Fred said into the phone, “He’s just walking in now. I’ll get back to you.”
The big guy who used to tousle my hair when I was small came toward me with a limp that betrayed his bum knees. He shook my hand with both of his, then sat down heavily in a chair.
“I thought we were supposed to meet on Friday,” I said.
“I got a call last night, Jack. I didn’t want to tell you about it over the phone.”
He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of smokes, put them back, said, “I’m trying to cut down. This doesn’t help one bit.”
Colleen came in to say good night. “I put Mr. Moreno’s phone number in your briefcase. You’ve got a phoner with the office in Rome at seven a.m. tomorrow. About the retainer for Fiat. Need anything else, Jack?”
“Thanks, I’m fine. Good night, Molloy.”
She closed the office door.
“So how are you doing with our project?” Fred asked me. “Please tell me we’re somewhere.”
“We’re making progress. I think Del Rio is onto something interesting. It’s going to take a couple of days to check it out. Tell me about the phone call.”
“Barney Sapok,” Fred said. “I’ve known him for, I don’t know, fifteen years. He’s never called me at home before.”
Fred reached for the cigarettes again, resisted. “He said our friends in the ‘gaming industry’ are poking around, coming to the same conclusions we did. Something’s not kosher this season.
“I should’ve come to you earlier, Jack. I just didn’t want to believe it. Now I’ve got mafiosi asking questions the commissioner should have asked. But didn’t. Whatever’s going on, I’ve got to know before they do.”
“I’m not going to let you down. This whole operation is at your disposal.”
“I know. You’re my guy. You were always the smart one.”
I walked my uncle to the elevator, then stepped back as the doors closed.
I stood for a moment and watched as the numbers above the elevator counted down. I thought about the Mob looking into those iffy plays that had sent final scores skidding sideways in the last moments of the games, moments that had probably cost organized crime multimillions. Someone would have to pay for that.
But who had been clever enough to fix pro games with dozens of cameras and millions of witnesses watching any suspicious move? For the life of me, I couldn’t figure how it could be done.
Chapter 60
Sci’s apartment was on the top floor of a run-down building that had once housed a printing press, back in the days when some people in Los Angeles actually read.
The space was open, with metal columns supporting the high ceilings. Photos were being projected onto white walls in a looping slide show: the Vatican at night, the Tatshenshini River in the wilds of Alaska, the quad at Harvard, an aurora borealis, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem shot from a high floor at the King David Hotel. Some of Sci’s favorite things to behold.
A twelve-foot-long tiger shark was suspended above the space by chains attached to a framing timber.
Trixie, Sci’s lab monkey rescue, was perched atop her cage, greedily eating banana chips, while Sci, seated in front of his computer, chatted with his beloved Kit-Kat by webcam.
Her pretty face and large body filled the screen.
“You’re very anxious tonight,” she said. “This case has really upset you, hasn’t it?”
“It’s all about sick fantasies that have turned into real murders. Sound about right, Kat?”
“Ja. That’s how these rotten killers operate. Happens all over the world.”
“Only this time, there’s no pattern we can see.”
Sci knew that Kat was a biochemist. He also knew she was married and that she lived in Stockholm, but he didn’t know Kit-Kat’s actual name. They had no plans to meet, because that would ruin everything, wouldn’t it?
“I called because I found something for you, Sci. It’s just a whisper. I can’t confirm it. Rumors of a wireless spy-bot program that originated in the US. It lets the user grab the signal of a particular cell phone and clone it. Undetected.”
Sci felt his heart pumping pure liquid hallelujah. He’d often imagined such a program, and now Kat was telling him that it existed.
“Tell me everything, Kat, my sweet girl.”
Trixie the monkey shrieked, threw down her snack, and ran across her rope line. She leaped to Sci’s shoulder, where she squatted and chattered at Kat’s image on the screen.
“Hello, beautiful Trixie… Anyway, this program seemed a little familiar, Sci. So I chased down a different program that’s a few years old but with a similar signature. That program was created by a gamer called Morbid. Don’t take this for more than it is, darling, please. It’s an educated guess, built on a rumor. I have been searching everywhere, though.”
“Kat, I can’t thank you enough. This is the closest thing I have to a lead yet.”
“I have to go in a few minutes,” Kat said. “I have just enough time…”
Kat unbuttoned her blouse, and techno music with a complex melody and a pounding beat came over the speakers. Sci’s thoughts about a spy program moved to the back of his mind as he locked Trixie in her cage and turned to Kit-Kat.
The very large, very lovely woman took a clip out of her thick blond hair and began to slip out of her clothes. “Tell me what you like tonight, my lover,” she said. “Then I will do the same.”
Chapter 61
Later that night, Sci sat in the shadow of the fearsome, wondrous shark, his fingers on the keyboard, his eyes on the screen.
Since signing off with Kit-Kat, he’d run the name Morbid through his browser, coming up with trash bands Morbid Angel and Morbid Death, and morbidity in every absurd category imaginable.
When he’d exhausted Google and Bing, he signed on to one geek message board after another, searching for references to a spy-bot that cloned cell phones wirelessly and to a programmer called Morbid.
He ransacked every board he subscribed to and came up dry. So Sci e-mailed his good friend Darren in India. Darren worked for a major Internet provider and he responded to Sci’s e-mail with links to exclusive websites that were restricted to high-level tech professionals. Darren also sent Sci his IDs and passwords.
Sci made coffee and then prowled the back corridors of the Internet. He struck gold on a supergeek board he hadn’t even known existed, and that in itself was news. He plucked the name Morbid from a recent thread and read a post saying: “Morbid-the-great has taken to the streets. Rumor has it he’s a key player in a combat game IRL called Freek Night.”
Sci was virtually bolted to his chair, both excited and afraid that this lead might run into a wall. This was why Private was the best-they had the best resources, and they weren’t constrained in ways the police were. They operated with their own sense of justice.
Using his friend’s ID, Sci posted a query about Freek Night, and he got an instant message from a member who believed Sci to be Darren.
“Darren, dude. What I can tell you. Freek Night is so sick, it’s transcendent. It takes fantasy to a new level- real life.”
“How do you know about this?”
“A gamer named Scylla posted a couple of times on Extreme Combat. He said he was recruited into the game. Could be bullshit tho. I tried to get in myself. Never got a reply.”
“First I’ve heard of it,” Sci replied as Darren.
“Because you live in a dungeon in Mumbai. LOL. In most places, murder is not a game. Even so, Scylla
