wasn’t simple.
“Hey Duff.” It was weird seeing Jerry without a Cosmo in front of him. “Thanks for coming over,” he said.
“Sure, Jer. What have you found?” I said.
“Pull up a seat. This will take some explaining.”
I wheeled over one of Jerry’s four office chairs. Jerry called up www.Xcracksterweb.com on his computer and pivoted the twenty-inch monitor so we could both see.
“Okay, try to follow me, Duff. When you look at this webpage you see the usual stuff, in this case, porn. The menu on the bottom brings you to other pages, like the page that asks you for a password and user name.”
“I gotcha so far.”
“I got into the pay site with some hacking software.”
“How’d you do that?”
“Basically, I have software that throws the dictionary, the alphabet, and numbers zero through nine at the user name box. When the software finds a user name it starts the same process with the password.”
“Does that always work?”
“It does because most people are very lazy when it comes to password security. They use birthdays and initials and common names. This site required at least an eight-character password, which is very unusual. It means they were really concerned with getting caught.”
“Go on.”
“So anyway, I got in and this is what was there.”
Jerry went to the pay page and I braced myself to see something really disturbing. When the page appeared, I let out my breath and became confused. It was the web pattern again being spun by a spider.
“What’s this? Why would anyone pay for this?” I said.
“That’s what the Webmaster wants you to think. There’s something else to it,” Jerry said.
“What?”
“All right, this is where it gets a little complicated. Looking at this, all you see is the little spider spinning an endless web, right?”
“Yeah…”
“If you go to the menu on the top of the browser and click on ‘view’ and then click on ‘source’ this is what you get.”
Jerry pulled down the menu and it revealed line after line of that cryptic computer language, some in different colors. Some of the words said things like “table,” “head,” “width,” and “style.”
“Jerry-now you’re getting weird on me. I have no idea what this shit is.”
“All it is, is the code for techs to understand how the page was constructed. It’s sort of like a blueprint to understand its construction.”
“So?”
“If you scroll all the way down, you see this called ‘area shape poly’?”
“Yeah…”
“That means there’s a hidden link in the page.”
“What do you mean ‘hidden’?”
“You know when you’re on a webpage and there’s a menu and you can just click on it and it brings you to another page?”
“Sure.”
“Well this is a link that’s not labeled.”
“So-where is it?”
“It’s the little spider. If you click on the spider it takes you there.”
Jerry clicked on the spider. At this point the suspense had me on edge and I wanted Jerry to just get to the point, but I realized knowing the hows and whys had some value.
The hidden link was a plain white page with the following web address: briefcase. yahoo. com
Under the address there was a simple line of directions that said:
Username: Webster
Password: 4#crackgirls
Jerry went to the briefcase webpage and put in the instructed username and password. It immediately went to a page with a series of folders marked simply with dates.
“This is where it gets bad.” Jerry’s voice got low.
“Open it up, Jer.”
Jerry clicked on the folder and it opened to a series of photos. They were young girls, in various forms of undress. Many had tears coming down their face. In each of the photos was a black guy I guessed was Tyrone, Walanda’s ex, the pimp. He was smiling and had his arm around the girls in some pictures. In others, he had their shirts lifted up, and in others he had skirts and pants pulled down.
Jerry took me through a bunch of the folders showing what women and girls were available. On the “Newcomers Page” there was a photo of a pretty young black girl and under it was the name Shony. Tyrone the pimp was next to her. Shony was crying.
I almost got sick. Jerry was silent and a hush fell over the office.
Jerry clicked out of the folder and went to the folder labeled “instructions.”
He clicked on it and a white page with simple lettering appeared. In part in read:
Young daughters of crack hos available for your pleasure. Do the mother and daughter at the same time, if that’s what you’re into. E-mail us, we’ll send you the details: Webmaster@xcracksterweb. com.
Don’t miss our upcoming video feed.
“Jerry, close it out.”
Jerry closed out of the site and went to his desktop. Neither of us spoke or moved for what seemed like a long time.
“All right, Jer, tell me: once one of these assholes gets the passwords, what keeps him from telling all his asshole friends so everyone could get in free?” I asked.
“The webmaster has it set up on a randomizer so that the password changes probably every couple of minutes or seconds. You would have to go through this process every time you wanted access,” he said.
“Why did they bother with the briefcase piece?”
“A briefcase is sort of like an extension of e-mail. It won’t be picked up by search engines. That way, if the FBI or whoever is scanning the Internet for child porn, it won’t be recognized.”
“Someone who knows this stuff went to some trouble to do this, didn’t they?”
“Yeah. I think the pervs who get nailed are the idiotic ones who put their stuff out there in the open. Either that or they’re so brazen they don’t care.”
“Do these guys make serious money doing this?”
“Are you kidding, Duff? You’re the addiction expert. Porn might as well be crack, and when it comes to something forbidden like children, I’m betting these guys just can’t stop,” he said.
“That and they have all the women hooked on crack so they can’t do anything. What they’re doing to those kids is the devil’s work,” I said.
I thanked Jerry and headed home. Jerry had suggested that when I had time that I should go through some of the links listed on the page because they might give me some more information. I really couldn’t stomach any more at that point, so I left that project for another day. I had a sick feeling in my gut, and I wasn’t sure what to do about it. According to Kelley, I could call the FBI or the local authorities and they’d do an investigation, but that would take a lot of time. In the meantime, Shony was about to be turned into something that could ruin her for life. I didn’t like the sound of this upcoming “video feed” thing, either.
I was going to do something, I just didn’t know what.
24
