Play To Kill

Chapter Twenty-six

John Smith was at the window table in the Monkeewrench office, looking out through the leaves of a tall tree with a trunk as big around as his Great Aunt Harriet five years after she discovered fast food and Twinkies. He wondered how old the tree was. Decades, certainly; maybe centuries, or however long trees lived. Maybe this one had witnessed the migrations of the Ojibwa and the Sioux, the growing pains of a city that kept changing its identity, depending on which industry or immigrant population was dominant, or maybe Harley had planted it last year. John didn't know, and would never have wondered about such a thing three days ago. It disturbed him enormously that such questions were starting to occur to him, and he blamed Monkeewrench for putting him at a table where a tree constantly distracted him.

Why did he care how old it was? Such musings were the provenance of people who wore funny wide shoes and hung wooden beads around their necks. If you couldn't kill it or pick it and throw it in a stewpot for supper, nature's bounty had never held any interest for him. For the most part, it was messy, sometimes dangerous, and always annoying. Especially insects. They'd been bad in the often humid climate of Washington, D.C., but in Minnesota they were enough to drive a man insane. The one and only time in his career he'd been tempted to draw his weapon was when a swarm of gnats had descended on him in the motel parking lot.

And what was so wrong about killing all the insects? Who cared if the frogs died with them? The only thing frogs were good for was keeping the insect population down, and clearly they were lousy at that. So if the insects were gone, the frogs could either find another job or go extinct. That was the way of the world… and, come to think of it, a pretty good description of the Bureau's mandatory retirement policy.

His cell phone lay forgotten on the table next to him, still warm from almost an hour of calls informing those who needed to know that Clinton Huttinger had been arrested in Oregon and was now under lock and key. A surprisingly big part of John understood that he had been a very small part of capturing this particular psycho (making the world safe for waitresses everywhere!), and every time he passed the news along in that dignified, self-effacing manner that the classes in Quantico had drilled into him, he felt a little flutter in his stomach, a sense of that satisfaction his father had talked about when he locked a bad guy into the back cage of his squad, and the feeling was like a narcotic. Too bad it had happened for the first time so near the end of his law enforcement career.

'Penny for your thoughts, man.' Harley's big mitt came down on his shoulder, making him jump. Funny how such a big man could move so quietly.

John looked up at him. 'Murder, mayhem, chaos - the usual.'

'Holy crap, John, I think you may have come close to a rib-tickler there. Are you okay?'

'Actually, I am very well, thank you. Passing on the news that Clinton Huttinger is off the streets was very… satisfying.'

Harley set his bulk down in a chair and stretched out his legs. 'We all kicked some bad ass there, didn't we? So that's who you've been talking to all this time? The big guns in D.C.?'

'Yes.'

'That's good to hear. At first I figured you were having phone sex, you were on that cell so long; then I was afraid you were having some kind of special freaky moment with that tree, the way you were looking at it all serene. For a second there you looked almost happy. Very un-Fed.'

John rolled his chair to face him. 'I was actually thinking about killing all the frogs, if that makes you feel any better.'

Harley raised a brow. 'Frogs, huh? That's a pretty weird target for a crime fighter.'

'It was a very convoluted train of thought.'

'That's never bad. Someday we'll get snockered together and you can tell me how you got there. Not that I care. Personally, I hate frogs. Always did, ever since I ran over one with the lawnmower at foster home number seven. Freaked me out big time. And speaking of that, we just put the dead-people software to bed.'

John took a breath as he tried to fumble his way through Harley's maze of thought. Foster home number seven? How many had there been? 'The dead-people software?'

Yeah. Remember? The thing you brought us on board to do? Roadrunner's spinning the thing through the beta version now, and when that's tight, we'll have a product that can tell you in two seconds if you've got film of a real dead body or a setup. So the whole damn day is just plain good. Huttinger's in jail, and you've got the software you wanted.' 'Oh.'

'"Oh"? That's all you've got to say? Get your dancing shoes on, Mr. John, because the champagne flutes are polished and I'm ready to dust off the big boys.'

John almost smiled, and it looked a little silly, as if smiles rarely found a comfortable spot on his face. You know, half the time I have no idea what you're saying, but I do enjoy the way you say it.'

Harley guffawed and clapped him on the back just as John's cell phone started skittering across the desk. 'Tell whoever's on the other end of that thing to lose your number. We've got some celebrating to do.'

Harley walked away, giving him some privacy, which John thought said a lot about the man. He snapped open the cell and listened carefully for a time, and felt that elusive and rare moment of semicontentment he'd been enjoying seep away. 'I'll pass it on and get back to you,' were the only words he uttered during the entire conversation. When he snapped the phone closed he looked down at his watch, wondering where the afternoon had gone, where the years had gone, and how the world had changed so starkly while he was right there in it, a blind witness.

Everything seemed to be swirling out of control, falling apart - his watch included. There were little things on the face he'd never noticed before. A fleck of dirt under the glass between the two and the three; a dull spot where the metal had worn off on the minute hand. Cheap junk, deteriorating less than a year after he'd bought it. He thought of his uncle, in the ground for over a decade now, wearing the Swiss watch his own father had given him the day he put on the blues. I should have snatched it off his wrist while the coffin was still open, he thought, and then closed his eyes, startled that such a thing had occurred to him. When he opened them again, Harley was back in the chair opposite, fingers laced over his barrel chest.

'Bad news, Smith?'

'We have a new problem.'

'Huh. Interesting. So far we've got actual murders broadcast over the Web and schoolteachers gone mad. The way I see it, the only things left are ICBMs on their way from China or a comet on a collision course with Earth. Which is it? And, Christ, I hope it's the comet, because that would take longer than ICBMs from China, which gives us time to get ripped.'

The smile was totally inappropriate, and John had to fight the impulse to cover it with his hand. 'That was Chelsea Thomas on the phone.'

'The hottie profiler you sent Magozzi to see?'

John frowned. 'Who told you she was a… hottie?'

Harley grinned, thinking that Special Agent John Smith had probably never ever uttered that word before in his entire politically correct life. He shrugged and his leather jacket exuded a saddle smell. 'Rolseth called with a howdy-do the day she brought the murder films to City Hall. He doesn't mince words when it comes to describing women, if you know what I mean. Unless his wife is around. Then he's Prince Charming on a horse.'

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.'

Grace was smiling at him when he hung up.