by Steven James
Of course, in NowLife, he might have been a forty-five-year-old Buddhist single mom who liked classic movies and judo.
Or anyone else.
That was part of the fun. A whole new life played out in your imagination.
Though it was possible that in NowLife he might be a woman, in their initial emails, Brad had responded to her questions in a way that seemed unmistakably masculine. He also appeared to exhibit the qualities she was looking for in a NowLife man.
Sometime after meeting him online, she’d begun to wonder what it would be like playing these games of life and death and destiny on real people.
She’d invited him to her DuaLife apartment and was getting him drunk so she could more easily subdue him before killing, but that’s when she started to have second thoughts.
“Why do you want to die at my hand?” she’d asked him. “Why do you want me to kill you?”
“Because you’re a woman.”
“A woman?” On her computer screen she saw that he had finished his vodka. She poured him another.
He took a sip. “In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote, ‘A real man wants two things: danger and play. Therefore he wants woman as the most dangerous plaything.’”
“So, to a man, a woman is a plaything?”
“Yes.” He downed his drink. “And the more dangerous she is, the more desirable. The greatest danger, the greatest pleasure.”
“But I would be the one playing with you.”
“Yes,” he’d typed.
When he didn’t elaborate, she’d responded, “I thought you believed in God, and yet you read Nietzsche? The man who said ‘God is dead’?”
“You can find flowers even in a field of weeds.”
So.
Nice.
Perhaps it was time to see if Brad might just be the one to partner with her. She’d typed, “How much danger and play can you handle?”
And after a pause he’d replied, “How much are you offering?”
Oh yes.
“I think it’s time we met,” she typed. “In person.”
And so they had.
And sex had followed. And so had love. And now, though she hadn’t yet told him, so would a child.
A new family grown from their DuaLife encounter.
As they’d gotten to know each other, they’d chosen to keep using their DuaLife names, rather than use their real ones. A way to extend the fantasy. To keep the illusion alive.
DuaLife.
NowLife.
Becoming one and the same thing.
It hadn’t taken them long to learn the art of killing, and then the art of setting others up for their crimes.
She’d found that, just like his avatar, the NowLife Brad believed in God, and yet, despite his religious convictions, he seemed surprisingly willing to take the life of other human beings whenever she required him to do so.
Now, as she lay in bed with him, she slid her hand to her stomach, where their child was growing. A second heartbeat inside of her. The child of their passion and desire.
A new life. To be taught and molded. Just like her man.
He stirred.
“You’re sleepy this morning,” she said.
“I killed two people last night. That can really take the life out of you.”
“Ha.” She smiled. “Doesn’t God say killing is wrong?”
“No one acts in complete congruence with his convictions.” He still sounded half asleep. “Admittedly, this is one area I need to work on.”
She ran her fingers through his hair. “That sounds like a line from a made-for-TV movie. That’s not enough of a reason. Not for you. There’s more to it, isn’t there?”
“Saint Paul wrote, ‘That which I do, I don’t understand. For I do not do the good I wish, but the evil I do not wish, this I do. I am a wretched man! Who will rescue me from this body of death?’ The inner war is the burden of all who believe.”
She trailed her finger along the edge of his scars. “Brad, Brad, Brad, you are my little enigma, aren’t you?”
A slight hesitation, perhaps a hint of intimidation. “Do you know anyone who is not?”
“Not?”
“An enigma.”
“Well, if you’re right about God, darling, I imagine you’ll go to hell for the things you’ve done.”
He was quiet.
“Any quotes on that? On the enigma of hell?”
He thought.
She smiled. “I got you this time.”
“Francios de Fenelon.”
“Who’s Francois de Fenelon?”
“He was a priest in the seventeenth century. He observed that you can see God in all things but never so clearly as when you suffer. Perhaps hell, where people suffer the most acutely, is where they begin to see him the most clearly.”
She laughed at the absurdity of using a priest to justify a journey to hell in order to discover God. Only Brad could come up with something like that. “Well,” she said. “If God exists—”
“There is no ‘if.’”
“If he does”—and she let him know by her tone of voice that the subject was not up for debate—“and if people become more aware of him in hell, then I expect both of us will be quite the experts on him someday.”
“I expect we will.”
After a few more minutes of letting him hold her, she rose, telling him that he could sleep in if he wanted, that she would get everything ready.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll see you at 2:00.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll take care of the alley video?” she said.
“The surveillance camera will be looping through previous footage when you arrive.”
“And the door?”
“I’ll leave it propped open.”
She flipped open the laptop belonging to the woman in the basement, downloaded the video Brad had taken last night from his cell phone, then she put the computer in the van.
Hopped into her car.
And left for work.
17
The FBI Academy
Classroom 317
7:46 a.m.
Death.
That was the agenda for today.
This morning, videos of murder, then a visit to the body farm this afternoon.
Over the years, the Bureau has collected thousands of DVDs and video tapes from crime scenes, from secret stashes of killers and videos from certain websites we’ve learned to monitor.
We have the world’s largest collection of videos of humans dying at the hands of others.
Disturbing.
But, unfortunately, necessary.
We show these videos to the New Agents and National Academy students so they can understand the true nature of those we hunt. We make the agents and law enforcement officers watch real people die in painful slow motion, rewind, pause, replay.
So that they’ll know.
Really know.
Some victims beg, others bribe. Men make threats they must certainly know they’re incapable of carrying out. Women try to barter, offering their bodies and vowing not to tell.
Sometimes I wonder how many women actually succeed in exchanging sex for survival. I’ve only seen the videos of those who failed.
In my classes I’ve seen even the most hardened cops, the most experienced investigators from around the world, break in half when they see these videos.
Almost always, whether the victim is compliant or struggling, praying or begging, there’s that moment when he realizes what is about to happen. You see the knowledge of the inevitable pass across his face.
The undeniable truth we spend our lives denying has finally sunk in: death is coming.
The end is here, only moments away.
That look, when he comes to that final chilling revelation, is the most heartbreaking of all to see. The race is over. Life has lost.
I turned on the video projector to cue up today’s first video—a man in San Francisco who did to prep
ubescent boys the things that nightmares are made of.
For me, the hardest videos to watch are the ones in which people pray, because in so many cases you can see that they really do believe that God will hear them, will intervene, will save them. But in the videos we have here at the Academy, he invariably chose not to.
I often wonder if his silence is proof that he isn’t there. That’s the easy answer, of course. The intellectually facile one, but still, it’s tempting to retreat into skepticism when you see such suffering responded to with silence.
Sometimes I envy people who find a way to live in quiet denial of what we as a species are capable of doing to each other. It’d be so much easier to live with that kind of naivety, closing one eye to the tears of the world, thinking that everything has a Disneyfied ending, a silver lining, a sunset to ride into.
A few months ago when I was speaking with Lien-hua about this, she told me not to dwell on the negative so much.
“I can’t pretend that the world isn’t what it is,” I’d said.
“What do you mean?”
“That these things I see don’t happen, that life is better than this.”
A small pause. “But can you stop pretending that it’s worse?”
It took me a long time to reply. “I’ll try,” I’d said.
And I still am.
I turned on the projector, tapped the DVD’s play button, but the first frame—the one in which the killer zoomed in on the young boy’s frightened eyes staring into the camera—today that image alone was too much for me.
I couldn’t do this. I needed to look away from suffering, at least for the moment.
So I shut off the projector.
Plan B.
Astrid knew that Brad had money; he’d never kept that a secret, although he hadn’t explained where it was from, and she’d never pried.
She’d suspected he’d stolen or extorted it until she saw him working on the computer system at the research facility yesterday. Now she began to wonder if he might actually have earned it as a computer programmer.
Well, what mattered was not where it had come from but what they could do with it if they needed to.
Disappear.
Or, if she needed to, she could do that herself.
Yes, she knew his bank account’s pin number. She’d found it jotted on one of his statements two months ago. And this secret knowledge was a sweet and subtle thing.
Now, as she pulled into the parking lot at work, she thought of what would happen to the woman at 3:00 p.m. as the game moved toward its climax.
Tessa had agreed to meet Paul Lansing on the steps of the Library of Congress at 10:30 sharp. And now as she stepped onto the Amtrak train that would take her to the city, she felt somewhat like she was running away.
She told herself that as soon as she got some answers to the questions she hadn’t felt comfortable bringing up while Patrick was around, she would explain everything to him and things would get back to normal between them.
Through Paul’s emails over the last few weeks she’d found out where he grew up—St. Paul, Minnesota. His pastimes—sculpture (pretty cool), hunting (definitely uncool), hiking, carpentry, and organic gardening (that’s better). His birthday—September 9. And so on.
And on.
But the core stuff went a lot deeper.
That’s the stuff she needed to know.
The train doors closed, and she took a seat.
She’d chosen a T-shirt that left the scars on her right arm visible, the scars she’d given to herself when she was into cutting. A man stared at her now, his eyes lingering on her arm, and then on the oxymoronic words on her shirt: “Anarchy Rules.”
She handled his curiosity with a steady gaze, locking eyes with him until he looked away.
Tessa had saved the biggest questions for a face-to-face meeting with her dad: How long did you date Mom before you slept with her? Did you love her? How come you live by yourself in the mountains? What are you running away from?
It seemed beyond weird to her that a man who lived without a phone or running water, a guy who’d been emailing her from a six-year-old borrowed laptop, had suddenly decided to hop on a plane and fly to the nation’s capital just to see some sculptures that one of his friends had made. She’d have to ask him about that too.
He’d said he didn’t know that Christie ever had her child, that he thought she’d gone through with the abortion she’d been planning. That’s what he’d said, but Tessa didn’t believe him. She’d found the postcard he sent to her mother only a few years ago. If he kept tabs on her mom, how could he not have known about her?
And so, perhaps the most important question of all: why didn’t you ever come to see me after you two broke up?
And then there was Patrick.
She tried to think of a way to politely cancel lunch with him without making him suspicious. And without lying. She’d done enough of that already.
With a lurch, the train left to take Tessa Bernice Ellis to her father.
Class had started five minutes ago.
There were a number of seminars running concurrently this morning, and though officially the National Academy course didn’t begin until Monday, the NA students who’d already arrived were invited to attend any of the lectures this week that they thought would be most helpful to them.
I’d been hoping Cheyenne might sit in on my class so I could thank her for taking Tessa home last night—at least that’s the reason I told myself. But when class began and she wasn’t in the room, I realized it was probably a good thing, since she has a way of monopolizing my attention and there was already plenty on my mind.
So, no videos today. Just discussion.
I’d kicked things off by telling my students that understanding the process an offender undertakes in planning and carrying out his crime is vital to eliminating suspects.
“Excuse me,” a woman in the front row said, two fingers flagged in the air. I’d met her earlier in the week: Annette Larotte, a National Academy student from Houston. A homicide detective. Tall—5'11". Brunette. Deep, reflective eyes.
“Yes?”
“What was number four? From last night?”
“Number four?”
“At the panel discussion you said there were four premises underlying geospatial investigation. But you only had time to list three before the discussion was cut short. What was number four?”
I quickly reviewed the first three: “Number one—timing and location. Most crimes occur in the offender’s awareness space. Two—rational decisions lead to the criminal act. Three—least amount of effort principle.”
When I paused to take a breath, Annette finished my thought for me: “Offenders try to save time and money just like everyone.”
I nodded. “Exactly. So here’s number four: progression. With each successive crime, offenders become more efficient and experienced, learn from their mistakes, develop tastes and preferences for specific activities over others. They also learn from other people—criminal associates, research, observations—and as they do, two things happen: they become more competent, and typically, they become overconfident, which can lead to carelessness.”
A few people took notes, Annette nodded her thanks to me, and I went on, “So to get us rolling today, tell me: what are the secrets to committing a perfect murder?”
The students began by noting the obvious:
1. take precautions to avoid leaving physical evidence,
2. contaminate the scene with other people’s skin cells, bodily fluids, or DNA to confound investigators,
3. dispose of the body outdoors where insect activity, scavengers, and the weather will help disperse and destroy physical evidence—or better yet, don’t allow the body to be found at all,
4. never murder someone you have a close relationship with, but rather choose someone whose disappearance will go unnoticed (runaways, transients, vagrants, hitchhikers, prostitutes, etc.).
Self-evident, rudimentary
ideas.
I knew that the students in my class could do better, and I challenged them to go deeper.
And they didn’t disappoint me:
5. since the authorities begin by searching for people who would most likely be present at the time and place of the murder, it’s wise to counterintuitively break your habits rather than keep them when you commit the crime,
6. kill alone because as soon as you have an accomplice you have a loose end,
7. if possible, artificially, microscopically, fake the DNA evidence you leave. Ever since two years ago when Israeli researchers discovered how easy it is to do—that even first-year college biology students could do it—it’s become more and more common among educated criminals, and even with the Bureau’s technological advances over the last year, it’s still frustratingly hard to detect,
8. don’t kill close to your activity nodes (home, work, preferred recreational areas, and commercial businesses) or the travel routes between them.
“Good,” I said, building on the idea. “Very good. Most current research indicates that proximity of a series of crimes might be an even more accurate indicator of crime linkage than modus operandi or signature.”
Then a suggestion came from a man in the third row, a detective from Bangkok, a member of the Royal Thai Police: “Keep it simple.”
The door in the back of the room eased open and Cheyenne surreptitiously slipped into the room and took a seat in the back row.
Detective Nantakarn went on, “The more unique the crime, the more attention you’ll draw from investigators. And the more arrows will lead back to you.”
I nodded.
Annette suggested using an untraceable means of death, and because of the famous forensics dictum that whenever you leave a room you take something with you and leave something behind, the class debated about whether or not that was possible. However, I’d worked cases where the principle hadn’t borne out, so I let the suggestion stand.
“Anything else?”
Cheyenne lifted her hand, and I nodded to her.