“Message one. One thirty-fourA.M.”A real human voice kicked in: “Good morning, Alex Cooper. Or should I say I hope there’s nothing good about it.”

The stalker. Shirley Denzig’s biting tone was unmistakable. The young woman with a complicated psychiatric history had harassed me for weeks during the winter months, after a confrontation in my office when I had seized a forged document that she was carrying with her. She had ferreted out my home address and tried to get past the doormen, at the same time that I was embroiled in a dangerous homicide investigation. The detectives from the District Attorney’s Office Squad had searched for her in vain, certain also that she had stolen a pistol from her father’s garage in Baltimore.

“I haven’t forgotten what you took from me, Alexandra. And I haven’t forgotten that you told people I was crazy.” Denzig rambled on, filling the three minutes of recording time with vitriol, short of threatening but nasty and unwelcome.

The second message picked up seconds later and Denzig finished her tirade. “I’m closer than you think, Alexandra. You’d better stay out of my way.”

She was smart enough to know exactly what she was doing. At no time in either message did she express any intent to harm me. The sound of her voice and the fact that she had not forgotten her anger was enough to alarm me. I dialed the extension upstairs in the squad and reached the duty sergeant who had come on at 8A.M.

“Steve Maron will know what to do when he gets here. He and Roman handled this one last winter. I’d like someone from the tech unit to come down and tape the messages, so I have a record of them. And I’ll get Sarah to sign off on a subpoena to dump my phone.”

Computerized telecommunications systems were so sophisticated now that even the shortest telephone call or message would leave its source on our machines. We could request a “dump” of my phone line, specifying the date and time of our interest, and within a day would know from what number Shirley Denzig was calling me. It was an expensive process-five hundred dollars for each twenty-four-hour period in question-but it was foolproof.

Ryan Blackmer had walked in and taken a seat opposite my desk. “Got a minute?”

This was one of the assistants who could always make me smile. Smart, hardworking, and with a talent for attracting the bizarre and unusual, Ryan loved to produce results for the detectives and they loved bringing cases in to him.

“Remember that guy who was on-line in the chat room with Brittany in April?”

“Vaguely.” Brittany was the screen named used by a male detective from the pedophile squad, Harry Hinton, when he went on the Internet to look for child molesters.

“I’ll refresh your recollection. He wants a meet tomorrow afternoon.”

“Friday? Right before the holiday?” It was the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend, and for many New Yorkers it signaled the start of three- or four-day summer getaways to beach and country houses, hotels and inns.

“That’s the ruse. Brittany said her parents were going out of town and she’d be home alone in the city, having a sleepover at a girlfriend’s house.”

“Did you review the transcripts?”

Blackmer was always prepared. “Nice and clean, just the way you like ‘em.” He passed the folder over to me.

On the World Wide Web, Brittany was a petite thirteen-year-old cheerleader with a ponytail who attended a parochial school on the Upper West Side. In real life, Harry was a muscular thirty-six-year-old cop with lots of facial hair and fifteen years on the job.

When he went on-line to surf for pervs, Brittany-Harry never initiated the conversation. This was not entrapment. It was simply going to the cyber-caves where these creatures lurked, just as Felix steered his cab through city streets looking for underage girls.

“Which chat room?”

“It’s called ‘I likevery older men.’ The usual profile. Say the magic words-cheerleading, music videos, parochial school uniforms.”

You could watch Harry’s act in real time. Within minutes of his logging on in that kind of room with his benign teenage-girl profile, sharks would come out of the water and line up for the kill:

“How big are you?” they’d ask.

“I’m only five-three. I’m short,” Brittany would reply.

“No, I don’t mean your height. What’s your bra size?” and then “Describe your uniform,” and then “Are you a virgin?” usually followed by “Send me your picture.” Harry would press the enter key, and off would go a digital head shot of Joni Braioso, the undercover who actually took the meet, if the case progressed that far. Although she was twenty-four, Joni didn’t look a day older than sixteen. When she dressed in a plaid skirt with navy blue knee socks, fake braces on her teeth, hair pulled back in a bouncing ponytail, and weighing less than a hundred pounds, she easily passed for twelve or thirteen.

Harry had downloaded the response to the photo he sent: “This is me at my computer.” Attached was a picture of a middle-aged man in a polo shirt, looking like an ad for a sportswear catalog.

“And this is mymonster. ” The printed page that followed was a close-up of a penis.

I did a double take.

“Huge, huh?” said Ryan. “Harry and I are betting he borrowed that from a porn site. These guys never have the equipment they claim is theirs. I especially love it when they name their private parts. Just something that never occurred to me to do.”

“Shall I read on?”

“Follows the basic outline. Wants to show her the ropes. Meet the monster and learn how to make love.”

“Is he explicit?” I didn’t want to waste police manpower if he was simply talking dirty.

“Lays out what he wants to do and how he wants to do it. I’m telling you, he’s the perfect target for us. Wants her to suggest a meeting place where there are hotels in the area. He’ll bring the condoms, the marijuana, and some booze to relax her.”

“And you’ve found out who he is?”

“Faxed a court order to the ISP.” The Internet service provider had responded with information about the subscriber whose screen name was MonsterMan. “The response was sitting in my fax machine this morning. Just ran him through Faces of the Nation.”

Ryan read to me from the background report he had pulled off the web. “Frederick Welch III. He’s a high school principal in Litchfield, Connecticut.”

“The meet is a go. Let’s decide on a place that makes Joni comfortable and scout out some SROs that the squad has a relationship with.” The single-room-occupancy hotels were often hot-sheet operations, renting rooms by the hour. Plagued by prostitutes and junkies, they frequently looked to the NYPD when trysts and drug deals turned sour and became emergencies. Harry would call in a chit with some desk manager who owed him a favor.

“You want to take it that far?”

“I want him to sign in and ask for a room key. We lost one a month ago by grabbing the guy as soon as he showed up and gave Joni a kiss on the cheek. The judge said we couldn’t prove that the perp had any intention of following through with his screen banter.”

Cyberspace had become a new kind of playground for pedophiles. Not only were there thousands of sites on which to buy, sell, and exchange child pornography, it was an easy and inexpensive way to correspond with children and adolescents all over the world. Parents who enforced rigid rules about playmates and curfews in their own neighborhoods sent their kids to their bedrooms for hours on end, without ever warning them that the dangers of talking to strangers were every bit as real on-line as on the street.

Sarah Brenner came in with two mugs of coffee, one for her and a refill for me. “Got your message and came right upstairs. Hey, Ryan. Something good, no doubt.”

“Maybe I’ll just skip the coffee and put toothpicks in my eyelids to keep them open. Good morning,” I said, reaching for the hot cup.