Play To Kill

    '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?'