Dodge waved this away. "Fuck Grandy. When this gets out, nobody’s gonna give two shits about police brutality. Even the fucking spooks won’t care. They’ll be too busy getting the hell out of town like everybody else."
Levine tried not to look interested, but as a poker player, he frankly sucked, and Dodge knew he had the reporter’s complete attention.
"Why will anybody be leaving town?" Levine tried for humor. "Stage-three smog alert?"
"More like DEFCON One in a fucking war."
Levine blinked. "War? What is it, the goddamn Arabs again?"
"It’s better than that. Imagine if I were to tell you that we have a weapon of mass destruction floating around in this city, only it’s not in the hands of your run-of-the-mill little-dicked camel jockey. This time it’s in the possession of a bona fide serial killer. What would you say about that?"
The question was rhetorical. Dodge knew exactly what Levine would say-namely, nothing at all. The man just stared.
"That’s right, my friend," Dodge went on. "This city is in some serious shit. And I know the details."
"You shitting me?"
Dodge gave him a bored look.
"Okay, okay, you’re not bullshitting, sorry, I just mean that this is, I mean, this is…"
Awful. Terrifying. Unthinkable. There were lots of words he could have used.
"This is fantastic! I mean, this is fucking incredible. If it pans out," he added cautiously.
"It’ll pan out." Dodge waited, saying nothing more.
"So give," Levine said finally.
"What’s it worth to you?" Another rhetorical question.
" If it pans out, like you claim…you’ll get the ten grand."
Dodge smiled. "That’s what I like about you, Myron. In the end, you’re always willing to be reasonable."
When he was done with Levine, Dodge sat alone and had himself a slice of Lucy J’s pie. He was going to grow a goddamned potbelly if he kept celebrating like this, but what the fuck. He had reason to celebrate. He’d obtained three grand in cash, with an IOU for the rest. He knew Levine was good for it. Gutless little troll didn’t have the balls to double-cross him, and besides, he couldn’t afford to shut off such a valuable pipeline of information-especially after today.
Anyway, Levine had gotten a bargain. Fucking story was worth twenty grand easy, maybe twenty-five. But Dodge had known that Levine would never go that high without tedious negotiations. That process would take time, and Dodge couldn’t wait. Some other media outlet might get hold of the story.
There were a dozen-hell, a hundred-places that might spring a leak. Even in Tess McCallum’s rushed synopsis of events, it had been obvious that just about every local government operation was involved in this case. Not everybody knew the whole story, but enough people knew bits and pieces. It would all come out before long, whether it was Levine who got the tip or some other jackass at a rival station or a newspaper.
And, honest to God, the story really ought to come out. The public, bless their precious constitutional rights, was entitled to know. And he, Jim Dodge, was just a public-spirited citizen. Sure he was. And pigs could fly to the fucking moon.
He swallowed his last forkful of pie and left his payment, adding a smaller tip than usual because the waitress with the Jennifer Lopez ass wasn’t on duty today. Which was too bad, because with money in his pocket and a song in his heart, he was looking to get laid tonight.
When Special Agent McCallum had walked back into his life, he’d thought he might have been offered a second chance to find out if she was a natural redhead. But he’d decided McCallum was butch, or de-sexed or a nun or something. She hadn’t responded to his manly charms or his pheromones or whatever women responded to.
Well, fuck her and the horse she rode in on. The way he had it figured, the news leak would prompt an FBI internal investigation. And who was likely to get nailed for talking out of school? Little Miss McCallum, who had a prior connection with Myron Levine in Denver. She would take the rap, and Dodge would walk away clean.
Tough break, Tess. Serves you right for giving me the cold shoulder.
30
Tess sat alone in a squad room of the Westwood field office, staring at a computer monitor as she studied the results of another database search.
She had waited at the Life Sciences Center for nearly two hours. First Larkin had arrived to ferry the tape player, sealed in its plastic bag, to the AD. A long time later the forensics team had finally showed up. Tess had left them at their work and driven the short distance to the field office.
In the hallway she’d run into the Nose, the last person she wanted to see.
"Hard on the case, McCallum?" Michaelson had asked.
She said something noncommittal. He studied her shrewdly.
"You don’t have to be evasive with me. I know what’s going on."
Tennant brought you in? she almost asked, but of course no one had brought him in. He was fishing for information.
"Going on?" she said innocently.
"The other squad. You know."
Yes, she thought. I do know. And you don’t.
"The other squad’s not talking to me." The lie came easily to her. "If they’ve opened up to you, I’d like to hear about it."
He stood there, frustrated, evidently pondering several possible comebacks before settling on "Never mind."
She watched him walk away. His shoulders, she noticed, seemed to be sagging a little. He was out of the loop, and he knew it. She would have felt sorry for him if he wasn’t such a jerk.
She’d found an empty squad room, commandeered a computer, and set to work.
"Wipe Out" was the song title. It had to mean something to Mobius. Maybe she could find out what. But it wouldn’t be easy.
The idea that there was a vast searchable computerized archive of crimes and criminals, and that anyone with a badge could type a few keywords into a search box and obtain instant results, was unfortunately a myth. The reality was that most law enforcement databases were useful only for a fingerprint search, in which case the FBI’s NCIC system was the best bet, or a search by the suspect’s name. There was no nationwide archive at all, merely a variety of more or less inclusive databases run by states and counties, accessible only by dedicated terminals within courthouses and halls of records.
Tess, of course, had neither a fingerprint nor a suspect’s name. She had the name of a song that might or might not be connected to a crime Mobius had committed early in his career-perhaps in his youth, even before he was Mobius.
The only official database that might be of help was VICAP, short for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. VICAP listed crimes by modus operandi, including any signatures-distinctive peculiarities of the crime scene, such as notes or messages left by the perpetrator. But when she typed in the Boolean search term "wipeout OR wipe out," she got no hits.
This meant she would have to try other databases not specifically designed for law enforcement. LexisNexis, a repository of newspaper articles, was her first stop. Her initial search yielded a number of hits, too many to peruse. When she narrowed the search to eliminate irrelevant articles, she came up dry.
The same thing happened when she visited the major Web search engines. There were thousands of Web pages containing the term "wipeout" or "wipe out," but nothing that seemed relevant to her needs.
So what now? She had to conduct a more focused search, and she had to cover the entire Web.
Most people didn’t realize it, but even the most popular search engines scratched only the surface of the vast pool of material available online. There were millions-actually billions-of Web pages that had never been collected and indexed by any standard search engine. This mass of material was sometimes known as "the deep Web."