'Because they get millions of them. The volume is crippling. No way they can look at them all.'
'Arrest a couple of CEOs and I bet they'll find a way to look at them all.'
Tommy shook his head. 'You can't lock up the mailman for delivering kiddie porn, Gino. He doesn't know what's in the package.'
Gino put down the potato chip bag, a measure of his distress. 'Damnit, Leo, I told you we should have stayed in the car. This is really depressing. How bad did he hurt that guy, Tommy?'
'Pretty bad. He died on camera.' He clicked the mouse to run the video to the end.
Magozzi didn't want to watch. In Homicide you saw a lot of aftermaths, but few murders in progress - yet in a weird way, he felt he owed it to the guy on the ground. Bearing witness, he thought, pulling a phrase from a childhood of religious training, shifting it over to a cop's version of respect for the victim. He closed his eyes when the film ended, and listened to Tommy talk.
YouTube pulled it the minute they saw it and turned it over to the Feds. The guy on the ground was gay, which makes it a hate crime, and he was dead long before the end of the film. That's a metal pipe he's swinging, no question he was out to kill, and there isn't a chance in hell of ID'ing him. Not from this film, anyway. He didn't talk, he didn't show his face, and from the back he could be anybody. Cleveland Homicide worked every angle they could think of, including gay-bashing incident history, and came up empty. The Feds aren't doing much better nailing down the origin of the post, which is why they called in outside help.'
'They called you in?' Gino asked.
'Me and about fifty others. Invitation only to the big seminar last Saturday. I met gurus from all over the Midwest, cyber crimes guys from St. Paul and a lot of other departments, some teenage hackers they pulled off their summer jobs at McDonald's - kind of a geek fest hosted by suits with really bad ties. How come you don't know about this? I figured Grace must have told you. Monkeewrench was the major panel.'
'Yeah?'
'Oh, man, yeah, and let me tell you, that was a trip. You got all these Brooks Brothers types lined up at a table and then in comes Fat Annie in sequins, knock-'em-dead Grace, biker Harley, and Mr. Lycra. It wasn't a Star Trek- convention high, but it was damn close.'
Gino frowned. 'They're pulling in that many outsiders for a case that's four months old?'
Tommy grimaced. 'That's the thing. They found some more videos the sites pulled before they made it to the Web, and they've got bodies to match the film. Five cities across the country so far. They think Cleveland might be just the tip of the iceberg.'
Gino was uncharacteristically silent as they walked back to their office from Tommy's, a sure sign that he was processing some sort of philosophical revelation. Magozzi, being an expert in the varying degrees of his partner's rare verbal lapses, drew the quick conclusion that this particular soul- searching session was less cognitive and much more reflective than usual. Too bad Magozzi couldn't transfer the same intuition to his relationship with the woman he loved.
'That was the worst goddamned thing I've ever seen,' Gino finally said.
'It was bad.'
'I mean, I've had a car accident vie bleed to death in my arms on scene; I was holding my grandpa's hand when he made his final exit; and you know exactly how many corpses I've helped you clean up over the years. Me and death are on a first-name basis. But, Jesus. We just watched some guy's final nightmare minute of life - on the Web. On the goddamned Web. People are filming this shit. Posting it. Other people are watching it. I don't get it. I just don't get it.'
'Can't argue with you there, buddy.'
Gino shook his head irritably. 'It's like the Roman Colosseum. Call me a dreamer, but I thought the human race got over that after two thousand years.'
We never got over it. Think about it - the Inquisition. Public executions. Genocide every day, somewhere in the world. Terrorists. People can really suck.'
Gino rolled his eyes. 'Thanks for that uplifting message of hope. Should I just kill myself now?'
'I don't think that's the solution.'
'Okay, how about I go kill all the assholes?'
'Better.'
They arrived at their desks, and sank into their chairs. Gino immediately withdrew a purloined packet of beef jerky from his suit-coat pocket and began gnawing. "You know what? I blame this on Hollywood. And the Web. We've got a bunch of kids calling in bomb scares for their fifteen minutes, and now we've got psycho killers posting their carnage on the Web so they can get their fifteen minutes. Celebrity culture gone wild. Everybody wants to be a star. And they don't care how they do it. Can't make the American
Idol cut? Hell, kill somebody and make a movie of it. Jesus. I never thought I'd say this, but, man, just give me a plain old straightforward homicide to solve, because those always make sense in the end.'
Out of the corner of his eye, Magozzi caught the blinking red light on his phone. 'Gino, I wish you hadn't said that.'
Chapter Four
Gino was running the electric seat buttons in time to the bass throb of the sound system in the car next to them, and it was driving Magozzi nuts.
'Do you have to do that?'
Gino was looking down at his belly. 'I do. This lumbar support thing is amazing. You know it actually pushes your stomach out?'
'How can you tell?'
'Gee, thanks, Leo.'
Magozzi braked at the fourth red light he'd hit on Washington and glared past Gino at the do-ragged dumbo in the car next door. 'Sorry. I don't like river calls. And that kid's radio is driving me nuts.'
Gino took a look at the jacked car bouncing to the beat next to them, opened his window and waved his badge. 'Sound ordinance, buddy. You're way over. Shut it down now.'
Magozzi took a breath when the throbbing stopped. 'Thanks.'
'Not a problem. The little bastard looked like a skinny Eminem, and I hate Eminem. I caught Helen listening to one of his piece-of-shit songs when she was eleven - you ever hear that guy's lyrics?'
'Not on purpose. They got him out of the hood, though.'
'Bullshit. He brought the hood out with him, and now the rest of us have to worry about our kids listening to it. Man, when I was growing up all my mom had to do was worry about me running in front of a car. Now you gotta screen the radio, check out every album, every game, every TV show, and this morning I find out we got snuff films on the computer. Christ. Makes you want to uninvent electricity.'
The light finally changed. Within minutes they were in sight of the Hennepin Avenue suspension bridge. Gino still took Angela and the kids down here three or four times a year to watch the fireworks from the bridge; Magozzi hadn't liked bridges much since the night he'd gone into the Mississippi after two babies whose mother had just tossed them over the rail. The babies had drowned, but not before Magozzi had heard the noises they made. The mother took a dive in a halfhearted suicide attempt, but came through the swim golden, which was more of a miracle than anyone knew, considering that every man in the river that night wanted to push her under and hold her there instead of dragging her out. Sometimes Magozzi still dreamed about killing her, and woke up in a sweat, wondering if he was the only one that close to the edge.
'Light's green.' Gino rapped a knuckle on the dashboard. 'You know what we ought to do? Drag this out until noon and do a little lunch at St. Anthony on Main. There's a place here that deep-fries cauliflower so even I can eat it.'