Page 10 of The Midnight Lock (Lincoln Rhyme 14)

“Mr. Rhyme, please answer.”

Rhyme cleared his throat. “What you describe is possible.”

“No further questions.”

5

Isee that, no, it’s not a scare tactic.

This is going to be murder. The real thing.

Blood is about to flow.

In quantity.

AC/DC, the one with the knife, grabs the victim’s hair with his left hand, pulls it back and works the knife around the neck, the way you slit the paper wrapper atop a bottle of whisky. The victim gives a squeak as if of surprise and the crimson fluid flows. Oh my, it sprays. He sinks to his side. The knife man saws and saws—the knife merelyappearedsharp—and finally detaches the head. He tosses it contemptuously aside and continues to lecture. The body doesn’t twitch or curl. It’s completely still.

And now for my role in the matter.

My decision.

I hit the space bar to freeze the video. I sip some caffeine-free cola and realize it’s gone warm and flat during the course of the pasthour or so; I’ve been engrossed in videos of the sort I’ve just been watching. One loses track.

I sit up a bit straighter and lift one shoulder, then the other. A bone pops. I’m at my workbench in a chair that’s padded but not made for long-term sitting, though I usually sit in it long-term. I’ve been meaning to get a new one and I will soon. I have my eye on a thousand-dollar, special-order model.

I read the comments populating the screen below the frozen video.

Epic!!!!

Los Zetas should be rounded up and shot.

Was a Mexican cop who did it, the cartels OWN them.

Not as good as last weeks why no closeups!!

Why didnt they do his girlfriend two?

Why indeed? I think. Thatwasa bit of a disappointment.

So, decision time.

I type several keys and hit Return.

The screen goes black, replaced by the words:

This video has been removed for violating our community standards.

This will piss off a lot of our audience. I sometimes read comments complaining about the company deleting a video. They cry censorship. How can we ignore the First Amendment?

But viewers on social media are rarely constitutional scholars andthey miss the significant fact that the First Amendment prohibitsgovernmentalcensorship. My company—ViewNow—like YouTube, Instagram and all the others can delete to their hearts’ delight. Completely legal. You don’t like it, type in another URL and browse elsewhere.

I had debated a different route. Rather than deleting the vid, I could have put it behind an entry page. When a viewer clicked on the title, “Justice Cartel Style,” a pop-up would have appeared.

Mature content. Sign in to confirm age.

But the video was, like most nowadays, high-def. The blood was vivid and plentiful, the death yelp—the last sound ever to be uttered by the victim—clear. So the execution had to go altogether.

My job as content moderator is to consider what’s in the best interest of my employer. And that means striking the fine balance between the titillating, shocking and disgusting on the one hand, and the cute, funny and inspiring, on the other. Ultimately, of course, I suspect that when it comes to offense, the wunderkind execs within the Silicon Valley headquarters of ViewNow don’t give two shits about producing upright content; they’re terrified of scaring off advertisers if the vids are too troubling (though I was amused when a banner ad at the bottom of the Los Zetas beheading was for Family Pride Life Insurance).