Play To Kill

by P. J. Tracy

  He leaned his arms on the podium and let his eyes travel over every face. We trust you all,' he said, and everyone laughed. 'For that reason, we are absolutely certain that we will never have reason to suspect that any of you would violate federal or international law. It would be pointless to waste Bureau time investigating such a possibility. Is that perfectly clear?'

  For a moment, everyone went silent. Nobody knew doublespeak as well as a really good hacker. Special Agent in Charge Paul Shafer looked like he'd swallowed a toad, which, for some reason, pleased Smith mightily.

  'Furthermore,' John continued, 'your efforts will not be expended on catching "one of your own." These people are not identity thieves, spammers, or virus disseminators. These people are cold-blooded killers. They film their murders and post them on the Web for the world to see.'

  The lights in the auditorium dimmed further and the screen behind the speaker became illuminated with the introduction to a PowerPoint presentation. The caption read: 'Cleveland, Ohio.'

  'What I'm about to show you is a series of five videos that were pulled from various websites over the past several months. Some of you may have stumbled across these videos before they were pulled from the Web, and even though you now know that these are authentic, please be warned - the images you are about to see are extremely graphic and disturbing. Before we begin, I want to give anybody here who doesn't feel comfortable with viewing such content the opportunity to leave the auditorium now.'

  No one in the room moved a muscle.

  'The reason we are showing you these films is to highlight the critical importance of tracing the murderers who posted these films. They are still out there, probably still killing, or planning to kill, and we have absolutely no idea who they might be. They are extremely computer proficient. For this reason, I warn you not to discuss this case with fellow hackers who have not been invited to this seminar. If you do, you may unwittingly be talking to one of the killers. All of you here have been thoroughly vetted to the very limits of our resources. Still, we realize that the vetting process is not perfect, and that some of the murderers may be in this room at this very moment.' He paused for effect, pleased to see a few attendees cast sidelong glances at their seatmates.

  'Now. The films you're about to see have already been seen by hundreds of thousands of people on the Web, but very few of those people realize that what they were watching was actually real. Nor do they understand that these may not be anomalies, but perhaps the very grim beginning of an unimaginable new cyber crime.'

  He tapped some keys on his laptop to roll the first film but didn't turn around to watch the images. He didn't have to. He knew exactly what was happening on the large screen by the involuntary gasps from his audience.

  You had to see a body close-up, touch it with your own hands, to connect with the deadly real loss of a single human from the entire race. Everyone in this room saw murders almost every day. On television, in movies, video games, on computer screens that showed that which was real, and that which was staged. The average person never connected a depiction of death with a human being, and that was more than a problem; it was a moral catastrophe.

  'These are real people,' he said in the break between one film and another. 'People who were here one moment, and cruelly torn from the world the next. Please remember that.'

  In the very back row, in the darkness under a balcony, Grace MacBride watched the next film and felt her heart take a double beat, because if this couldn't be stopped, it could change everything.

  * * *

  Chapter Three

  The thermometer on the sleek black Cadillac read eighty- five degrees when Detectives Leo Magozzi and Gino Rolseth pulled into a slot in the underground garage.

  It was a new car, relatively speaking, confiscated from a dealer who'd been smart enough to finance a bells-and- whistles model and too stupid to latch the trunk. A couple of kilos of coke started blowing out behind him on the freeway, leaving a Hansel and Gretel trail right to his front door. Magozzi and Gino had the Caddy on loan from Narcotics for a week until their new bare-bones sedan was delivered.

  Gino had pretended disdain when Narcotics made the offer. 'Oh, yeah, sure. Every major dealer in Minneapolis tools around in a Beemer or a Mercedes, and the only one you guys can catch is some low-level incompetent with a stinking Cadillac. Thanks a million. Does this piece of crap have a GPS?'

  The guy from Narcotics shrugged. 'If you hadn't beaten your old sedan to a pulp you'd still have a nice ride.'

  'The damn thing was three years old and the only thing that worked in it was us.'

  Whatever. Is Angela cooking for Thursday-night poker?'

  'Maybe. We'll see how I like the car.'

  As it turned out, Gino liked the car just fine. It had GPS, a working air conditioner, a tricked-out engine, and electric seats with more positions than the Kama Sutra. Angela had cooked for Thursday-night poker, and they had the Cadillac for another week.

  Magozzi turned off the engine and opened his door. The garage was stifling already, and it was barely eight o'clock. The imposing red block building that was Minneapolis City Hall squatted on top of the garage like a stone comforter, holding the heat and humidity its ventilation system never handled very well on days like this. Gino started mopping his brow immediately.

  'This sucks. Let's get back in the car, push the seats on full recline, crank up the air, and plug in some tunes. They'll never find us.'

  'Nice talk for a crime fighter.'

  'It's too hot to fight crime. You know what I've been thinking? About shifting from homicide over to Water Rescue, just for the summer.'

  Magozzi glanced over at his partner's generous paunch.

  'What?'

  'I just had a really scary visual flash of you in a wet suit.'

  Gino gave his protruding belly a fond pat. 'Some women find this profile irresistible.'

  'What women?'

  'Some women. Somewhere.'

  Amazingly, Detective Johnny McLaren had beat them to work and was trolling City Hall like he usually did at least a few times during any given day, looking for scraps of conversation like a dog at a barbeque. It's wasn't that the skinny Irishman had a shortage of friends in the department, but with no life to speak of outside the job, he was chronically lonely. And without the companionship and human contact he craved, he tended to drink a lot off duty, and sometimes he gambled too much. Still, he was one of the sharpest detectives on the force.

  He didn't look hungover, but his wardrobe choice made Magozzi think twice about the condition Johnny had been in when he'd dressed himself this morning-he was wearing a terrible blue seersucker suit that had surely been pulled out of the throw-away bin at the Goodwill. With his blue suit, flame-red Irish hair, and Pillsbury Dough Boy complexion, he sort of looked like an American flag. Not that Magozzi was on the GQ style radar by any stretch, but Johnny had found a niche for himself in the annals of bad taste.

  Next to him, Gino snorted, his train of thought obviously tracking Magozzi's own. Jeez, Johnny, there must be a naked homeless guy out there somewhere.'

  McLaren gave him an indignant look and brushed an imaginary speck of lint from his puckered sleeve. 'This is the height of sartorial genius, Rolseth. You're looking at a five- foot-four walking chick magnet. See, women are threatened by men who dress better than they do, so you have to look like you don't care.'

  'Mission accomplished. I sure as hell hope you aren't wearing that thing in your on-line dating profile or you're never gonna see any action.'

  Johnny scowled, looking a little sheepish.

  'How's that going, by the way?'

  'Sucks. Everybody's looking for Brad Pitt. I signed up for a new one, though. J Date.'

  Magozzi lifted his brows. "You do realize that's a Jewish dating service, don't you?'

  Yeah, I know.'

  'And you're Catholic.'

  'Well, I'm not having any luck with my tribe, so I figured maybe I could find a nice Jewish girl and conve
rt.'

  'Seems like sound reasoning,' Gino said. 'Hey, aren't you supposed to be in Colorado this week?'

  Yeah. But my brother blew his knee doing some weekend- warrior bullshit and had to have surgery, so I canceled my trip.'

  'Bummer.'

  'Yeah, bummer, but he's a dumbass. Still thinks he's eighteen, and that rock climbing is a good idea. Anyhow, I figure no way I'm going to spend seven days' vacation time listening to him whine. So instead, I'm an even bigger dumbass and decide to take the holiday fund and hit every casino in Minnesota.'

  'How'd that work out for you?'

  'I'm back here, three days into my vacation, how do you think it worked?'

  'Probably better than if you'd put that money into your retirement account.'

  Ain't that the sad truth.'

  They heard heavy footfalls echoing in the hall long before they turned a corner and saw Joe Gebeke jogging toward them, all dolled up in his Bomb Squad gear.

  McLaren raised a hand in greeting as he approached. 'Hey, buddy. Got an exercise today?'

  Joe Gebeke was a big man, and the gear he was wearing added another fifty pounds, at least. He was already red- faced and sweating, and had yet to step out into the blast furnace outside. Magozzi felt sorry for him.

  He paused, gave them all a nod in greeting, then took a second to catch his breath. 'Ninety-nine percent of this job has been an exercise lately. Right now, we got an anonymous tip on a suspicious package in the food court at Maplewood Mall. Last week it was Rosedale Mall.'

  'What's going on?' Gino asked.

  'Snot-nosed delinquents messing around, thinking they're cute and sucking up tax dollars. They're driving us crazy - last month we had four call-outs at four different high schools during finals week. Now that the school year's over, the little bastards are terrorizing the malls.'

  'Did you catch them all?'

  'Sure we did. No-brainer. The only good thing about delinquents is they're stupid, thank God. But it's like there's a union or something. Somebody gets busted, another one comes off the bench to take their place. They're just like the pyros who start fires and get their jollies watching fifty thousand acres burn up on the news, thinking they'll never get caught. Look, I gotta run, guys. May be a false alarm, but we have to respond like it was the real deal.'

  'Be safe,' McLaren called after him as Joe jogged toward the door.

  Magozzi and Gino parted company with McLaren and stopped at Tommy Espinoza's office on the way to Homicide, primarily because Gino had heard the crackle of a bag that sang to him like sirens on a sea cliff.

  'Gino, it's eight o'clock in the morning.'

  'What's your point? I hear the sound of salt and fat and I obey.'

  'Could be a bag of raisins.'

  Gino snorted and pushed past him into Espinoza's office, central command for the department's computer division. Tommy looked up from his monitor, his dark Hispanic coloring making his blue eyes strangely intense. Gino always thought they were about the same color as the blue stuff people put in toilet bowls.

  'Hey, guys.' He automatically handed Gino a bag of Cheetos.

  'Not those. I can never get all that orange stuff off. Angela will find a speck and I'll be busted. Got anything white?'

  'Sure. Popcorn, potato chips…' Tommy spread his arms expansively toward a metal table that looked like the snack aisle at Cub Foods. 'Rummage away, my friend. Mi casa, su casa.'

  While Gino went on a cholesterol hunt, Magozzi looked at the monitor Tommy was working on. 'You're on YouTube?'

  'Sad, but true. We who serve the public must sometimes walk the sewers. Take a look at this.' He tapped the screen where a streaming video showed five girls beating the crap out of another girl trying to crawl away.

  'Jeez. Is that for real?'

  'This one is. A lot of the ugly stuff that gets posted is staged - Spielberg wannabes trying to outdo each other - but some of them are the real McCoy.'

  Gino walked over to look, his hand deep in a package of potato chips. 'Hey. I saw that on the news. High school girls from someplace advertising stupid. They put that girl in the hospital, then they posted it with all their faces showing. How dumb is that?'

  'Thank God for the dumb ones. The Brits are having a ball monitoring these sites, ID'ing the idiot perps then heading right for their digs like they had a written invitation. But every now and then, a smart one surfaces, and that's when it gets really scary. Take a look at this. This is Cleveland, four months ago.' He fiddled with the mouse until a new video appeared, this one showing a man from the back, beating another one on the ground.

  'Jesus,' Gino said. 'Why the hell do the servers let this kind of shit on the Web, and why the hell aren't we shutting them down? My kids could see this, for God's sake.'

  'Take it easy, buddy,' Tommy passed him a Butterfinger as if that would cure everything. 'Don't kill the messenger. YouTube and all the rest of them screen like crazy; they've even got software in place with certain words and symbols, like the swastika, tagged so a screener can do an eyes-on assessment. Trouble is, no bad words or symbols, no alarm for an eyes-on, and that's how stuff like the Cleveland film slips through. They only caught it because it had so many hits, which is another alarm tag, but by that time over a hundred thousand had seen it.'

  Gino was not comforted. 'Then why aren't they looking at every single post before they let it on site?'

  'Because they get millions of them. The volume is crippling. No way they can look at them all.'

  'Arrest a couple of CEOs and I bet they'll find a way to look at them all.'

  Tommy shook his head. 'You can't lock up the mailman for delivering kiddie porn, Gino. He doesn't know what's in the package.'

  Gino put down the potato chip bag, a measure of his distress. 'Damnit, Leo, I told you we should have stayed in the car. This is really depressing. How bad did he hurt that guy, Tommy?'

  'Pretty bad. He died on camera.' He clicked the mouse to run the video to the end.

  Magozzi didn't want to watch. In Homicide you saw a lot of aftermaths, but few murders in progress - yet in a weird way, he felt he owed it to the guy on the ground. Bearing witness, he thought, pulling a phrase from a childhood of religious training, shifting it over to a cop's version of respect for the victim. He closed his eyes when the film ended, and listened to Tommy talk.

  YouTube pulled it the minute they saw it and turned it over to the Feds. The guy on the ground was gay, which makes it a hate crime, and he was dead long before the end of the film. That's a metal pipe he's swinging, no question he was out to kill, and there isn't a chance in hell of ID'ing him. Not from this film, anyway. He didn't talk, he didn't show his face, and from the back he could be anybody. Cleveland Homicide worked every angle they could think of, including gay-bashing incident history, and came up empty. The Feds aren't doing much better nailing down the origin of the post, which is why they called in outside help.'

  'They called you in?' Gino asked.

  'Me and about fifty others. Invitation only to the big seminar last Saturday. I met gurus from all over the Midwest, cyber crimes guys from St. Paul and a lot of other departments, some teenage hackers they pulled off their summer jobs at McDonald's - kind of a geek fest hosted by suits with really bad ties. How come you don't know about this? I figured Grace must have told you. Monkeewrench was the major panel.'

  'Yeah?'

  'Oh, man, yeah, and let me tell you, that was a trip. You got all these Brooks Brothers types lined up at a table and then in comes Fat Annie in sequins, knock-'em-dead Grace, biker Harley, and Mr. Lycra. It wasn't a Star Trek- convention high, but it was damn close.'

  Gino frowned. 'They're pulling in that many outsiders for a case that's four months old?'

  Tommy grimaced. 'That's the thing. They found some more videos the sites pulled before they made it to the Web, and they've got bodies to match the film. Five cities across the country so far. They think Cleveland might be just the tip of the iceberg.'

  Gino was uncha
racteristically silent as they walked back to their office from Tommy's, a sure sign that he was processing some sort of philosophical revelation. Magozzi, being an expert in the varying degrees of his partner's rare verbal lapses, drew the quick conclusion that this particular soul- searching session was less cognitive and much more reflective than usual. Too bad Magozzi couldn't transfer the same intuition to his relationship with the woman he loved.

  'That was the worst goddamned thing I've ever seen,' Gino finally said.

  'It was bad.'

  'I mean, I've had a car accident vie bleed to death in my arms on scene; I was holding my grandpa's hand when he made his final exit; and you know exactly how many corpses I've helped you clean up over the years. Me and death are on a first-name basis. But, Jesus. We just watched some guy's final nightmare minute of life - on the Web. On the goddamned Web. People are filming this shit. Posting it. Other people are watching it. I don't get it. I just don't get it.'

  'Can't argue with you there, buddy.'

  Gino shook his head irritably. 'It's like the Roman Colosseum. Call me a dreamer, but I thought the human race got over that after two thousand years.'

  We never got over it. Think about it - the Inquisition. Public executions. Genocide every day, somewhere in the world. Terrorists. People can really suck.'

  Gino rolled his eyes. 'Thanks for that uplifting message of hope. Should I just kill myself now?'

  'I don't think that's the solution.'

  'Okay, how about I go kill all the assholes?'

  'Better.'

  They arrived at their desks, and sank into their chairs. Gino immediately withdrew a purloined packet of beef jerky from his suit-coat pocket and began gnawing. "You know what? I blame this on Hollywood. And the Web. We've got a bunch of kids calling in bomb scares for their fifteen minutes, and now we've got psycho killers posting their carnage on the Web so they can get their fifteen minutes. Celebrity culture gone wild. Everybody wants to be a star. And they don't care how they do it. Can't make the American

  Idol cut? Hell, kill somebody and make a movie of it. Jesus. I never thought I'd say this, but, man, just give me a plain old straightforward homicide to solve, because those always make sense in the end.'