Next Victim

by Michael Prescott

It was a small metal object, rectangular, its exterior badly oxidized by the heat of the fire and the subsequent dousing of the flames. When she turned it over, she saw a row of small buttons.

  "Could be part of the computer gear," Dodge said. "Zip drive or CD burner or something."

  "No. It’s a tape recorder."

  "Maybe the vic was listening to some tunes."

  "Probably." She opened the compartment containing the tape and saw a cassette inside. "But I’d like to be sure."

  The cassette appeared to be intact. The player’s metal casing had protected it from damage. There was no label on the cassette. It seemed to be a blank tape that the owner had recorded himself. She wanted a closer look. Maybe something was written on the other side.

  The eject button wouldn’t work. Without touching the cassette, she pried it loose with a ballpoint pen from her purse, then held it by the corners. No label on side two, no indication of the tape’s contents. This struck Tess as odd. Normally when people dubbed a CD or a batch of MP3 downloads onto a cassette, they would label the tape so they knew what they had.

  The cassette was made of clear plastic, the spools of tape visible inside. She peered at it closely.

  "It wasn’t Scott Maple who brought this here," she whispered. "It was Mobius."

  Dodge frowned. "Where’d you get that idea?"

  "Look at the tape. See how it’s twisted? A single twist in the ribbon."

  "Tapes get snarled sometimes."

  "This was done deliberately. The twist was put in to make the double-sided tape into a continuous loop." She looked at him. "A Möbius strip. That’s what it’s called."

  There was nothing else in the lab, or at least nothing they could find. They emerged blinking into the daylight of late afternoon.

  "What now?" Dodge asked.

  "I call my AD about this." Tess tapped the two plastic evidence bags into which she’d inserted the tape player and cassette.

  "You’re not even slightly curious about what’s on the tape."

  "I’m curious. But I don’t carry a Sony Walkman around with me, and the machine we recovered is inoperable."

  "There’s a cassette player in my car."

  Tess hesitated only a moment. She knew it was a violation of procedure to play the tape before the forensics technicians had a look at it. She also knew that the sun would set soon, that Mobius might well be planning to strike tonight, and that time was of the essence.

  "Let’s do it," she said.

  Dodge slid into the driver’s seat and started the engine, and Tess sat on the passenger side and carefully removed the tape from its bag. With a gloved hand she inserted it into the dashboard tape deck. The tape began to play automatically in the middle of a song.

  No lyrics. Just guitar chords, drums. A fast, hectic beat.

  "Recognize it?" Tess asked.

  "No. Maybe. It’s almost familiar."

  The song ended, then began again—an endless repetition courtesy of the Möbius strip. At the start of the song there was a peal of tittering laughter and a falsetto voice simpering, "Wipe out."

  "I know it now," Dodge said. "Shit, that goddamn song always did creep me out."

  "It’s called ‘Wipe Out,’ I assume?"

  He nodded as the song played on. "Surf music from the early sixties. Some Beach Boys wannabes, as I recall. I don’t remember the name of the group. Why the hell would Mobius be carrying this around?"

  "I guess it’s his theme song."

  "But what’s it mean?"

  "That," Tess said, "is the million-dollar question."

  They sat in the car as the song played again and again over the dashboard speakers.

  Standing next to Dodge’s car, Tess used her cell phone to call the AD. Andrus answered on the fourth ring. She told him what she’d found.

  "All right," he said. "We’ll have to see if the tape is playable—"

  "It is."

  "You listened to it? Without letting the lab have a look at it first? What if there was a fingerprint on the play button and you destroyed it?"

  "The exterior of the player is oxidized. No fingerprints. Anyway, Detective Dodge and I—"

  "Who?"

  "LAPD homicide detective. He’s assisting me. We played the tape, and it’s a song—"

  "Right, fine. We’ll talk about it, but not over the phone. I’m dispatching Larkin to pick up the evidence. He’ll deliver it to me, and I’ll hand carry it to the lab. I’m also sending a crime-scene squad to the campus. I want you to stay there and watch the site until they arrive."

  "I can get a security guard to do that."

  "I want you to do it. That’s an order."

  "Gotcha." She was a little peeved to have to waste time hanging around, but there was no point in arguing.

  "And, Tess?" he added. "Don’t touch that tape player again."

  Andrus clicked off. Tess stuck the phone back into her purse, fuming.

  "You look unhappy," Dodge observed with a smile.

  "My boss is an asshole sometimes."

  "Whose boss isn’t?" The smile lingered, incongruous on his hard, cynical face. "So after we’re done here, you want to get together, go over what we’ve learned?"

  She didn’t quite understand. "Go over it?"

  "At my place, say. I’ve got a house in the Hollywood Hills. Great view of the city."

  Well, she got it now. It was their little dialogue in the elevator all over again.

  "I think I’m going to be busy tonight. There’s kind of a crisis, in case you hadn’t noticed."

  "This is LA. There’s always a crisis. Anyhow, we’ve done our part. We’re entitled to some downtime."

  "Sorry. I’m pretty sure I’ll be otherwise engaged."

  The smile on his face flicked off, as simply as if he had flipped a switch. "Okay, then," he said in a tone that would have been more appropriate to Fuck you. "I’ve gotta get going. Write this up. Paperwork, you know."

  She disliked him, but she didn’t want to be rude. "Thanks for your help," she said feebly.

  "Protect and serve, that’s my motto." He was already getting back into his car.

  "Detective?"

  He stopped, possibly wondering if she’d changed her mind.

  "Keep quiet about this, all right? It can’t get out to the media."

  Dodge smiled again—a smile that was subtly different from before, in a way she couldn’t quite define.

  "I hear you, Agent McCallum." He zipped his lips with a forefinger. "Mum’s the word."

  29

  "I don’t mean to be rude, but today’s not a good day for you to be jerking my chain," Myron Levine said as he slid into a banquette at Lucy J’s.

  Dodge gave him a cool smile. "That’s uncalled for, Myron. My feelings are hurt. I’m getting all weepy." He let the smile go away. "Since when have I ever fucked with you?"

  "You’re fucking with me right now. Right this very minute. And I’m on a tight schedule. I’m on the air live at six o’clock. I don’t have time for any crap."

  "Then I’ll get right to the point. I got something major. And it’s gonna cost you."

  "I’m all tapped out—"

  "You want to sling bullshit, or you want to talk straight? It’s your call. You’re the one in such a goddamn hurry."

  Levine looked away. Dodge knew the guy was a coward. He talked big, but it was an act, as phony as his bad toupee or the lifts he wore to look taller. He was a scared little man, and one of the things he was scared of was Dodge himself.

  "What kind of money are you looking for?" Levine asked after a short pause.

  "Ten thousand."

  Levine’s eyebrows shot up like two moths singed by a flame. "That’s ridiculous. That’s totally out of the question."

  "It’s a bargain. It’s the sale of the motherfucking century."

  Something about Dodge’s coolness seemed to communicate a sense of sobriety to Levine. He calmed visibly. He became almost thoughtful. "What is it, more about Grandy?"

/>   Dodge waved this away. "Fuck Grandy. When this gets out, nobody’s gonna give two shits about police brutality. Even the fucking spooks won’t care. They’ll be too busy getting the hell out of town like everybody else."

  Levine tried not to look interested, but as a poker player, he frankly sucked, and Dodge knew he had the reporter’s complete attention.

  "Why will anybody be leaving town?" Levine tried for humor. "Stage-three smog alert?"

  "More like DEFCON One in a fucking war."

  Levine blinked. "War? What is it, the goddamn Arabs again?"

  "It’s better than that. Imagine if I were to tell you that we have a weapon of mass destruction floating around in this city, only it’s not in the hands of your run-of-the-mill little-dicked camel jockey. This time it’s in the possession of a bona fide serial killer. What would you say about that?"

  The question was rhetorical. Dodge knew exactly what Levine would say—namely, nothing at all. The man just stared.

  "That’s right, my friend," Dodge went on. "This city is in some serious shit. And I know the details."

  "You shitting me?"

  Dodge gave him a bored look.

  "Okay, okay, you’re not bullshitting, sorry, I just mean that this is, I mean, this is…"

  Awful. Terrifying. Unthinkable. There were lots of words he could have used.

  "This is fantastic! I mean, this is fucking incredible. If it pans out," he added cautiously.

  "It’ll pan out." Dodge waited, saying nothing more.

  "So give," Levine said finally.

  "What’s it worth to you?" Another rhetorical question.

  "If it pans out, like you claim…you’ll get the ten grand."

  Dodge smiled. "That’s what I like about you, Myron. In the end, you’re always willing to be reasonable."

  When he was done with Levine, Dodge sat alone and had himself a slice of Lucy J’s pie. He was going to grow a goddamned potbelly if he kept celebrating like this, but what the fuck. He had reason to celebrate. He’d obtained three grand in cash, with an IOU for the rest. He knew Levine was good for it. Gutless little troll didn’t have the balls to double-cross him, and besides, he couldn’t afford to shut off such a valuable pipeline of information—especially after today.

  Anyway, Levine had gotten a bargain. Fucking story was worth twenty grand easy, maybe twenty-five. But Dodge had known that Levine would never go that high without tedious negotiations. That process would take time, and Dodge couldn’t wait. Some other media outlet might get hold of the story.

  There were a dozen—hell, a hundred—places that might spring a leak. Even in Tess McCallum’s rushed synopsis of events, it had been obvious that just about every local government operation was involved in this case. Not everybody knew the whole story, but enough people knew bits and pieces. It would all come out before long, whether it was Levine who got the tip or some other jackass at a rival station or a newspaper.

  And, honest to God, the story really ought to come out. The public, bless their precious constitutional rights, was entitled to know. And he, Jim Dodge, was just a public-spirited citizen. Sure he was. And pigs could fly to the fucking moon.

  He swallowed his last forkful of pie and left his payment, adding a smaller tip than usual because the waitress with the Jennifer Lopez ass wasn’t on duty today. Which was too bad, because with money in his pocket and a song in his heart, he was looking to get laid tonight.

  When Special Agent McCallum had walked back into his life, he’d thought he might have been offered a second chance to find out if she was a natural redhead. But he’d decided McCallum was butch, or de-sexed or a nun or something. She hadn’t responded to his manly charms or his pheromones or whatever women responded to.

  Well, fuck her and the horse she rode in on. The way he had it figured, the news leak would prompt an FBI internal investigation. And who was likely to get nailed for talking out of school? Little Miss McCallum, who had a prior connection with Myron Levine in Denver. She would take the rap, and Dodge would walk away clean.

  Tough break, Tess. Serves you right for giving me the cold shoulder.

  30

  Tess sat alone in a squad room of the Westwood field office, staring at a computer monitor as she studied the results of another database search.

  She had waited at the Life Sciences Center for nearly two hours. First Larkin had arrived to ferry the tape player, sealed in its plastic bag, to the AD. A long time later the forensics team had finally showed up. Tess had left them at their work and driven the short distance to the field office.

  In the hallway she’d run into the Nose, the last person she wanted to see.

  "Hard on the case, McCallum?" Michaelson had asked.

  She said something noncommittal. He studied her shrewdly.

  "You don’t have to be evasive with me. I know what’s going on."

  Tennant brought you in? she almost asked, but of course no one had brought him in. He was fishing for information.

  "Going on?" she said innocently.

  "The other squad. You know."

  Yes, she thought. I do know. And you don’t.

  "The other squad’s not talking to me." The lie came easily to her. "If they’ve opened up to you, I’d like to hear about it."

  He stood there, frustrated, evidently pondering several possible comebacks before settling on "Never mind."

  She watched him walk away. His shoulders, she noticed, seemed to be sagging a little. He was out of the loop, and he knew it. She would have felt sorry for him if he wasn’t such a jerk.

  She’d found an empty squad room, commandeered a computer, and set to work.

  "Wipe Out" was the song title. It had to mean something to Mobius. Maybe she could find out what. But it wouldn’t be easy.

  The idea that there was a vast searchable computerized archive of crimes and criminals, and that anyone with a badge could type a few keywords into a search box and obtain instant results, was unfortunately a myth. The reality was that most law enforcement databases were useful only for a fingerprint search, in which case the FBI’s NCIC system was the best bet, or a search by the suspect’s name. There was no nationwide archive at all, merely a variety of more or less inclusive databases run by states and counties, accessible only by dedicated terminals within courthouses and halls of records.

  Tess, of course, had neither a fingerprint nor a suspect’s name. She had the name of a song that might or might not be connected to a crime Mobius had committed early in his career—perhaps in his youth, even before he was Mobius.

  The only official database that might be of help was VICAP, short for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. VICAP listed crimes by modus operandi, including any signatures—distinctive peculiarities of the crime scene, such as notes or messages left by the perpetrator. But when she typed in the Boolean search term "wipeout OR wipe out," she got no hits.

  This meant she would have to try other databases not specifically designed for law enforcement. LexisNexis, a repository of newspaper articles, was her first stop. Her initial search yielded a number of hits, too many to peruse. When she narrowed the search to eliminate irrelevant articles, she came up dry.

  The same thing happened when she visited the major Web search engines. There were thousands of Web pages containing the term "wipeout" or "wipe out," but nothing that seemed relevant to her needs.

  So what now? She had to conduct a more focused search, and she had to cover the entire Web.

  Most people didn’t realize it, but even the most popular search engines scratched only the surface of the vast pool of material available online. There were millions—actually billions—of Web pages that had never been collected and indexed by any standard search engine. This mass of material was sometimes known as "the deep Web."

  There were ways of accessing the deep Web. Just as it was possible to send a robot probe into ocean trenches, exploring realms off-limits to human beings, so it was possible to launch a software robot—a bot, in computeres
e—into the deep Web. A bot was a program that searched for specific keywords in specific contexts. The search could be as narrow or as broad as the user desired. It could take a long time—hours, even—because the bot was simply set free to follow link after link, collecting any data that matched the search criteria, crawling automatically and unsupervised through myriad uncharted Web pages.

  Tess had downloaded a bot program in Denver for use on a case last year. It had spidered across the Web for twenty hours before finally returning the hit she needed, a site unlisted in any of the brand-name search engines. She decided to try it again.

  Since this wasn’t her own computer, she had to find the shareware site where she had obtained the bot, then download the software and install it. This took only ten minutes, thanks to a high-speed connection. Next she set the search parameters, trying to include only pages in which "wipe out" was mentioned in conjunction with criminal activity. If she set the parameters too wide, she would haul up a mass of junk she could never sift through. Too narrow, and she might miss what she was looking for.

  Before initiating the search, she instructed the program to place any Web links that it found in an online storage service she used, rather than on the desktop’s hard drive. That way she could access the search results from her laptop or any other computer.

  When she was ready, she launched the bot. Nothing to do now but wait, maybe get some coffee or something to eat. It occurred to her with a touch of surprise that she had eaten absolutely nothing all day, and it was now nearly seven o’clock. She was about to go in search of a vending machine when the squad room door opened and Andrus walked in.

  "Gerry," she said with a smile. "You get the evidence from Larkin okay?"

  "I got it," he said, but he looked strangely unsettled, and there was a coldness in his tone she hadn’t heard before.

  She frowned. "There a problem?"

  "Problem?" He took a chair near her desk and swiveled restlessly. "No problem. What could possibly be a problem?"

  Sarcasm was a blunt instrument in his hands. He rarely wielded it.