Dark Places

by Evans, Jon

  "Mr. Wood," Agent Turner said sharply, "your cynicism does you no credit."

  "So you think he's going to be arrested?"

  "I guarantee you that this case will be pursued with as much vigor as any other Interpol case I have ever seen."

  I laughed, putting as much contempt into my voice as I could, and sat back in my chair. "Now that is a very revealing answer."

  "Look, Mr. Wood," Agent Turner said, and she sounded almost conciliatory, "I want to stress that you have done the right thing. You've gone to the appropriate authorities, and I will be opening a real live wire of an investigation on this case. You can sit back. Morgan Jackson is no longer your problem and you should leave him alone."

  "You mean you can envision Morgan Jackson being arrested?"

  "I certainly can."

  "All right. Then I have two questions. In this pretty little vision you have, who is arresting him, and on what charge?"

  She didn't answer me, just looked back at me and gave a little shake of her head.

  "That's what I thought," I said. "This doesn't change anything. I don't know shit about international law, but I do know it's basically toothless."

  "I do know something about international law," Talena said suddenly, and I thought she was going to contradict me, "and you're so right. There are men walking around scot-free right now in the Balkans who are guilty of genocide and ordering mass rapes and the worst crimes imaginable, and the West could get a hundred people to testify against each one… and there they are. Walking around. Or, more likely, driving around, in their big fucking bulletproof Mercedes between their big fucking mansions."

  I sensed I had hit a hot button.

  "All right," Agent Turner said wearily. "All right. Mr. Wood, Miss Radovich, I hear your concerns, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't share some of them. No. We're not going after Morgan Jackson for the crimes he has committed. What we are going to do is keep a very close eye on him. One thing about serial killers is that you can be confident they will kill again. The next time he strikes, particularly if it's in a First World nation, I will do my best to ensure that somebody is waiting for him."

  Talena and I shouted at the same time:

  "The next time—!" from her.

  "First World nation—!" from me.

  We stopped when we heard we were interrupting each other and motioned to each other to go ahead. Eventually I convinced Talena to begin.

  "You're saying you're going to sit around and hope you catch him next time? That's your big fucking plan? We've told you that there's a madman wandering around the world killing people at random and all you can say is wait until we get lucky?" she demanded.

  "Miss Radovich, please be realistic —" Agent Turner said defensively.

  I interrupted. "Do you not fucking get it? He's not going to kill anybody in a First World nation! He's not going to do it because he's too fucking smart! He can kill all the victims he likes when he goes traveling, any shape or size or colour or creed he's in the fucking mood for! It's a fucking buffet out there! You wait for him to go after someone in New York or London and you'll be waiting forever!"

  "All right!" Agent Turner snapped. "All right! Shut the fuck up!"

  We shut the fuck up. It was like hearing a nun swear.

  "Okay," she said. She looked at the recorder and the phone, presumably to be sure that they were off. "Yeah. The truth is he's outsmarted the world. The truth is that unless he fucks up at a kill site there is shit-all we can do in terms of actually arresting him. What we could do is try to keep track of his movement between borders and inform the relevant authorities in his destinations."

  "Now you're talking," I said. "Why didn't you say so? That would make for some nice frontier justice. If he goes to Kenya just leak to Moi's Boys that he might be big trouble, and that nobody would make a big fuss if his remains turned up sealed in a forty-gallon oil drum, and they'll take care of the rest for us."

  "We could do that, but we're not going to," Agent Turner said.

  "What? Why?" Talena asked.

  "Because we're talking about Interpol, not some kind of Wild West sheriff," she said scathingly. "It's not something we do. It's not something we have the authority to do unless one of our member states has prima facie evidence to arrest the suspect on a charge, and even then only under certain very tightly restricted conditions which make it basically useless in this case, even if we did have evidence, which we do not. You're right, he's not going to be arrested. Not on what we have. We have no real evidence."

  "What do you want, a signed confession?" Talena asked. "And if we had one, would it make any real difference?"

  "Honestly?" she asked.

  "Honestly."

  "Probably not," she said. She gave us a defeated shrug. "But you never know. We still might get lucky."

  Chapter 19 Cookie Monsters

  We went for a coffee afterwards, Talena and I, at a little cafe on Market Street.

  "Shouldn't you be at work?" I asked her.

  "I go back tomorrow."

  "Hmm."

  We sipped coffee at each other.

  "You look nice in a suit," she said.

  "Enjoy it while it lasts," I said. "I wear ties for interviews, weddings, and funerals. And court appearances and depositions, as of today. That's it."

  "Men," she said. "You pay them a compliment and they tell you that they hate it."

  "There's not a whole lot that justifies my whole gender's existence, is there?" I teased.

  "Don't get me started," she said. "Especially don't get me started on stubborn idiots who go endanger themselves for no good reason."

  "No good reason? I found him, didn't I?"

  "Yes, you found him." She sighed. "And you were very brave and resourceful. Pity about you being so stupid or you'd almost be admirable. But honestly, what good does the name do? You heard the lady. Even if he'd given you a signed confession it probably wouldn't change a thing. He's going to go on doing what he does until he fucks up and picks on somebody one size too big."

  "Maybe," I said.

  "What I don't understand is why. I mean, I have a degree in psychology, I'm supposed to have some understanding why people do the things they do, but not this guy. Most Western serial killers are totally fucked up, especially sexually, with the worst childhoods imaginable, and they're really sublimating their sexual urges into murder, but from what you say Morgan Jackson wasn't — what's so funny?"

  "Nothing," I said hastily. I had thought to myself: well, she's talking about sexual urges at last, Paul, that's a heck of a start. "No, he wasn't like that. He seems stable enough. Actually he seems more stable than just about anyone else I know. It's just that he's a total sociopath. It's all just a game to him. On the truck we called him the Great White Hunter."

  "The world is full of sociopaths," Talena said. "Half the really successful businessmen you'll meet are textbook cases. Most of them don't go around killing people."

  "Maybe because they don't realize how easy it is," I said.

  "Yeah. That's what's scary. You see what he does and you wonder why there aren't hundreds of people doing it. They would, you know. In the West people think that anyone who goes around killing people for fun, they have to be sick, deranged, brain chemistry problems. It's nice that they can think that. But it's not true. It happened all the time in Bosnia. Normal people, middle class, stable homes, good jobs, turned into monsters. Sometimes overnight. One of them was someone I knew. Not close, but still. He always said it was for his people, for his country, but really, I think he was just like Morgan. Just because he could. Just to show he had the power. And it's not just Bosnia. You know that. Rwanda. Cambodia. Same thing."

  "Huh," I said.

  We looked at each other.

  "That's awful too," I said. "But I don't think it's really Morgan's trip, not exactly. I don't know, I'm just guessing, but I think I knew him pretty well. I don't think it's all about power, for him. It's the thrill of the hunt. Murder as some kind of
extreme sport. I guess it's crazy, but so is BASE jumping, you know?"

  "It's not really all that different," she said. "Different excuse for the same…" A thought hit her and she looked at me, alert. "What did you mean 'maybe'?"

  "Eh?" I said, avoiding her suddenly icy blue gaze.

  "When I said he's going to do on doing what he does until he fucks up, you didn't say 'yes', you said 'maybe'. Why is that?"

  I shrugged.

  "Paul. Don't go clamming up on me now."

  "I don't know," I lied, "I just said it."

  "Oh, no." She slammed her coffee down so hard that although it was half-empty some of it splashed out of her hand. It must have scalded but she didn't react. "Oh, you totally stupid asshole. Don't tell me you still have some kind of plan. Don't tell me you're still not going to leave well the fuck enough alone."

  "I don't have any kind of concrete plan," I said. "But if the opportunity presents itself, I'm going to do something about Morgan Jackson."

  "Like what? Become Victim Number Three? That'll sure show him. You were five seconds away just a couple days ago, in case you've forgotten already. Do you have some kind of fucking death wish?"

  "Relax," I said. "It's a moot point. I said if the opportunity presents itself. Doesn't seem likely that it will anytime soon." I was prevaricating a little but didn't want to provoke her any further.

  "I see," she said.

  Clearly she could tell I was not telling her the whole truth. We sipped coffee at each other again. This time the air was hostile.

  "Well," she said, standing up. "I'm going home. Give me a call if you ever get that much-needed lobotomy."

  * * *

  I went home too, after a period of kicking myself and imagining the countless different ways I could have handled that conversation better. I decided to kill time by getting my old computer hooked up. I went down to the copy center, bought some floppy disks, downloaded the cable modem drivers onto them, came home, installed the drivers, played around with the configuration until it finally started working. I was back on the Net. This computer was a little slow but not too bad. I considered replacing Windows 95 with Linux but decided to delay awhile.

  First I went back to the Thorn Tree. There was, as I had half-expected, one final message tacked on to the conversation I had started.

  BC088269 11/17 04:07

  Consider that your final final warning.

  Live long and prosper, Paul. And don't ever fuck with me again.

  "Fuck you," I muttered under my breath. An easy thing to say from the safety of my Cole Valley apartment.

  I went to my Yahoo Briefcase account and downloaded the zip files with the cookies from that machine in Tetebatu. I examined the list of files:

  aol.com

  canoe.ca

  excite.com

  footballunlimited.co.uk

  hotmail.com

  lonelyplanet.com

  lycos.com

  microsoft.com

  msn.com

  netscape.com

  nytimes.com

  rocketmail.com

  roughguides.com

  times.co.uk

  yahoo.com

  216.168.224.70

  The filenames indicated the site that the cookie referred to. Most of the sites were pretty well known and pretty much what you'd expect on a backpacker machine. But that last one, 216.168.224.70, was an IP number instead of a DNS name. That was unusual. I examined the cookie:

  server=Microsoft Active Server Pages Version 3.0

  session=HX8338947MUT7G-KXFWJ38

  Nothing useful there. Sites that run on Microsoft ASP are automatically configured to leave cookies so that they can track user access over a period of time. It didn't tell me anything about what was on that site. But that was easy enough to find out. I typed http://216.168.224.70/ into my browser address window.

  A popup window appeared asking for my username and password. The browser contents did not change. No welcome page, no nothing. Whatever this site was, its owner didn't want anyone looking at anything unless they had a name and password. Pretty unusual in a medium where page-views were the measure of success. Pretty unusual for a vanity site too. Pretty unusual full stop.

  I tried a whois:

  whois: 216.168.224.70

  Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:

  Merkin Muffley

  P.O. Box 19146

  Cayman Islands

  mm9139@hotmail.com

  Well, that gave me a contact name, but… "Merkin Muffley"? I didn't think so. That was the president's name from Dr. Strangelove. Somebody had pulled a fast one on CaymanDomain and Network Solutions.

  So what we had here was a site with a moderately paranoid level of security registered under a false name and presumably hosted in the Cayman Islands. Could have been a lot of things. An offshore bank, say, or one of those buy-a-second-passport offers you see in the back pages of the Economist, or some kind of connection to money launderers or drug runners or God only knows what sort of illicit activity.

  But probably not. First of all because it's unlikely anyone would have connected to one of those from a hovel in Tetebatu. But second of all because it really wasn't that secure. That popup login window wasn't encrypted; anyone with a packet sniffer on the network could read what the user typed in. Anyone with serious resources would have done a far better job. It looked more like a site thrown together by some amateur who wanted to make it as secure as possible without actually understanding the myriad problems of security.

  It was still going to be problematic. I wasn't really a hacker. I was probably enough of a programmer to become one in the space of a few days, I could go out and get some Cult of the Dead Cow software or hacker scripts, but realistically, it wasn't my forte, and hacking isn't near as easy as newspapers and movies make it seem.

  For fun I typed "thebull" into both the login and password fields and clicked on OK. "Invalid login" said the computer. So I tried "taurus" instead of "thebull", thinking of that five-year-old Usenet conversation I had dug up.

  And the browser filled with data. Not very much data. The simplest arrangement imaginable, black text on a white background. There were only thirteen words, but they were enough to set my heart racing.

  The Bull

  Add Entry

  Bulletin Board

  Leader Board

  Current Log

  FAQ

  Register

  Archives

  Being a longtime Webhead, I went straight for the FAQ.

  Frequently Asked Questions

  What is The Bull?

  The Bull is an online dead pool with two unique qualities. In other online dead pools, players guess who will die and are awarded points for being correct. As a player of The Bull you choose who dies and you are awarded points for both quantity and quality.

  What do you mean, I choose who dies?

  I mean you commit murder. If you have somehow found this site and you're not okay with that, don't worry. Participation is optional as of this writing.

  I'm okay with killing people. How do I get points?

  First of all, you have to register.

  How do I register?

  Just go to the registration page here, and enter a password. You will be given a username (of the form "NumberOne", "NumberTwo", etc for purposes of anonymity and security). Users are strongly discouraged from having multiple usernames.

  What happens after I register?

  Then you go out and kill someone, and post evidence to the site. Then you keep doing it.

  What kind of evidence?

  Photographs are a start, but they are not sufficient as they are too easy to fake. Videos are better, particularly if they have audio tracks as well. Pointers to corroboratory evidence, such as news articles, are often your best bet if available. And every victim must have the mark of The Bull.

  What is the mark of The Bull?

  Two matching red Swiss Army knives driven into the victim's eyesockets
.

  Isn't that a pretty weird mark?

  Yes. That's the point.

  Are there any rules about who I kill?

  We don't have any rules. However we have some very strong recommendations, such as:

  - only perform kills where you are beyond the jurisdiction of

  competent police forces, eg Third World countries

  - don't kill anyone you know socially

  - don't kill anyone if the situation is anything but perfect

  - don't ever get fancy

  - after the deed is done, get out of the country

  In general we recommend that new users examine the log carefully to get an idea of techniques which have been used successfully.

  Isn't it dangerous posting evidence of my kills to a Web site?

  You bet your sweet ass. Don't ever access this site except from some public location such as a Web cafe, and when you're through, clear all traces of your access by deleting the browser history and Temporary Internet Files (click here for details.)

  How do I get points?

  There are two types of points: substance, and style.

  How do I get substance points?

  After you add an entry (via the Add Entry page here) each qualified user may award you 5 substance points if the evidence you posted convinces them that you actually performed a kill.

  How do I get style points?

  Each qualified user may also award you 1-5 style points, and may also comment on your kill.

  What is a qualified user?

  You become a qualified user the first time at least half of the existing qualified users grant substance points to one of your kill entries. You can only award points to kills which occur subsequent to your achieving qualified-user status.