Psycho Save Us (34 page)

Later, as he
recalled, the jackalope got renamed “Jack Ching Bada-Bing” in a Name the
Jackalope Contest.

“Fuck you, Jack
Ching,” David Emerson swore.  He found the keys were still in the ignition, and
turned them.  “Yeah.  It’s jackalope season, motherfucker.”  He pulled around
yet another forensics van that was coming up the street.  The ballistics and
blood spatter experts had a long night ahead of them.

Leon checked the
time on his iPhone: 3:04
AM
.

About fifty
yards away someone was shouting.  He turned and looked out his window.  A girl
no older than fifteen was walking down the street arguing with a man at least
twice her age.  The girl’s belly was swollen.  Knocked up before her sixteenth
birthday, and angry at her baby’s daddy?  Hard to say, but Leon figured his
guess was probably close.

The rain had
started in again, then stopped, then started again, and then stopped.  It
seemed that would be the way of the night.

“Yo, dawg!”
someone shouted.  Leon looked.  It was some guy sticking his head out of a
window half a block up.  He was hollering down to his buddy in the street, who
was waving up.  They had had a brief conversation, the man in the window
reminding him to say something to his sister about something or other.  There
were laughs, and they went their separate ways.

The parking lot
behind Grady’s Bar had no painted lines.  All around, wild tufts of grass had
started pushing their way up through cracks in the pavement.  An entire piece
of the parking lot on the east end had been washed away and a row of wild sages
were growing there.  Vines clung desperately to the edge of Grady’s.  To Leon,
places like this always reminded him of images he’d seen of Chernobyl after the
big nuclear disaster.  Strange to think that if mankind were to die that Nature
would just reclaim it all again.  The estimates he’d heard had it that it would
take 10,000 years—just a thousand decades—for there to be no evidence that
mankind had ever lived.  At least, not on Earth.  Ironically, the longest
lasting evidence for mankind’s existence would be the flags and rovers left on
the moon; silent monuments to all that we were, and ever could be.

He’d let his
mind wander a bit.  He did this whenever he got nervous.  Gracen was late, and
even if he showed up Leon wasn’t sure the fool could play his part.

“So this Rainbow
Room,” Leon said.  “You say Interpol’s got a beat on them in Germany and
Australia?  That matches up with what the Yeti said.”

Agent Porter was
still sitting in the front seat, conferring with someone on his smartphone. 
That, or playing Angry Birds.  “Yeah.  Berlin, Sydney, Dublin, Hong Kong, Belfast,
Moscow, and some middle-of-nowhere place out in Wyoming.  They’re everywhere. 
The people in Lyon said they busted into a house in Dublin six months ago, but
by the time they got there the apartment had been cleared out, just a computer
and a desk was all that was left, and the computer had been completely
scrubbed.”

“Lyon?”

“France. 
Interpol headquarters.  The agents there are the ones that work as liaisons,
I’m sure you know.  They try to time hits against international cells all at
once, before the media can get a hold of it.  That way, if the FBI busts
someone in a child porn ring over here, the others in the child porn ring in
Germany don’t get wind of it and take off.  They coordinate, hit all these places
at once, take as many down as possible.”

“But not the
Rainbow Room?”

“Not the Rainbow
Room,” Porter confirmed.  “Least, that’s what my friends at the bureau are
saying right now.  Interpol’s damn interested in Atlanta tonight.  They’ll be
watching us.  They’re saying that they didn’t think the Rainbow Room had roots
here.”  He scratched at his beard, and shook his head.  “They say the Room’s
like weeds, they’re growing everywhere now.”

“How do they
work?”

“Far as what
they tell me, they put out requests.  A website was originally started, nobody
knows what it was called now, but it got together the original members,” Porter
said, lifting his head up from his phone to scan outside the window.  “Your boy
gonna show?”

“He’ll show,”
Leon said, sounding more confident than he felt.

Porter accepted
it.  “Anyways, before they shut down they always have a few backup sites to
retreat to, confer a bit, and then hop, skip, and jump to another server, IP
address, all that.  They use proxy servers so no one can track them, and
Interpol thinks they communicate through fire-and-forget e-mail accounts.  They
probably also do recruiting through sites where anyone can put up any homemade
porn movies they want.  X-vids-dot-com, you know, shit like that?

“In places
they’ve left behind, Interpol has found all sorts o’ computer drives that the
Rainbow Room uses to hide things in code, pretty much just gibberish unless the
person has the right cipher.  Sneaky bastards, tech wizards.  Phantoms.  You
know the kind these days.”  He rolled down his window, breathed the fresh air. 
“Skip-tracing these kinds of fuckers is almost impossible.  You can only join the
Rainbow Room by being recommended by one of the highly respected members, and
you’re put on a one-year probationary membership kind of thing.  If you submit
enough pictures and donate enough to the community, either money or tips, you
can become a full member.  Then, the more pics and vids you submit, and the
greater the quality, and the higher people rate your pics an’ videos, the
higher up you go.  That means you get more access to child porn.”

“People do this?”
Leon asked, knowing the answer.  He wasn’t naïve, one couldn’t be if you wanted
to be a detective in Atlanta, but his worldview and moral compass demanded he
ask the question, almost rhetorically and yet still wanting to verify the
absurdity.

“Full-time, my
friend,” said Agent Stone, speaking for the first time in a while.  “They go
years without getting caught.  Kids getting raped in a basement, it all gets
taped, the bodies get dumped, the tapes go online, and the neighbors don’t know
shit because nobody knows their neighbors anymore.  People peek from their
windows, but they don’t knock on doors and greet the new folks in town.  Who
the fuck knows who’s living next to you these days?”

Leon glanced
anxiously out the window. 
Where the fuck are you, Cee-gray?
  “You ever
brought people like that in?”

Porter said, “Like
what?  The Rainbow Room?”  He shook his head.  “No.  I track serial killers,
sometimes chase fugitives on the run.  Rainbow Room types get passed on to the
guys at Migrant and Domestic Trafficking.  I’m just here for Pelletier. 
But
,
I’ll do my part until the MDTs get here, I guess, much as I can.  And who
knows?  Might be Pelletier has a hand in this shit, too.  Wouldn’t surprise
me.”

Leon wasn’t
convinced.  He didn’t know Pelletier as well as Porter did, but this didn’t
seem to fit.  “How would he have gotten hooked up with people like the Rainbow
Room?” he asked.

“Who knows?  The
man’s a recidivist.  Maybe heard about it somewhere in the joint?  We know he’s
criminally diverse and has a black hole where his moral compass ought to be, so
anything’s possible.”  He pointed out the window.  “This your guy?”

Leon looked out
his window.  A pair of headlights came bouncing towards them.  When the vehicle
turned, he saw that it was a blue Chevy Nova.  “That’s him,” he said.

They opened
their doors and stepped out.  The Nova halted, its engine dying gratefully
after the end of a long, cruel life, and its fat driver stepped out.  Charles
“Cee-gray” Gracen commonly wore black jackets with hoods, even though he never
wore the hood up, lest it cover up his tightly-woven cornrows.

Leon approached
with his hands in his coat pockets.  He gave Gracen a look upon his approach,
and Gracen betrayed nothing as they bumped fists.  “S’up, Leon?”

“A whole lot tonight,
Charlie,” he said.  “You remember the guy you were telling me about earlier?”

“Yeah, white
motherfucker.”  So far, so good.

“That’s right.” 
He turned to introduce the agents.  “This is Special Agent Porter of the FBI. 
These are agents Mortimer and Stone.  Charlie, they wanna ask you about this
white guy.”

“A’ight. 
Shoot.”

“Mr. Gracen,”
said Porter, stepping to him enthusiastically.  “Detective Hulsey here tells us
that you gave him a lead earlier tonight about a Caucasian male, approximately
thirty years old.”

“True,” Gracen
said, inclining his head.  He gave a brief glimpse to Leon, and privately Leon
was willing him not to do that.  So far Special Agent Jamal Porter seemed like
a sharp man, and no doubt had had extensive training in advanced interrogation. 
He would know that glancing up and to the right indicated an insincere
response, because it meant the person was accessing the creative centers of the
brain.  If Leon knew that, then Porter almost certainly did, too.  And he’d
also notice furtive glances for help sent in Leon’s direction. 
Just act
cool, you fat fuck
.

“Is this the man
you saw?” Porter said, holding up his cell phone.  It was a mugshot of Adam
Pelletier from the Bureau of Prisons.

“Hard t’say,”
Gracen admitted.  “Might’ve been.  Looks like him.  White boy, black hair, blue
eyes.”  Once again, he unconsciously glanced over to Leon to see how he was
doing. 
Don’t look at me, you fuck
. 
Look at
him
!

“What was the
nature of your conversation with Detective Hulsey?  Why did you contact him
earlier tonight?”

“I give him a
heads-up, an’ he usually lets me alone, long as I keep myself outta trouble,”
Gracen said, which was true.  “I used to run with a bad crew, an’ I still
pretend to be they friend, listen in on some o’ they plans, who they sellin’
jabs to, this’n that, an’ I give him a call.  I called Leon ’cause I heard
about these folk up on L Street startin’ back up on a meth lab once they
brother get outta the joint next week.  I told my boy Leon here that I seen
this white boy walkin’ that way, thought he looked strange.  I’d never seen him
befo’, an’ in my neighborhood when new white folks show up it’s sometimes a
cause fo’ concern.  I’m a changed man, a concerned citizen lookin’ out fo’ the
kids in my ’hood.  I’m a father now, ya heard me?”

Porter nodded. 
“Mr. Gracen, have you seen anyone about your ’hood with maybe a tattoo of a red
bear?”

“You talkin’
about the fucking Russians?” Gracen asked.  Porter nodded.  “Them motherfuckers
be around,” he said simply.

“Around…where?”

The fat man
shrugged.  “All over.  They ain’t got no territory yet, but everybody know they
lookin’ fo’ it.  They work with local boys sometimes.  I know these cats from
the Crips who worked with them fo’ a minute.  Said it was just slingin’ jabs at
first, but then they wanted ’em to start snatchin’ kids to, I don’t know, send
a message to they family?  Them Russians be crazy.  Startin’ to get
real
around here, ya feel me?”

As far as Leon
knew, none of this was actually a lie.  Gracen must have been sitting on this information
for some time. 
We’ll have to discuss this later
, he vowed to himself.

“Do you know
where—”  Porter stopped to answer a buzzing at his phone.  “Excuse me.”

While the agent
turned away to answer his phone, Agents Mortimer and Stone remained standing a
few feet from Gracen and staring at him.  Gracen, for his part, tried to look
casual, yet still darted glances in Leon’s direction. 
Dumbass, don’t look
at me
. 
Don’t you fucking fuck this up, you stupid fat
—

“Detective
Hulsey.”  Porter was waving him over.  He walked casually over to where the
agent was standing near the SUV.  Porter lowered the phone and covered it with
his hand.  “We got a trace on the phone,” he said.

Leon thought for
a second, then figured it out.  “What, you mean
the
phone? 
O’Connor’s
phone that he gave to Pelletier?”

Porter nodded
and went back to the phone and said, “Yeah, I’m here, go ahead.”  The next few
minutes were filled with nothing but silence, a bit of murmuring from someone
on the other end of the phone, and Porter giving out the occasional “Mm-hm” and
“Yeah” and “Uh-huh” and “Got that.”  Finally, he hung up and said, “They’re
tracing the signal now.  They think they can pinpoint it down within ten
yards.  Motherfucker called the Parole Commission in Valdosta.”

Leon tried to
connect that with anything that made sense, and found that it was impossible. 
“The Parole Commission?” he asked.  While he was vexed, he was also glad to
have this break in Gracen’s interrogation.  Though, he now realized that Stone
and Mortimer were chatting it up with him. 
Keep up the ruse, you fat fuck
. 
So help me god, if you cost my sister a husband, I’ll make sure you end up
in a cell right next to Pat
.  “What the hell did he call the Parole
Commission for?”

“They don’t know
yet, but they’re finding that out.  It’ll take a bit to find out which officer
he spoke to and then to find the call records from the office in Valdosta.  You
up for another drive?”