James Grippando - Afraid of the Dark

“Did you look at the file I sent you?”

Chuck had e-mailed Jack a key file that he had obtained through Project Round Up. It wasn’t that Jack didn’t appreciate how important the work was. It just took some emotional preparation to dive into this particular type of P2P trading.

“Not yet.”

“What are you waiting for? Another dead friend?”

Chuck had quite the way of reminding him that he was here for Neil. But he had a point. “I’ll do it tonight,” said Jack.

“Let’s do it now.”

“I said I’d get to it.”

“I’ll walk you through it. It will be better that way.”

Again, he had a point. Jack took a minute to say good-bye to Andie on his cell. Then he returned to Chuck on the landline and booted up his laptop. Chuck gave him click-by-click instructions to bring up the file. It was a video, as Jack had expected, and a thumbnail bearing the name Project Round Up appeared on Jack’s LCD.

“That’s obviously not the original thumbnail,” said Chuck. “But everything else about the file is intact, exactly the material I traded for on the P2P network. Left click once, and that will bring up the original thumbnail; click again, and that will enlarge it to screen size.”

Jack clicked once, and even though the icon was the size of a postage stamp, it was enough to give him pause. He clicked again and looked away.

“Do you see it?” asked Chuck.

Jack’s gaze returned to the screen. The girl staring back at him was wide-eyed with fright. Jack guessed that she was sixteen, at most, and her long brown hair was tied in pigtails to make her look even younger than she was. She was wearing only the skirt from a cheerleading outfit, and across her smallish breasts someone had written a message in bold red lipstick: FMLTWIA.

Chuck said, “If you click again-”

“Is it really necessary that I watch this?” said Jack.

“Hey, if you want to understand the artist, you have to look at the art.”

Jack had heard that analogy before, even from elite FBI profilers, and he’d never liked it. It was running way too far with Warhol’s concept that “art is what you can get away with,” as if there were art in savagery.

Jack took a breath and clicked again. The image shocked him, as he wasn’t prepared for instant hard-core sex.

Chuck said, “The guys who crave this stuff aren’t into foreplay.”

The man was unidentifiable, his face completely off screen, his body filmed from the big hairy stomach down, the phallic version of the proverbial Everyman. Nothing about the girl suggested a willing participant. Jack looked away, but the audio was equally disturbing-the man inside her shouting at his underage victim, berating her on his way toward climax.

“Who did this to you, huh?

“You did.”

“No! Who did this to you? Who made you into such a little slut?”

“Me.”

“Say it again!”

“I did.”

Jack closed the file, ending it. “That’s enough. I get it.”

“No, you don’t,” said Chuck. “I’ve been studying these sick sons of bitches for three years, and I still don’t get it.”

Jack felt a sudden urge to shut down his computer-to grab it and throw it out the window, he was so repulsed. He collected himself and said, “What I’m saying is that I ‘get’ the FMLTWIA. That was the text message that McKenna sent to Jamal before she was murdered.”

“Let’s be more precise,” said Chuck. “The man who killed McKenna used McKenna’s phone to send that message to Jamal. That made it look like Jamal was the killer. That’s why I was so encouraged when I found these FMLTWIA videos being traded in the P2P networks.”

“There are more?”

“Many more. Some sick pervert took the text acronym that high-school girls send to their boyfriends and turned it into his pornographic video signature.”

Jack was almost afraid to ask, but he had to know. “Is there a McKenna video?”

“Not that I’ve been able to find. But my theory is that her killer made one before… you know.”

Jack noted the break in Chuck’s voice, and it was a painful reminder that this was a father talking about his child. Chuck was a tough guy, but no one could be a John Walsh all of the time.

Chuck continued, his composure restored. “That’s what drives me with Project Round Up. If I can find McKenna’s video, and if I can use Project Round Up to unwind the trades all the way back to the camera that created it… bingo.”

“You found her killer.”

“In fact, it may be the only way to catch this guy,” said Chuck. “There are no witnesses. All physical evidence was destroyed in the fire.”

“Which would give McKenna’s killer good reason to go to great lengths to stop Project Round Up.”

There was silence on the line, as if they were both ticking off the lives that had been lost so far. Finally, Chuck said, “I realize there are missing pieces to this puzzle.”

“A few,” said Jack.

“I think they’ll fall into place once we get an answer to the one part of the equation that doesn’t seem to add up.”

Jack thought about it, and intuitively he knew it was the one thing that had troubled him all along. “Why did McKenna say Jamal did it?”

“Remind me to ask that question,” said Chuck, “just as soon as I get my hands around this monster’s throat.”

It was cold in the backseat of the taxi, but Vince didn’t ask the driver to turn up the heat. A little chill in the air would keep him alert.

It was important to be alert around guns.

Vince had lied to Jack about going down to dinner. Food was the furthest thing from his mind. He was singularly focused on the e-mail message that had landed in his work mailbox, and which his screen reader had converted from text to mechanical audio. “Are you afraid of the Dark? Admit it. You are. You shouldn’t have come to London. May the best blind man win.”

The city streets were wet, and the whump-whump of the windshield wipers gave rhythm to his ruminations. The Dark. He imagined the words were capitalized in the e-mail, and the significance wasn’t lost on him. He’d heard about the signature before-scrawled on the cocktail napkin in a message to Jack at the Lincoln Road cafe; on the napkin from Club Inversion that police had found in Jamal’s back pocket after he was killed. In is own mind, Vince had already made the connection between McKenna’s killer and this man who called himself the Dark. But the reference in this e-mail to “the best blind man” was confusing. Was he blind, too? Was he talking about blindness in some other sense? Was it just more taunting? Vince wasn’t sure. Nor had he determined how the Dark knew he was in London. But he recognized fighting words when he heard them. If it was a showdown he wanted, then yes, by all means: Let the better man win.

“Right turn at White Chapel High Street in twenty-five meters.”

It was the computerized voice of his GPS navigator. He didn’t trust taxi drivers, who had been known to rob blind people… well, blind.

The driver turned right, and Vince was glad to have kept him honest. They were headed for Brick Lane, an East End area once prowled by Jack the Ripper, now famous for curry houses and everything Bangladeshi. Streets were narrow and the one-way traffic was slow, so Vince used the travel time to phone his wife. The call went straight to voice mail. At the tone, he left a simple message.

“I love you.”

The taxi stopped. “I love you, too,” said the driver. “Four pounds fifty.”

The GPS navigator announced, “You have arrived at your destination.” It was nice to have the reassurance of technology that he wasn’t being dropped off just anywhere, even if the satellite was a few seconds late.