Shoot to Thrill by P.J. Tracy Read Free Book Online

up for the next ten, then turn their back when you start to show gray. I’m telling you, Son, and I sure wish you would listen …
    ‘Agent Smith?’
    He came back from his reverie instantly. They were all sitting at a round table in the third-floor office, and now the skinny guy was shoving a mug of coffee under his nose.
    ‘Well. Thank you very much. Do you happen to have any sugar?’

    Agent Smith had no idea what Jamaican Blue was, but he complied, set his mug on the table, and looked down into the brew. ‘My goodness.’ He felt Harley’s massive hand clap him on the shoulder.
    ‘Okay, Agent Smith. You’ve got a palate. You just went up a couple of notches. Now, we pulled something interesting off the Web this morning.’
    ‘Another murder scene?’
    ‘Maybe. You show us yours, we’ll show you ours. So what have you got for us?’
    Smith started emptying his briefcase. ‘These are the video films of the five murders. Cleveland, Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and Los Angeles.’ He dug deeper into the leather case and pulled out a bound folder of untold pages. ‘This is a detailed record of our Cyber Crimes Division’s failed attempts to trace the posts involving those murders. And these are the fringe sites we’d like you to monitor.’ He slapped down a folder stuffed with printed pages.
    Annie pulled the folder toward her and started shuffling through them. ‘My God. There must be hundreds of them.’
    Smith nodded. ‘We narrowed it down as much as we could. The fringe sites we’ve listed are limited to those dedicated exclusively to murder scenarios. Some of them are distinctly amateurish and clearly staged events; others are questionable. We need a program that spots the real crimes instantly so we can get law enforcement on the ground right away, before critical evidence and possible
    Roadrunner showed him a couple of print frames from the site. Smith looked at them without expression. The Feds were good at that. ‘Did you get anything from this? Did you try a trace?’
    ‘No joy,’ Harley said. ‘We already passed it on to Agent Shafer so he can put your people on it, but they’re not going to get anywhere. That post was flying around the world at the speed of light. Right now we’re running some enhancement programs on the film to see if we’ve got a real murder or Memorex.’
    ‘Which won’t do a lot of good without a location, and you can’t get location without a trace.’
    Annie tipped her head and gave him a little smile that gave him a little funny feeling in the pit of his stomach. ‘A picture’s worth a thousand words, darlin’. Or is it ten thousand?’ She scooped up the folder containing fringe sites and stood. ‘Are you okay there, or do you want us to set up a desk for you?’
    ‘Well, I think this will work for the time being.’ He sat quietly for a moment, watching and listening to the others as they scattered to their respective workstations, then opened his laptop to begin his daily report. He looked up from his screen when he heard a timid clicking, and stared in amazement as a sorry-looking dog with no tail climbed up onto the chair across the table and sat down facing him.

Magozzi had never been one for self-examination, although the department shrink suggested it every time he shot someone. Well. The two times he had shot someone. It hadn’t told him much then – killers had taken a shot at him, and he shot back, what was to introspect? – and it wasn’t going to tell him much now.
    He’d had this silly idea as a young man that he’d make his way in the world, marry and have kids and a house and whatever the hell it was people called a normal life. That was the plan. That was what you grew up expecting when you were raised Italian Catholic with a family bigger than the population of Rhode Island and were stupid enough to believe that things would be the same for you as they had been for your parents. No one ever suggested that it might be otherwise; that your