The Cat Dancers

8

Three months after the minimart case went off the tracks, Cam returned to his office from an interminable budget meeting and sent his notebook skidding across his desk and onto the floor, scattering papers like duckpins. Horace, recognizing the symptoms of bureaucratic overload, pretended to stare hard at his computer monitor, even though it wasn’t on. Cam swore out loud as he dropped into his chair. Kenny came in from next door, pulled up a straight-backed chair, and sat down in it backward, ready to hear Cam’s tale of fiscal woe.

“We lose?” he asked.

“We lost,” Cam said. “Narco-Vice got the augmentation money.” His phone rang. He picked it up and identified himself, listened for a moment, wrote down a string of letters and numbers on his blotter, and then hung up.

“That was Eddie Marsden over in Computer Crime,” he said to Kenny. “Says there’s something we need to see on some Web site. Here’s the Web address.” He turned his blotter around so Kenny could read it. Then Cam got up out of his chair so Kenny could get on Cam’s machine and find the Web site. Every time Cam tried to surf the Web, his machine would bring up a string of porn sites, which Kenny said meant somebody had been screwing around with his computer. Kenny rattled the keyboard and made the screen dance through several images before stopping at a totally black screen.

“Oh, great,” Cam said. “I recognize that. That’s what I usually get. This is a joke, right?”

“Don’t think so,” Kenny said. “Says it’s buffering a video.”

The screen remained totally blank. “Speak English,” Cam suggested. As far as he was concerned, buffering was what the cleaning crew did to the linoleum.

“Means it’s downloading a video stream from a Web site. Like a movie, or a TV clip.”

The screen remained black, but then Cam thought he could hear something coming from the computer’s speakers: a hissing sound, with a deep bass note underlying the hiss.

“Still buffering,” Kenny said, watching the screen. “It’s big, whatever it is. Eddie say where he got it?”

“He said it was an attachment on an e-mail from the Bureau’s Charlotte field office, but the Feebs say they didn’t send it. Whoa-what the hell is that?”

A picture was forming on the screen. The video camera was obviously sitting on a table, pointing across a long, narrow, darkened room. Perhaps ten feet away, a crudely hooded figure was sitting in what looked like a barber’s chair, or maybe it was a dentist’s chair. Whatever it was, it seemed to be made of shiny metal, with footrests, armrests, and a barely visible metal pedestal. There appeared to be metal clamps binding the figure’s forearms and bare feet to the structure of the chair, and there was a wide leather belt cinched around his middle. The deep humming sound grew louder, reminding Cam of one of those big pipes on a church organ. As the sound rose, another hooded figure appeared behind the one in the chair. Horace got up and came in to stand behind Cam’s desk when he heard that deep humming sound. The second figure had the physique of a man, and he was wearing a dark windbreaker and a hood that had vertical eye slits. His clothes revealed absolutely nothing about the face under the hood or the man’s size. Cam realized he was just assuming it was a man. Then an electronically distorted voice boomed out of the computer’s speakers, startling all three of them. Cam hadn’t been aware that his speakers were even capable of transmitting such a noise.

“All rise,” the voice commanded, the sound loud enough to be heard around the office. A detective from Major Crimes stuck his head in the door and asked, “What the hell was that?”

The standing figure reached over the figure in the chair and lifted the hood, which Cam recognized was probably just a pillowcase. The video was a little jerky, but it was clear enough to see who was in the chair, and Cam grunted in surprise. It was Kyle Simmonds, aka K-Dog, of minimart fame.

“Well, looky here,” Kenny murmured. “K-Dog, my man. What you doin’ there, dude?”

K-Dog’s tongue came out as he licked his lips for an instant and tried to look around. Then Cam saw the neck brace and realized that K-Dog’s head was also immobilized.

“Watch carefully, Officers,” the computer’s speakers intoned in sepulchral tones. “This man slaughtered three innocent people. You let him get away with it. I’m going to rectify that problem. I’m going to send him to hell until the end of time.”

K-Dog’s eyes got very wide and he appeared to be trying to speak, but then they saw that there was something in his mouth, some soft, wet, bulky object that appeared to be held in place by two shiny metal clamps on either side of his mouth. He was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, but no shoes or socks. Beads of perspiration stood on his forehead. They couldn’t see his teeth when he opened his mouth and began making increasingly frantic mewing sounds while his hands turned red as he fought against the steel restraints on his wrists. The hooded figure standing behind the chair withdrew from sight, and for a moment nothing happened.

“Oh my God,” Horace said. “You know what that is? That’s a fucking-”

The deep bass note coming from the speakers was replaced by the unmistakable sound of high voltage, a lethally urgent throbbing sound that transfixed K-Dog’s strappeddown body, making every one of his muscles suddenly visible and causing a sputtering cooking sound to come from his mouth. Cam found himself backing away from the computer screen as the electrocution gained in strength and ferocity, the volume rising now as K-Dog’s eyes bulged out to the size of golf balls and then began to change texture from clear to something more like hard-boiled eggs. The sputtering from his mouth became the sound of fat roasting in open flames, and it was accompanied by a brownish vapor. His hair began to smoke and his arms and legs were jerking furiously against the restraints as the neurons in his body responded to the current’s frequency, forcing every one of his muscles to expand and contract in time with some distant power plant’s turbogenerator. Finally, visible flames crackled around K-Dog’s neck and ears and his spine curved outward against the leather belt, bending his fuming corpse toward the camera as if in supplication, while an eerie blue aura formed around his extremities. Then came the sound of a huge electric arc, and all the sound stopped, along with the current, apparently. K-Dog’s body slumped down into the chair as if his skeleton had been rubberized. His eyes were still wide open, but they were just brownish white balls now, with only barely visible irises.

Cam swallowed and exhaled noisily, as did the other men, unaware that they’d been holding their collective breath. And then, to their horror, the current snapped back on. This time, the body jerked around in the chair like a puppet on springs as the relentless amperes coursed through what had to be a very dead body for another ten gruesome seconds.

Then the screen slowly dissolved to black again and the speakers subsided into that original deep bass note. Just as Cam was clearing his throat, the spectral voice boomed out again.

“That’s one,” it announced.

Then the screen went gray and the humming sound stopped.

Kenny whistled softly and then started banging away on the keyboard again.

“Mother fuck!” said the detective standing behind Cam, who hadn’t realized that all the noise had attracted an audience from the office next door. “I think I’m gonna puke.”

“What are you doing?” Cam asked Kenny.

“Trying to get a fix on the real source of that attachment,” he said, tongue between his teeth as he concentrated on the screen. The screen had turned blue, with white text and computer hieroglyphics scrolling down.

“Was that real or Memorex?” Horace asked.

“Looked real to me,” Kenny said, still typing. “Hope so anyway.”

The phone rang on Cam’s desk. He picked it up, the execution images still vivid in his mind. “MCAT, Lieutenant Richter.”

It was the sheriff, trumpeting on his speakerphone. “Lieutenant, I have Carol Hawes with me. Her office has been getting calls about a Web site that’s purportedly showing an electrocution of one those guys who did the minimart fire. You know anything about that?”

Carol Hawes was the Sheriff’s Office’s public relations officer. “We just saw it,” Cam said. “Puke city. Computer Crimes alerted us. I take it this is out there for the whole world to see?”

“I think that’s why they call it the World Wide Web, Lieutenant,” the sheriff said dryly. Cam’s reputation for being something of a Luddite when it came to computers was widespread. “What are we doing about it?”

“Watching it?” Cam said, rolling his eyes. Like what in the hell could they do about it? And why was the sheriff calling MCAT? This was definitely one for Major Crimes. “Sergeant Cox is trying to do an Internet trace on the attachment, see what he can find out about it. We need Computer Crimes to do the same, I guess.”

Cam heard a buzzer going off in the sheriff’s office. There was a moment of quiet mumbling as the he took a call. Then he was back on the speakerphone. “Meeting. My office in thirty,” he announced, and hung up.

Kenny swore as a black screen came up. He hit one final key with a dramatic flourish, which signaled he’d signed off for Cam, and got up from Cam’s chair. “Nada,” he said. “It was posted on one of those floating chat rooms. Kind of like a blog. Current events and shit. I Googled the name string from the attachment, found the site again, but on yet another floating box.”

“Oka-a-y,” Cam said. “I’m punching the ‘I believe’ button here. And?”

“No luck. I’d recommend getting the Bureau into this. Eddie’s going to agree, I think. Goddamn, boss. You thinking what I’m thinking?”

It took Cam a moment. “Marlor?” he said.

As Kenny nodded, Cam suddenly realized he needed some coffee. Actually, he needed a drink, but he didn’t keep booze in the office.

They had gone to see James Marlor a week after the media dust began to settle on the minimart case. His home was down in Lexington. His job required him to be on the road most of the time, so the company didn’t care where he parked his family, and he’d chosen Lexington over the much larger and more crowded city of Charlotte.

Marlor had been reserved, attentive, and not terribly surprised when Cam finally broached the real purpose of their visit. Marlor had told them simply that he was not going to introduce more tragedy into his life by hunting down those two. He said they’d probably die in prison, as Cam had suggested, and that that was a better fate than a bullet through the eye. Cam remembered that particular image now as he mixed sugar into his coffee. Marlor would have to be a very cool customer indeed to have done this, if it was indeed real. And that was the larger problem: This could well be just some more digital fraud zinging away out there on the Internet.

“We’ll have to look at him, I guess,” he said. “It’s been what-three months since we talked to him? He certainly has a motive.”

“What do you think?” Kenny asked.

“I think we need to let the Computer Crimes guys do their thing, you know, see if they can find out how that little drama got onto the Web.” He looked at Kenny. “Is that possible?”

Kenny fixed up his own coffee while he thought about that. “Again, that’s probably a Bureau labs project. It would take a hell of digital studio to do that from scratch using just ones and zeros. Only real way to find out is to chase down K-Dog; see if he’s still out there, alive and eating shit.”

“If he’s alive, that would settle it,” Cam said. “But if we can’t find him, we still don’t know. What’s your gut reaction?”

Kenny was nodding to himself. “I think it was real,” he said.

“He said ‘That’s one,’ right there at the end. That tells me he’s going to do it again. That black guy-what’s his name, Butts? He’s gotta be next.”

Kenny nodded again. “The media is gonna go to town on this thing,” he said.

“Gosh, you think?”

“Worse, actually,” Kenny replied. “Something like this can attain cult status on the Web, especially if he’s promising to do another one.”

“Maybe we should pick Butts up for his own protection.”

“On what grounds?” Kenny asked.

“Hell, I don’t know-show him the video?”

“And what would Commissar Bellamy say to that?”

Cam had no answer for that one.

“If we have to work on Marlor,” Kenny said, “maybe you should let me do it.”

“Why?” Cam asked.

“Because I’m more sympathetic to his cause than you are?”