Leslie Parrish: Fade To Black

“If you’ll excuse me, I think I need to go splash bleach in my eyes before the second feature,” Mulrooney said.

Nobody laughed. They all felt much the same.

Brandon closed the video player window on his powerful, state-of-the-art laptop, and swiveled in Wyatt’s chair. “It’s not a double feature. I’ve found eight so far.”

Wyatt put a hand up, halting the conversation that erupted after Brandon ’s bald announcement. “Let’s take five, then meet back here when we’ve all regained our focus.”

Leaving the tight office, Dean finally felt capable of drawing a clean breath of air. Or at least as clean a breath as one could get in this stuffy, stifling old suite of crappy rooms at FBI headquarters.

Only the computer equipment was top-of-the-line. Everything else had been handed down to the team by other departments: desks, chairs, and worktables that had been gathering dust in their own storage rooms.

Wyatt’s requisition for office equipment had been stalled.And their so-called conference room was stacked floor to ceiling with dusty boxes full of ancient files.

“What the hell did you get yourself into?” Dean asked himself aloud as he grabbed a bottle of water from a small fridge somebody had stuck in the hallway between two rickety bookcases. He took it into his office and sipped it slowly, savoring the clean, cool relief that seemed to wash away some of the ugliness of the morning. When he was finished, he headed back into the lion’s den.

Entering his boss’s office, Dean found the others already there. They were seated in folding chairs around a small worktable somebody had set up at the end of the desk. Wyatt sat behind it, Brandon to his right.

Brandon, suitably subdued, didn’t volunteer any new information. He quietly waited for their boss to ask him for the exact details he wanted to know.

Blackstone picked up right where they’d left off. “Are all of them bad as the one you showed us?”

The young IT specialist shrugged. “Define bad . If getting buried alive is nicer than being ripped in half, I suppose some are worse than others. They’re all pretty awful, by any definition.”

Buried alive. God in heaven.

“How do you know they’re connected?”

“The unsub himself. He’s got a portfolio, I guess you’d call it.”

“Hold up,” Dean said, not willing to accept the brief answers a chastened Brandon Cole might offer. He wanted the whole story, start to finish. That might not be Wyatt’s style, but the supervisory special agent wasn’t a field guy; he hadn’t been for a long time. He was used to running an office, being briefed along the way-succinctly and concisely.

Dean knew from experience, however, that succinct and concise didn’t cut it at the start of an investigation. They needed to know every detail, as ugly as those details might be. Learning the minutiae would allow all of them to watch for patterns, to hunt for mistakes. And bring them closer to nailing this sick bastard.

Besides, something this distasteful had to be built up to, not just gulped down in huge bites of information.

“Start at the beginning, Cole. Who the hell is this guy, and how’d you find him?”

“I got a tip from an old friend,” Cole said. “He’s a gamer. D and D, Second Life, Zanpo. Guy lives a virtual existence; I don’t think he’s seen the sun since 2006. He heard rumors about a very secretive site, an international one, where things don’t just get realistic; they’re downright bloody.” Cole tilted back on the rear two legs of his chair, like some kid in science class. “It’s called Satan’s Playground, and from what my friend said, that’s a pretty good name for the kinds of things going on there.”

“Never heard of it,” Dean said.

“Considering it’s been around for a couple of years, you’d think there’d be more whispers about it among that circle, but the people who run the site are smart, and they’re secretive. Nobody gets in without an invitation and five ‘references.’ The whole thing’s hosted overseas, with members in probably two dozen countries. Redundant servers, constantly changing passwords, encryption, layer upon layer of security.”

Dean might officially be part of the Cyber Division now, but he had only the most basic knowledge of computers, so he didn’t even try to understand the technical details Brandon rattled off. Mulrooney, he already knew, was the same way.

That was another thing that made their CAT unique-having a good mix of experienced field agents and IT specialists. It was, of course, the only way a group formed to solve Internet-related murders could ever work. They needed both skill sets. Make that the best of both skill sets. Which was exactly what Blackstone had told Dean when he’d recruited him.

“Sounds sophisticated for a bunch of bored losers with no real lives,” Lily said.

Brandon shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what we’re looking at. Judging by the money involved, and some of the conversations I’ve seen, we’re talking about normal people with careers, families, wealth . It’s much more like a pervert’s secret worldwide club than any gaming universe for teenagers with no social skills and no jobs. Accountants by day, cyber S and M masters by night.”

“So, Brandon, how’d you break in?” Jackie Stokes asked, her tone challenging. Stokes was the unique one in the group, straddling both lines. She’d done forensic work in the field early in her career, but had started working cyber crimes several years ago when her kids were little. Now that they were older, she seemed itchy to get back out there, traveling, getting her hands dirty. Though Dean doubted she’d ever pictured them getting this dirty. “I don’t suppose you got an invite. And if you did, I have serious questions about these friends of yours.”

Brandon merely shrugged, a tiny smirk on his mouth. The guy was cocky. Maybe as cocky as Dean had been when he’d started with the Baltimore PD fresh out of college a lifetime ago.

“Let’s just say I came in through the unattended back gate of the Playground.” Then the young man focused his attention on Wyatt. “Satan’s Playground doesn’t exist anywhere but in cyberspace. Sounds to me like it’s exactly our type of case.”

Wyatt didn’t reply, appearing to mull it over.

Wanting more, Dean prodded, “Okay, we’ve got the backstory. Tell us what you discovered when you actually made your way inside.”

“I discovered that animated people can have all kinds of wild, nasty sex and can do the most violent, degrading things to each other.” Brandon spoke quickly, as always, expecting everyone to keep up. “Rape, pedophilia, S and M, incest, whatever your kink, there’s an area of the playground for you. Including a big hellhole under the sliding board for those who like to enact murder scenes, to the cheers and adulation of others.”

“Virtual murders,” Dean clarified.

“At first. But then, almost a year and a half ago, something changed. This new guy appeared on the scene. Calls himself the Reaper.”

How original.

“His avatar is this black-cloaked dude with a skull face; a totally off-the-rack, Grim Reaper Halloween- costume look. And he invites people to join a new club within Satan’s Playground. A club for those who want to see people really die.”

Dean would like to think such a club would have very few members. But he knew better. After twelve years in law enforcement, God, did he know better.

Still needing to work off the nervous energy that always enveloped him, Brandon began to tap his pencil on the table, keeping an underlying staccato beat-a sense of urgency in the rhythm. “His first one was a freebie, just to show he could do it.”