Duckworth raised a hand. “Two days ago, someone—”
“You just don’t want to hear it, do you? No one does. But I think it’s even harder for guys. It all got chewed off. They didn’t find anything to reattach. Maybe someone should have thought of opening up the dog and getting my bits back. How about that, huh?”
Duckworth cleared his throat. “Two days ago, someone was coming out Knight’s. You know Knight’s?”
“Sure. A fine drinking establishment.”
“He got lured into an alley. Then he blacks out. Wakes up two days later.”
“What ate him?” Craig asked. “A polar bear? A wolverine?”
“Neither. Someone did some artwork on him.”
Duckworth got out his phone and showed Craig the photo he had taken of Brian Gaffney’s back.
“Hmm,” Craig said, nodding. “That’s it? A little inspirational message?”
“It’s a tattoo,” Duckworth said.
“So he got off easy. What I’d give for someone to scribble shit all over my back. Throw on a shirt and off you go. No biggie.”
“I take your point,” Duckworth said. “But just the same, I want to find out who did this. Although what was done to him was different than what was done to you, the setup strikes me as similar.”
“Who’s Sean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Surely your victim does, though.”
“He says he doesn’t.”
Craig’s damaged mouth grinned again. “Yeah, right, and I didn’t feel up that little girl, either.”
Duckworth felt any sympathy he’d had for this man slowly slipping away.
“Yes, he could be lying,” he conceded.
Craig pointed to the laptop still resting on his knees. “Well, if it was the same person — or persons, as they say — who did it, they must be bragging about it online. Are they?”
Duckworth felt caught off guard. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? And what are you again? A detective?”
“I hadn’t gotten to that point.”
Craig shook his head and made a “tsk, tsk” sound. He started tapping away on the keyboard. “If it was the same people, then they might be doing something like this.”
He spun the computer around so Duckworth could view the screen. It was a website called Just Deserts. The name was plastered, newspaper-banner-style, across the top of the page. Below that, a headline that read: KID DIDDLER GETS HIS.
And a photo.
It was a picture of Craig Pierce staked to the ground, minus pants. His midsection was obscured by a dog, which was, as everyone knew by now, feasting on him.
“I’ve seen all this,” Duckworth said. “I know about Just Deserts.”
“You know they encourage this kind of thing. You know there are nutjobs out there who can’t wait to be honored on their website.”
“No one even knows who’s behind it,” Duckworth said.
“Yeah. It’s like Anonymous, but with a big difference,” Craig said, adopting an almost professorial tone. “Anonymous is all about exposing government hypocrisy and making public the shit that’s been kept secret. They’ll even go so far as to sabotage websites and disrupt commerce and that kind of thing. And when they say they’re going to expose people who belong to ISIS and fuck up their Twitter accounts or whatever, a lot of people think, hey, what the hell. We don’t know who they are, but if that’s what they want to do, it’s okay by us. And there was that other case, the one where the hackers said they’d release all the private info on that website for people who want to have affairs. And the fuckers did it! Bam. Marriages broke up, man, it was something. But still, it’s all about exposing data and secrets. Just Deserts, well, they’re different. They push the envelope.”
He gave Duckworth a grisly smile.
“Just Deserts likes to say that Anonymous doesn’t leave any marks. When Anonymous goes after you, sure, maybe your lies have been exposed, your website hacked, but you can still get up in the morning and take a pee without blood coming out of your dick. Just Deserts likes to see bad people get physically hurt.”
He leaned in close to Duckworth as if he were letting him in on a secret. “I was a bad person.”
Duckworth said, “Yeah.”
“So this site’s inspiring vigilante nutbars all over the country.” He swung the laptop back around so he could see the screen. “Like, listen to this. Sacramento, California, there was that white guy who went to a black protest rally, about all the black folk getting shot by cops? And he starts scratching under his arms and making like he’s a monkey, and he gets caught on cell phone video and within a day it’s being watched all over the world?”
“I remember. It was last year some time.”
“Yeah, right. So the asshole gets identified, and his employer, which just happens to be the city, fires him. But that’s not enough retribution for Just Deserts. So one night, the guy gets picked up right out front of his house, and he literally gets tarred and feathered.”
Duckworth nodded. “I don’t remember anyone getting arrested for that.”
Craig shook his head in affirmation. “Nope. But they took snaps and got them to Just Deserts and up it went for all to see. Here, I can show you.” He tapped out a few keystrokes, spun the laptop around again. “Check it out.”
Duckworth had a look. “Yikes.”
“Yeah, no shit.” Craig spun the laptop back toward him. “Now we go—”
“I don’t need to hear all of these,” the detective said.
“—we go to Miami — that’s in Florida, you know — where we find that dipshit Wall Street investor who bought up the pharmaceutical company and raised the price of a life-saving drug from like fifteen bucks a pill to seven hundred and thirty dollars a pill, and he’s hanging out in some high-end nightclub dancing with these supermodels, and some guy comes through the crowd with a fucking syringe, right? And fucking injects the guy and says, ‘Hope you enjoy AIDS, asswipe!’ He slips away and they still don’t know who it was. But it hit Just Deserts in like twenty minutes.”
“Was it AIDS?”
Craig shrugged. “Who knows? I think the guy’s still undergoing tests. But think how that fucked with his head, right? Then, in France, because this is not an America-only thing, you know, that woman politician who compared those millions of refugees to cockroaches — and let’s face it, she was kind of onto something there — goes out to her fancy Beemer and turns the key and thousands of the little bastards start streaming out of the air vents and coming out from under the seats. And voilà!”
He spun the laptop around again for a shot of the woman bailing out her car, her body covered in roaches.
“Someone was waiting to take the picture, and minutes later, it was uploaded to Just Deserts. So you’ve got people all over the motherfucking planet inspired to exact vengeance on people who’ve got it coming, hoping like crazy that what they do is nasty enough to be honored on this website. And let me tell you, Promise Falls has made a name for itself in the whole getting-even department. That guy you killed last year, who poisoned half the fucking town, you know there are whole websites devoted to him?”
Every day Duckworth tried not to think about that, and every day he did. Even without reminders. He said, “Go on.”
“Well, some people think he was terrific, that he made a difference. That he didn’t just teach Promise Falls a lesson. The whole world took notice. They’re saying, what he did, it’s made people more concerned about their fellow man. Isn’t that wild?”
“I sense some grudging admiration about these sites,” Duckworth said. “Even after what happened to you.”