بخش 04 - فصل 17

17

“Sure, there’s a police computer forensics squad,” Hodges says, in answer to Holly’s question. “If you want to call three part-time crunchers a squad, that is. And no, they won’t listen to me. I’m just a civilian these days.” Nor is that the worst of it. He’s a civilian who used to be a cop, and when retired cops try meddling in police business, they are called uncles. It is not a term of respect.

“Then call Pete and have him do it,” Holly says. “Because that fracking suicide site has to come down.”

The two of them are back in Freddi Linklatter’s version of Mission Control. Jerome is in the living room with Freddi. Hodges doesn’t think she’s apt to flee—Freddi’s terrified of the probably fictional men posted outside her building—but stoner behavior is difficult to predict. Other than how they usually want to get more stoned, that is.

“Call Pete and tell him to have one of the computer geeks call me. Any cruncher with half a brain will be able to doss the site and knock it down that way.”

“Doss it?”

“Big D, little o, big S. Stands for Denial of Services. The guy needs to connect to a BOT network and . . .” She sees Hodges’s mystified expression. “Never mind. The idea is to flood the suicide site with requests for services—thousands, millions. Choke the fracking thing and crash the server.”

“You can do that?”

“I can’t, and Freddi can’t, but a police department geek freak will be able to tap enough computing power. If he can’t do it from the police computers, he’ll get Homeland Security to do it. Because this is a security issue, right? Lives are at stake.”

They are, and Hodges makes the call, but Pete’s cell goes directly to voicemail. Next he tries his old pal Cassie Sheen, but the desk officer who takes his call tells him Cassie’s mother had some sort of diabetic crisis and Cassie took her to the doctor.

Out of other options, he calls Isabelle.

“Izzy, it’s Bill Hodges. I tried to get Pete, but—”

“Pete’s gone. Done. Kaput.”

For one awful moment Hodges thinks she means he’s dead.

“Left a memo on my desk. It said he was going to go home, turn off his cell, pull the plug on the landline, and sleep for the next twenty-four hours. He further shared that today was his last day as working police. He can do it, too, doesn’t even have to touch his vacation time, of which he has piles. He’s got enough personal days to see him through to retirement. And I think you better scratch that retirement party off your calendar. You and your weirdo partner can hit a movie that night, instead.”

“You’re blaming me?”

“You and your Brady Hartsfield fixation. You infected Pete with it.”

“No. He wanted to chase the case. You were the one who wanted to hand it off, then duck down in the nearest foxhole. Gotta say I’m kind of on Pete’s side when it comes to that one.”

“See? See? That’s exactly the attitude I’m talking about. Wake up, Hodges, this is the real world. I’m telling you for the last time to quit sticking your long beak into what isn’t your busi—”

“And I’m telling you that if you want to have any fucking chance of promotion, you need to get your head out of your ass and listen to me.”

The words are out before he can think better of them. He’s afraid she’ll hang up, and if she does, where will he go then? But there’s only shocked silence.

“Suicides. Have any been reported since you got back from Sugar Heights?”

“I don’t kn—”

“Well, look! Right now!”

He can hear the faint tapping of Izzy’s keyboard for five seconds or so. Then: “One just came over the wire. Kid in Lakewood shot himself. Did it in front of his father, who called it in. Hysterical, as you might expect. What’s that got to do with—”

“Tell the cops on the scene to look for a Zappit game console. Just like the one Holly found at the Ellerton house.”

“That again? You’re like a broken rec—”

“They’ll find one. And you may have more Zappit suicides before the day’s over. Possibly a lot more.”

Website! Holly mouths. Tell her about the website!

“Also, there’s a suicide website called zeetheend. Just went up today. It needs to come down.”

She sighs and speaks as though to a child. “There are all kinds of suicide websites. We got a memo about it from Juvenile Services just last year. They pop up on the Net like mushrooms, usually created by kids who wear black tee-shirts and spend all their free time holed up in their bedrooms. There’s a lot of bad poetry and stuff about how to do it painlessly. Along with the usual bitching about how their parents don’t understand them, of course.”

“This one is different. It could start an avalanche. It’s loaded with subliminal messages. Have someone from computer forensics call Holly Gibney ASAP.”

“That would be outside of protocol,” she says coolly. “I’ll have a look, then go through channels.”

“Have one of your rent-a-geeks call Holly in the next five minutes, or when the suicides start cascading—and I’m pretty sure they will—I’ll make it clear to anyone who’ll listen that I went to you and you tied me up in red tape. My listeners will include the daily paper and 8 Alive. The department does not have a lot of friends in either place, especially since those two unis shot an unarmed black kid to death on MLK last summer.”

Silence. Then, in a softer voice—a hurt voice, maybe—she says, “You’re supposed to be on our side, Billy. Why are you acting this way?”

Because Holly was right about you, he thinks.

Out loud he says, “Because there isn’t much time.”