Detective Brisco, his face as long as usual, looked around this apartment he'd been dispatched to with his partner. The resident, apparently now quite dead, had been a fairly neat individual. There was mail stacked on the end of the kitchen table. The clothes were put away, everything in its place.
This was a two bedroom apartment but had, from the contents of the closets, only one occupant. He was still seated at a desk (in what looked like an expensive office chair, much nicer than anything he'd seen at the station) in front of a computer. The computer had quite a good connection to the internet. One of the uniforms said, a look of awe on his face, that this guy had a T1 (whatever that was) all to himself.
He realized that the neatness of everything here would make it look less like a scene of a violent crime. His partner, Ed Green, was looking through the papers stacked in the laser printer next to the computer. The scent of lemons hovered in the air, masking the smell of the corpse.
It wasn't an old corpse; apparently someone called this in before any neighbors would have been able to tell. That call was already being traced back because only the killer could have made the call so early.
Normally Lenny was able to handle the sight of a dead body with a sense of distance but this one disturbed him.
The dead man was tied to his chair, quite nude. No, with this kind of event, the body was naked, not merely nude. It bothered Lenny that the medical examiner would need to have the body undisturbed so he couldn't cover the man's genitalia.
The body-- including the genitalia-- seemed to have little lines all over it, not a lot of bleeding but it sure looked like this poor fellow had thousands of paper-cuts.
As if that wasn't the most disturbing thing, there was the five gallon bottle that had held water connected to a device designed to spray the body down with lemon juice. The rinds from the fruit included not just lemons but a few limes and even one grapefruit which still lay in the bottom of the big bottle in the shallow layer of water. The many towels on the floor (and the drop cloth underneath them) to catch the juice as it ran off the body was a sign that who ever had killed this man had not been interested in making a mess.
Yeah, Lenny thought, he must've been killed by Felix Unger.
This sure looked like a case of pre-meditated murder. It might have started out as torture but the man had died.
But-- and this was really bothering him now-- why would any one ever put so much effort and forethought into arranging such an excruciating death? Why would anyone do this kind of thing? The dead man wasn't even a lawyer!
"Hey, Lenny, look here. He was a spammer."
The look of utter incomprehension crossed Lenny's bloodhound like face, thinking that the victim sure didn't look like he dealt with small tins of alleged meat by-products.
Green took pity on him. "Lenny, don't you have a computer? Use e-mail? Any of that stuff?"
Lenny shook his head. Every one of his forays on the so- called information super-highway had ended with him being blown into the weeds. He'd felt like road-kill.
"Oh. Well, this guy was the electronic equivalent of a junk mailer, sending ads to people via e-mail."
Lenny's eyes opened wide. "And what kind suspect will we be looking for?"
Ed held up a CD. "Got a suspect list right here. About one hundred and fifty..."
"That's gonna be a lot of legwork..." Lenny Briscoe interrupted.
"... million."
Briscoe looked at him with big eyes: "One hundred and fifty million suspects? You're kidding, right?"
Ed Green shook his head. "Nope. And every one of them would consider this a justifiable homicide, Lenny."
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Author: Jack C Lipton Title: Downtime (incomplete) Part: 0/ Universe: Law and Order Summary: The InterNet has two kinds of people: users, who use the network for reasonable purposes, and abusers, who send spam to the users. Keywords: crime, nosex Revision: $Revision: 1.3 $ Archive: http://www.asstr-mirror.org/files/Authors/CupaSoup/www/ Mailing List: FAQ: RCS: $Id: LO-downtime.x,v 1.3 2003/07/03 16:28:13 jcl Exp $