Play To Kill

    Nonplussed at all the unsolicited information, John caught himself wondering if Detective Rolseth was a philanderer. 'Oh. Well, yes. Agent Thomas is the profiler I sent Magozzi to meet, and she's been involved in the murder cases from the beginning. Her specialty is actually the increase of youth crime fostered by Internet communities. She assiduously monitors the youth social sites - YouTube, Facebook, and the like, and stumbled across a few of the murder films in the course of her work that hadn't been caught by the servers.'

    'Wow. Great titties and a monster brain. Can't get much better than that.'

    John scowled and puffed up a little. 'She's a brilliant agent with a stunning intellect and has an unquestionable loyalty to law and justice that has absolutely nothing to do with her physical appearance.'

    Harley blinked at him. 'John. Get over it. Great titties are a good thing. Not an insult. So what did this female goddess tell you on the phone that sent your feel-good swirling down the toilet?'

    'Firstly…'

    'Is that an actual word?'

    Yes, it is. Firstly, that everyone in the Bureau is celebrating the capture of Huttinger, as if he were the end of this. They've all forgotten the other murders.'

    Harley rolled his upper lip and moved his black beard.

    'Nobody's forgetting. You just have to celebrate the little victories, otherwise you reach for the razor.'

    Smith rubbed at his eyes. "We didn't have a victory. We caught a fluke. A loser who stumbled into the place where the real monsters play. Those are the ones we have to stop, or we haven't accomplished anything'

    'Jesus, Smith. What do you mean, we haven't accomplished anything? So what if Huttinger was just a copycat. We nailed his ass, and who knows how many he would have hurt with a little more practice. The white hats won one today.'

    Smith sighed. 'I guess.'

    Grace, Annie, and Roadrunner slipped into the other chairs at the table and just looked at him. It was kind of creepy.

    'Sugar, you look plumb worn out,' Annie said. 'Gracie must have busted your balls in the kitchen this morning'

    'Not at all.'

    '"So why the long face?" said the bartender to the horse. We stopped a bad guy, we had a good day.'

    'He just had a downer call from Chelsea Thomas,' Harley explained. 'The firstly part was all wrong, but I straightened him out on that. So - what's the secondly part, John?'

    Smith shrugged. 'This thing keeps expanding in directions nobody expected, getting bigger and bigger all the time. Ever since the media publicized the code the murderers used, there have been thousands copying the "CiTy oF" format to post nonsense, and no way to separate the chaff from the real thing without tracing each one individually. The people in Cyber Crimes are afraid we're going to miss a pre-post of a real murder while they're chasing down false leads.'

    Roadrunner smiled. 'No sweat. I'll just modify the program we're already using to set up an automatic trace on every post that uses the code. If they're traceable, the program puts them in the slush file. But if they use the same type of routing the real murderers used or some kind of anonymity software, we'll get an alarm. That should help.'

    Harley patted him on the head. 'Cool, little buddy. I wasn't going to think of that for another three seconds.'

    'How long will it take to put something like that together?' Smith asked.

    'Give me half an hour. And call Cyber Crimes and tell them it's coming. Last time I tried to send them something they fried me as spam.'

    Smith grabbed a pad of Post-it notes and scribbled an e-mail address. 'Can you send that off to Chelsea Thomas to load on her computer, too?'

    'You got it. And if that's all you need, call the restaurant, Harley. I'm starving'

    Roadrunner headed for his station while Harley stood up and stretched his tattooed arms wide. 'Glory hallelujah. I've got pasta on my mind. You like pasta, John?'

    'I really should get back to the motel.'

    Annie flapped a hand. 'Oh, screw that, darlin'. We're going out, and you're comin' along'

    'So what's the deal with Huttinger?' Harley asked as he lumbered over to the mini-fridge. 'Is he talking?'

    'Not yet, but he's processed, and the locals are about to commence the first round of questioning'

    'Well, I hope they put the son of a bitch in a rack and yank the truth out of him joint by joint. He slimed into this twisted network of maniacs somehow, so there's gotta be something he knows that we can use. Here you go.' He set a tiny bottle of beer in front of Smith.

    'What's this?'

    Harley rolled his eyes. 'Man, do you need work. That's a shortie. A mini-beer, right out of the mini-fridge. We've got thirty minutes to kill, and happy hour is now enforced by law.'

    'I really shouldn't.'

    'Don't give me that no-drinking-on-the-job crap. I didn't buy that for a minute. Job like yours, you can't tell me there aren't really pissy days when you come home and take a sip or two to destress, and you've had a few pissy days in a row. Besides, livers are evil and must be punished.'

    John blinked at the bottle. 'You have an opener?'

    Grace sighed, then reached over and unscrewed the cap. 'They invented twist-off caps a while back, John.' 'Oh.'

    'So who has Huttinger's computers?'

    'His laptop and the CPU from his home office are with our Computer Analysis and Response Team in Portland. They'll work on forensic recovery around the clock.'

    'How good is Portland's CART?'

    'Excellent. Our field office there also houses the Northwest Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, so the Bureau has a very solid local team on this. They'll also be sending copies of the hard drives to D.C.'

    Grace sighed. 'We might be able to help if you got us copies of those drives, John.'

    'I've made the request on your behalf already, and paperwork for that clearance is in the pipeline.'

    'Paperwork?' Harley growled. 'Man, that's scary, because paperwork usually means nothing gets done. Jesus. We offer up our services on a silver platter, and you've got to jump through hoops to get it?'

    And that, in a nutshell, was what was wrong with the Bureau, and centralized bureaucracies in general, Smith thought; if you wanted to accomplish anything, you had to check with somebody who had to check with somebody else, who had to check with somebody else, ad infinitum. In the meanwhile, time got wasted, opportunities got lost. Would it really be so bad if the powers that be put a little more faith in the people on the ground they'd hired to get the job done in the first place?

Dangerous territory, he chided himself. This morning you turned your back when MacBride hacked into airline computers; now you're sitting in front of an open beer you absolutely are going to drink; and in a few minutes, you're going to get hard drives without authorisation for people with no clearance. What are you going to do next, John? Grace watched John Smith's face reflect the battle his conscience was having with his good sense. 'John. Huttinger didn't just know the code, he knew the routing all the murderers used. He made contact with these people at some point, and it's probably on his computer. I know your people are good-'

    'No, we're better,' Harley interrupted.

    Smith took a breath and another sip of beer, then pulled out his cell and punched in a series of numbers. 'Mark, this is John in Minneapolis. Expedite copies of Huttinger's hard drives to me here, will you? No, no clearance numbers yet. My authority.'