by P. J. Tracy
“Sure they can. Some killjoy with asthma complained about the chalk dust, so they replaced all the blackboards with whiteboards.”
“Whiteboards suck.”
They wended their way through the tables and desks and found McLaren and Tinker in the far corner of the beehive, both hunched over a laptop, noses practically pressed to the screen. “How’s it going?”
McLaren shook his head without looking away from the black-and-white security footage. “This is damn near impossible. Everybody at the mall is carrying a shopping bag, damn near everybody at the library convention is wheeling around a suitcase full of books . . . and none of us have seen any boxes get dropped yet. The locations must have been scouted, because they’re all out of camera range.”
Gino grunted, still pouting over the chalkboard. “That’s a little spooky.”
“Yeah, no kidding . . . Tinker, wait. Back up a few frames and play it in slo-mo for me.”
Tinker clicked the mouse a few times and McLaren jabbed a finger at two kids who were milling around at the Mall of America. “Check out those guys. Look familiar?”
Tinker stared for a moment, then shook his head. “Just a couple of skate punks. The mall is full of them.”
“Yeah, but I think I’ve seen these dudes before, in some of the footage we checked out earlier. Maybe from the Metrodome. Go back.” He pushed away from the desk while Tinker worked the mouse some more. “So, you solve your case already, or what?”
Magozzi shook his head. “We’re stuck in neutral, getting nowhere fast.”
“I know what you mean—I went through those two files you gave me and came up with nada. I have a list of names for you, but I gotta tell you up front that nothing clicked. The most interesting thing I pulled was the blood alcohol on your river bride—that guy should have been wearing a biohazard warning label. I’m surprised he had a liver left, especially with all the meds he was on.”
“Meds?” Gino asked.
“Yeah. He had AIDS.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. Don’t you guys read autopsy reports?”
“Not recreationally, like you, McLaren,” Gino grumbled. “Besides, we already knew how he died.”
Tinker tapped the screen. “Rolling tape, Johnny.”
The four of them turned their attention to the computer screen and watched a motley assemblage of humanity unwittingly pass beneath the all-seeing eyes of the Metrodome security cameras. Ten minutes later, Gino slid his eyes to look over at Magozzi. “The Tiara Club film was way more entertaining.”
Magozzi nodded.
Gino started fidgeting. “Man, this is more boring than what we were doing back in the office. What do you say we break for lunch, then . . .”
“Stop!” McLaren said, then pointed to the screen. “See? Same two kids. Exact same skater punk clothes, same faces.”
Magozzi and Gino were now breathing down McLaren’s neck. “I think Johnny’s right,” Magozzi said. “What kind of time frame are we looking at?”
Tinker scrawled down the time stamp, then went back to the mall footage and compared them. “About two hours apart. You might have something, Johnny.”
Gino shrugged and pushed up the sleeves of his wrinkled white button-down. “Or not. Could just be bored kids making the rounds. And I gotta tell you, these two don’t look bright enough to tie their own shoes, let alone pull something like this off.”
“Yeah, but the same two guys at two different sites? I don’t know, that’s kind of a coincidence.”
Gino blew out a breath. “If they show up at another site, then I’ll jump on board.”
“Pull up some chairs and we’ll check out some more tape.” Gino rolled his eyes. “Great.”
It took another half hour before McLaren found what he was looking for—the same two kids, loitering around the Crystal Court in the IDS building, about half an hour after they’d been filmed at the Metrodome. “Goddamn. These could be our perps. Two kids.”
Just like Chelsea suspected, Magozzi thought.
Gino leaned back and rubbed his eyes. “We’ve still got a problem. We didn’t see them drop any boxes. So this doesn’t prove anything.”
“Yeah, but it might be enough to bring them in for questioning. If we can figure out who the hell they are.”
“Good luck with that. How are you going to match identities with a couple faces in a city with a few hundred thousand people?
We can’t question them if we don’t know who they are or where they live.”
“I have an idea,” Magozzi said quietly.
The other three detectives looked at him hopefully.
“Do you remember that facial-recognition software Monkeewrench developed?”
McLaren scrunched his face up for a moment, then his eyes widened. “Yeah. That was the program that basically tied up the old Nazi case, right?”
“Exactly. You input the photo of the person you want to identify and the program cross-references with images on the Web and looks for a match.”
Gino smiled. “And there’s one thing you can count on—kids have their pictures plastered all over the Web.”
CHAPTER 34
GINO SPENT MOST OF THE RIDE TO HARLEY’S ON THE PHONE with Angela. He hung up just as Magozzi turned onto Summit Avenue.
“Everything okay at the B and B?”
“Better than okay. There’s a pool and a restaurant that has cheese curds on the menu. And here I am, fighting crime with an empty stomach and a bad donut hangover.”
“What’s the mood on the street?”
“She said people are pretty spooked. Nobody’s actually letting themselves believe the threat is credible, but so what? They’re still white-knuckling it in Somerset, Wisconsin, just in case. One hell of a big power trip for our doer, or doers.”
“Reminds you how vulnerable we all are. The price of a free society.”
Gino nodded emphatically. “Exactly. What a big problem that is. But, fortunately, I have a great solution—martial law for a few months with you and me in charge. Shut down the Web, beer and fresh donuts for the troops. And all our generals will drive confiscated Caddies just like this one.” He let out a miserable sigh. “This is depressing. Do you really think kids are behind this?”
“I don’t know. What’s scarier? Criminally warped kids on the rampage or real terrorists?”
“I don’t think you can split hairs when it comes to terrorism, which is what this is, plain and simple, no matter who’s behind it. But at least if it’s kids, there’s probably nothing in any of the jars except water or something else lame, right? I mean, I’m no Chelsea Thomas, profiling goddess of the modern world, but I know how those little antisocial bastards’ minds work. They go for the big bang, but they usually don’t have mass slaughter on their minds.”
“The Columbine kids had bombs, and they obviously had mass slaughter on their minds. Hell, they probably used blueprints from some terrorist website.”
Gino scowled. “Thanks for that. And by the way, the Web is really starting to piss me off. It’s like a meet-and-greet for sociopaths all of a sudden.”
“Access and anonymity. If you’re a scumbag, it’s the perfect storm. But in the end, it’s the same old criminals, just a different venue.”
“Yeah, I suppose. Too bad we’re always playing catch-up and doing damage control.”
“That’s what this job is about. It’s what this job has always been about. You win some, you lose some, and you do as much good as you can along the way.”
Gino grunted. “Christ, Leo. You’re sounding like one of those scary, late-night TV inspirational speakers. And here I am, wondering what our new shrink friend would say about the kind of personality that picks a career where your chance of failure is about as good as your chance of success.”
“She would say we’re noble, gallant, right-fighters. Maybe even modern-day superheroes. She has to think that way, because she picked the same field we did.”
“Masochism?”
> “Yep.” He pulled into Harley’s driveway and parked behind the airport-rental Fed-mobile that obviously belonged to John Smith, then smiled a little when he saw Roadrunner, waiting anxiously on the front steps for them.
“Damnit,” Gino said under his breath. “I can’t get used to seeing the skinny guy in jeans. It’s just wrong.”
Roadrunner waved as they approached, then held out his hand. “Hey, guys. You have a disk for me?”
Magozzi handed him a CD in a plastic sleeve and gave him an affectionate pat on the shoulder. “Three clips of the same two kids at three of the box sites. How long do you think it’s going to take?”
Roadrunner’s brow wrinkled. “I don’t know . . . the program is pretty bloated, out of sheer necessity. We’ve tweaked it a little since the last time we used it, but it could still take a while. Come on in, make yourselves at home, I want to get started on this right away.”
Roadrunner ignored the elevator and took the stairs three at a time up to the office, while Gino headed straight for the kitchen, Magozzi on his heels. They startled John Smith, who was standing by the refrigerator, drinking a glass of orange juice. The poor man looked almost embarrassed for having been caught in the midst of a perfectly normal, human act. “Good afternoon, Detectives.”
Gino’s eyes scanned the empty countertops in disappointment. “Afternoon, Agent Smith.”
“Good work with the surveillance footage. Let’s hope it will help bring this situation to a quick resolution. I was informed that five of the boxes have been cleared.”
Magozzi nodded. “That’s right. No explosives, plain glycerin in the jars.”
“So eight more to go.”
Gino snorted. “Eight more that we know about. There could be another hundred out there that we just haven’t found yet. Or maybe the frigging bastards are still out there planting the things, we don’t know. Nobody’s taking a powder on this thing. Not your guys, not ours.”
“How is your murder investigation progressing?”
“It’s not,” Magozzi said.
Smith looked troubled. “Last we spoke, you mentioned a Minnesota connection with the seven male murder victims, which seemed like a promising detail.”
“We’re still working that angle,” Gino said. “Nothing so far.”
“But it’s quite a coincidence, you must admit.”
“You’re telling me. Minnesota is suddenly up to its eyeballs in Web-related homicide, and now this crap with the boxes.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and regarded his shoes for a moment—an innocent pair of physical tics that meant nothing to anybody except Magozzi, who knew his partner’s pre-attack body language better than his own.
“And as long as we’re on the topic of coincidences,” Gino continued, as Magozzi knew he would, “here’s another one. A week ago, you ride into town for a cyber-crime sting before you even knew about the Minnesota connection. Or did you know?”
John blinked a few times, genuinely blindsided, in Magozzi’s opinion. “We absolutely did not know. We never even considered the fact that the Web murders could be related until Monkeewrench found the pre-posts. And, frankly, just because they were all pre-posted doesn’t mean they’re related. As I’m sure Dr. Thomas mentioned to you, there is a great potential for deviant communities to form and escalate on the Web. The fact that seven of the victims have ties to this state is really the most compelling evidence for a connection we have so far.”
Gino frowned. “So maybe we’ve got a deviant community escalating right here.”
“It’s a possibility.”
“So why did you pick Minneapolis for a base of operations if you didn’t know anything before you got here?” Magozzi picked up Gino’s pass.
Smith almost smiled. “You two are an impressive interrogation team.”
Gino puffed out his chest a little. “Thank you.”
Smith nodded graciously. “We’re here because Monkeewrench is here. Regardless of the competency of our Cyber Crimes Division, we felt it critical to utilize all resources available for this investigation. And I think we can all agree that there is nobody better at what they do than Monkeewrench. We did offer to set them up with an office in D.C. for this assignment, but they preferred to work from their home office. We agreed to accommodate them.”
“So this really is just a coincidence?” Gino asked.
Smith frowned. Apparently he was as uncomfortable with the word coincidence as everybody else in law enforcement. “It appears that way.”
GRACE, ANNIE, AND HARLEY all pulled up chairs next to Roadrunner and watched as he loaded the clips from the surveillance footage onto a dedicated computer that ran the facial-recognition software.
“Are you going to limit Web-search parameters, buddy?” Harley asked.
“No.” He turned around in his chair. “Should I?”
“It’s gonna take forever if you don’t. Start out small and match against a few social networking sites first.”
“Okay. I’ll start the search with MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook. They’re the biggies.”
Annie, who was looking particularly fetching in a floral-printed silk caftan today, gave Harley a rare compliment. “That’s the most sensible thing that’s come out of your mouth in days.”
Harley waggled his eyebrows at her. “Everything out of my mouth is sensible. You’re just finally getting it, doll face.”
“Keep the dream alive, Harley,” she snipped back. “Sophistry becomes you. And don’t ever call me doll face again, or else I’ll . . .”
Grace tuned out the ongoing tête-à-tête between Harley and Annie and let her eyes drift up to the wall-mounted television they rarely watched but had kept on since the box fiasco had started. Every channel, on network and cable, was still running nonstop coverage of Minneapolis in chaos. How long would it take before this scenario replayed itself in other cities across the country, and across the planet? Probably not long. Global interconnectedness had seemed like such a great idea at its incept, but like all powerful things, it had its dark side—a seriously big dark side—and they were on the front lines.
Annie had apparently burned out her war of words with Harley, because she was watching the television now, too, her lips pursed in a glittery, pink pout that matched the shimmering silk poppies on her dress. “This is just plain craziness. Look at those freeways—plumb full of nice people who are scared to death to stay in their own city. That’s not right, and we need to do something about it.”
Grace sighed. “The only real solution is to change human nature, and that we can’t do. The Web might be inciting bad behavior and providing a global audience, but in the end, we’re still talking about bad people, not bad technology.”
“The thing that drives me crazy is there are too goddamned many places on the Web where the bad guys can hide,” Harley grumbled. “If we took away their hiding places, maybe they’d think twice.”
Roadrunner spun his chair around. “I just launched the facial-recognition software. Now it’s a waiting game.” He looked at Harley. “And there’s nothing we can do about their hiding places, Harley.”
“Oh, yeah?” Harley grumbled. “There’s lots we can do, if we have the cojones to do it.”
Roadrunner rolled his eyes. “Oh, yeah? Like what? We’ve been tap-dancing in and out of these hostile servers and sites for the past week. The people we’re looking for know how to stay stealth, and every single post that predicted crimes has been bounced around the globe through anonymity software, botnets, networks of firewalls, you name it. There is such a thing as untraceable.”
“I know that, dipshit, I worked with you on all the traces we tried. My point is, we need to cut off the head of the Hydra. There are foreign servers we know about that are protecting bad guys seven ways to Sunday and won’t grant access to law enforcement. So what are we supposed to do, play nice? Follow international laws that promote cyber crime? Hell no. We shut ’em down. Every time we find a foreign server tag associated with a crime? Bang!
Denial-of-service attack. Viruses. Whatever. And we’ll just keep shutting them down the minute they go back online.”
Annie gaped at him. “Sweet Jesus, Harley, you’ve lost your mind. We can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“First of all, it would probably incite an international incident. Second of all, we would surely end up in those orange jumpsuits.”
Roadrunner was smirking at Harley. “Besides, dipshit, do you know how many servers there are in this country alone, let alone the world? You might as well try to empty the Pacific Ocean with a teaspoon.”
Harley scowled back. “Okay, so maybe shutting down servers isn’t the answer. My point is, our law breaking has always been in proportion with whatever crime we’re trying to solve. But the crime is escalating, and so we have to, too. Laws don’t keep up with technology, and those laws deserve to be broken.”
“I agree with you, Harley,” Grace said quietly. “The problem is, there will always be criminals out there, whether or not we shut down servers or compromise the anonymity networks that protect them. All we can do is try to keep up, and help the cops make an example of the criminals we do catch.”
“Pretty ironic that four people who repeatedly break the law spend so much time fighting crime,” Annie said, scrutinizing a chip in her new manicure.
“Did I hear something about breaking laws?” Gino’s voice preceded him into the room, along with Magozzi and Smith.
Harley chuckled. “Just international law. Nothing you have to worry about, buddy.”
“How’s it going with the surveillance footage?” Magozzi addressed the room, but his eyes were fixed on Grace.
“Hi, Magozzi. The program is running now.”
“Pull up some chairs, darlings,” Annie drawled. “We’ve got some time to kill.”
Ten minutes later, Roadrunner let out a whoop and Harley started laughing so hard, he doubled over, and everybody in the room descended on Roadrunner’s computer.
“What is it?”
Harley took a few seconds to catch his breath. “We got a match,” he pointed to the enhanced picture of one of the kids from the surveillance tape. The program had pulled up a second picture from MySpace. “Can you believe it? This kid was smart enough to use anonymity software that’s so complicated, you practically need two brains just to install and config it, but there he is, right on MySpace, full name, city, and state. What a dumbass.” He looked at Magozzi. “How many Kyle Zellicksons do you think live in Minneapolis?”
