His eyes scanned the cell. Things had been touched, the bed remade. He went to the shelves and inventoried his personal items. His deck of cold case playing cards were missing. He stomped his feet and clenched his fists in anger. Those cards were special. He’d been able to match most of the crimes in the deck to specific killers, and make good guesses on the others. It had been fun, and helped pass the time.
The voice inside his head screamed.
He went to the cell door. Across the block, a three-hundred pound black inmate named Leon shot him the hundred yard stare. It was a look meant to inspire fear.
“Yo, peckerwood. Guards take anything from your cell?”
“They took my playing cards,” Crutch said.
“They took my tooth brush. How am I gonna brush my fucking teeth?”
“I’ve got a spare.”
“Give it to me.”
Leon was a bad ass, and treated Crutch like dirt. Leon believed the extent of Crutch’s crimes were a single charge of kidnaping and rape. In Leon’s eyes, that made Crutch a nothing, or what the black inmates called a peckerwood.
Crutch did not have a problem with that. He had not told Leon about the crimes he’d committed. Nor had he told any of the other inmates. Most of the inmates liked to brag about the bad things they’d done. Crutch had done the opposite.
Crutch had researched hundreds of serial killers during his time in Starke. He knew more about serial killers than anyone alive. When it came to being incarcerated, being a serial killer was no badge of honor. At best, the other inmates shunned you. At worst, they killed you.
Crutch tossed the spare toothbrush to Leon.
“Think they’re gonna let us exercise in the yard?” Leon asked. “I hate being cooped up in here.”
“Beats me,” Crutch said.
Leon put on his headphones. Soon he was riding a wave of rap music. Crutch cupped his hands over his mouth and called down the hall. A steel door slid back, and a pimply-faced guard named Mickey stuck his head in.
“What do you want?” Mickey asked.
“I need a favor,” Crutch replied.
Mickey lumbered into the cellblock. Only twenty-eight, he was so overweight that he had difficulty walking. He stopped at Crutch’s cell door, his body jiggling.
“What’s up little man?” Mickey asked.
“I want to know who searched my cell.”
“One of the guards searched your cell.”
“It wasn’t one of the guards. It was someone else.”
“That’s news to me.”
Everything’s news to you, Crutch nearly said.
“Can you ask around, and find out for me?”
“What’s it worth to you?”
Telling Mickey that he wanted something would only increase its eventual price.
“The usual.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Mickey left the cell, the steel door banging behind him. Crutch heard the static of a walkie-talkie as Mickey called around. Soon, Mickey was back at Crutch’s cell.
“Who did you piss off?” Mickey asked.
Crutch feigned innocence and shook his head.
“It was two FBI agents,” Mickey said solemnly. “The first was Special Agent Vaughn Wood. He’s the director of the FBI’s Jacksonville office.”
Crutch knew of Wood. He was low level, and not someone who worried him.
“Who was the second person?” Crutch asked.
“It’s gonna cost you extra.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so, little man.”
Crutch gripped the bars at chest height. Mickey was leaning close enough for him to grab him by the head and pull his face into the bars so he could sink his teeth into the carotid artery in his throat. One bite, and fat boy would be doing the death dance.
“How much?” Crutch asked.
“Double.”
Mickey grinned wickedly. The second name was much better than the first. That was why Mickey was putting him through the wringer.
Kill him, said the voice inside his head.
“You’ve got a deal,” Crutch said.
Mickey brought his face closer and dropped his voice. “The second guy in your cell was Special Agent Ken Linderman. He used to be a profiler at Quantico, now runs the CARD unit down in Miami, whatever that is. I hear he’s a big shot.”
Crutch released the bars and lowered his hands. Ken Linderman had helped capture half the serial killers in the country through his profiling. Now he was on a one-man crusade looking for his precious little daughter. Of all the FBI agents who could have searched his cell, Linderman was the most dangerous.
“I want the money by tomorrow,” Mickey said.
Kill him now, the voice said.
“Of course,” Crutch replied.
Mickey left, leaving Crutch with his dark thoughts.
Crutch knew how it worked with the FBI. They could enter any prison at any time, and start giving orders like they owned the place. If Linderman wanted to search his cell again, he would. Next time, Crutch might not be so lucky.
The surveillance camera in the hall was pointed away from his cell. He lifted up his cot, and unscrewed the right front leg. The people who ran the prison were cheap. When a bed broke, it was repaired in the machine shop instead of being replaced. He wasn’t the only inmate who’d paid to have a hollow leg put on his bed.
Two items fell out of the hollow leg into his hand. A long piece of steel with a sharpened point – what prisoners called a shiv – and a 16 gigabyte memory stick he’d found on the floor of the records department. No bigger than his thumb, the memory stick held more data than most PCs, and could be plugged into the department’s computers through their USB ports. Stored on the stick was a project which he called The Program. It was the most important thing he owned, and could not fall into the FBI’s hands.
He returned the shiv to its hiding place. Taking a pack of gum off the bookshelf, he carefully peeled away the plastic, and used it to wrap the memory stick.
The surveillance camera in the hall was still pointed the wrong way. He dropped his pants and sat on the toilet. Reaching between his legs, he stuck the memory stick up his rectum into his anal cavity. He didn’t imagine the FBI looking there.
He lay down on his bed, and stared at the ceiling. Several years of research had gone into the Program, and he likened it to doing a doctor’s thesis. It was his life work, and would live on long after he had perished.
It had all started one day in the mess hall. Another inmate, a professional jewel thief, had told him how he’d been “turned out’ by his father. Crutch had never heard the expression before, and asked what it meant.
“It’s how you get trained,” the jewel thief had explained. “An older guy takes you under his wing and teaches you the trade, then turns you out into the world.”
“Like an apprentice,” Crutch said.
“Exactly. You gotta have young people coming up.”
The jewel thief was right. Every trade needed new blood. But there was a problem in Crutch’s world. Law enforcement was becoming more adept at catching serial killers. Their ranks were thinning, one killer at a time.
He’d decided to change that.
With the memory stick, he’d downloaded hundreds of documents off the Internet, which he’d later studied when he was supposed to be data processing. Written by doctors and psychiatrists, the documents were about the minds of serial killers, and why they killed. He’d compared their findings to his own experiences, and the experiences of other serial killers whom he’d talked to in prison. Over time, he’d begun to see certain patterns and shared experiences. The fantasies that drove serial killers were different, yet originated from the same dark place in the soul. And those fantasies started young.
Crutch was an engineer by trade, and knew that his research was flawed. The pool he was drawing from was too small to be conclusive. He’d needed more information, only the Internet didn’t have it. He’d decided to hack the FBI’s web site.