The Carma Klown 12

Chapter 12

© 2013 by the author

Friday, ca. 9:30 a.m., June 11, 2010

“That looks so familiar.”

The group of cops crowding the AV conference room stared at the image on the large monitor. In the center was a row of three large windows divided into smaller panes by what appeared to be a metal framework, and, to the right and left, portions of similar windows. Weathered, stained bricks surrounded the windows. It was night and several panes held a reflection from a street light. The building looked old and slightly decayed. It wasn’t derelict—someone used the building and needed the windows to be functional, but clearly not much money was spent on its upkeep. The image appeared to have originated from an upper floor of the building across the street.

“That’s the problem,” said Michael. “It could be any of hundreds of buildings in the metro area. An old factory or workshop, some sort of office building. We’re trying to work out how high off the ground the windows are, based on the angles of the reflections of the street light and the shadows cast by the light. We’re not going to get an exact figure—the Public Works Department says that there are dozens of different types of streetlights still in use, but they vary only about five feet or so in height. So we should at least be able to estimate what floor the video was made on.”

“Google has that street view program. Did you run it through that?” Some voice in the group standing behind him interrupted his explanation.

There always has to be one smartass who thinks I don’t know my job and asks the obvious question, thought Michael.

Before he could say anything, Altmann spoke up. “That was the first thing Mike did. The problem is that there are hundreds of possibilities.”

Michael found no little satisfaction in the impatient note of reproof in Altmann’s voice. At least the Captain was beginning to appreciate his efforts.

“It took hours of careful work for Mike and his team to build this image,” Altmann continued. “If you could see what they started with, you would know that it’s a miracle that we have this much. But it’s just a start. Look at it. It tells us a lot. We know that the Klown isn’t working in a high-rent district.” He stopped and gestured out the window at the row of gleaming modern buildings across the street from One Police Plaza. “It’s an old building. That in itself eliminates a lot of areas. We’re circulating the image to every precinct. It will be shown at every watch meeting. We’re asking every patrol officer in the city to alert us to possible candidates. Mike has set up a special account where they can send us pictures from their phones along with a text message identifying the location. Checking them out is not going to be easy. We expect hundreds of suggestions. But Mike or somebody on his team will show you how to use Google Street Views to eliminate the buildings it can’t be and to whittle down the list. Then we start going out to look at each of the remaining ones. This is the best lead we have so far, and we can thank Mike and his team for it. Now . . . .” Altmann began assigning tasks to various individuals.

It was a vote of confidence, Michael knew. An hour earlier, Altmann had met with his team, and they had shown him the image. Mike had begun explaining how they had generated the image. Altmann had listened for two or three minutes and then asked only, “Is it accurate?” Their assurances that it was satisfied Altmann. He had been disappointed that they weren’t able to identify the precise building immediately, but he quickly moved past that and grasped the possibilities. Then he had called everyone present in the squad room to a meeting and had Michael show them the reconstruction.

Michael had noticed that about the captain before. Once Altmann was confident of his subordinates’ abilities, he didn’t question their expertise. It might take a while to earn that confidence, but once it was earned, the captain was supportive. He didn’t need to know the technical details, but if you gave him the information relevant to the case, he built on that and moved the investigation forward. Michael mentally filed this technique of leadership away for future reference. If—when—he made lieutenant and then captain, he could use it.

When the captain had cleared the room of all but the three lead investigators, he closed the door. “This will keep everyone busy for a couple of days. Good work, Mike.”

“It was a group effort, Captain. Jim Mitchell did most of the mathematics to help us work out angles and distances, and Ellen Corwin and Vince Pascoe worked with me to make the composite image.”

Altmann looked at him speculatively for a second and then slowly nodded. Michael couldn’t tell if he had scored points by admitting that the credit didn’t belong solely to himself or if Altmann was indicating that team work was an assumption that didn’t need to be acknowledged.

“The building looks so familiar. I have this feeling that I’ve seen it somewhere recently.” Michael shook his head. “It’s like a name that’s on the tip of your tongue but you just can’t remember it.”

“That’s the problem,” Jerry Baker said. “It’s the type of building you see every day, but you don’t really look at it. Practically every major highway in the metro area is bordered by buildings that look like that. You see them as you drive past. Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens are full of them. They’re all over the place. It could even be up in Yonkers or across the river in New Jersey. About the only place you don’t find them is downtown Manhattan. And that’s because they were all torn down years ago.”

The four men nodded in resignation. It was going to be hard to identify the building. Although no one brought it up, they all knew that luck would play a large role in the process.

“So,” sighed Altmann, “what else do we have? Phil? What have you got on the other people in the videos and on the equipment.”

“Okay, we’re making some progress.” Redding caught Michael’s eye. “We’ve been following up on a couple of your suggestions, Michael, and been looking into the other actors in the videos and sources of equipment. We found an ad that appeared on Craig’s List beginning the week before the first video appeared. It asked for actors—it specified male actors—with well-developed backs and buttocks for modeling work. We reposted the same ad hoping that some of the same people who replied to the first ad will reply to ours. So far we’ve had 37 responses. We emailed each of them asking if they also applied to the first ad. We didn’t explain why—we didn’t want to alarm them by getting them worried about being involved with the police. But it worked. Fourteen of the people who replied to our ad said that they had also replied to the first ad. We’re going to start interviewing them today. We’ve also been tracking the people who commented on the videos and suggested other victims. So far we’ve found a couple of people who suggested one or more of the men who subsequently appeared in a video. Some of the commentators claim to have personal knowledge of the Klown, and we’re sorting through those. Most of those appear to be braggarts, but we’ve still got to check them out.”

“Any luck finding the suppliers of the equipment?”

“We talked with several suppliers of video cameras, but they all say they can’t help us until we know the make and model used. So that’s a dead end unless we can find out more. We did have some luck with one of the—I guess you would call it a prop—one of the props used in the video with Reilly and Milowski. Kinda embarrassing, but we were able to identify the company that makes that particular, er, um, butt plug, and they gave us a list of local stores that sell it. We’ve been checking them out. No luck so far. They aren’t the type of store that keeps detailed sales records. The only store that admits to selling a pair of them lately said that they were purchased by an older woman. The clerk said she looked like somebody’s grandmother. He had never seen her before, and she paid cash. So there’s no credit card record. The clerk said she knew what she wanted. She walked in, went right to the butt plug display, picked up the two she wanted, and then bought them. She didn’t say anything, but that’s not unusual for stores like that. We had the clerk work with a sketch artist. This is what they came up with.”

Redding handed a copy of the sketch to each of the others. “As you can see, it’s not very helpful. Plus, I don’t know about you, but it seems unlikely to me that the Klown is an old woman. Maybe she’s an accomplice. But in this city, you never know. An old lady like that—she might have a dozen reasons for buying a butt plug.”

“I sure wouldn’t want to be her husband,” Baker laughed.

“Me neither,” said Redding. He shuffled the papers in the folder he had brought with him. “That’s all I got for now, Captain. Just one more thing. Michael, can you get me several pictures of each of the men who appeared in the videos? I mean the other men, not the victims. As many angles as possible. We’ll need them for comparison purposes when we start interviewing the guys who replied to our ad.”

Michael nodded and made a note. “I’ll email them to you when they’re ready. It won’t take long.”

Jerry Baker didn’t wait for Altmann to ask for his report. “We’ve been conducting follow-up interviews with everyone. No further information there. The good news is that Sophia White persuaded the victim in the first video—his name’s Malcolm Hainault—to talk to us. The meeting’s set for this afternoon in Hainault’s office. Sophia’s going to be there, plus Hainault and a group of his lawyers. We’ll try to persuade Hainault to show us his left buttock so that we can confirm if he was actually in the video. Sophia thought maybe she could ask one of his lawyers to check. Come to think of it, Michael, can you get me some pictures from that segment of his video? That might help for identification purposes.”

Michael made another note. “Will do.”

“Michael, what have you got for us?”

“Ellen and I are going back to Syswide this afternoon to check on the six computers used to upload the videos. We’ve tracked the access back to Syswide in all cases. Plus Ellen’s discovered what looks like an earlier appearance of The Karma Klown. Can I show you? It will just take a second. I’ve got the file right here.” Michael pointed at his computer.

When Altmann nodded, he tapped in a command and an image appeared on the monitor.

Revenge.com

Did your boss (a client? a coworker?) give you a hard time at work today?

Did a cop hassle you?

Was a clerk rude to you?

Did the cable service guy fail to show up some time between nine and three, as promised, after you took the day off work? Were you left waiting, with no explanation,
only to receive an automated message from the cable company
rescheduling your appointment for 10:00 pm the Tuesday after next?

Were you told “Please stay on the line. Your business is important to us.” till you were screaming at the phone “If my business is so fucking important to you,
why don’t you hire more operators to answer calls”?

Relieve your daily frustrations at Revenge.com. Choose from our wide selection of whip­ping boys and watch while we take your rage out on him. Our boys are obnoxious bosses, lawyers, teachers, salesmen, plumbers, dads, cops, clerks, call center employees, know-it-all nerds. You’ll hate them as soon as you see them. We have every type and shape. Ages 21 to 80.

Choose from our menu of punishments or create a scenario of your own. We accom­modate all tastes and requests. Do you want to watch a dumbass stupid jock bend over and get paddled till his ass is red and he’s crying and begging you to stop? We can do that. Do you want a bald, overweight guy wearing a suit and tie to confess that he’s a worthless, pathetic, old faggot who can’t get it up and then watch him choke on a huge cock? We can do that. Do you want to watch a cop kneeling on the dirty floor of a public toilet and getting a dozen facials from cocks shoved through glory holes? We can do that.

Why wait? Click the “enter” button below and get started on your revenge!

Below the text on the screen was the familiar image of a clown speeding away in a small car.

“How did you find this?” asked Altmann.

“We were searching for earlier evidence of the Klown’s activities. We were Googling various catchphrases and images, like the clown in the car. We found this when we searched for the phrase “worthless, pathetic, old faggot.”

“What are we looking at exactly?”

“It’s one of Google’s caches of a website. This one is no longer active. If you type in Revenge.com, you get a notice from one of the sites that licenses commercial websites that this name has not been taken and an offer to help you arrange to claim the name. Luckily this website was originally created after Google began its caching program. What you see here is the website as it appeared on . . .” Michael consulted a note he had made “on June 22, 2008.”

“What’s the idea?” Baker asked.

“The person who set it up described it as an interactive video game. We can’t really tell how it was supposed to work because this screen is all that survives. We found a few discussions of the site elsewhere. As near as we can deduce from the comments of those who saw the original site, the idea was that someone with a grievance would join the site, log on, and then choose one of several dozen authority figures to punish. These could be varied by age, gender, race, appearance, occupation. I guess so that the person could match the online victim as closely as possible to the person annoying them. Then you gave the online image a name and chose the punishment you wanted to inflict. These varied from the physical to the mental, but they all involved humiliation. Then the scenario was played out. The resulting session was recorded and other members of the site could log in, view it, and rate it.”

“That sounds familiar,” said Redding. “So this is either an earlier version of the Klown’s scheme that he’s now expanding on, or he took the idea from this site. Can you trace who set up this site?”

“That’s a bit trickier. The site was registered through Metasites, which is one of the services I was talking about. According to them, the site was active only for a couple of weeks in 2008. They processed the application, which was paid for using a credit card. We traced the credit card number. It belonged to a woman who died on June 19, 2008. The charge went through, and Metasites had no reason to be suspicious. The family didn’t get around to canceling the card until June 26. Apparently the family just paid the bill without questioning any of the items on it—Metasites doesn’t charge much for its service. So whoever registered the site didn’t leave any trace of himself.”

Altmann broke in, “I’m sensing a ‘but’ here.”

“We’re working with Metasites, but they’re not hopeful. Once the site was registered, the owner uploaded the screen I’ve just shown you. That was apparently the only time he accessed the site. They didn’t keep a record of his IP address. The site attracted some attention. Within a few days there were comments on other sites and chat rooms about Revenge.com, but these were quickly followed by complaints that none of the links worked. No one could sign up. And a year later, the license expired and the site was no longer active. We’re trying to trace some of the people who commented on it. Vince suggested maybe the Klown himself posted some of the comments to draw attention to the site and to see how people reacted to it. Sort of like a trial run.”

“What were the responses?” asked Redding.

“Overwhelmingly positive. There was a lot of regret that the site didn’t work.”

“Yeah, I can imagine,” said Altmann. “Ellen told me that the funeral home handling Milowski’s funeral put up an online notice about the services. There was a place where people could leave messages, condolences for the family, that sort of thing. I guess they had to disable that because there were so many nasty comments. She also said that all but a few of the comments on the Klown’s videos applaud his efforts. He tapped into a vein of popular discontent.”

“I saw T-shirts with the Klown image in a shop as I walking to the subway,” said Baker.

Michael nodded. “I’ve seen them too. There are several websites devoted to his activities now. As far as we can tell, none of them is connected directly to the Klown, but I’ve got Vince Pascoe working on that.” It doesn’t hurt, Michael thought, to remind them that I’m assigning jobs to people. “We also discovered several earlier examples of people using the name Karma Clown with variant spellings, including karma with a ‘c’ and clown with a ‘k’. Dozens more people have begun using the name since the videos started appearing. We’re trying to trace the users of the name that predate the videos. Most of them are not local or they’re clearly kids. So we’ve been able to eliminate lots of them.”

“Good work, Mike. You got anything else for us at the moment?” Altmann began gathering up his things in preparation to leave.

“Well, if you look at the wording used on Revenge.com, you’ll see that all of the proposed authority figures are male and the punishments involve male-male sex. That seems to be true of The Carma Klown as well. I happen to agree with Phil that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Klown is homosexual. It’s just that homosexual sex is the most humiliating punishment he can think of. He does have it in for male authority figures, however, and all of his victims so far benefited from the financial collapse in 2008. So I’m guessing that is the cause behind his campaign.”

“We can hardly investigate everyone who suffered in 2008,” Baker broke in. “It would be 90 percent of the country. That’s a deadend. As for people who would see forcing someone to have gay sex as a form of humiliation—that’s got to be a large number too.”

“Yeah, too large,” Michael admitted. “There’s one more thing. The Klown is adept at hiding behind screens—first Syswide and now Metasites. He has to be someone who understands computers and how networks function and how companies like Syswide and Megasites operate. We’re working with Syswide and Metasites to see if any of their employees overlap.”

“Okay. I think we’re on the right track. Let’s keep digging. Thanks. That’s all for now.” Altmann stood up and opened the door to the conference room. As the other three men gathered their papers together, he said, “Mike, if you’d step into my office for a second. There’s something I want to talk to you about. Not about this case.” He directed the last comment to Redding and Baker. “It will just take a couple of minutes.”

Baker and Redding paused outside the door of the conference room and stared at Michael’s back as he entered the captain’s office. Altmann nodded at them as he closed the door.

“Take a seat.” He pointed to the chair in front of his desk. “Coffee?” He held up the thermos that seemed always to be filled.

Michael shook his head. “No thanks. I’ve already had too much.” He waited while Altmann filled his mug, spooned in sugar and powdered creamer, and then stirred it. He folded his hands and rested them on the file folder he had placed on his lap. His posture was tense. He wasn’t sure why the captain had called him into his office. There had been that shrewd, speculative look earlier. Had he done something wrong?

Altmann tossed the plastic stir stick into his wastebasket. He sat down and leaned back in his chair. He looked out the window into the squad room and took a deep drink of coffee. He let the silence linger for several beats before speaking. “You’ve been doing good work, Mike.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

Altmann’s eyes flicked briefly in his direction. “Steve’s fine. At least in private. Use your judgment about what title is appropriate in public.”

Michael nodded to show that he had heard. He didn’t think he could manage “Steve” at this point.

“How long have you been a detective, Mike?”

Michael suspected that the captain already knew and was simply asking for confirmation. “Four years and nine months, plus a few days.”

“Good. Almost five years. The next examination for detective sergeant is coming up in October. You’ll meet the time requirements then.”

“I’ve been studying for it. I plan to sign up when they make the formal announcement and open the list.”

“Good. You know that if you pass the test, I’ll be asked to testify before the Promotions Board. I just wanted to let you know that based on your work to date I’ll be able to recommend that you get the promotion. You’ve shown good leadership skills. You’re a team player. You’ve got good judgment and a good eye for details. You interface well with the public. Just a word of advice—be sure you have the legal stuff down cold for the exam. Sergeant is regarded as the first management level, and they want to make sure that the people leading ordinary officers know the law. If you have any questions, just ask one of the ADAs. They all like to give lectures on the law, especially to cops.”

“I will, Captain. Thanks for the advice. I appreciate your taking the time to talk with me.”

“It’s just something I’ve been meaning to talk with you about. Of course, a lot depends on whether we catch the Klown or not. You’re playing such a major role in that, you’d get a lot of credit for that. I’d make sure of that. But that’s not the reason I called you in. I need you to help me with something else.”

“Anything, Captain. Whatever I can do.” At the moment, Michael would have jumped out the window if Altmann told him to.

“It’s becoming obvious that crime involving computers and, whaddya call it, the Web? The Internet?”

“Most people say the Internet now.”

“Yeah, the Internet then. It’s just becoming more and more of a factor in crimes—especially crimes involving finance and money. The department needs to keep up with the criminals. That’s where you come in. Right now we got people like you with computer skills scattered throughout the division. What I need from you is a report on what it would take to form a permanent computer group. Like the Robbery or Murder or Fraud groups but different. It would investigate computer crimes directly but also advise the other groups. Work up detailed proposals for staffing, budgets, equipment. That sort of thing. You’ve already got the nucleus of one now. Corwin, the Pascoe kid, the others. Just base it on that. Don’t be too ambitious. We need to be realistic about what the Department will approve. And you’ll need to work on the report on your own time. I’ll add a summary of the cases in which we’ve relied on your skills to solve and make the case that we need this sort of group permanently. But I need you to supply the technical details. Focus on financial crimes, fraud—that’ll appeal to the mayor. But don’t forget other crimes—ways in which computers can help us with drugs, vice, theft. Anything you can think of. And again, if we can find this Carma Klown, it will make the case even stronger. There’s no hurry. Let’s aim for September 1. By the time the report makes its way up to the people who will make the decision, you should be the sergeant who helped put a stop to the Klown.”

Michael was sitting on the edge of his chair, leaning toward the captain. He had to restrain himself from showing his enthusiasm. “I’ll get right on it. I’ve got lots of ideas, Captain.”

Altmann smiled. “I’m counting on that.”