P Deutermann - The Cat Dancers

“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?”

An hour and a half later, Cam assembled the entire team in the office. Billy Mays and Pardee Bell had been on their day off and were not too thrilled, but having seen a rerun of the video, they now were at least interested.