I gave her a puzzled look, but quickly figured out she was just drawing a breath before she went on: “You can leave messages, okay? Sometimes the star. . . or the writer, or the singer, or whoever the cyber-guy set the home page up for. . . actually answers, but that’s like a big thing. . . real rare. Usually it’s just fans of whoever the home page is for—talking to themselves, you know? Like who should play what character in the movie, like that.”
“And this guy has one of these home pages?” I asked her.
“Yeah. In fact, there’s about a half-dozen of them. One’s even in Japanese.”
“And people write to these message boards with stuff for him?”
“Sure. Mostly it’s like ‘Right on!,’ you know? I mean, they’re fans, right?”
“Of a serial killer?”
“Oh, please,” Xyla said. “First of all, that’s nothing new. Charles Manson has a website. Plenty of people get turned on by serial killers. Go to the movies, read a book—serial killers are hot stuff. But this one, it’s. . . different. I figured, at first, it was mostly gay guys writing, just being. . . encouraging, you know? But once he started blasting those child molesters, it’s like everyone’s on his side. You can see it everywhere. They call him HE. For his initials, I guess it meant, once. But now it’s like ‘he,’ understand? Like ‘He said so,’ see?”
I did see. I’d sure seen
graffiti’ed all over town. Thought it was another of those religious-nut organizations pasting their crap up the way they always do.
“Anyway, so, I got a bunch of hit-backs, like I said,” Xyla went on. “But only three even opened up the encryption, and two of those were obviously from geeks.”
“How’d you know that?”
“ ‘Cause it worked just like you said,” she replied. “That velociraptor bit. The other two, they started in with Jurassic Park. The movie, right? And they wanted me to send them a gif, and—”
“A what?”
“A picture. Digitized photograph. Just wanted to see if I was a boy or a girl, my best guess. So lame. . . like anyone couldn’t send someone else’s picture. Anyway, I knew it couldn’t be them. But this one. . . it’s him, I bet. Take a look for yourself.”
She hit some keys again. The screen blinked, went all blue, then flicked back into white. Xyla pointed at the lettering:
>>Send proof. One (1) word. No more.<<
“Jesus Christ!” I said. “That has to be him. You’re right. Can you get an address from what he sent?”
“Not a chance.” Xyla laughed. “The guy’s way ahead of me. It’s not just his addy that got nuked, it’s the whole ISP.”
“Huh?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, an undercurrent of impatience in her voice at having to explain such simple stuff to the older generation. “Look. No, I can’t trace it. Nobody could. He built it himself, from scratch. And he’s probably got more. . . that he’s only going to use one time and do the same thing. It probably only existed for a few seconds. It’s gone forever. Very, very slick,” she said, admiringly.
“But if you can’t find him. . . if his address is gone. . .?”
“I can’t find him,” she said. “That’s true. And I could never find him if I couldn’t at least get into the server. I can’t believe he actually built one just to send one lousy message. He’s not just smart, I’ll tell you something else about him—he’s rich. Whatever he’s got, it cost more than all this,” she said, sweeping her arm to indicate the bank of machinery in the room, “times a hundred.”
“So what do we—?”
“Well, I don’t have his address, but he has mine. At least, he did. I nuked it myself, soon as I heard from him, like I told you I would. I figure, we keep playing, right? Send out another message, just like I did before. He must have known what was going to happen. That’s why he said ‘one word only,’ see? I’ll put it out there again. He does lurk. He’ll see it. And, if it works, he’ll reply to whatever new addy I send it from, then nuke himself off again, see?”
“Yeah,” I told her.
“So,” Xyla asked, her fingers poised, “what’s the word?”
I told her, playing the only card in my deck, watching the name of the ice-man pop up on the giant screen:
wesley
I tried the radio on the drive over to my place. No music that didn’t belong in elevators. No surprise. The all-news station was all-crime. No surprise there either. I tried talk radio. Mistake. Some “expert” was saying depression is America’s number-one mental illness. Chump. You want to know about America’s number-one mental illness, consult a proctologist.
Pansy was glad to see me anyway.
The next morning was so bright and crisp it made the badlands look pretty through my window. Until you looked close. Like those magazine photos of Tibet. The ones that don’t show the Chinese troops.
I thought maybe I’d start looking for the witch I needed, playing it that Nadine’s friend would come through. Then I realized. . . I didn’t know anything about the witch but her name. The name they gave her, and the name she took for herself. I knew her daughter’s name. . . but that kid would be a teenager by now. She could have moved. Disappeared, even. The only one I could have asked was the guy who got me involved with her in the first place. Julio. The one she watched die, gleeful witchfire crackling in her eyes. I still had her phone number, but it had been so long. . . .
I thought it through. Nothing. Then I worked with the singing bowl Max had given me. I never wondered why he had such a thing himself. Max can’t hear, but I know he can feel vibrations—better than anyone else I know. So, when he held it in his hands, maybe. . .
Pansy liked the sound too. I was getting pretty good at it. When I came back around, I made the decision. If she was still there, okay. If not, I’d try and trace her through her daughter. But I wasn’t going to open that coffin unless I had something to ask for.
So I went back to waiting.
Part of the waiting was sex I had with a girl named Lois. I wasn’t looking for her—she just turned up in a place I was and we went back to her apartment. If the action had been in a movie, the critics would have called the whole scene gratuitous.
“Just like old times,” she said, when we were finished.
That was the truth. She’d greeted me with “Hello, stranger,” and that’s the way I left.
I stayed down in the whisper-stream, sifting and sorting, looking for anything that could get me what I needed. That “message-board” thing Xyla told me about was nothing new. It works that way down here too. At the intersection of a few wires, I picked a rumble from a finger—someone who sets up jobs but never does them himself. Some fingers are amateurs—cable-repair guys, utility company workers, deliverymen—anyone who gets access to a house and has a chance to look around, check the security, see if there’s a dog, anything worth stealing, like that. But this particular guy was a pro, and he only fingered big jobs. An armored car, this one was supposed to be. And the finger didn’t just have the route, he had an inside man. A driver who wanted a piece of whatever haul he got “robbed” of—willing to take a few good knocks to make it look real too, and guaranteed to hold his end of the take for no less than five years before spending a penny. Sounded like gold. Unless you listened close. The way I saw it, the finger had finally gotten popped himself. And instead of diming out people who’d worked opportunities he’d pointed out in the past, the cops were using him to catch the crew who’d been doing cowboy jobs on armored cars all over the East Coast the past year or so. The cowboys didn’t seem all that organized—they’d just cut off the armored car with their own jalopy, jump out wearing ski masks and body armor, rake a full-auto burst across the windshield to get the driver’s attention, then hold up a grenade. . . high, so the driver could see what would happen if he didn’t open up. Sometimes they scored—one take was near a million—sometimes they struck out. In fact, the one driver they killed was piloting an empty truck, on his way back from a dropoff
. So the FBI probably figured the hijackers for some of the White Night crowd, refinancing their coffers after so many of them had been captured last year.
I thought the feds were wasting their time. The guys they were looking for weren’t even pros themselves, so they wouldn’t be tuned in. No working pro would care if a pack of Nazi asshole amateurs went down, but the finger was marked lousy now. No matter how it played out, he was done.
I didn’t know if Lincoln was bugging Davidson for “progress-report” crap, but it wouldn’t matter. We already had his money, and Davidson wouldn’t even bother telling me about things like that.
The more I thought about it, the more I figured this Homo Erectus guy was already well away. It had only been a couple of weeks—not enough to make the fag-bashers brave again, sure—but he hadn’t done his bit for a while, so he could be anywhere.
Maybe I was right about that. Maybe it was the other stuff that brought him back. Maybe he never left.
The other stuff was copycat. It started small: A child molester just released from prison had his address published in the paper—seems he decided the only suitable housing he could find was about a hundred yards from a kids’ school. Some people paid him a visit one night. And lit a fire. It was an amateur arson, but good enough to total the house. And if the freak hadn’t moved fast, he’d have been barbecued.
I knew it wasn’t the killer’s work. So did the cops, I was sure. But the papers didn’t. And they started playing it up again.
Smart fucking move. A while back, the papers decided to do a series on the Bloods. Not the real-thing, L.A. gangsta Bloods, this was about the East Coast version—a few guys who got together in the joint, awarded themselves OG status and started talking the talk. Probably began in response to the Latin Kings and the Netas—two Hispanic gangs who formed themselves Inside for protection, the same way it always starts. But the balance had shifted. Rikers Island was more Hispanic than black now. If the Latino gangs had joined forces, they could have ruled. Naturally, that didn’t happen. When I was Upstate, it was usually black against white, with the Latins trying to stay out of the crossfire. Now it was the whites’ turn to play that role. The papers did what they usually do: interview some “spokesman” and print it all like it was gospel.
Next thing was a wave of random slashings all over the city. Usually box-cutter jobs, usually to the face. Word was that you had to cut someone to be a Blood, and all these dumb-fuck kids wanted to be in. . . so they went out slicing. And when the cops responded to the media with their usual sweep-arrest thing, they scooped a lot of nasty little weasels, but no real Bloods.
The Bloods found out the wannabes were even imitating the triangular cigarette burns that proved you were in. And so they started issuing more press releases, working the pay phones in the jailhouses to call the newspapers collect, disclaiming any responsibility for the slashings, warning the wannabes they’d be “dealt with” as soon as they came Inside. And as long as they were on the line with the press, they couldn’t pass up the opportunity to dump on their Hispanic counterparts.
So the Latin Kings demanded equal time. And the newspapers were eager to comply. Each reporter dutifully printed the usual rant about how the gangs were community-improvement and racial-pride organizations. Sure, they could be violent, if they were forced to, but their purpose wasn’t crime, it was. . . uh, you know, political.
Sure. The papers, especially the columnists, provided a perfect forum for the Bloods and the Kings to death-diss each other publicly. All the leaders ended up in total lockdown, but the slashing continued Inside. And the publicity only got more kids wanna-being.
The Mayor pledged to wipe out the new scourge, convinced that winning the last election against the lamest candidate the Democrats had come up with in half a century made him a national model for city management. Yeah. Like the ATMs in New York City strip bars are proof of our “economic revival.”
Sure enough, the cops started finding Crips too. No, not the Compton Crips. This crew was mostly crack dealers flying colors.
Perfect. Now you had Hispanic kids approaching black kids, asking, “You a Blood?” and slashing away no matter what the answer. You had some kids afraid to wear red or blue, while others proudly flew the colors without the credentials, risking attack from both sides.
So, when the freak’s house got burned down, it wasn’t a big surprise that whoever wrote to the papers bragging about doing it signed off with “HE Rules!” Not pretending to be him, just with him.
Then the gates opened again.
The first four seemed unrelated at first. A stockbroker in his twenties, a middle-aged manager of the service desk at a car dealership, an unemployed guy who lived alone but wasn’t on welfare, and a woman who had once run a day-care center on the West Coast.
They all had two things in common. Each had been shot in the head at close range, in their own home. The papers weren’t saying, but the implication was that it was the same weapon too.
The other common denominator was computers—they’d all been involved in freakish cyber-stuff.
The stockbroker and the unemployed guy were after boys, haunting the chat rooms. The manager liked little girls. They didn’t find any evidence that he did any more than collect pictures of them. He was trading the pictures too. But if the cops learned the identity of any of the kids in the photos, they weren’t saying.
The woman was looking for “models.” Said she ran an agency, and promised girls big bucks for a few hours’ work. All she wanted was teens or younger. “Hairless” was her favorite description for the merchandise. One exchange the cops pulled off her computer’s hard drive was between her and a twelve-year-old who’d already been “posing” for a year. The girl had a little sister, and was negotiating a price for her, seeing her own market value dropping with age, moving up to agent status.
This time, as soon as he spoke up, the papers didn’t wait to print what he had to say.
Impostors beware! I do not seek converts. I am a hunter, not an evangelist. Those last four were all targeted for their crimes against gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. A warning here: I am well aware that two of the targets met their victims through so-called “homosexual” chat rooms. This perversion will not be tolerated. Anyone who links homosexuality to pedophilia will be dealt with. Anyone. The other two were dispatched because their conduct fuels the fires of discrimination and violence against us. Finally, no crimes are to be committed in my name. None. Should my name be linked, in any way, to an incident of violence, the perpetrators will be viewed as antithetical to my mission. For all I know, the pedophile whose house was burned was targeted because of a misperception that he was “homosexual.” I have gone to great lengths to disabuse the world of the notion that molestation of children is “homosexual” even if committed by perpetrators of the same gender as the victim. That myth is homophobic. Homophobia breeds gay-bashing. And gay-bashing now brings death. The equation is simple. The rules have been explained. Unless a public disavowal of self-identification as “homosexual” by major pedophile organizations is forthcoming within the next two weeks, escalation will occur.
So he was here. In the city. Had to be. No way to do all those close-up hits without having someplace local to disappear into.
I spent a lot of time thinking. Almost like being back Inside. Only I wasn’t thinking about getting out, I was focused on getting in. Into him.
He wasn’t a chess player, not that kind of killer. No, he played outside the lines. Made the rules. So I went outside the lines myself. Off the chessboard. Considered what nobody seemed to be thinking about: All we had was the letters. And the murders. Did it have to be a man? Or even one man? There was nothing to show one man couldn’t have done everything he’d pulled off. . . no simultaneous murders in different parts of town, nothing like that. The letters were all in the same voice. No question about that. As distinctive as a fingerprint—egotistically individualized beyond the ability of any group-composition effort, no matter h
ow shared their rhetoric. And too concise to be group work anyway. But if he did have partners, he’d know how to keep that off the screen.
And why respond to that “velociraptor” bait at all if he didn’t want to. . . what? He already had the biggest forum anyone could hope for. All the newspapers published his letters the minute they came in, usually on the front page. I knew they were translated into other languages too. Fan pages on the Internet. He wasn’t threatening anyone if they didn’t publish, like that Unabomber maniac. He didn’t have a fucking “manifesto” he wanted in print. And he sure as hell wasn’t looking for a book-and-movie deal.
I couldn’t make it work. But I had to work from someplace, so I settled on three assumptions: he was working solo; he was based here; he was willing to talk to me if I was the real thing—not a cop, from the other side of the line.
And if Wesley’s name didn’t prove that to him, I was out of luck.
A few days passed. And when the pedophile organizations didn’t produce the public statements he wanted, didn’t admit they were not “gay,” but just child molesters, he went even farther off the board.
“KIDDIE SEX TOUR” PLANE
EXPLODES OVER PACIFIC!
Some version of that headline blazed across the front page of every paper in the world. For once, the TV networks were ahead in the race—this time they had footage, and video beats print every time. But the footage wasn’t much. . . mostly of the futile rescue efforts.
There had been no irregular communication from the plane just before it vanished from the radar screens. No warning, no hint. No nothing.
But though nobody expected a bombing, the anchorman made it clear that his network had known about the flights for a while. I tuned in somewhere in the middle of his somber-voiced speech:
At the time of the crash, our In-Depth Investigative Team had already been working on the shocking story of “kiddie-sex tourism” in Southeast Asia. The changing economic climate in that region has paralleled a change in child prostitution practices. Thailand was originally considered the worst offender, but Thai brothels are now largely staffed with women and children brought across the border from Myanmar, while Goa, Sri Lanka, and especially the Philippines are all significant purveyors. The ID Team has learned that the charter service, which had advertised under the name “Budding Blossoms,” has been in operation for several years. We now go to Mary Jo Sanstrom, on board a SEATO vessel which is part of the search-and-rescue operation. Mary Jo. . .
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