Nick ran a hand over his beard and took a deep breath.
"So Noah had recorded Happy Slapping, too?" Elizabeth asked as she sat down on the edge of her desk with her coffee cup.
Katherine crossed her arms in front of her chest and raised her eyebrows briefly. "The idea comes from the UK. The lemonade brand Tango once made a rather misleading advertisement for it. Whenever someone drank it in the ad, they were slapped by an orange man. You know when you've been tangoed, it said."
Nikki sat down on one of the chairs. "What happened to the ad?"
"It was banned."
"Is that common for today's youth?" growled Elizabeth.
"Yes," said Katherine, nodding. "The motivation is simple: everything must be shown and staged. The climax of the violence is captured on film. Of course, it's illegal, but that's why it's made and posted."
Elizabeth snorted and sat down behind her desk. "Sure. Assault is illegal, of course. Even if the courts always play it down."
"It's not just assault that's illegal," Nick replied. "It's also about the right to one's image, which we show. Without consent."
Elizabeth coughed and then sipped her coffee. "I also think it's doubtful that someone wouldn't want to be beaten up but would give up the pictures afterward."
"What you can hardly see are the tears of the victims," Nikki replied with a furrowed brow. "It doesn't just have to be happy slapping. Twenty percent of young people have been victims of cyberbullying. It can be done without violence."
Katherine raised her eyebrows briefly. "Think about the revenge porn, Liz. There are also sites like . It's that site with the broken black heart. And they auction off naked pictures of ex-wives on eBay. It's almost always men who do that."
Elizabeth looked at her sister for a long time and frowned a little. "But here it was a sixteen-year-old boy and not a girl."
"Yes, but a young woman was neglected, and a knight in shining armor tried to rescue her. The first perpetrator acted like a typical man by leaving the woman on the left, and the second perpetrator acted like a typical man by killing the other guy."
Elizabeth snorted, stood up, and opened her office window. "By ripping the head rind off his sister's ex-boyfriend's face. It was different in children's fairy tales back then. Besides, none of them are men. They're all goddamn children, remember?" She sat down behind her desk and frowned deeply. "But you said you found something else on Noah's laptop."
Nick stood up and placed the laptop in front of his sister-in-law. "Yes. Also from GOB666."
The lieutenant licked her lips. "Is this on the dark web?"
"No, 4chan. You can find some nasty stuff there, though."
The video started. But nothing happened.
The laptop screen had been dark for a while. Elizabeth wondered if Nick was joking.
It remained dark.
Ten seconds.
Twenty.
A whole minute.
Elizabeth looked at her brother-in-law, annoyed.
"Wait," he muttered.
Suddenly, there was a small pixel graphic; several pixel men ran into a corridor. Flames came from above, and the pixelated men turned into skulls. The skulls turned into crosses. Grave crosses. And the grave crosses crumbled into little pixels and were finally gone.
"I command you to do three things," a distorted voice suddenly said from the blackness of the screen. "An overkill where the victim is destroyed much more than necessary for the kill."
"Mia Newman in the train compartment," muttered the lieutenant.
"There's more," Nick replied.
The voice continued. "A Dawnraid where someone is suddenly ambushed and murdered --"
"Jeremy Acosta at the bus stop."
Nikki took a deep breath and gritted her teeth. "The old lady who was walking her dog discovered the body at dawn. Dawnraid."
"So that means Jeremy Acosta was supposed to be found at dawn."
"It certainly seems that way, Lieutenant," Nikki said, frowning deeply. "Nick and I have discovered something else, though."
The voice continued. "And then you go as a group to a public place where you just massacre a bunch of people without warning. With axes or even box cutters." The voice paused and chuckled as if laughing. "You know the activists who organize flash mobs. I want you to do the same. I want you to organize and cut people's throats. People you have nothing to do with, people you don't even know. I don't want you to be a flash mob; I want you to be a ... Slash mob!"
Elizabeth's eyebrows shot up as her cell phone started buzzing in front of her. Her gaze darkened. She was thinking about the slash mob, so the interruption was inconvenient.
Elizabeth read the message and slumped her shoulders, exhaling slowly.
Katherine furrowed her eyebrows and took a step forward. "What's going on? Don't tell me we have a real slash mob."
"No," the lieutenant sighed, gritting her teeth, "it's not quite that bad, but almost. The chief wants to see us."
xxx
Elizabeth, Katherine, Nick, and Nikki had just taken their seats at the conference table in Jane's office while Jane's constantly bad-tempered secretary, Silvia, balanced a tray of lousy coffee.
Jane had just opened one of the files when the entire entourage had entered her office. With a curt gesture, she said she was almost finished while her gaze flew over the pages of the files. Then she closed the file again with a jerk.
Nikki looked around with wide eyes. It was utterly redundant, as she had been here before.
Jane took her reading glasses off her nose and dropped them onto the file. "Teenagers who commit murders. And who will blame it all on the internet and video games?"
Katherine took a deep breath and licked her lips. "They'll most likely plead insanity in court."
"I certainly don't need a lesson in criminal law," Jane growled, giving her younger daughter a warning look.
Elizabeth pressed her lips together. She knew immediately that they had to be especially careful today. Her mother was probably already under pressure from above.
Jane opened the file again and tapped a particular section with the temple of her glasses. "This whole thing is getting interesting. You suspect that some person on the internet is manipulating these people?"
"Young people," Elizabeth teased.
Now, Jane glared at her older daughter. "Is there a difference if a thirteen-year-old, a thirty-year-old, or a sixty-year-old kills someone else, and I haven't been told about it?"
Elizabeth cleared her throat and tucked her chin. "No, ma'am."
Katherine, on the other hand, couldn't help herself. "Statistically, men commit eighty percent of all violent crimes, make up ninety-four percent of all prisoners, and kill almost thirty times as often as women."
Jane looked at the psychiatrist for a long time with furrowed brows and blinked slowly. "Thank you, Dr. Isles, for that lecture. You weren't the only one lecturing Quantico with those statistics."
Clearing her throat a little in her chair, Katherine sank and licked her lips, smiling a smile that didn't reach her eyes.
Jane stood up from her desk chair. "With men, the victims are usually women. But here it was, a young woman and a young man."
Nick cleared his throat and then looked at his wife and sister-in-law. "That's right, the perpetrator uses certain injuries or humiliations that the victims have previously inflicted on the perpetrators. It doesn't matter what sex the victim is. Or at least less so than with sexually motivated perpetrators."
Jane nodded slowly and pointed to her desk. "You're writing here," Jane continued, unimpressed, "This is the murder variant of an online game from the dark web. Blue Whale.
"Yes," Nick said again, "we'll talk to the FBI about it in more detail."
Jane looked at him for a long time but left him undisturbed. "This Blue Whale is an online community where young people have to do certain tasks, all of which lead to them killing themselves at some point."
Nikki looked at the older investigators for a long time, swallowed hard, and licked her lips. "They end up committing suicide." She'd often thought about what drove people to suicide after losing her mother, Sarah, to it as a young girl. There were the strangest statistics about suicide. City dwellers could kill themselves undetected because there was less cohesion in the city. Rural dwellers, on the other hand, had it easier because they had the means at hand, such as firearms or pesticides. But the worst thing was that most of the suicides had only decided to commit suicide in the last two hours before death.
Nikki licked her lips again. "The teenagers are psychologically manipulated on this blue whale platform until they kill themselves."
Jane looked at her granddaughter for a long moment and deeply breathed. "And that works?"
Nikki raised her eyebrows briefly and gritted her teeth. "It certainly does. There's now an advocacy group with over three hundred and fifty parents from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island whose children have been killed by the Blue Whale."
Elizabeth furrowed her eyebrows. "The guy who programmed that shitty website has been arrested, hasn't he?"
Nick nodded slowly. "Yeah, but we can't get a hold of him. It's a criminal offense to drive someone to suicide. However, the perpetrator has to have humiliated or abused the victim. That's not the case with this website."
"And raising your finger and saying 'You're not allowed to play this' has never worked with children anyway," added Katherine. "Kids are much more likely to play it."
Jane took a deep breath and ran a hand through her increasingly gray hair. "Okay," she said, "that means we've got a puppeteer in the background who's pushing teenagers into murder. And we can't prosecute this puppeteer because he's not abusing anyone."
"That's to be feared," Elizabeth replied, chewing the inside of her cheek. You could see exactly how much she wanted to smoke a cigarette at that moment.
"Whatever," Jane said and returned to her desk, gritting her teeth. "It's settled now where the jurisdiction belongs. Even if Kate is still twenty-five percent docked with the FBI. Seventy-five percent she's docked with the BPD." She nodded, and it was clear that the conversation was over.
The office door opened. Silvia stood in the doorway. "Chief, Detective Morelli has been trying to reach Lt. Rizzoli."
"The lieutenant is here; you can see that," Jane growled with a scowl.
Elizabeth furrowed her eyebrows and looked at her smartphone, which she had switched to silent before the briefing. "Morelli has tried to reach me several times. Seems important."
"It is," said Silvia. "According to Detective Morelli, an absolute massacre."
Jane's head snapped to her secretary. "Absolute massacre? Where?"
"Quincy Market. There are multiple deaths. An attack by several young people. With knives and axes. And they have --" Silvia had to collect herself. "They smeared a word on the street with the victims' blood."
Nikki's heartbeat quickened. "Let me guess. The word is slash mob."
Silvia stared at the young woman in astonishment, and Jane raised her eyebrows too. "How do you know that?"
