Play To Kill

    'Some women. Somewhere.'

    Amazingly, Detective Johnny McLaren had beat them to work and was trolling City Hall like he usually did at least a few times during any given day, looking for scraps of conversation like a dog at a barbeque. It's wasn't that the skinny Irishman had a shortage of friends in the department, but with no life to speak of outside the job, he was chronically lonely. And without the companionship and human contact he craved, he tended to drink a lot off duty, and sometimes he gambled too much. Still, he was one of the sharpest detectives on the force.

    He didn't look hungover, but his wardrobe choice made Magozzi think twice about the condition Johnny had been in when he'd dressed himself this morning-he was wearing a terrible blue seersucker suit that had surely been pulled out of the throw-away bin at the Goodwill. With his blue suit, flame-red Irish hair, and Pillsbury Dough Boy complexion, he sort of looked like an American flag. Not that Magozzi was on the GQ style radar by any stretch, but Johnny had found a niche for himself in the annals of bad taste.

    Next to him, Gino snorted, his train of thought obviously tracking Magozzi's own. Jeez, Johnny, there must be a naked homeless guy out there somewhere.'

    McLaren gave him an indignant look and brushed an imaginary speck of lint from his puckered sleeve. 'This is the height of sartorial genius, Rolseth. You're looking at a five- foot-four walking chick magnet. See, women are threatened by men who dress better than they do, so you have to look like you don't care.'

    'Mission accomplished. I sure as hell hope you aren't wearing that thing in your on-line dating profile or you're never gonna see any action.'

    Johnny scowled, looking a little sheepish.

    'How's that going, by the way?'

    'Sucks. Everybody's looking for Brad Pitt. I signed up for a new one, though. J Date.'

    Magozzi lifted his brows. "You do realize that's a Jewish dating service, don't you?'

    Yeah, I know.'

    'And you're Catholic.'

    'Well, I'm not having any luck with my tribe, so I figured maybe I could find a nice Jewish girl and convert.'

    'Seems like sound reasoning,' Gino said. 'Hey, aren't you supposed to be in Colorado this week?'

    Yeah. But my brother blew his knee doing some weekend- warrior bullshit and had to have surgery, so I canceled my trip.'

    'Bummer.'

    'Yeah, bummer, but he's a dumbass. Still thinks he's eighteen, and that rock climbing is a good idea. Anyhow, I figure no way I'm going to spend seven days' vacation time listening to him whine. So instead, I'm an even bigger dumbass and decide to take the holiday fund and hit every casino in Minnesota.'

    'How'd that work out for you?'

    'I'm back here, three days into my vacation, how do you think it worked?'

    'Probably better than if you'd put that money into your retirement account.'

    Ain't that the sad truth.'

    They heard heavy footfalls echoing in the hall long before they turned a corner and saw Joe Gebeke jogging toward them, all dolled up in his Bomb Squad gear.

    McLaren raised a hand in greeting as he approached. 'Hey, buddy. Got an exercise today?'

    Joe Gebeke was a big man, and the gear he was wearing added another fifty pounds, at least. He was already red- faced and sweating, and had yet to step out into the blast furnace outside. Magozzi felt sorry for him.

    He paused, gave them all a nod in greeting, then took a second to catch his breath. 'Ninety-nine percent of this job has been an exercise lately. Right now, we got an anonymous tip on a suspicious package in the food court at Maplewood Mall. Last week it was Rosedale Mall.'

    'What's going on?' Gino asked.

    'Snot-nosed delinquents messing around, thinking they're cute and sucking up tax dollars. They're driving us crazy - last month we had four call-outs at four different high schools during finals week. Now that the school year's over, the little bastards are terrorizing the malls.'

    'Did you catch them all?'

    'Sure we did. No-brainer. The only good thing about delinquents is they're stupid, thank God. But it's like there's a union or something. Somebody gets busted, another one comes off the bench to take their place. They're just like the pyros who start fires and get their jollies watching fifty thousand acres burn up on the news, thinking they'll never get caught. Look, I gotta run, guys. May be a false alarm, but we have to respond like it was the real deal.'

    'Be safe,' McLaren called after him as Joe jogged toward the door.

    Magozzi and Gino parted company with McLaren and stopped at Tommy Espinoza's office on the way to Homicide, primarily because Gino had heard the crackle of a bag that sang to him like sirens on a sea cliff.

    'Gino, it's eight o'clock in the morning.'

    'What's your point? I hear the sound of salt and fat and I obey.'

    'Could be a bag of raisins.'

    Gino snorted and pushed past him into Espinoza's office, central command for the department's computer division. Tommy looked up from his monitor, his dark Hispanic coloring making his blue eyes strangely intense. Gino always thought they were about the same color as the blue stuff people put in toilet bowls.

    'Hey, guys.' He automatically handed Gino a bag of Cheetos.

    'Not those. I can never get all that orange stuff off. Angela will find a speck and I'll be busted. Got anything white?'

    'Sure. Popcorn, potato chips…' Tommy spread his arms expansively toward a metal table that looked like the snack aisle at Cub Foods. 'Rummage away, my friend. Mi casa, su casa.'

    While Gino went on a cholesterol hunt, Magozzi looked at the monitor Tommy was working on. 'You're on YouTube?'

    'Sad, but true. We who serve the public must sometimes walk the sewers. Take a look at this.' He tapped the screen where a streaming video showed five girls beating the crap out of another girl trying to crawl away.

    'Jeez. Is that for real?'

    'This one is. A lot of the ugly stuff that gets posted is staged - Spielberg wannabes trying to outdo each other - but some of them are the real McCoy.'

    Gino walked over to look, his hand deep in a package of potato chips. 'Hey. I saw that on the news. High school girls from someplace advertising stupid. They put that girl in the hospital, then they posted it with all their faces showing. How dumb is that?'

    'Thank God for the dumb ones. The Brits are having a ball monitoring these sites, ID'ing the idiot perps then heading right for their digs like they had a written invitation. But every now and then, a smart one surfaces, and that's when it gets really scary. Take a look at this. This is Cleveland, four months ago.' He fiddled with the mouse until a new video appeared, this one showing a man from the back, beating another one on the ground.

    'Jesus,' Gino said. 'Why the hell do the servers let this kind of shit on the Web, and why the hell aren't we shutting them down? My kids could see this, for God's sake.'

    'Take it easy, buddy,' Tommy passed him a Butterfinger as if that would cure everything. 'Don't kill the messenger. YouTube and all the rest of them screen like crazy; they've even got software in place with certain words and symbols, like the swastika, tagged so a screener can do an eyes-on assessment. Trouble is, no bad words or symbols, no alarm for an eyes-on, and that's how stuff like the Cleveland film slips through. They only caught it because it had so many hits, which is another alarm tag, but by that time over a hundred thousand had seen it.'

    Gino was not comforted. 'Then why aren't they looking at every single post before they let it on site?'