James Swain - The Program

“ To the living we owe respect; to the dead we owe the truth. ”

The truth. Sometimes it was hard to find the truth. Linderman had seen these cards before. Printed on their faces were photographs of fifty-two people who’d been murdered or had gone missing in Florida. Each card contained a brief bio of the victim, along with a toll-free phone number to call. The cards were distributed to Florida’s prison population in the hope they might lead to tips or information in cracking the cases. He knew about the cards because Danni’s case was featured on one. Danni’s card was the Queen of Diamonds, which she would have liked. Beneath her photograph were the words 18 Year Old White Femalefollowed by a sixty-five word description of how she’d disappeared while jogging at the University of Miami.

“All done,” Wood said.

Linderman scooped up the cards and found himself staring at the dead and missing. In the margins of each card Crutch had written cryptic notes in pencil, sometimes several sentences long. The printing was tiny and needed magnification.

“Find something?” Jenkins asked, standing outside the cell.

“There’s writing on these playing cards,” Linderman explained. “I want to keep them, if that’s all right.”

“Take whatever you want. Just make sure you take things from the other cells as well.”

Linderman slipped the deck into his pocket. He supposed he should have leveled with Jenkins, and told him about Danni’s card being in the deck, and how he wanted to see what Crutch had written in the margins. But he decided against it. He’d stopped believing that anyone truly cared about what had happened to his daughter except he, his wife, and a handful of his friends. So he rarely talked about it, and never with strangers.

Linderman grabbed a handful of items from other cells. Wood met him in the center of the cellblock when he was finished.

“All done?” Linderman asked.

“All done,” Wood said.

“Having a little cougar-time?” a voice asked.

Vick turned away from her computer. DuCharme stood in the doorway to her temporary office at police headquarters, holding two cups of coffee and a bag of pastries, his body reeking of cheap aftershave.

“Excuse me?” she replied.

DuCharme bit his lower lip. As opening lines went, it was a real stinker.

“You’ve never heard of cougar-time?” the detective asked.

“Afraid not.”

“It’s a popular expression with the kids.”

“That’s nice.”

She went back to her computer. The police department’s server had been down, and her web site had just gone live. She was monitoring the postings on the site’s blog, hoping Mr. Clean took the bait. There was technology which would have enabled her to read the site’s blog on her BlackBerry, only no one in the building knew how to use it.

“Those coffees must be hot,” she said.

“You bet they’re hot. They’re burning my fingers.”

“Put them on the desk and have a seat.”

DuCharme put the food on the desk. He grabbed a chair and sat so their legs were nearly touching. Shredding the bag, he removed two huge Danish pastries dripping with sweet cheese, and offered Vick one.

“No thanks,” Vick said.

“Aw, come on. They’re really good.”

“I was raised never to eat anything bigger than my head.”

“You sure?”

“Yes, Roger, I’m sure.”

DuCharme inhaled the first Danish as if it were his last meal, gulped down his coffee, then attacked the second with the same gusto. The crescendo was a deep belch which he smothered with his fist.

“You’ve piqued my curiosity,” she said. “What’s cougar-time?”

“It’s when older women pursue younger men,” DuCharme said, licking the sugar off his fingers.

“And why would that pertain to me?”

He pointed at the photographs of Mr. Clean’s three victims lying on the desk. “Those are three good-looking boys,” he said.

“Those are our victims. In case you hadn’t noticed, Mr. Clean is picking good-looking teenage boys to kidnap and kill. I was studying them.”

“I thought Mr. Clean was picking them because they were punks.”

“Punks?”

“Yeah. You know, trash.”

“Why do you call them that? Because they’ve killed?”

“Damn straight.”

“They’re still victims.”

“Society’s better off with them gone, you ask me.”

No one asked you, Vick nearly said. She stifled the urge to blow him off, and tried a more tactful approach. “Society treats young people who kill differently than adults. Young people, especially teenage boys, often act impulsively, and don’t fully comprehend the consequences of what they’re doing.”

“What… we should let them skate?”

“No, just give them another chance.”

“Why do that?”

“So they can be rehabilitated.”

DuCharme pointed at Wayne Ladd’s photo. “That boy stuck a bayonet through his mother’s boyfriend’s heart. He got right in his victim’s face, and looked him in the eye when he killed him. There’s no changing punks like that.”

Vick wanted the conversation to end. A new posting had appeared on the web site’s blog. Reading it, the skin on her scalp turned warm and prickly.

The police are never going to catch this guy because the police don’t know what they’re doing. They’re fucking assholes. They look at things, and only see what they want to see. How can people that fucking stupid expect to solve a crime. Answer: THEY CAN’T!

Someone with real anger toward the police had written this. The claim that the police would never catch the killer was also troubling. Vick typed a command into her computer that allowed her to access the filter on the site. The author’s IP address appeared on her screen, along with the physical address of the author’s computer. The posting had been made from a computer terminal at the Broward County main library.

Vick phoned the library and spoke to the sheriff’s deputy in charge of security. She asked the deputy how many cops were on duty.

“I’ve got five officers in the building,” the deputy said.

“Get them together, and go to where the computer terminals are located,” Vick said. “Have your officers hold whoever’s sitting at those computers. Our suspect is a large Cuban male between thirty-five and fifty years of age. He’s armed and extremely dangerous. I’ll be right there.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the deputy said.

Vick hung up and grabbed her purse off the back of her chair. She was halfway out the door when she spotted DuCharme frantically punching a number into his cell phone. She paid it no heed, and hurried down the hallway toward the elevators.

The Broward County library was an imposing six-story structure on the corner of Andrews Avenue and SW 6th Street in downtown Fort Lauderdale. A covered walkway protruding from the building’s second floor led to an elevated parking garage across the street, which also serviced the nearby courthouse. Vick had planned to park in the garage and use the walkway, only there was a problem. The front of the library was jammed with police cars, both marked and unmarked. Unable to maneuver around them, she put her FBI decal on the dash, and parked in a bus zone. She turned to DuCharme, who sat in the passenger seat.

“Is this your doing?” she asked angrily.

“Sorry. I wasn’t thinking,” the detective said.

“What if Mr. Clean was listening to the police patrol car conversations on a scanner, and heard your distress call go out? You didn’t say our suspect was a serial killer, did you?”

“I may have…”

“You idiot .”