'I have never been accused of being a good guy.'
'Uh-huh. You want some chili before we get to work, darlin'?'
'No, thank you very much for the offer.'
'How about a beer?' Harley raised his own bottle.
'FBI agents do not drink alchololic beverages on duty, sir.'
Yeah, yeah, and FBI agents are always on duty, right?'
'Precisely.'
'Well, I guess that makes my goals pretty clear here. Before you leave I'm going to see you totally snockered with three belly dancers sitting on your chest and a really great Cuban cigar stuck between your teeth. Let's get up to the office.'
For the first time in his career, John Smith was conflicted. When you boiled it all down, this whole assignment required that he consort with the kind of criminals he'd spent his life trying to convict. Who knows how many laws these people had broken. Besides, they looked weird. And they all carried concealed weapons. On the other hand, they were totally up-front about who they were and what they did, which was more than he could say for the Bureau, and they helped law enforcement across the country free of charge. Hell, they were starting to look better than most of the agents coming up the ladder from some Shangri-la place where an Ivy League education counted for more than ground law enforcement and a cop's brain.
What the hell do you think you're going to get from the Feds?
That had been his dad, a D.C. beat cop for thirty years, totally psyched on instinct and puzzle-solving, totally down on a bunch of suits who thought academia trumped people skills.
You got the Feds, who think those of us in the trenches are pretty much part of the trash they're trying to sweep under the rug, and then you got the cops, who know the people on the streets and do the hard work separating the bad guys from the good guys. And here you are, choosing the high road that doesn't know shit about what's real.
His dad hadn't come to his graduation; hadn't even sent a card when he'd made agent, but he'd read his future in a bottle of Pabst when John had come home for his uncle's funeral.
They'll eat you up for your first ten years, use you up for the next ten, then turn their back when you start to show gray. I'm telling you, Son, and I sure wish you would listen…
'Agent Smith?'
He came back from his reverie instantly. They were all sitting at a round table in the third-floor office, and now the skinny guy was shoving a mug of coffee under his nose.
'Well. Thank you very much. Do you happen to have any sugar?'
Roadrunner took a step backward. 'Are you kidding me? That's Jamaican Blue. Taste it first.'
Agent Smith had no idea what Jamaican Blue was, but he complied, set his mug on the table, and looked down into the brew. 'My goodness.' He felt Harley's massive hand clap him on the shoulder.
'Okay, Agent Smith. You've got a palate. You just went up a couple of notches. Now, we pulled something interesting off the Web this morning.'
'Another murder scene?'
'Maybe. You show us yours, we'll show you ours. So what have you got for us?'
Smith started emptying his briefcase. 'These are the video films of the five murders. Cleveland, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and Los Angeles.' He dug deeper into the leather case and pulled out a bound folder of untold pages. 'This is a detailed record of our Cyber Crimes Division's failed attempts to trace the posts involving those murders. And these are the fringe sites we'd like you to monitor.' He slapped down a folder stuffed with printed pages.
Annie pulled the folder toward her and started shuffling through them. 'My God. There must be hundreds of them.'
Smith nodded. 'We narrowed it down as much as we could. The fringe sites we've listed are limited to those dedicated exclusively to murder scenarios. Some of them are distinctly amateurish and clearly staged events; others are questionable. We need a program that spots the real crimes instantly so we can get law enforcement on the ground right away, before critical evidence and possible witnesses are lost. Now tell me what you pulled off the Internet this morning.'
Roadrunner showed him a couple of print frames from the site. Smith looked at them without expression. The Feds were good at that. 'Did you get anything from this? Did you try a trace?'
'No joy,' Harley said. We already passed it on to Agent Shafer so he can put your people on it, but they're not going to get anywhere. That post was flying around the world at the speed of light. Right now we're running some enhancement programs on the film to see if we've got a real murder or Memorex.'
'Which won't do a lot of good without a location, and you can't get location without a trace.'
Annie tipped her head and gave him a little smile that gave him a little funny feeling in the pit of his stomach. 'A picture's worth a thousand words, darlin'. Or is it ten thousand?' She scooped up the folder containing fringe sites and stood. 'Are you okay there, or do you want us to set up a desk for you?'
Well, I think this will work for the time being' He sat quietly for a moment, watching and listening to the others as they scattered to their respective workstations, then opened his laptop to begin his daily report. He looked up from his screen when he heard a timid clicking, and stared in amazement as a sorry-looking dog with no tail climbed up onto the chair across the table and sat down facing him.
Chapter Seven
Magozzi had never been one for self-examination, although the department shrink suggested it every time he shot someone. Well. The two times he had shot someone. It hadn't told him much then - killers had taken a shot at him, and he shot back, what was to introspect? - and it wasn't going to tell him much now.
He'd had this silly idea as a young man that he'd make his way in the world, marry and have kids and a house and whatever the hell it was people called a normal life. That was the plan. That was what you grew up expecting when you were raised Italian Catholic with a family bigger than the population of Rhode Island and were stupid enough to believe that things would be the same for you as they had been for your parents. No one ever suggested that it might be otherwise; that your marriage would go south and you'd end up with a recliner and a twelve-inch TV and a blasted remnant of what your life was supposed to have been. And for sure no one ever told you that after the first marriage was erased like a mistake on a blackboard, you'd end up falling for a woman who would probably never say the word love out loud because it was a concept that eluded her. There would be no second marriage in his future; certainly no children, no shared house, no normal life. Not until he could manage to convince himself that he had to learn to live without Grace MacBride. He wasn't there yet. He wasn't even close, for all of Gino's prompting. But maybe he was stepping back, just a little; or maybe she was pushing him.
She opened the door when he knocked, and there was the thin smile reticence made, the swinging black hair, the face that always made his breath stop in his throat. And as if that weren't enough, there was Charlie's tongue licking his palm, and he was so goddamned stupid he thought all of this was the welcome home he'd been waiting for his whole life.
'Hey, Magozzi.'
'Hey, Grace.'
She stepped aside, reset the alarm when the door closed behind him, and just assumed he would follow her down the hall into the kitchen. When he didn't, she turned to look at him, puzzled. 'What's wrong?'