Warnings: Adult language. Disturbing content.
Part XXIII: Hack
Chief Bennigan's secretary cringed and then scrambled for her pen as it slipped from her fingers. The surprised look on her face was perfect enough to be in the dictionary under the word itself. She turned to Detective Vash Severem where he sat nearby, his hands knotted together in his lap and an apologetic look on his face. He had been sitting there for five minutes, ever since the chief had asked him to please step outside in the kind of voice akin to a contained explosion.
The secretary tried to look supportive. The detective tried to smile. Both of them failed. Around the South 33rd station, cops and meter maids and hardened criminals froze and stared at the door of Bennigan's office. They imagined it rattling on its hinges.
"If this is the best you can do, then I don't know why the hell you're even here!"
Bennigan's voice, barely muffled by the door, created images of veins popping out of necks and foreheads. Had his wife heard, she would have warned him about losing his temper and said a few cautioning words about blood pressure.
"Chief, with all do respect, I don't think you're listening to me."
Detective Wolfwood's words would have sounded friendly had they not been screamed at glass-shattering volume.
"Oh, I'm listening. You want to waste time, resources, money, and men we don't have on a hunch."
"It's not just a hunch. There's evi--"
"There's jack diddly shit. I look at this and I don't see evidence. If I showed this to anybody and said, 'Hey, do you see evidence?' do you know what they'd say?"
"'Hell yes'?" Wolfwood spat.
"'Fuck no!' They'd call it what it is: a goose chase. And I don't care what the commissioner says; I'm not sold on your famous hunches. Trying to get approval for these resources? Trying to justify why we're doing what we're doing? God couldn't pull that off!"
"But if there is something there and we ignore it, we're negligent!"
Bennigan went silent then. Negligence was an ugly word. His voice was more of a booming hiss when next he spoke. "But if you do go in there, poke around and stir up trouble, and there's nothing, let me tell you this: I'd be the first in line to take a piece out of you. Do you know how much fun it would be to watch you get knocked onto your ass off your high horse?"
Now it was Vash's turn to cringe. The secretary raised her eyebrows imploringly at him as if to say, "The chief's really not such a bad guy. Once you get to know him. Honestly."
"So why put up the fight?" Wolfwood asked slyly. "Give me access to what I want, and you can sit back and watch me fall." The venom in his voice carried across the air though the station. You could almost imagine that Bennigan smiled, savoring the idea.
"Information services is busy," he said, but he already sounded resigned. "They've got dozens of computers to comb through from that fraud case."
"You can spare one."
"He's busy."
Wolfwood's voice took on a strange tenor, almost taunting. "Come on, chief, isn't it worth it? The department's spoiled Golden Boy slips up and you get to say, 'I told you so.' That's worth it, isn't it?"
Nothing else was said. There was what sounded like a paper being handed over and then what may have been the violent scribble of an unwilling signature.
The door opened one minute later. The secretary scrambled to look busy. The station went from dead silent to bustling instantly. Nobody was staring at the door anymore, but a few stole secretive glances towards it and the man in black standing before it. Wolfwood smirked.
Vash stood and gave his partner a disapproving look.
"What?" Wolfwood asked.
"Nothing," Vash answered. "I'm just disappointed: people in Utah didn't here you. And the dead were almost completely left out. Next time try harder."
Many of his old habits endured. They gave him an office with bright lights and he kept them off as if he feared a raid at any moment. Every criminal knows that it's hard for the cops to find you if they can't see you. The dark was their best friend. This one huddled in it like a caterpillar inside a cocoon.
They gave him a state-of-the-art computer and he took it to pieces and rebuilt it because he wanted to "pimp it out, yo." The most Wolfwood could figure was that "pimping something out" meant making it into a hulking behemoth that could terrify small children. And one monitor wasn't enough. His desk was littered with them. Wolfwood imagined that the legs of the thing groaned under the weight of one of them, which had been converted from a widescreen television.
And a single 'box'? Unheard of. He had a fan going year-round to cool all the hard drives and servers and toys he had hooked to his system. Wires snaked up and over ever surface within arm's reach. He worked by himself because he'd scared everybody else away. They crouched in nearby offices together, afraid that he might come by and ask for a boot disk.
Vash flipped the lights on the minute he was in the room. He wasn't sure if the bat-like hissing of pain that came from behind the wall of technology was real or imagined. The loud, "Ouch. God! Turn 'em off, dammit!" was real enough.
Vash hurried to comply and a relieved sigh sounded through the air followed by, "Well, come on it." Now that he was back in his natural element of lightless deprivation, he sounded almost normal.
The detectives cautiously navigated their way into the dark office. It wasn't a small room since more than one programmer was meant to work there, but with all the equipment it was a maze. They stopped before the desk and waited for the dark haired boy to raise his head. When he did, he pulled one earphone off to give them his attention. The music from his headset was loud enough to flood the room. He left the other earphone on. Wolfwood guessed it was to prove that he was still who he was and who he was didn't care about them very much at all. It was an act and not a very believable one, but all three of them played along very well.
The teen, who looked at them with cold indifference, was a skinny configuration of elbows and arms too long to use them properly. Only his headset helped to control the scruffy mess of his hair. His shirt had an ancient, fading picture of some giant robot from an anime series on it. It wielded a long spear beneath stylized letters that proclaimed, "Teksetter!".
"S'up," Kaite said with a rebellious jerk of his head.
Wolfwood didn't answer immediately. Instead, he listened to the music that blasted from the headsets. "Nine Inch Nails?" he asked.
"Yeah, baby. An oldie but a goodie. You can't go wrong with 'em. Trent, see? He understands. About life."
"What about it?"
Kaite smiled. "It's fuckin' painful, dude."
Wolfwood regarded the youth in front of him and thought, not for the first time, that for someone so young, he had lived through quite a lot.
Kaite Trevisick's situation was special. He was so many things at once: an orphan, a runaway, a criminal, and a reluctant employee of the JCPD. Designer of a scam so perfect it had been doomed to fail, he had gotten rich quick at the age of 16. Online banking, he said, was a beautiful thing because people are stupid. They trust so easily. People enter their credit card numbers and account numbers and personal identification numbers into tiny little boxes online every day. And when they did, Kaite was there. He said it had been as easy as taking money from offshore mutual funds. Wolfwood hadn't been sure what that meant.
Unfortunately for Kaite and fortunately for the police, his status as millionaire only lasted about a month. Before he was caught, he had been the member of a small-time gang who had assisted him with his scam. But before they turned to the world of computer theft, they did little things: chop shops and nickel bags and convenience store hits. But meeting Kaite, a kid too smart for his own good, had given them an edge and the chance to make real money.
They got rich thanks to the kid, got scared with all that money in their hands, and when the heat got too hot, bailed on him. They left him to take the blame. He had been a minor, sure, almost untouchable. But there are still things you can do to a kid.
But Kaite, it seemed, was not one who valued loyalty highly. When the police said, "You wouldn't happen to know...?" they had been rewarded with the names of every member of his old gang, how to trace the money, where you could find their hideouts and anything else they thought they wanted to know. Really, just ask.
Revenge, Kaite said, fuckin' rocked.
But after that, setting him loose back into the world simply wasn't a good idea. It would be like putting him in a pair of fake antlers and sending him into the woods during deer season. Luckily, the police let all their threats of juvenile detention centers disappear provided Kaite joined their team and helped them catch people just like him. He hadn't been happy with the offer. According to him, he was a lot of terrible things--a crook, a liar, and a snitch--but the one thing he wasn't was "stinkin' pig". He lasted a day. When he had almost gotten knifed in an alley, had changed his mind.
So here he was, not quite a cop, he said, but almost as bad. He got protection, all the toys he could want to play with, and the knowledge that he was helping the police put an end to cyber crime. Too young for the force? Not at all. After all, if you're old enough and bad enough to commit a crime, then you ought to be old enough and bad enough to solve them. The rules were bent. Or broken completely as the case seemed to be. Two years later and Kaite was still at it, though he happily admitted that he only really cared about the toys.
"Brought you something," Wolfwood said and set the brown paper bag before Kaite. He tore it open.
"Ah, hell ya!" he shouted. "Meta-Capsule 3? Man, I've been wantin' this since I saw the commercial with the rocket launcher. This is hot, yo. Thanks." His expression was like that of any gamer envisioning hours of blissful mindlessness in front of a screen, blowing things up.
"Don't mention it."
It took a moment for Kaite to pull himself together and put the game away, but once he did, he turned to look at Vash suspiciously.
"Come to arrest me, again?"
"Nope, once was enough," Vash answered as he took a seat in a chair that had seen better days. "And look at you doing such a good job. We'll make a detective out of you yet."
"Bastard," Kaite said with a snarl.
"Brat."
"Wuss."
"Ankle-biter."
"Nice haircut, jerk." He winced. Jerk? Ouch, that was lame. That one hadn't been up to par and the look on Vash's face showed that he knew it. In fact, these days, his insults of Vash were getting weaker and weaker. The truth was, the scrawny teen had a hard time pretending he wasn't impressed with the lanky detective. The story went that after a lot of begging, Vash had let the kid come with him to the shooting range. Kaite had been fighting a case of hero-worship ever since.
"That's all you've got?" Vash asked.
Kaite seemed to decide that ignoring Vash was the biggest insult he could deal today. He turned his wide blue eyes to Wolfwood who had perched on a free corner of his desk. There was a creaking noise and he stood again hurriedly.
"S'up, detective Wolfwood? Heard you caused all kinds of shiz-nit to come down and see me today. I didn't know you cared."
"Hey, I wanted the best."
Kaite looked down at his keyboard suddenly, obviously flattered. Wolfwood exchanged a look with his partner. Vash's expression almost said, "Here we go again."
He teased Wolfwood about it whenever he was sure it wouldn't piss him off. Yes, Wolfwood was bad with people. Yes, he was intimidating and got angry easily. Sometimes he just rubbed people the wrong way. But, for some sick, sick reason, he was good with kids. Kaite was just another example of children clinging to Wolfwood like white on rice. This time it came with a kind of respect that was rare for the rebellious Kaite to give. Vash was any number of insulting nicknames. Wolfwood was always "Detective."
"So what can I do ya for?" Kaite asked, swiveling in his chair childishly. He looked impish lit up by the glow of his computer screens as he was.
"This," Wolfwood said and handed him a small sheet of paper.
"A hotel, eh?" Kaite said. His eyes skimmed the page quickly. "Oh, my bad. Two hotels? This for Picasso?"
"Yes. We've got a few victims connected to those hotels. Two of the victims went on vacation together and stayed at the Southern Inn and Lodge," Vash said. He passed over one of the pictures of the vacation to Kaite. "The man in the back appears in more than his fair share of the pictures from that vacation. There may be something there."
Wolfwood leaned forward and tapped the picture in Kaite's hands. "So we were hoping you could tell us who stayed at the hotel with them during those dates on the paper. And who worked there."
"And run a few searches on any names that come up. Like the, 'Past criminal record' kind of searches. And find out if there's any connection between these two hotels. " Vash added.
"And if the names of his victims," Wolfwood said and handed over another sheet of paper, this one with sixteen names, "pop up at either place."
Kaite whistled. "Damn. Not asking too much, are ya?"
Wolfwood managed to look apologetic. "Honestly, at this point, I'm counting on you to give me the kind of information that will justify my coming here to bother you in the first place. I'm hoping whatever you can tell me will be exactly what I was looking for all along."
Kaite made a messy stack out of the papers the detectives had given him next to a battered-looking tower. "One of your hunches, huh?"
"More or less," Wolfwood answered with a smile. "So, are you up to the challenge, or should I find another computer know-it-all?"
"Are you kiddin'? I'm down for this. I'm fuckin' stoked."
Wolfwood and Vash exchanged another look, this one completely confused. Sometimes, they really didn't know what Kaite was saying. "Well, that's good then," Vash said but he sounded like he wasn't quite sure what he was agreeing with.
"Do you need anything else?" Wolfwood asked.
"Nah, I'm straight." Kaite slipped the headset back over his ear and his fingers became a cartoon-like blur on the keyboard. The detectives watched him for a moment in expectation. But nothing happened for two minutes. Kaite typed, they stood there watching. Finally, the hacker pulled the earphone off again.
"Dudes," he said in the kind of voice all service personnel use when addressing the people who employ them--the ones who really don't understand anything. "Rome wasn't built in a day. I'll call you," he said miming the motion of dialing a phone, "when I find something. Oookaaay? Now get the fuck outta here."
Vash and Wolfwood took the hint. They headed out the door, but Vash couldn't resist the urge to flick the light on again as he walked out. "Do your best, kid," he said.
"You spiky-haired son of a--"
The door closed. The detectives started down the corridor and then took the steps up.
"That was cruel," Wolfwood said.
"Yeah," Vash agreed. "By the way, didn't the entire precinct here you tell chief Bennigan that this wasn't a hunch?"
"Did I really say that? Must have slipped my mind."
When she was afraid, she became a different person. Some people, they hide it. You can look at them and never guess that they were afraid for their lives. But Milly wore it on her face like a gash, like a bleeding wound.
Yesterday, her phone went dead. Mysterious. The day before that, her mail didn't come. And each time something happened, her shoulders grew tenser. Her hair was no longer as neatly styled. She always looked pale.
All the times before, it had been for the joy of watching them squirm, of seeing how someone so perfect dealt with life torn asunder. If this were any other summer, he'd be doing this for Milly. This time, something was different. At first, it had confused him. But now he knew. He could taste the reason at the back of his throat like the heavy syrup of blood dripping down to swirl in his belly, warming him.
This was not for Milly.
He was waiting for someone else.
For Detective. Because Detective was hard to find. Because he was difficult to get near, difficult to follow. Because he was not listed in the phone books and directories scattered around his room. And because he was...
She had called him once before. When he had given her the dark for the beautiful moment, savoring the sounds of her screams through the sleeping evening. She had called him then and he had come like a knight in a story. He swept her away, took her someplace safe. And when they returned, he had carried her to the front steps in his arms and then stayed with her through the night.
How noble.
But she had not called him when the phone line died. Had not called when it was obvious someone had been inside her house. She called him for other reasons at her own leisure. For dinner. For a walk in a park. It was almost as if she knew that nothing would happen to her as long as he was nearby. She called him quite a lot, lately. But never to tell him the simple truth: someone was out there, watching her.
Because if she had, Detective would know.
He wondered why Milly stayed silent. She was not a fool. He knew the signs. He had known exactly when his Kelly became aware. Of him, of the game. Of the fact that she, quite simply, was prey. It was a look in her eyes, a tremble in her hands, the steady, paranoid craning of her neck behind her. Yes, Milly knew he was there.
So why...?
He did not know. Did not understand. He only knew that he would have to try something else.
Milly looked neat today, but the circles under her eyes matched her navy pumps. She stepped outside her front door. It was a cute door, decorated with a wreath of dried flowers. They smelled like a field of honeysuckle. He felt the moment so acutely, it might as well be preserved on film, replayed in slow motion like the assassination of a president on television.
She lifted the top of the mailbox, like every morning. Once her hand was inside, once she froze and bit back a cry, he imagined he could feel everything she could.
She drew her hand back and stared at it. The coating of thick, red, blood on her fingers shone in the morning sun. Even from where he was, he could see her hand start to shake and the tears start to slide down her face. Only then did she look down.
Routines are beautiful things. They blind people to changes. Dust gathers in the corners and you never sweep it because you never have before. You do not notice the spider on the ceiling because you never look up. When you do the same thing everyday, you see the world as a repeat, a broken-record clip of today and everyday leading up to it. Milly had never looked at the landing of her step when she got the mail before because she had never had a reason to do so.
Had she, she might have seen the blackening blood dripping from her mailbox first. Before she had daintily slid her hand into it, she might have seen the cascade of it onto the painted steps beneath it, forming a puddle that waterfalled over and down onto the sidewalk below.
She did not lower her hand. She held it out and away from her body, but she did not move from that spot. She was thinking and that was fighting with her body's urge to panic. There was something inside her mailbox.
Something bloody and cold from the shadows. Something that made sick, wet noises when her hand brushed against it.
She swallowed once, but he was certain it didn't give her the nourishment of courage. Turning her head away so she wouldn't have to see what she was doing, she lifted the top once more and slid her hand inside.
What she pulled from inside was a stringy mess of sinew and flesh with bone sticking out, white and terrible beneath all the blood.
She dropped it and it tumbled down the steps. When she ran into the house, she left bloody smears on the doorknob and the doorframe.
He stepped from the shadows, staring at the beautiful painting made by the stream of blood down her steps. "Run little rabbit, run, " he whispered. "Bring him to me."
To be continued...
So I like writing Kaite. I loved him to pieces in the show and the manga and randomly like to stick him in stories as a hacker. This time I decided to make him a foul-mouthed punk; half gangsta, half anime nerd. So he's not exactly how you remember him (and he's seven years older), but this is an AU. You're used to that by now.
Thanks for reading and reviewing!
Up next: ...?
