The bone cracks as the blade cuts through it. The woman’s head comes off. The wooden floor is awash in blood.
The killer stands and holds the severed head up in front of the camera. Blood pours from the neck. He is breathing hard, his heart racing. He tries to speak but can’t find his voice. He swallows hard and tries again.
“Elohim, Yahweh, Elah be praised!” he shrieks.
The killer is exhausted, but exhilarated. This day has been the longest of his life. Reflexively, he checks his watch. It’s 4:30 AM.
He should have gone to sleep when he got home two hours ago, but he was eager to upload the video onto his laptop to see how it looked.
It’s good, very good.
He set up the camera’s angle of view perfectly and had not gone offscreen when he toppled the chair and cut off the harlot’s head. Now he wants to upload it to the Web for all the world to see.
This will shake them up.
The portal Web site is innocuous enough, the home page of an obscure gamer magazine, with tips, strategies, cheat codes, reviews of new games, and links to gaming hardware and software. It’s a legitimate Web site and probably even turns a profit. But beneath it lies a hidden site. A sinister world of darkness and pain.
The killer slides his finger across the touchpad on his laptop until the pointer hovers over the small letter t in the word Triton at the top of one of the Web site’s interior pages. When he positions the pointer in exactly the right spot it changes from an angled arrow to a hand, indicating a link to another page or another site. In this case, the link is to a different Web site, one not registered with Google, Yahoo, or any other search engines. And because the only link to the site is hidden inside another Web site, a technique called piggybacking, the search engines’ Web crawlers can’t find it.
The killer clicks the hidden link, and a new Web page opens in his browser. The new page is a blank screen with two empty boxes, one for a user name, the other for a password. The killer types his user name and password and presses the enter key. A second password box appears.
Access to the Web site requires three different passwords. All three must contain letters, numbers, and at least one special character: an asterisk, a percent sign, an ampersand, or any of the others symbols that run along the top of the number keys on a computer keyboard.
The killer types his remaining two passwords. The Web site opens. Across the top of his screen the name of the site appears- DEVIL’S DEN.
Access to the site costs two hundred dollars a month. Setting up the payments is complicated and involves a double-blind system that uses international money orders instead of credit cards. Once a month the killer mails a money order to an address in Mexico.
In chat rooms connected to the Web site, he has learned that on the last day of each month, all of the customers’ money orders are cashed in for a single money order that is mailed to a bank in Eastern Europe. To protect the customers’ identities, no electronic money transfers of any kind are used and no records are kept other than user names and passwords, both of which, the Webmaster assures the site’s clients, are manually, not electronically, encoded.
It took the killer two months to get his account approved and set up, and like all new members he had to pay a one-time initiation fee of five hundred dollars.
The Devil’s Den is an amateur video swap shop featuring nearly every depravity known to man: bestiality, hardcore child-on-child and adult-on-child sex, necrophilia, self-mutilation, rape, beatings, stabbings, shootings, torture, and killings of all kinds. All filmed by the participants. It is the YouTube of perversion.
The site is broken down into fetishes. Subscribers can upload their own videos. New ones appear almost daily. The killer selects MURDER. The he clicks the upload link. A brief set of instructions appear. There is no warning label or age verification. Everything on the site is illegal in nearly every country in the world.
Below the instructions is a question that must be answered.
DO YOU WANT THIS UPLOAD TO BE PRIVATE OR PUBLIC?
Two clickable buttons appear below the question, the first labeled PRIVATE, the second labeled PUBLIC.
The killer clicks the second button. A warning screen pops up.
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT YOUR UPLOAD TO BE PUBLIC?
Two buttons appear below the questions: YES and NO. The killer clicks YES.
A second warning page appears.
PLEASE VERIFY THAT YOU WANT YOUR UPLOAD TO BE PUBLIC.
Below that, two more buttons: VERIFY and CANCEL.
The killer verifies that he wants his upload to be public.
Within the Devil’s Den Web site, private videos are indexed and are viewable by members only. Those videos marked for public viewing are stored on the site for members, but they are also uploaded through a redundant cutout system to a network of shifting, piggybacked Web sites in countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. One of the biggest such Web sites operates in North Korea. Most of the sites don’t require registration, and the videos can be viewed by anyone with access to the Internet. But their origins cannot be traced.
The killer selects the video file of the woman’s beheading from his hard drive and uploads it to the site. He then clicks a link to another screen and answers a few more questions. The Devil’s Den provides an extra service, for a fee payable by the last day of the current month. If the payment isn’t received, the member’s account will be canceled. A member whose account is canceled can open a new account-members’ names aren’t recorded anywhere-but that requires another five-hundred-dollar initiation fee.
Either way, the Webmaster gets his money.
The extra service, which costs two hundred fifty dollars, will send a link to the video to tens of thousands of e-mail addresses around the world, including those of journalists and bloggers. The mass e-mailings create a global buzz about the video. The more demented or perverted the video, the louder the chatter. Part of the reason the killer joined the Devil’s Den was so he could take advantage of this service.
As soon as he finishes making all of the arrangements, he logs out of the Web site, clears his browsing history, cache, and cookies, then shuts down his computer. He knows the police, and especially the FBI, have sneaky ways of extracting deleted files from a computer, but the police will never get that close to him. The Lord is with him.
Outside, he hears a car drive past, followed by the sound of a newspaper hitting his driveway. He looks toward the sliding glass door and sees the first hint of daylight shining through. He knows the newspaper will have a big story about the fire. Maybe several stories. But he is too tired to go outside. He has been awake for twenty-four hours, and his exhaustion has finally overtaken his exhilaration. He does not have to be at work again until Monday, so he can sleep all day. The newspaper can wait.
Soon they’ll find the woman’s body. Soon they’ll discover the video. Then all hell will break loose.
The killer slides into bed and pulls the covers up to his chin. It has been a good day, a good couple of days. He closes his eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Saturday, August 4, 8:10 AM
“If I was you, I’d stay out of the office today,” Gaudet said. “With all the shit we got going on, I’m sure the captain is going to be there.”
Murphy and Gaudet were at the Coffee House on Canal Boulevard, sitting at a table in the back. A copy of that morning’s Times-Picayune lay between them, along with their breakfast bill. Murphy’s police radio was on top of the newspaper and the bill to keep the ceiling fan from blowing them off the table. Murphy shot another angry glance at the headline.