P Tracy - Play To Kill aka Shoot To Thrill

'Suddenly, murder films are turning up all over the Internet, from all over the country. And the reason we know they're real is because every single murder was advertised in advance, in detail, right in chat room postings for anybody to see, and there's a body to match every post.'

'Including your drowning.'

'That's the first one we found.'

The judge's ruddy, booze-hound complexion turned pale. 'Good Lord. How many?'

'Eight. That we know of.'

'Eight?'

'Well, actually seven dead. The eighth one happened last night in Medford, Oregon, but the woman survived. She's in ICU now.'

The judge shook his head, then looked down into his glass and was quiet for such a long time, Magozzi and Gino started to wonder if he'd passed out sitting up. 'My God. The world has lost its collective mind,' he finally said.

'I'd say so.'

'You've got a true maniac on your hands, Detectives.'

'Actually, we think there's more than one killer.'

He blinked. 'This is simply overwhelming, even to me, and I lost faith in humanity long ago. How on earth did you go from a simple drowning two nights ago to a nationwide murder conspiracy?'

'The Feds are involved, and they brought in Monkeewrench. They're the ones who found the pre-posts that match with the victims – they all follow the same format. They seem harmless out of context, but the pattern suggests these guys are communicating. Showing off their trophies.'

The judge was thinking hard, and he seemed truly present for the first time since they'd met him. He'd even forgotten about his drink. 'But surely, either Cyber Crimes or Monkeewrench will ultimately be able to trace these posts or these films, and then you'll have your perpetrator. Or perpetrators.'

'Whoever's doing this is good. They know how to hide. So far, everything's been untraceable. So there you go, Judge. Is that enough of a puzzle for you?'

The judge cocked a brow. 'I don't know much about computers, but I do know quite a bit about human nature. Our species is reliable in one way and one way only – eventually, we all make mistakes. I would guess your killers are living on borrowed time.'

Magozzi's cell phone started playing AC/DC, and he excused himself and picked up. 'Grace.' He listened for a few moments, then pulled a notebook and pen out of his pocket and started scrawling.

'What is it?' Gino asked when he hung up, not at all liking the expression his partner was wearing.

'Monkeewrench just found a ninth pre-post. "City of Big Cheese, pink polyester, near steer," and they think Wisconsin's a possibility. They want us to call Sheriff Halloran over there and see if he can't help pinpoint a location, because they're running out of time to maybe prevent the murder.'

The judge dropped his glass and it shattered on the floor, spilling amber liquid over white marble. 'I used to have a cabin in Door County,' he said, his voice and expression numb. 'Interstate 94 to Wisconsin Highway 10. There's a diner just before that turnoff called the Litde Steer, and thirty miles north of that is the glass semi-trailer that holds what was then the largest block of cheese in the world, exhibited at the World's Fair.'

Harley was pacing the office like a manic gorilla, pounding a beefy fist into his palm, boots banging the wooden floor. 'Okay. City of Big Cheese. That's in Wisconsin for sure, right?'

'Absolutely positively,' Annie agreed.

Agent John Smith had his elbows braced on the table, his hands pushing through his nowhere FBI haircut. 'California produces more cheese per year than Wisconsin.'

Annie dismissed that silly notion with a fluff of her black bob. 'That is not true. I have been to Wisconsin, that place is practically made of cheese, and they produce more than any other state. I read that on a placemat in a diner over there.'

Smith shrugged. 'Point of pride for the Dairyland. California passed them in tonnage some time ago, but they're still in denial.'

'Crap,' Roadrunner grumbled from his station. 'I have almost three million sites on the search for Big Cheese. Give me some more parameters.'

'Add California and Wisconsin,' Harley said. 'Otherwise all we've got in the post is "pink polyester" and "near steer."

Annie snapped her fingers. 'What did I tell you, Agent Smith? Near steer. Who has more cows than Wisconsin?'

'California. And Texas. And probably Oklahoma.'

'That is an out-and-out lie.'

'It might be.'

Annie raised her brows. That had sounded suspiciously like a tease, which stunned her. In her experience, teasing a woman was directly related to testosterone, but Agent Smith looked like someone had wrung every bit of that out of him long ago. She opened her mouth to tell him the further edification that in the one Wisconsin diner she'd been in, the waitresses had worn pink-polyester ugly suits, but the phone rang before she could utter a syllable.

'Yes?' Grace snatched her receiver, listened, said, 'Got it,' and hung up. She looked over at Annie. 'Magozzi has a possible location. Interstate 94 and Wisconsin Highway 10, a diner called the Litde Steer.'

'Shit!' Harley bellowed. 'What county is that? Who's the sheriff?'

'I'm on it!' Roadrunner shouted back.

Agent John Smith put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. They were going to lose another one.

Lisa Timmersman didn't believe there was a hope on God's green earth of growing up thin on a Wisconsin farm. She had been a ten-pound baby born with her hand out for a cookie, to hear her father tell it, and for a while, looking at the rest of her hefty family, she actually believed she had just been a genetic fat bomb waiting to blow up.

It never occurred to her that growing up eating pure lard on homemade bread, and gravy on everything else, had anything to do with it. It was all she knew, and barely worth thinking about, since all the farm kids in her little country school looked pretty much the way she did.

And then skinny little Cassandra Michels transferred into her second-grade class from Milwaukee, told Lisa she was the fattest girl she ever saw in her life and that what she needed was an eating disorder. At that age, Lisa didn't have the slightest idea what an eating disorder was, or where she could get one. But that single remark from that single person taught her a very important lesson: that the people outside the small circle of her childhood weren't going to like her, not one little bit, all because she'd been born fat into a fat family and didn't have a prayer of changing that.

So, you carry a little extra baggage. Honey, that ain't such a bad thing. Makes for a softer place for a man to fall, and some day that's going to be a good thing.

Lisa had been eight at the time and didn't understand much of what her daddy was telling her, but for years she had nightmares about some gray area in her future where really fat hairy men would fall on her and squash her flat.

It wasn't her daddy's fault, who raised the food she ate, or her mother's, who put it on the table. All they'd ever done was let her know how much they loved her, and that she was pretty and smart and could be just about anything she wanted to be. They meant well, but they didn't have Cassandra Michels' perspective, and that was what she listened to.

When she was thirteen, her daddy put up a satellite dish and Lisa found the Food Network, where the people who cooked wore snappy white coats and clogs to work, which was totally cool. A lot of them were pretty fat, too, and no one made fun of them, which sealed the deal for her. Lisa was going to be a famous chef. She'd go to the culinary school in Chicago, or maybe Minneapolis, and then she'd buy a new front door for the house that fit so tight her mother wouldn't have to tuck blankets into the crack at the bottom to block the winter winds. And maybe one of those new shiny steel steam cleaners so her dad didn't have to kill himself scrubbing the milkhouse with a hose and a brush twice a day.