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our interest, and within a day would know from what number Shirley Denzig was
calling me. It was an expensive process five hundred dollars for each
twenty-four-hour period in question but it was foolproof.
Ryan Blackmer had walked in and taken a seat opposite my desk. Got a
minute?
This was one of the assistants who could always make me smile. Smart,
hardworking, and with a talent for attracting the bizarre and unusual, Ryan
loved to produce results for the detectives and they loved bringing cases in
to him.
Remember that guy who was on-line in the chat room with Brittany in April?
Vaguely. Brittany was the screen named used by a male detective from the
pedophile squad, Harry Hinton, when he went on the Internet to look for child
molesters.
I ll refresh your recollection. He wants a meet tomorrow afternoon.
Friday? Right before the holiday? It was the beginning of the Memorial Day
weekend, and for many New Yorkers it signaled the start of three- or four-day
summer getaways to beach and country houses, hotels and inns.
That s the ruse. Brittany said her parents were going out of town and she d
be home alone in the city, having a sleepover at a girlfriend s house.
Did you review the transcripts?
Blackmer was always prepared. Nice and clean, just the way you like em. He
passed the folder over to me.
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On the World Wide Web, Brittany was a petite thirteen-year-old cheerleader
with a ponytail who attended a parochial school on the Upper West Side. In
real life, Harry was a muscular thirty-six-year-old cop with lots of facial
hair and fifteen years on the job.
When he went on-line to surf for pervs, Brittany-Harry never initiated the
conversation. This was not entrapment. It was simply going to the cyber-caves
where these creatures lurked, just as Felix steered his cab through city
streets looking for underage girls.
Which chat room?
It s called I likevery older men. The usual profile. Say the magic
words cheerleading, music videos, parochial school uniforms.
You could watch Harry s act in real time. Within minutes of his logging on in
that kind of room with his benign teenage-girl profile, sharks would come out
of the water and line up for the kill:
How big are you? they d ask.
I m only five-three. I m short, Brittany would reply.
No, I don t mean your height. What s your bra size? and then Describe your
uniform, and then Are you a virgin? usually followed by Send me your
picture. Harry would press the enter key, and off would go a digital head
shot of Joni Braioso, the undercover who actually took the meet, if the case
progressed that far. Although she was twenty-four, Joni didn t look a day
older than sixteen. When she dressed in a plaid skirt with navy blue knee
socks, fake braces on her teeth, hair pulled back in a bouncing ponytail, and
weighing less than a hundred pounds, she easily passed for twelve or thirteen.
Harry had downloaded the response to the photo he sent: This is me at my
computer. Attached was a picture of a middle-aged man in a polo shirt,
looking like an ad for a sportswear catalog.
And this is mymonster. The printed page that followed was a close-up of a
penis.
I did a double take.
Huge, huh? said Ryan. Harry and I are betting he borrowed that from a porn
site. These guys never have the equipment they claim is theirs. I especially
love it when they name their private parts. Just something that never occurred
to me to do.
Shall I read on?
Follows the basic outline. Wants to show her the ropes. Meet the monster and
learn how to make love.
Is he explicit? I didn t want to waste police manpower if he was simply
talking dirty.
Lays out what he wants to do and how he wants to do it. I m telling you,
he s the perfect target for us. Wants her to suggest a meeting place where
there are hotels in the area. He ll bring the condoms, the marijuana, and some
booze to relax her.
And you ve found out who he is?
Faxed a court order to the ISP. The Internet service provider had responded
with information about the subscriber whose screen name was MonsterMan. The
response was sitting in my fax machine this morning. Just ran him through
Faces of the Nation.
Ryan read to me from the background report he had pulled off the web.
Frederick Welch III. He s a high school principal in Litchfield,
Connecticut.
The meet is a go. Let s decide on a place that makes Joni comfortable and
scout out some SROs that the squad has a relationship with. The
single-room-occupancy hotels were often hot-sheet operations, renting rooms by
the hour. Plagued by prostitutes and junkies, they frequently looked to the
NYPD when trysts and drug deals turned sour and became emergencies. Harry
would call in a chit with some desk manager who owed him a favor.
You want to take it that far?
I want him to sign in and ask for a room key. We lost one a month ago by
grabbing the guy as soon as he showed up and gave Joni a kiss on the cheek.
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The judge said we couldn t prove that the perp had any intention of following
through with his screen banter.
Cyberspace had become a new kind of playground for pedophiles. Not only were
there thousands of sites on which to buy, sell, and exchange child
pornography, it was an easy and inexpensive way to correspond with children
and adolescents all over the world. Parents who enforced rigid rules about
playmates and curfews in their own neighborhoods sent their kids to their
bedrooms for hours on end, without ever warning them that the dangers of
talking to strangers were every bit as real on-line as on the street.
Sarah Brenner came in with two mugs of coffee, one for her and a refill for
me. Got your message and came right upstairs. Hey, Ryan. Something good, no
doubt.
Maybe I ll just skip the coffee and put toothpicks in my eyelids to keep
them open. Good morning, I said, reaching for the hot cup.
Don t complain about sleep deprivation to the mother of three kids.
Battaglia s letting you run with this? You know you love it.
If you can cover my back down here, Ryan s Internet sting might heat up
tomorrow. We ve got three people on trial and a holiday weekend. The young and
the restless are bound to start celebrating the rites of spring. Our numbers
always went up in warm weather.
Do I get to make command decisions? she said, smiling.
You even get to suck up to McKinney, if you re in the mood.
I reached for the ringing phone but Laura came in and grabbed it. She greeted
all of us and told me Chapman was on the line.
I m just setting things up with Sarah. I ll be on my way.
That s not why I m calling. Dr. K. isn t even back from a domestic up in
Chelsea. What do I need to seize someone s passport?
What you don t have yet, in this case: probable cause. Why, has Pierre
Thibodaux packed up his bags already? I had worried that the soon-to-be
ex-director would have no reason to stay in town, but figured that there would
be a period of transition until his successor was named.
I just called Ms. Drexler to see when I could pick up a list of all the
employees, and get a guided tour of the other Egyptian coffins from Timothy
Gaylord, who left us so abruptly yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, he s
leaving the country tonight.
Business or displeasure?
A rather special assignment, down in Chile. He s going to the mummy
congress.
12
The morgue attendant at the loading dock on East Thirtieth Street was pushing
an empty gurney through the entrance that Mike Chapman was holding open for
him. I slammed the cab door behind me and squinted because of the bright
sunlight. It was unusual to hear singing at the mouth of this gray tunnel
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