Rule 34

personal note to a co-ordination wave, asking if anyone else has seen anything relevant; tweedle a brief announcement of the facts of the case (suitably blinded) in case any of your colleagues in other jurisdictions have useful suggestions: and on your public blog, ask if any MOPs who were in the vicinity of Mikey Blair’s demesne would like to drop by for tea and a chat. Only then do you get to start sifting through your regular inbox and prioritizing the day’s routine work-load.

Item: There’s a Person of Repeated Interest in Pilton who’s just turned up at the Royal Infirmary with forty sutures in his lower back, a nasty case of MRSA, and a missing kidney. Question from CID, Do we have an organlegging problem or is this just punishment surgery?

Item: a Person of Repeated Interest in Cramond has been found unconscious in a gutter, sporting unusual leg injuries. Recovering in hospital, officers called to deal with the reported shooting incident took possession of the recovered projectiles—ultrahard plastic spheres about a centimetre in diameter that show signs of having been produced on an unregistered fabber, invisible on X-ray, which had been fired into the meniscal cartilage of each knee at point-blank range. PORI is being uncooperative: Are there reports of kneecapping using this MO elsewhere on the net?

Item: We recently lifted another PORI in Craigmillar on a public-order charge. IT Forensics found his phone contained numerous videos which we are treating as Extreme Pornography as per CJ&L(S) (2009). A query with cause on the NPFIT database failed to identify where he downloaded this material—it certainly wasn’t logged over the public Internet. Query: What should we be looking for? Blacknet, sneakernet, or some other option?

This is the problem with being on the Rule 34 Squad: You get to wade through everyone else’s shit, but your own case resolution metric is in the tank. For example, if you could get the resources to track down where the feedstock for that metal-hard polymer the black hats are putting through their fabbers is coming into the city from, you could follow it to the customers and shut the bastards down for a very long time indeed (Firearms Act, 1968, as amended). If ICIU was classified as a support unit rather than a bastard offshoot of CID you’d be in the clover. But it isn’t, so you’re expected to spend your time running dumb-ass web searches on behalf of the real detectives— support unit stuff—while trying to meet utterly inappropriate performance metrics for arrests and convictions. No gold star for you.

On the other hand, CID can’t do without the Rule 34 squad these days, doing the stuff nobody else wants to take on. So you get to keep this job so that they don’t need to sit in ancient Aeron chairs all day, drinking bad coffee and staring up the Goatse-shaped ring-piece of the prolapsed, ulcerous arse-meat of the Internet until their eye- balls melt.

The members of your constantly rotating pool of Internet porn monkeys typically last three months on the team; then they flee screaming back to the blessed relief of patrolling the sinkhole estates and vomit-splattered pub doorways of the wrong side of town. Most of them are volunteers—officers who figure a few months off their feet in a nice warm office with a nanny-free net feed is a soft touch next to collaring neds in Craigmillar or public-order headcases off Lothian Road. Oddly, they don’t often come back for a second tour of duty in bad head park. A small subset are here reluctantly: You figure some of the more unscrupulous brass in E Division may be using ICIU as a punishment posting.

But for you, there’s no escape. The Internet amplifies everything. You’d thought you’d seen the lot, you with your background in homicide and computer crime and years on the beat. You’ve seen rape and murder and the vileness that men and women do to one another. But the horror of their actions pales into insignificance compared to what they fantasize about. And on that note, it’s just you, Moxie, Speedy, and Squeaky against the scum of the Internet: So it’s a blessed relief when you get to spend a day on the control centre desk and an evening mopping up after a guy in a gimp suit who autodarwinates with extreme prejudice.

Keep taking the happy pills, Liz. It’s better than the alternative.

(Didn’t you have a meeting to be going to?)

Your meeting rolls round, and then a lengthy chat with Chief Inspector Dixon, your boss (who mostly seems to want to catch up with the latest scuttlebutt about Dickie’s dastardly deviant’s demise—prurient curiosity never goes out of fashion, even among those who ought to know better), then an hour-long mentoring session with Speedy (who is arsing around trying to make up his mind whether to go for his PIP entry exams with an eye to making inspector some year or other—not totally impossible, you will concede, but he’ll have to get his shit together and focus if he’s to have a hope).

You attempt to put in half an hour collating the paper-work on the DNA tests on those black-market feedstock canisters that have been turning up fly-tipped in residents’ recycling bins, but there’s nothing conclusive; it’s one of those hundred–per cent under-resourced investigations that’s going to go nowhere until you find something concrete to justify the resourcing without which—

Lunch is a speedy bowl of microwave seitan bulgogi noodles slurped down at your desk with the door shut: Then it’s on to the afternoon. First you have a dedicated off-the-hook hour for training courseware; then it’s over to room D31 to give Dickie’s DCs an off-the-cuff (and off-the-record) briefing on Michael Blair’s colourful pre-mortem history. After which it’s back to ICIU and a half-hour mentoring Constables Janie Jones and Baz MacIntyre on the banality of evil, the evil of banality, how to tell the difference between faked videos and the real thing, and the best way to keep a sense of perspective while watching vids of kittens being dropped into food processors in slomo (or whatever else the griefers are amusing themselves with today).

Sometime during the afternoon, your phone begins to shake, rattle, and roll for your attention, requesting a personality change. At least, you think it began during midafternoon—you tend to ignore it while you’re busy. When you finally get annoyed at the desperate armwaving, you swipe the screen: It does a Jekyll-and-Hyde swap from its officious duty VM to your home phone’s personality.

You have face-mail. “Liz?” It’s Dorothy. You startle and guiltily look over your shoulder, but the door’s shut. “Long time no see. Uh . . . I’m in town again? And I was wondering if, if you’d like to meet up? I’m free tonight, if that’s convenient, or we could talk?”

Well, that’s a turn-up. But it also up-ends all your carefully controlled tranquillity. You and Dorothy have history. (Or herstory.) Your heart beats faster for a moment, the phone clammy in your palm. “I—” You stop. Talking to voice mail: ungood. You text her back, quickly, suggesting meeting up in a friendly wine bar in the new town. Then you take a deep breath and swipe your phone back to its on-duty persona. You take another deep breath as you try to gather your scattered thoughts. You’re not sure how you feel about this; it’s been months, hasn’t it? But suddenly you feel almost hopeful. Which is bad, because you’re meant to be on duty. So you turn back to the waves and streams of ICIS chatter, and see—

KARL@Dresden, DE, 15:56 -1:00H: Hi guys we have a weird one here today! One of our local low-lifes tried to off himself in a really original way—we think. $PERP owns a fancy sun-tanning bed. (Don’t ask.) Apparently there is a common software hack to override the 10-minute maximum exposure and tanning intensity limits, and he drank half a bottle of schnapps spiked with oxazepam before getting in. Not sure why . . . Anyway, third-degree radiation burns to 95% of body! Man, those UVA LEDs are scary! There is rumour about tanning and street drugs producing endorphin high—are any similar reports?

You’re not sure just what it is that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, but you sit there and stare at the transcript for a long moment, then air-type:

QUERY: What is $PERP’s background?

It’s a minute or so before Karl spots your addition and replies, during which time you’re perusing a report on trends in toxicant inhalation among youth in the seedier Parisian banlieues, then:

$PERP is a scam artist—bulk-mailing fraud and tax evasion. Why?

Your fingers shaking, you reply:

Maybe nothing, but we have a weird one here, too. Our $PERP had a record: pharmaceutical spam, illegal sale of medicinal products, counterfeit goods. We are investigating as murder due to circumstances of death.