. I would know about anything illegal at the main office. There wasn’t anything. I ran a clean operation.”

  “How did you oversee everything?” Turner asked.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Did you analyze each system?” Turner asked. “Did you inspect every program that went out? How were these sold? Could a company go to a store and buy them?”

  “No. You had to call us directly, and we designed a system tailor-made for your company. I made sure people met
deadlines. I helped in development or worked on problem solving.”

  “Did you have to design a new system for every different customer?” Turner asked. “Isn’t that kind of expensive, and sort of like reinventing the wheel each time?”

  “Believe me, these people could pay. Often we used one basic program, but we adapted each one to fit a particular company’s needs. In addition, we sold them guarantees that we would come and upgrade their service every three months for five years. We were the best. Those who wanted secure protection came to us. There were also weekly or monthly services for the ones who were more paranoid. Those were very expensive. Small companies could never afford them. There’s a lot of competition in this industry and there’s a lot of cutthroats out there. You need protection.”

  “But Lenzati and Werberg designed the special packages for each company?” Turner asked.

  “Yeah, the vast majority of them. Then different engineers worked out all the specific details, and created the programs.”

  “How much did Lenzati and Werberg have to do with the final product for each of those companies?”

  “They had as much or as little input as they wanted. If it was an especially big client or the problem a company was having was especially complicated, they liked to be directly involved.”

  “Very possibly, every single system your company sold was sabotaged,” Fenwick said. “How could you not have noticed?”

  “That’s the third time you guys asked me that. I’m telling you, my job was to work on the systems that I was told to and do the part I was assigned. Craig and Brooks could take and alter them any time they wanted.”

  “I thought you were in charge,” Fenwick said.

  “I was.”

  “You don’t sound very in charge,” Fenwick said.

  “I had no reason to kill anybody,” Fortesque said.

  Turner said, “If the sabotage is the reason for the killing, and you were in charge of that section, I would assume that you would be in as much danger as Lenzati, Werberg, and Homan. If we assume it, why wouldn’t a person who was sabotaged assume it? If someone had hacked into your system and discovered what your company was doing, and they were bent on getting revenge, why wouldn’t they kill all of you? How would they know which person worked on which program?”