I clicked on images. The next page to pop up was full of thumbnail photographs of starving kids, most of them naked. If you'd seen any one of the photos in the middle of an essay about world hunger or something, it would have seemed perfectly innocuous. But when you put them all together this wayâwell, it was clear enough. This was pornography. Some bunch of sick geeks were sitting around getting their rocks off looking at starving children.
I felt a horrible numbness soaking up through my body, an uncomfortable fascination, not with the images, but with a sort of perverse curiosity to know how far these sickos would take this fetish.
Was this Lt. Gooch's fantasy? Or the most recent fruits of his investigation?
I went back to the main page, clicked on the chat room. It was full of conversations between people with screen names like GAUNTLVR and HUNGRKID, conversations about the enjoyment they found in seeing starving children. This made me even more nauseated than the images themselves.
Back to the main page again. I stared at the screen for a while. I wanted to flee, to leave this place forever, to never even have to think about it again, but I knew that I was suddenly and finally on the road to an answer. I clicked on button that said STARVATION LIVE.
The computer came back with a message saying: “You are not authorized to enter this area. Would you like to register for starvation live?”
I hit the “Yes” button.
For a while nothing happened. A minute went by, then two, then five. I was just getting ready to turn off the machine when a small chat box popped up. A message appeared.
I typed in the screen name from the e-mail message. OXFORD.
CAPTHUNGER: DON'T PLAY WITH ME.
OXFORD: I'M NOT.
CAPTHUNGER: THEN TELL ME WHO YOU ARE.
OXFORD: I THOUGHT THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ANONYMOUS.
CAPTHUNGER: KEEP DREAMING, DIPSHIT. WHO ARE YOU?
OXFORD: MY NAME IS HANK GOOCH. I LIVE IN ATLANTA.
CAPTHUNGER: WHAT'S YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER?
OXFORD: ARE YOU CRAZY?
CAPTHUNGER: DO YOU WANT STARVATION LIVE OR NOT?
I waited, made it like I was thinking. Finally I just typed in a bunch of random numbers.
OXFORD: OKAY, OKAY. 236-00-4457.
There was a long pause. It struck me that what he was doing was verifying the number on a credit bureau or some other online source. I started rummaging furiously around in the drawers of the desk until I found a pay stub from the department. Lt. Gooch's Social Security number was right there in the corner. I typed in another line.
OXFORD: LOOK, SORRY, YOU MADE ME NERVOUS.I'M NEW AT THIS. MY REAL NUMBER IS 105-78-3328.
Again there was a long pause. Then the response came back:
CAPTHUNGER: THAT'S BETTER. YOU CAME HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, SO I'M CUTTING YOU SOME SLACK. NOW, HERE'S THE DEAL. YOU SIGN UP FOR STARVATION LIVE ONE MONTH AT A TIME. THAT GIVES YOU 24 HOUR ACCESS TO THE SHOW. YOUR PASSWORD IS YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER. THE COST IS $2,000 FOR THE MONTH.
OXFORD: JESUS. THAT MUCH?
CAPTHUNGER: I'M GETTING IMPATIENT HERE. YOU IN OR OUT?
OXFORD: IN.
CAPTHUNGER: I'VE GOT YOUR CREDIT CARD ON FILE. YOU WANT TO CHARGE IT?
OXFORD: YES.
CAPTHUNGER: EXCELLENT. YOU'RE GOOD TO GO NOW. AND TRUST ME, IT'S WORTH EVERY DIME. FEEDINGS ARE AT 10:00 AM AND 10:00 PM. IF YOU'RE INTO THAT. EXERCISE IS AT 3:00 AND LASTS ABOUT AN HOUR. WE'LL SEND YOU E-MAIL TO NOTIFY YOU OF SPECIAL EVENTS. THE CHERRY POPPER, IN PARTICULAR, IS NOT TO BE MISSED. ENJOY!
OXFORD: OKAY.
CAPTHUNGER: ONE LAST THING. I NEED NOT POINT OUT TO YOU HOW SERIOUS THIS SHIT IS. I AM NOT JOKING WHEN I SAY THAT IF YOU MESS WITH US, YOU WILL BE TERMINALLY SORRY. WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE, AND WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE. ALSO IF YOU EVER MENTION THIS TO ANYBODY WITHOUT CLEARING IT WITH US FIRST, YOU WILL BE TERMINALLY SORRY. PLAY BY THE RULES, EVERYBODY IS HAPPY. GET STUPID, YOU'LL BE TERMINALLY SORRY. I TRUST I'M MAKING MYSELF CLEAR.
The chat box disappeared, and I was immediately transferred to a password screen. I typed in Lt. Gooch's Social Security number, and a new screen popped up immediately. It was a small pop-up screen, the kind that carries full-motion streaming video. For a minute I had a hard time making out what was in the picture. It looked like a large, complicated, smooth river rock. Then something moved. An arm. And it turned from stone into a little girl, naked, curled up in a ball. Her body looked slightly distorted from the closeness of the wide-angle lens, but it was easy enough to see that she was being starved. Every rib was clearly outlined, and her elbows and shoulders stuck out from her tiny arms like knobs. She stirred listlessly, her face turning toward the camera. Her cheeks were sunken, her eyes glazed, her skin taut against her skull.
But still, I recognized her in a heartbeat: it was Jenny Dial.
For a moment I stared at her in horror, trying to get a bead on how I felt. It didn't take long. Maybe some folks might have felt sick or sad or grieved. But not me, goddammit. I got mad. Oh, boy. Next thing I knew, I had picked up the computer and slammed it against the wall. The screen shattered, and bits of plastic showered all over the floor.
“All right you bastard! Mama's coming now.” I guess maybe I was screaming. Sometimes that happens when a thing actually matters: you stop caring.
FORTY-FOUR
I was out the door of Lt. Gooch's apartment and down the stairs before I noticed the white Crown Vic parked on the other side of the lot.
For a moment I thought about trying to hide or slip away. But then I realized there was no point in it. So I just charged across the cracked tarmac, yanked open the passenger-side door, and sat down next to Captain Goodwin. The captain's car, I noticed, was equipped with the full patrol car electronic rigânot just the Motorola radio; but the AFIS computer, the one that allowed street cops to run plate numbers, wants and warrants, criminal records, aliases, and so on. So far as I knew, the computer ran dedicated: it was piped straight into the department's main computer. It wasn't like you could log on to the Internet through AFIS. But jacked into Captain Goodwin's AFIS machine was something that wasn't standard department issue: a notebook computer.
Suddenly I was thinking:
what if?
“They let you do that, Captain Hunger?” I said.
Captain Goodwin looked at me coolly. At least I assume he was looking at me; I couldn't see his eyes because of the sunglasses. “Do what?”
“Surf the net while you're on duty? Huh, Captain Hunger? Soak up all that precious departmental bandwidth?” I couldn't see the screen, so I didn't know what was on there. I was just guessing. But suddenly it seemed like a reasonable guess.
He kept looking at me imperiously from behind the shades.
“And take those silly things off. You look like an idiot!” I reached over and yanked the sunglasses off his face. Even at night I could see he didn't have the usual dark eyes of a black man. They were a sort of murky, mossy green. “This where you running it from? Have computer, will travel? Huh? Huh, Captain Hunger?”
He folded his glasses, set them on the dashboard, closed his computer. Finally he spoke. “Don't put your hand on my glasses again, Detective. They cost me a hundred and twelve dollars.”
“Captain Hunger,” I said. “Cap. Tain. Hung. Ger.”
He seemed slightly puzzled. Or slightly off-put, I couldn't tell. “My name is Goodwin.”
“Oh?” I said. “You want to show me what's on your screen, then?”
“What's that got to do with anything?”
I grabbed his computer, turned it around, flipped open the screen. I expected to see an Internet browser. Instead it was a word-processing program. The last line on the screen said, “Subject exited Lt. Gooch's apt. at 10:21 PM.”
I hit a few keys trying to find a browser, but came up with nothing.
“Where is it, Captain Hunger? How do you get on the Internet from here?”
“What in the name of hell are you talking about? You can't access the net off an AFIS machine.”
“Yeah, but this isn't an AFIS computer.”
“I'm telling you. The only communications I can do with this is call up AFIS.” He looked at me curiously. “And anyway, what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?”
“I'm asking the questions,” I said.
“Feel free. Ask anything you want. But when I get back to City Hall East, I'm going to write you up for insubordination and striking a superior officer. And then I'm going to recommend that the Chief do what he should have done a year ago: take you off the force.”
“Where were you on January 13 of this year?”
“See, I'm going to be tolerant. I'm gonna be nice. I'm gonna humor you. So let me ask you again, what's that got to do with anything?”
“You know, Captain Hunger,” I said. “I believe I need to take this to the next level.”
“Meaning what?”
I drew my Glock and pointed it at his face. “Meaning, I asked you what you were doing on January the thirteenth.”
He shook his head sadly, playing it cool. “Mm, mmm,
mmm
. Now we're looking at criminal charges.”
“Answer the question.”
“January? Let's see . . . I was with my wife down in Antigua.”
“Prove it.”
He shrugged, tapped a few keys on his computer, turned the screen around. It was some sort of personal-organizer program. On the screen was a calendar for the month of January. In each daily block for the middle of the month was typed one word.
ANTIGUA
.
I felt a sinking sensation. “How about June 9 of last year?”
His manicured fingernails clicked on the keys. He turned it around again. In the block for June 9 it said
FBI TRAINING QUANTICO. “
Some training the Chief sent me on. Methods and management of interdepartmental narcotics task forces. Very informative seminar.”
I decided to start from the other end. “1987. Where were you?”
He raised one beautiful eyebrow. “Nineteen eighty-
seven
? I was working street patrol for the NYPD. The nine-six up in Harlem.”
I still had the pistol trained on his face. “1990?”
“Passed the sergeant's exam in New York, took an assignment at One PP.”
“One PP? What's that?”
“One Police Plaza. NYPD headquarters. Bureau of Crime Information.”
I lowered the gun. If he was in New York when the first four or five murders went down, there was no way he was the right guy. “You can prove all this? Tickets, calendars, time cards, whatever?”
“Of course.” He kept looking at me. “Whoa. Hey. Wait a minute? Are you still obsessing on this crazy serial-killer thing? Lt. Gooch is dead.”
“Lt. Gooch may be dead, yeah, but the case is alive. And Gooch didn't kill those kids.”
“You are living a fantasy,” he said. “I read his files.” Then his face suddenly went blank. He knew he shouldn't have said that.
“So you're admitting to me that you removed evidence from the scene of a homicide, that you destroyed chain of custody with evidence from a crime scene.”
He sighed. “Look. There's no serial killer here. Maybe Gooch killed four kids. Maybe five. But the DNA on all those other cases proves that they were done by other people.”
I shook my head. “Nope. I've been studying this, and I believe what happened was that somebody planted the DNA evidence. If you had actually
read
those files instead of skimming them, you'd see that Gooch had already figured that out. For a minute there, I thought it was you. But I guess it's not.”
“You're delusional.”
“I wish I was.”
Captain Goodwin frowned at me. “Meaning what?”
“Jenny Dial? I just saw her.”
“Girl, you aren't making sense.”
“You ever heard of hunger freaks?”
“Hunger freaks?”
“They're perverts who get their rocks off looking at starving children.”
“So?”
“So, I
saw
her. Jenny Dial. On the Net. A live video feed on a pervert site. This guy, Captain Hunger, he's letting freaks watch her starve to death.”
Captain Goodwin studied my face for a long time. “When?” he said finally. His voice had gotten soft and strange.
“Five minutes ago. She's lying around in a box, naked, starving to death. And for two grand, you can watch it happen.”
“Yeah, but . . .” He frowned. “None of your kids showed evidence of starvation. I did read the files.”
“Actually, they did show evidence of having been starved. But it was a subtle clue. I think what he does, he takes them right up to the point of death, then he brings them back. Force-feeds them or something. Just enough so that when he kills them, the MO will be different in every case.”
Goodwin stared out the window for a while. “You really saw this little girl? You're not bullshitting me?”
“You think I would have pulled a pistol on you if I hadn't seen her? I thought it was you. I thought that was why you were following me around.”
He drew himself up a little straighter, put on an officious look. “Hey, I'm just doing my job.”
“So it's the chief that's got you following me around.”
“Well, I'm not some stalker, for goodness sake. Frankly right now I'd rather be home with my wife.”
“The Chief say why he wants you following me?”
“Damage control. He doesn't want you pursuing this case anymore. We had a serial killer in the department, he wants to minimize the damage. He says it's five missing kids, he doesn't want you running around talking about how, no, it's seventeen kids or how, no, it's not Gooch, it's somebody else. The department does not need that. We need to get this over and done with, nice and clean.”
“And you'd sacrifice Jenny Dial to that?”
He clamped his jaw shut. “I don't know anything about Jenny Dial.”
“I just
told
you.”
“You, Little Miss Crankhead, being a real trustworthy source of information.”
I stared at him for a while. “All right. All right. You want to follow me? Follow me now.”
I got out of his car, ran over to my old car, jumped in, and drove back to my house as fast as that poor wheezing engine would go. About halfway there the Captain put on his flashing lights.
When we reached my apartment, I ran up the stairs. Goodwin was two strides behind me. I went inside my apartment, turned on the computer, logged onto the Internet, then typed in captainhunger.com.
I clicked on the button that said STARVATION LIVE. The password screen popped up. I typed in Lt. Gooch's Social Security number.
The message came back quickly. ACCESS DENIED.
“Must have typed the number in wrong.” I checked the e-mail from Captain Hunger to Lt. Gooch to make sure I had the passcode right; then I typed it in carefully, hit the return key.
ACCESS DENIED.
I felt a mounting nervousness. I typed in the number a third time.
This time the chat screen popped up.
CAPTHUNGER> WE KNOW WHO YOU ARE.
The chat box went away. The Captain Hunger main screen sat there with its pious little paragraph about World Hunger.
“Who did you call?” I said softly. “Did you call the Chief?”
Captain Goodwin had an angry look on his pretty face. “I don't see
anything
here.”
“I'm asking you a question. Did you call the Chief?”
Captain clenched his jaw. “Of
course
I called the Chief. I
work
for the Chief.”
“Because seventeen minutes ago, Captain Hunger thought I was just some pervert. Now he knows who I am. You want to explain that? You want to explain how he figured me out?”
Captain Goodwin stood sharply. “Consider yourself suspended. And when the Chief gets back on Monday, you may expect that I will inform him that I'm pressing criminal charges against you.”
“The only difference between now and seventeen minutes ago is that you called the Chief in between.”
“No, the only difference is that for about five minutes, I halfway believed your crazy-ass story.”
“Where's the Chief now? I want to talk to him.”
“The Chief is at his place on the lake. With his family. And I guarantee he will not be chatting with you.” He moved one step toward me. “Now. I want your badge and I want your weapon and I want your ID.”
I took a step back.
He took another step toward me. “Your badge and your weapon. Right now.”
I pulled out my Glock again, pointed it at his face.
“This is getting tedious,” he said. But based on the way his face went one shade paler, it didn't look like tedious was quite the right word.
“Get out of my house.”
We stood there in silence. I could see he was looking hard at my trigger finger. I started taking up the slack in the trigger. He saw it, too, the trigger creeping slowly back. “There's about a quarter inch of slack in this trigger,” I said. “I'd say it's moved about an eighth.”
He began backing slowly toward the door. “You are history, little girl,” he said softly. “You are way past anybody saving your ass now.” I followed him out the bedroom and across the floor of my living room, my front sight right in the middle of his face. He felt the knob behind him with his hand, not taking his eyes off my trigger finger. The door opened, and he disappeared. As soon as the door closed I heard him running, heading for his car like some scared kid.
I realized I was still pointing the Glock at the open, empty doorway. I kicked the door shut. My hands were shaking as I lowered the gun.