May 3
693 Linden Avenue
Overland Park, Kansas
8:51 A.M. CDT / 9:51 A.M. EDT
Bacon and eggs—fried for him, though Josh would only eat them scrambled—with the otherwise Spartan nature of the offering modulated by slightly under-toasted refrigerator muffins, allegedly English and allegedly baked by someone named “Thomas.” As a trained police detective, Brian Fisker was skeptical of both claims.
He was just serving them up when the kitchen extension rang, bringing a grimace to his face that matched that of the nine-year-old already seated at the small table.
“Dad, we’re going to be late!”
“Go ahead and start, kiddo. Won’t be a minute.”
He snatched up the wall-mounted receiver, growled an efficient “Fisker.”
“Hey, Sergeant—sorry to call you at home. Hope I didn’t interrupt your morning.”
Fisker recognized the voice of the FBI liaison. “My son has an early lacrosse match. I’m going to watch it, then drop him off at his mother’s before the afternoon briefing with you and the task force.”
“I hear you. I’m a Weekend Warrior too. Divorce sucks, doesn’t it?”
“What can I do for you”—Fisker searched his memory for the name, gave up—“Special Agent?”
“We have something I didn’t want to wait on. Those names of visitors to Adaala Al Thar, that ‘justice and vengeance’ website? We sent out local field agents all over the country to interview them, starting since yesterday afternoon. Most of them were unproductive, of course; the visitors, all of them kids, most of them teens, went to the site, but claimed they never had any other communications with anybody associated with it. Knew nothing about any ‘private chat room,’ they said. Never connected with anybody on any such thing.”
“Okay. And?”
“But there were three of them—two teenaged boys, one girl—who admitted they had. One of the boys, a total of a dozen times. He thinks; may have been more.”
Fisker heard the latent excitement in the FBI man’s voice, found that it was contagious.
“Get this, Sergeant: Apparently it’s an ‘invitation-only’ sort of thing. Kid said he felt they were trying to, I don’t know, screen him. Make sure he was their type of guy, you understand? Like some kind of survey.”
“What kind of survey?”
“They’d work in questions about who he was, where he went to school, did he drive a car—kind of casual at first, but the kind of stuff you’d want to know to check a person’s bonafides. ‘Hey, what kind of car do you drive? Bet it’s pretty fast,’ et cetera. See if the kid’s name was connected to a driver’s license, we think, possibly hack the state’s computers to check on the date of birth.”
A chuckle. “To maybe make sure it was a high school kid, not somebody with a badge, out surfing the Internet for scumbags. You know. But not too intense at first; nothing that might be overly alarming. A sympathetic ear, somebody to talk it all out with.”
Fisker had worked pedophile cases; he understood the process of grooming all too well.
“The boy said that after that, it started getting strange. ‘Creepy’ was the term he used. Lots of what we’re reading here as a gradual process of indoctrination. Things that might feed any fire the kid already had, in a way that might lead him to start thinking he needed to do something to right all the wrongs. First, the ones in his own life: bullies, teachers who picked on him, maybe the kid’s own parents.”
“Good Lord,” Fisker muttered.
“It gets better—or worse, I should say. The boy told our field agent that after a few ‘chats’ like that, things started to get more political. Started leaning toward the ‘bigger picture;’ suggestions on how the kid could ‘make a real difference.’ Some pretty specific suggestions too, Sergeant.”
“Did any of them involve shooting up public places?”
“You got it. And a few other concepts too, but they all involved mass-casualty scenarios. The boy says that’s when he ‘freaked’—his word, a direct quote—and broke off contact. Three months ago. You believe it? The little bastard kept his mouth shut about it until now.”
“Three months. Nothing since then?”
“The boy says no. Our guess is that the ‘justice and vengeance’ people wrote it off as a ‘miss,’ and moved on to the next candidate. I’ll send you the interview transcript. But it sounds like a pretty smooth script they were following in those ‘chats.’”
“Yeah,” Fisker said. “I’m no expert, but—”
“Me neither. But we had the transcript looked at by somebody who is. Clinical psychologist, teaches over at Mizzou; the lady consults with the Bureau on things like this.”
“What did she say?”
“Her opinion is that whoever is behind this is a professional, or knows someone who is. Knows where the buttons are, and how to push them.”
“They sure pushed the button hard on Chaz Campbell, maybe that kid in Decatur.”
“Looks that way.”
Fisker did the math.
In any given population anywhere, there exists a certain number of the morally disaffected, the mortally disillusioned; among that tally, there is also always a sub-set of the mentally disturbed, and a sub-sub-set of the overly susceptible among them. Many experts, quoted widely in law enforcement journals Fisker had read, estimated the latter percentage between as low as one percent, to as high as five percent.
In any given population.
Overland Park has a population of slightly under 180,000 souls, Fisker told himself. The United States as a whole, what? More than 350 million? And how many of them, given the proper encouragement—hell, given the damn incentive or the ‘duty’ even…
Fisker had also worked vice, broken up more than a few illegal gambling rings.
It’s a goddamn numbers game, just like blackjack.
Play enough hands, hook up with enough kids, stack the deck just enough…
… and the dealer always wins.
“You still there, Sergeant?”
“What else did your people get from the interviews?”
“Some details. Now that we know what to ask, we’re going back and hitting the others again. This time, a little harder. But look, that’s not the best part, Sergeant.”
Fisker waited, charitably letting the FBI agent savor the suspenseful silence.
“Our cyber guys took the bit in their teeth real fast: ripped apart the boy’s computer history, call-dumped the phone records, compared everything to the other two admitted chat room chatters’ stuff. Let me tell you, you wouldn’t believe the devious cell-tower routes our cyber people had to trace—”
“Did they find a location? A point of origin?”
“Not a specific address. But close. All the dots connect to New Jersey. A section of Essex County, just outside New York City. Your shooting case has just officially become an FBI Priority-Alpha, Sergeant. I thought you should know.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well … in general terms, it means we’ll be taking it over from here. Your boss will be getting the paperwork, but think of this call as your formal notification, okay?”
There was a pause, as if the FBI agent expected a vehement reaction.
Then, almost hastily: “Hey, I’ll let you go now. Of course, I won’t be at your briefing this afternoon, Sergeant. You might want to cancel it, give everybody else on your team the weekend off, right? Enjoy the day with your son.”
The line went dead in Fisker’s hand.
As he replaced the receiver, Fisker felt a tug at his sleeve; he looked down to see the urgent, imploring eyes of his nine-year-old son.
“Dad,” Joshua Fisker implored, his voice almost inaudible in its urgency. “We’ve got to go.”
“I guess we should,” Fisker replied. “You lead on, son. I suppose I can follow.”
It sounded convincing, at least to Joshua.
As for himself, Brian Fisker heard the doubt in his own words.