Nikki and Nick had taken a seat in the visitors' room at a so-called 'deletion center' of Xenotech, an extensive social network.
A young man called Paul Warner, dressed in the obligatory hoodie of start-up people and computer nerds, sat down with them, a USB stick in his hand. A fitness tracker on his wrist. That, too, had changed in the tech scene: While the computer nerds of days gone by had subsisted almost exclusively on cola and fast food and often didn't precisely look malnourished as a result, modern nerds sought a balance to their mostly sedentary work by eating a vegan diet to reduce their carbon footprint and also to measure their exercise and physical activity. Everything was measured: the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, so-called conversion rates, how many buyers had been reached, clicks, weight, body mass index, steps walked, calories burned, and so on.
"Do you have coffee?" he asked.
"We have," said Nikki, pointing to the coffee mugs in front of them with the Xenotech logo. White lettering on a black background.
Nick looked around at the regular bouncy balls and Lego play area in any of these start-up offices and the fitness rooms, sleeping areas, and craft beer fridges. "It's nice here," he noted. "Are there any games consoles?"
"Sure."
"Also, Warhammer 40,000 tabletop tables?"
"I only know the computer games. But we have yet to get that. Let's suggest it.
"But it's possible that people won't work hard enough then," Nick replied with a slight frown, sipping his coffee.
"I think so, too." Paul pointed to the USB stick. "Well, this one's less nice. We've deleted these videos and pictures over the last few weeks."
Nikki furrowed her brows a little. "How do you deal with it?"
Paul took a deep breath and pulled the corners of his mouth down. "Well, we look for things like that and delete them. But we keep it internally for documentation, of course."
"No, I mean how you deal with it privately. We're actually both in the same shitty job. We both have to look at the excesses of the scum of the earth."
Paul nodded slowly. "I hadn't thought about it like that, but you're right. When I saw my first beheading, I ran out crying. Nowadays, it's halfway okay; it's our job, and you get used to it over time. We don't have as much here as our colleagues in New York, where there is still a main center. We call it high-priority content. It's all there. Some of it is just normal fraud. Links to the Telegram App and Western Union, where hackers try to take money from stupid people. Then, you can use Dark Jobs to find people for unpleasant tasks. You can do this without the dark web. But then the rest of the nasty stuff comes very quickly: child pornography, cruelty to animals, people trampling hamsters with high heels, murder, everything. Our work is also often about preventing suicides because there are lots of instructions on the internet on how best to kill yourself."
Nikki pressed her lips together. "Like with the Blue Whale?"
Paul nodded slowly and pulled on the drawstring of his hoodie. "Exactly like that. You can't do this job for years. I didn't have much faith in humanity before. Now I have almost none at all."
The young woman raised her eyebrows briefly. "Our colleagues in our IT department are no different. They also have to look at child porn all the time to document criminal acts. That doesn't go unnoticed either."
"That's why I want to help you," Paul replied. "And in the shortest possible way. What are you doing with the images?"
"We're comparing them," Nick explained, "together with our colleagues from the FBI. We're trying to conclude missing people with relevant ages from the actions visible in the images. Maybe that will somehow lead us to the core of this killer group before they strike again." You could tell he didn't believe this tactic would succeed quickly. Nikki didn't either, though.
"Is this easy for you?"
"No. With five thousand people disappearing without a trace every year in and around Boston alone, this task is almost hopeless. We want to get to the senders via the videos. Slowly, we need success, even if it's just the first clue. The media are slowly catching on. For them, this is the perfect opportunity."
Paul nodded and pointed to his iPad. "The clues are piling up here."
"Let me see that," Nikki replied with a furrowed brow.
"Here, as you said, the media immediately jumped on the subject. There's already talk of a death influencer controlling this killer group."
"Death influencer --" She shook her head. "Kind of fits with the God of Blood, though."
"Yeah," Nick nodded thoughtfully, "someone who doesn't post makeup tips or cat grooming videos in the style of consumer influencers but killing videos and killing tips."
Paul glanced at his watch and stood up. "I have to get on with it. But if you don't want to check out all the videos, there are a few quick links where you might find what you're looking for."
"Sites on the internet where you can find videos like that?" Nick asked with his eyebrows furrowed. "You mean the so-called gore sites?"
Paul nodded somewhat resignedly. "That's what I mean. You'll find the latest trends on the USB stick."
xxx
Nick, Nikki, and Katherine had once again taken over the BRIC. An IT expert from the FBI called John Melton had joined them on one of the monitors on the wall.
They had uploaded the contents of the USB stick to the FBI cloud.
Nick had opened two of the infamous gore sites, which featured all sorts of bloody and disgusting things. One of them was . The menu bar on the right led the user to various links to categories such as Animal Encounters, Autopsy, or Beheadings. To the right and at the top of the website were a lot of pornographic advertisements and ads, including some pictures showing a man and a small woman having oral sex. However, it was not entirely sure, and obviously should not be, whether the woman whose shadow was only visible was only minor or even underage.
The other website was called .
"We all know that one," Melton said, "that site has the classic mix of big-budget ISIS murder videos, Chechen rebel executions filmed on analog camcorders, and then whole collections of images of disfigured corpses from car crashes. Similar to what was on at the beginning of the millennium. I suggest we search semantically for postings that match the ones we already have. For example, this post about deboning."
"There aren't many," Nikki sighed and crossed her legs while looking at the monitor wall in disgust. On it was a picture of a naked, skewered woman being roasted over a fire. Surely a photomontage, but disgusting nonetheless. "Why is something like that legal?"
"It always depends on which jurisdiction the servers of these sites are in," explained Melton. "Apart from that, the operators of the website then say the same thing as the gun lobby: guns don't kill people. People kill people. It even says the same thing here. Videos don't kill people. People kill people."
"But it does show pictures and videos of people being killed?" Nikki didn't let up. Nick had clicked on a few links. In one, a Mexican who had betrayed someone had his head cut off with a knife by members of a drug cartel.
Melton nodded slowly. "That's right. It all started with Faces of Death, where real deaths were shown. It was sometime in the eighties. But these sites are more professional. They're often run by medical students who want to toughen up for their future career in trauma surgery."
Katherine pulled the corners of her mouth down. "If you really want to be a trauma surgeon, it's not that bad."
"They even have 24/7 hotlines," Melton continued, "where people can call if they're badly shocked by the videos and need someone to talk to."
"Solving problems they've caused themselves," Nikki murmured.
Melton nodded once more. "You can look at it that way. On the other hand, as strange as it sounds, these sites have helped solve real crimes."
Katherine raised her eyes. "The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs, right?"
Melton looked at the psychiatrist approvingly. "You know your way around.
Katherine was always familiar with this sort of thing. It was part of her job, but Nikki still didn't know if she should approve of something like this. Three Guys One Hammer was a video that could cause lasting psychological disturbance in people who didn't see what Katherine, Nikki, Nick, and Elizabeth saw every day - and it was still online. It showed the Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs from Russia smashing their victim's face with a hammer and stabbing his stomach and face with a screwdriver. Recorded with the cell phone camera of one of the murderers.
It was torture, it was murder - and it was real.
"The thing popped up on a gore site, and that's how they got caught," Melton said, "and that's exactly what you're trying to do. In that respect, the idea isn't so stupid."
"Wasn't it the same with Luka Magnotta?" Katherine asked with furrowed brows.
"Yes. He first acted in gay porn, then tortured and killed cats, and finally murdered people and sent body parts to the authorities. He also posted the whole thing on gore sites to make himself important. Then he was arrested in an internet café."
"Was it on one of those two Gore sites?"
Melton shrugged his shoulders. "I think it was on Cannibal Cantina, which isn't a gore site; it's a vore site."
Nikki's eyebrows drew together. "Vore side?"
"You don't know that?" Katherine looked at her niece like a professor at an underprepared student. "Vore pages are about cannibalism. Vore is from the Latin vorare, which means to devour or swallow. It's about a fetish. People either want to eat other people or be eaten themselves."
Nikki made a face. "Thank you, Katherine, for sharing these beautiful thoughts that make you sleep at night."
Katherine looked at her niece long and hard. "Then don't ask if you don't want to hear the answer." She seemed offended at Nikki's cynicism or perhaps insufficient appreciation of her comments.
Melton cleared his throat. "Here's something else. Almost three years ago, a Canadian court sentenced the webmaster of Best Gore, Mark Marek, to six months probation, three months house arrest, and thirty hours of community service for so-called moral corruption because of Luka Magnotta's postings."
"So he did," Nikki muttered.
"Marek was convicted under a section known as the obscenity law, which is very rarely used in Canada," Melton explained. "The law states that anyone who produces, prints, distributes or disseminates obscene materials, images or pornographic images can be imprisoned for up to two years."
"Can you send me that case?" asked Katherine.
Nikki shook her head, barely noticing. Her aunt was probably looking for weird stories for her lectures at BCU again.
Melton pulled the corners of his mouth down. "Sure. In May four years ago, Marek was the first to go viral with a video called 1 Lunatic, 1 Ice Pick.
1 Lunatic, 1 Ice Pick, Nikki thought, furrowing her brows. These horror videos always had names like that. Three Guys, One Hammer. Two Girls One cup, she remembered. As soon as it was deleted somewhere, it reappeared somewhere else. Two women indulging in the most disgusting excesses of fecal eroticism, only a minute and a half long, but by far the most disgusting thing the officer had ever seen. But at least it was only disgusting; no one was killed there.
"1Lunatic, 1 Ice Pick," Melton now said, "goes eleven minutes, and you see a person tampering with a strangled corpse: Necrophilia and cannibalism. The murderer later became known in the English-language press as the Montreal Skinner. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Lin Jun. And it was the fans of the Gore page who recognized him first. He had previously posted videos there of him torturing cats." Melton paused. "Here's another quote from Marek: The pictures and videos are not edited by a Hollywood special effects team. They are as real as possible, and I believe people are entitled to the truth. To the real, uncensored truth."
"Amen," Nikki groaned.
Melton cleared his throat and looked at one of his screens. "My computer here has already added a few things. Here, for example. This is a young man who is not yet sixteen from the countenance. You can see him here, pumped full of drugs, pulling the skin off his little finger --"
"... and seems to think it's great." Elizabeth dutifully watched the video on one of the monitors for a few seconds and lowered her eyes.
Melton took a deep breath. "Here we have a woman beheading an infant, but that's from somewhere in South America. Here's another beheading from Mexico. Then another woman cutting her own throat, and another cutting her tongue in two to get, as she says, a snake tongue."
A picture was seen. On it a mouth, a tongue, and a lot of blood. Melton pressed his lips together and rolled his eyes slightly. Even though he saw something like this every day, Nikki thought, he couldn't shake off the horror and perversion behind these videos.
Nick closed his eyes briefly. When they saw such images or videos or even just when such things were mentioned, they perceived the associated smells in their brains. The smell of iron, the smell of blood, the smell of excrement, the scent of fear, the smell of evil.
Melton continued to speak. "Here's an older video. It's been around for a while, but we can't prove where it came from." He played the video.
A man in a mask boasted that he had captured young women. "The first rule of exploitation: anything neutral can be abused. Do what I did. I introduced objects to them. I let them watch what I did to the children. I have grown on the child. So that they knew what to expect later. The women were my farm animals. I rode them, I tied them up, I milked them. And in the end, I slaughtered them."
"Sick shit," Nick growled with lowered brows. "You should do all that to that sick son of a bitch."
Katherine gritted her teeth and then licked her lips. "Unfortunately, we don't know where he is."
"There's another problem," Melton said with a sigh. "The Virtual Teams Management phenomenon isn't unique to management."
Nikki stood up from her chair. "What do you mean by that?"
"Well, every multinational company is confronted with the fact that different teams are scattered around the globe and must work together. It's the same with snuff movies now."
Nikki furrowed her eyebrows. "Excuse me?"
"Yes, I'm afraid that's the case. This guy here who wants to slaughter women also boasts that he has snuff movies produced in the Philippines."
"They're making snuff movies for him thousands of miles away?" asked Nick with a deep frown.
"Yes. He sends a producer a list of what's supposed to happen. For example, here ... Teenagers, 16 years old, with soldering irons, then chainsaws, rape in between. Beheading at the end. The producer gets an advance, kidnaps the girl or boy in the slums of Manila, finds a few perverts to do the job, shoots the movie, uploads everything to a protected cloud on the dark web, and then gets the second and final installment via Western Union or coin. My point is that sometimes these perverts get too cocky in their perversion. Then, they make mistakes. And we investigators can find out where their messages are coming from. And then maybe where they are. We --" Melton faltered. The screen went black.
Nikki furrowed her eyebrows. "Agent Melton? Are you still there?"
"Just a moment," he said out of the blackness of the screen.
The officer looked at Nick and Katherine.
"He hasn't just been kidnapped himself, has he?" the psychologist muttered.
"Very funny," Nikki growled back. "Agent Melton, what's going on? Are you still there?"
"More than ever." Now, Melton was visible again. "I've got something here. A video!"
"A video? Who's it from?"
"The guy calls himself ... God of Blood."