P Tracy - Play To Kill aka Shoot To Thrill

Annie pulled the folder toward her and started shuffling through them. 'My God. There must be hundreds of them.'

Smith nodded. 'We narrowed it down as much as we could. The fringe sites we've listed are limited to those dedicated exclusively to murder scenarios. Some of them are distinctly amateurish and clearly staged events; others are questionable. We need a program that spots the real crimes instantly so we can get law enforcement on the ground right away, before critical evidence and possible witnesses are lost. Now tell me what you pulled off the Internet this morning.'

Roadrunner showed him a couple of print frames from the site. Smith looked at them without expression. The Feds were good at that. 'Did you get anything from this? Did you try a trace?'

'No joy,' Harley said. We already passed it on to Agent Shafer so he can put your people on it, but they're not going to get anywhere. That post was flying around the world at the speed of light. Right now we're running some enhancement programs on the film to see if we've got a real murder or Memorex.'

'Which won't do a lot of good without a location, and you can't get location without a trace.'

Annie tipped her head and gave him a little smile that gave him a little funny feeling in the pit of his stomach. 'A picture's worth a thousand words, darlin'. Or is it ten thousand?' She scooped up the folder containing fringe sites and stood. 'Are you okay there, or do you want us to set up a desk for you?'

Well, I think this will work for the time being' He sat quietly for a moment, watching and listening to the others as they scattered to their respective workstations, then opened his laptop to begin his daily report. He looked up from his screen when he heard a timid clicking, and stared in amazement as a sorry-looking dog with no tail climbed up onto the chair across the table and sat down facing him.

Magozzi had never been one for self-examination, although the department shrink suggested it every time he shot someone. Well. The two times he had shot someone. It hadn't told him much then – killers had taken a shot at him, and he shot back, what was to introspect? – and it wasn't going to tell him much now.

He'd had this silly idea as a young man that he'd make his way in the world, marry and have kids and a house and whatever the hell it was people called a normal life. That was the plan. That was what you grew up expecting when you were raised Italian Catholic with a family bigger than the population of Rhode Island and were stupid enough to believe that things would be the same for you as they had been for your parents. No one ever suggested that it might be otherwise; that your marriage would go south and you'd end up with a recliner and a twelve-inch TV and a blasted remnant of what your life was supposed to have been. And for sure no one ever told you that after the first marriage was erased like a mistake on a blackboard, you'd end up falling for a woman who would probably never say the word love out loud because it was a concept that eluded her. There would be no second marriage in his future; certainly no children, no shared house, no normal life. Not until he could manage to convince himself that he had to learn to live without Grace MacBride. He wasn't there yet. He wasn't even close, for all of Gino's prompting. But maybe he was stepping back, just a little; or maybe she was pushing him.

She opened the door when he knocked, and there was the thin smile reticence made, the swinging black hair, the face that always made his breath stop in his throat. And as if that weren't enough, there was Charlie's tongue licking his palm, and he was so goddamned stupid he thought all of this was the welcome home he'd been waiting for his whole life.

'Hey, Magozzi.'

'Hey, Grace.'

She stepped aside, reset the alarm when the door closed behind him, and just assumed he would follow her down the hall into the kitchen. When he didn't, she turned to look at him, puzzled. 'What's wrong?'

'You're working with the Feds. You were center stage at the seminar last weekend.'

Grace frowned at him. She didn't do facial expressions often, which made them strangely precious. 'It's just work, Magozzi.'

'Tommy told us a little about what was going on. It's not your everyday average security-system setup. It's big. You never mentioned it.'

Her frown deepened, almost making a line between her brows, but not quite. You want to know what I'm doing every minute, every day?'

Oh yeah. That was exactly what he wanted. 'Of course not. It just pissed me off to hear the FBI's sitting on some new kind of Internet-connected homicide without sharing info with the cops. We're the guys on the ground. If this stuff is really happening all over the country, we ought to get some sort of heads-up.'

'Only five confirmed so far.'

'Oh, good. I feel better. So they're bringing in outside geeks because their geeks couldn't trace the posts, right? And they brought us in on absolutely nothing. Every decent- size department in the country works the Internet, and yet Tommy gets a private invitation instead of through protocol channels. Is there a gag order on this thing?'

Grace blew out breath. 'Not that I know of. They're just trying to get something in place the locals can use before they bring everybody on board, which is where Monkeewrench comes in. And if you want to know anything more, you can come back to the kitchen instead of standing out here being a puke. I've got things on the stove.'

Magozzi blinked as she stomped away down the hall. Puke?

He walked into the kitchen and was immediately assaulted by food aromas that mellowed his mind. He'd read somewhere that the most sexually stimulating aroma for a man was cinnamon, but all he could smell was garlic, which probably was a good indicator of the way the night was going to go. "You have something to drink?'

'Wine? Beer?'

'Something stronger.'

She set a whiskey, straight up, at the wooden table and sat down next to him. 'Bad day?'

Magozzi sipped at the whiskey before he spoke again. 'We had a floater.'

Grace winced. 'I hate that term.'

'Makes it easier. Less personal.'

'Homicide?'

'No. Anant called just before I left the office. No bruising, hyoid bone intact, blood alcohol through the roof. It's off our desk, just not out of our minds yet. Plus, Tommy gave us a look at the Cleveland homicide video, which didn't do a whole lot to make the day brighter.'

'Shall I try to cheer you up?'

'Go for it.'

'Harley's got a Fed in his house.'

Magozzi actually smiled. 'Dead?'

'Not yet. He's going to work with us on the software the Bureau wants us to create.'

Which is?'

'They want a program to separate staged death scenes on the Web from the real thing.'

'Sounds impossible.'

Grace shrugged. We've got some ideas. The agent brought us the classified films and files, and a huge stack of fringe sites that pop in and out on the Net we have to look at. It's creepy stuff, Magozzi, especially the fetish sites.'

He nodded. 'We saw a few of those at the Cyber Crimes happy golf weekend last spring. Sex stuff, sadomasochism, like that.'

'It's a lot worse than that. People are acting out murders on instant messaging, taking turns being the victim and the killer…'

'How do you act out a murder on instant messaging?'

Grace made a sour-pickle face. 'It's really depraved. They text this crap. One writes something like, "I'm plunging the knife into your stomach", then the other one writes back, "Oh my God, oh my God, I feel it going in, the blade is cold, my blood is hot…'"

'Jesus.'

'Yeah. And as disgusting as the texting is, the photos are worse, especially on the specific fetish sites. There's one totally dedicated to drowning, by the way.'