The Program

by James Swain

  Vick caught a movement out of the corner of her eye. Linderman stood next to the wall with Moody, and was motioning for her to slow down. She abruptly stopped talking. The sound of pencils scratching away on notepads filled the room. Every single detective was busily writing down notes. They’re listening to me, she thought.

  In the back, a black female detective raised her hand.

  “Yes, detective,” Vick said.

  “Does our killer have a name?” the detective asked.

  Vick thought back to the prostitutes they’d questioned that morning.

  “Mr. Clean,” she said.

  Everyone wrote it down.

  “Mr. Clean is on a roll, and has become empowered by his crimes,” Vick continued. “More than likely, he believes the police will never apprehend him. With the sheriff department’s help, the FBI wants to set a trap, and see if we can catch him.”

  Vick paused to let the detectives catch up. She had them now. It was her case.

  “Our trap will be a special web site devoted to Mr. Clean’s crimes,” Vick went on. “The site will contain information about the three victims, and will invite viewers to share any thoughts or tips through a blog. This blog will have a special filter that will capture the IP addresses of anyone who visits it, along with the physical address of their computer.

  “I know what you’re thinking. What if a few thousand people visit the site? What then? Well, the FBI has used web sites to capture serial killers before. We’ve discovered that these sites get heavy traffic the first day, followed by a second wave of visitors that include the victims’ families, friends, and often the killers themselves, who are interested in reading about the investigation, and what people say about them.

  “Any good trap needs bait. The site will contain information about Mr. Clean which we know isn’t true, and is designed to entice him to respond. For example, we may say on the site that we think Mr. Clean has a low IQ, when in fact we know he’s above average intelligence. Or, we might say he’s a poor dresser. If we hit the right buttons, he’ll respond on the blog, and correct us. Once he does, we’ll track him down and catch him. Any questions?”

  Several hands went up. Vick picked a Latino detective in a middle row.

  “It sounds like you’ve got all the bases covered,” the Latino detective said. “What can we do?”

  “This site is going to be presented as property of the Broward County Sheriff’s Department,” Vick replied. “It’s essential that the sheriff’s department play along. We need a detective to act as a spokesperson, and talk to the media. And, all of you must talk this up with the rank and file officers you come in contact with.”

  “You want us to lie to other cops about the investigation?” the Latino detective asked.

  “Yes,” Vick said.

  “That’s not ethical.”

  “No, but it’s necessary to our investigation.”

  “Why? Do you think Mr. Clean is a cop?” the Latino detective asked.

  A murmur went through the room. Vick cleared her throat.

  “No, but he listens to cops,” she said.

  There was a bottle of water on the table beside her. Vick unscrewed the top and took a swallow. The room had grown deathly still.

  “The FBI has discovered an interesting trait among serial killers in recent years,” Vick said. “Many of these killers use scanners to monitor patrol car conversations. If we give one story to the media, while speaking the truth amongst ourselves, Mr. Clean might hear it, and figure out what’s going on. We can’t let that happen. Every cop in Broward County needs to be in the same church, singing out of the same pew. Understood?”

  The Latino detective nodded solemnly. So did the other detectives packed into the conference room. Vick felt like she’d dodged a bullet, and decided to wrap things up.

  “By the end of the day, each one of you will receive an artist’s composite of Mr. Clean, plus photographs taken off the surveillance store film,” she said. “The web site should be up and running by tonight. Please refer to it, and memorize the details. Any questions?”

  DuCharme threw his hand into the air. He was the last person in the room she had expected to field a question from.

  “Yes, Detective DuCharme,” she said.

  “What’s he doing to them?” DuCharme asked.

  The question caught Vick off guard. “Excuse me?”

  “Mr. Clean. What’s he doing to his victims?”

  “We don’t know what he’s doing to them, detective.”

  DuCharme sat up straight in his chair. There was a gleam in his eye that she didn’t like, and she sensed he wasn’t going to let it go. Fucker.

  “I thought serial killers used their victims to act out their fantasies,” DuCharme said, talking as much to the other detectives as to her. “That’s the gig, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, detective, that’s the gig.”

  “Then you must have a theory.”

  “The FBI does not entertain theories, just facts, detective.”

  “Were the victims tortured?”

  “No.”

  “Sexually abused?”

  “There was no evidence of that.”

  “You must have found something.”

  DuCharme was needling her. If Vick didn’t stop him right now, she’d run the risk of losing whatever credibility she’d established with his peers.

  “There were ligature marks on the victims’ wrists and ankles,” Vick said. “Our lab has confirmed that Nardelli and Reedy were bound to a chair for several days with two inch wide leather straps. However, neither victim was physically tortured nor sexually abused, but in fact appeared to have been treated well by their captor. Both had full stomachs of food when we found them, and were dressed in very nice clothes which Mr. Clean gave to them.”

  “What’s he doing — killing them with kindness?” DuCharme asked.

  The line got a big laugh from the other detectives. Even Sheriff Moody got in on the fun. Vick had been raised in a household without laughter. Hearing it now made her feel like she was being mocked. She slammed the desk with her open palm, the sound sending a shock wave through the room.

  “In case you didn’t hear me, Detective DuCharme, Mr. Clean is murdering his victims with a point blank shot to the head,” Vick said. “If we don’t find him quickly, he’ll kill Wayne Ladd in the same fashion. Now, are there any more questions?”

  There were none. She glanced at Linderman, and saw him nod approvingly.

  “Thank you for your time, and have a pleasant day,” Vick said.

  Chapter 5

  Wayne Ladd could not shut his eyes.

  He sat in a chair with a metal device strapped to his head that felt like a vice. The device had a pair of eyepieces that came down around his face, forcing both his eyes to stay open. He would have ripped the device off, only his arms were tied to the arms of a chair by thick leather straps.

  He was scared.

  He was in a small room with muted florescent lighting and a vanilla concrete floor. The walls were lined with something that looked like cork. A high-definition TV hung from the wall in front of him, the screen blank. Music blared through a pair of wall speakers, the Beatle’s Helter Skelter.

  He was in hell.

  He felt a sneeze coming on. He had read once that if a person sneezed with their eyelids open, their eyes would pop right out of their head. He filled his lungs with air and held his breath, and finally the sneeze went away.

  He wanted to cry.

  He had lost many things in his young life — his freedom, his friends, his older brother — yet losing his vision seemed far worse than any of those losses. Even worse than dying, he thought.

  A film started to play on the TV. A porno movie, only not the kind he liked. There was no kissing or hugging or people talking dirty as they tore off each others clothes. He enjoyed those kind of movies. Instead, an enormous black man wearing a huge dildo with a red pump was raping a very scared white woman tied to a table. W
atching it made his entire body shiver.

  “Turn it off,” Ladd said loudly.

  The porno movie continued to play. Ladd tried desperately to look away. He didn’t want to be watching this, or wake up in the middle of the night, thinking about it. He had enough nightmares to deal with.

  He turned his thoughts to Amber, his girlfriend. She was sixteen, with long blond hair that teased her shoulders, emerald green eyes, and a pierced naval that turned him on. One night when Amber’s parents were out, they’d torn off each others clothes and had sex on the floor of her living room. They’d made love three times in a row, with each time being better than the last. Amber had taken him to a place that he hadn’t known existed.

  Amber had known more about sex than any girl he’d ever dated, and he’d only stopped making love to her because his penis started to burn. They’d lain on the floor and held each other, and he’d told her his deepest secrets.

  “Why won’t you go to the police, and tell them?” she’d whispered.

  “Because I can’t,” he’d said.

  “But you should. You should tell them the truth.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  For a long time they’d said nothing, content to stare at the ceiling.

  “I love you, Wayne,” she’d whispered.

  “I love you, too,” he’d said.

  “I don’t want you dating other girls anymore.”

  “You want to go steady?”

  “Yes. Say you won’t go out with anyone but me. Please.”

  “I won’t go out with anyone but you,” he’d promised.

  It had been a tough promise to keep. Wayne had more girls in his life than he could handle. It had started right after his arrest for murdering his mother’s boyfriend. Two girls from his highschool who’d never given him the time of day had posted naked photos of themselves on his Facebook page, while another had sent him a sex video on his cell phone. On the video, she had fondled herself while purring his name over and over.

  Amber was different. She’d slipped a letter into his locker at school, and asked him to go out. On their first date, they’d sat in her car in a parking lot, and talked for hours. Right then, he’d known she was special.

  The door opened, and his captor entered the room. He was a big Cuban with graying temples and cloudy, expressionless eyes. He wore shiny black boxing shorts and no shirt. His upper torso was ripped. In his hands was a device that looked like the blood pressure machine in the supermarket that the old folks lined up to use.

  “How do you like the movie?” the Cuban asked.

  Ladd didn’t answer. He still hadn’t figured out the Cuban’s deal. He wasn’t like the demented killers in the slasher movies. His voice was soft, and he had a funny little smile that never seemed to go away. He was also a cook, and had made chicken and yellow rice for lunch, which had tasted pretty good.

  The Cuban knelt down beside his chair.

  “How do you like the movie?” he repeated, raising his voice.

  “It’s sick,” Ladd said.

  The Cuban’s eyebrows rose like question marks.

  “He’s hurting her,” Wayne said.

  “That doesn’t make you want to have sex?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to see something else?”

  “Yes.”

  “What would you like to see?”

  “Does it have to be porno?”

  The Cuban laughed without any sound coming out of his mouth.

  “Something where the sex is normal,” Wayne said.

  “Very well.”

  The Cuban’s hands began to undo Ladd’s pants.

  “Hey — cut it out!” the teenager said.

  He pulled Ladd’s pants and underwear down to his ankles.

  “Look what a big dick you have,” he said. “That is very good.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The girls like you, yes?”

  Ladd swallowed the rising lump in his throat and nodded.

  “You have sex a lot, yes?”

  Ladd felt like the Cuban was reading his thoughts.

  “Sometimes.”

  “That is very good,” the Cuban repeated.

  The Cuban wrapped the blood pressure cuff around Ladd’s penis, and pumped it up so it was not too tight. He turned on the black box attached to the cuff, and several colored lights on the front panel started to blink. He patted Ladd on the shoulder.

  “Take this thing off my face,” the teenager said.

  “I cannot do that,” the Cuban replied.

  “If I sneeze, my eyeballs will pop out.”

  The Cuban considered it. “I am going to put a new movie on. Promise me you’ll watch it, and I’ll take the device off.”

  “I’ll watch the movie. I promise.”

  The Cuban removed the metal device from Ladd’s head and tousled his hair. It was the strangest thing. Wayne sensed that his captor liked him.

  The Cuban walked out of the room. Moments later, the movie on the TV changed. Ladd felt something drop in his stomach. The new movie had been taken with a jittery hand-held camera, and showed a bearded man in hunting clothes chasing through the woods after a screaming young girl. The music coming out of the speakers changed as well. The Stones’ Midnight Rambler, Mick Jagger singing about sticking a knife down a woman’s throat.

  Ladd averted his eyes. From out of nowhere came the Cuban’s booming voice.

  “I’m watching you!”

  Ladd refused to look at the TV.

  “Do it right now!”

  The Cuban didn’t sound friendly anymore. Ladd forced himself to accept the terrifying situation he was in. If he didn’t comply to the Cuban’s wishes, the Cuban would hurt him. That was how it worked in the slasher movies, and it was no different here.

  “Look at the fucking film!”

  Ladd made himself stare at the TV. The hunter had torn off the girl’s clothes and was tying her to a tree. The machine attached to the blood pressure cuff let out a loud beep. He looked down at his crotch. His penis had gone limp.

  Ladd knew it was the wrong reaction. The Cuban hadn’t strapped a cuff on his dick for it to go limp. The Cuban wanted his dick to go hard. That was the game.

  Give the Cuban what he wants, and maybe he won’t hurt you, he thought.

  Ladd looked at sickness on the TV while thinking about Amber, and their last night together. He got an erection despite of everything. The machine let out another beep, this one much louder than before.

  He imagined the Cuban in the next room, smiling to himself.

  Chapter 6

  Sky Tell Communications was one of four regional phone carriers doing business in Broward County. According to Google, the company made its money leasing pay phones to convenience stores and shopping malls. The company’s owner, a Russian named Dimitri Tursenev, was also on Google, and had spent six months in prison for running hookers through a string of strip clubs he owned on South Beach.

  With Vick now running the investigation, Linderman had offered to contact Sky Tell, and trace Mr. Clean’s early morning phone call. Normally, that would have meant calling the company, invoking the Patriot Act, and requesting their phone records. Only the owner’s background was a red flag, so he’d driven to company headquarters in Lauderdale Lakes, and punched the buzzer while showing his badge to the surveillance camera over the front door.

  “Yes?” a female asked over the intercom.

  “FBI. Open up,” Linderman replied.

  Static came out of the box like crowd noise at a football game. There was no shade over the front door, and beads of sweat marched down his back.

  “Do you have a subpoena?” the female asked.

  “No. Make me get one, and I’ll turn the place upside down.”

  The door buzzed entry, and he walked down a hallway to where a nervous receptionist sat at a desk. Her hair was dyed a color you didn’t find in nature, and she had enough rings in her face to hang a shower curtain.


  “Who’s in charge?” he asked.

  “May I see your ID?”

  He held his laminated identification card in front her face.

  “Now,” he said with emphasis.

  “I called Dimitri. He’ll be right out.”