Buried Prey

Computers, everybody had said, were the machines of the future, and people with a computer education were assured of success.
    The reality, the killer found out, was that a half-dozen courses in electronics would get you the same status and income as a TV repairman—not even that, after people began to accept the idea that computers were disposable. Then, they simply threw them away, rather than fix them when they broke.
    He trudged around the edge of the computer business for ten years, and finally, and almost inevitably, given his deepest interests, he wound up selling porn. He ran a half-dozen porn sites out of his den, collecting barely enough to pay for food, taxes, and the mortgage. Porn supposedly was a mainstay of the Internet, an easy way to get rich. Maybe it was, but if so, where was his money? Back at the beginning, when the Net was just starting up, he’d worked hard at it, gathering hundreds of thousands of porno shots from around the world, plus thousands of short videos.
    Now, he let the servers do the work. He had a computer kid over at the U who kept the site going—turning over the daily offerings so they didn’t recur too quickly, and stealing videos and photos from other sites when he could—in return for free access to the porn for himself and his friends, and a hundred dollars a week. The Jones killer did the books, processing the credit card numbers as they trickled in, a few every day, but, it seemed, fewer every day.
    He had money worries.
    The porn brought in two grand a month, after expenses. Nothing, really.
    He made the rest of his money on eBay, reselling almost anything he could turn up that might be of value to somebody, somewhere. Over the years, he’d developed an eye for moneymakers collecting dust in the back of junk stores; knew the back rooms of every junk store between the Ozarks and the Canadian line, from the Mississippi to the Big Horns. His latest score had been a bunch of silk kimonos that turned up in a bundle of rags from Japan. He bought sixty of them for twelve dollars each, sold them for an average of fifty to a hundred, depending on color and condition.
    Enough to keep going for another couple of months.
    But he needed money for his travel, and he needed to travel. The need was growing. He really would like to go first class, because he’d become large enough that tourist class was starting to hurt, especially on the long flights.
     
     
    THE KILLER WAS a borderline manic-depressive, currently sliding down the slope into depression. That hadn’t been helped when the cops turned over the basement of his old house by the university, and found the bodies of the Jones girls.
    He was mostly worried about the neighbors from back then. He’d never been a social butterfly, but still, some might remember him, if the cops could find them. He didn’t worry too much about the landlord, who was dead, and had been for years; and he’d always paid the rent in cash, for a ten percent discount, which the landlord had recouped by not paying taxes on the cash.
    In his manic phases, the killer had spent twenty years running his porn sites and collecting both junk for resale, and incautious young girls. He’d taken seven of them between the middle eighties and the middle nineties, and once kept one for almost a month before she died. Three, including the Jones girls, had come from Minnesota. The others had come from Iowa, Missouri, and Illinois. The Illinois girl had been an experiment, a bone-thin black girl from East St. Louis, taken to see if black girls were sexually different, like he’d heard. They weren’t, and he decided he didn’t like black. He cut her throat the same night he took her, and threw her body in a ditch off the Mississippi up in Granite City.
    Then, in the middle nineties, he’d discovered the sex tours to Thailand.
    You could get whatever you wanted in Thailand, if you had the right contacts. No fuss, no muss, no risk . . . and he liked the little yellow ones.

    HEADACHE.
    He stood up, went into the bathroom, pulled off six feet of toilet paper, folded it into a pad, and used it to pat sweat off his forehead and the top of his chest. The house smelled, he thought. Pizza and beer and black beans and beer-and-black-bean farts. He’d open the window, but it was just too damn hot.
    He went into the second bedroom, where he kept the junk, and retrieved a pair of antique wooden Indian clubs. He’d had them up on eBay for $99, but hadn’t gotten any