Easy Prey

by Dan Ames

  There was a pause and I let it go on too long because Nate’s reporter instincts flared up. “What?” he asked. “Do you know something? Does this relate to a case you’re working on?”

  I could practically picture him with his cell phone tucked under his chin, his fingers poised above his keyboard ready to take notes.

  “Probably not,” I said, without much conviction.

  “Huh, doesn’t sound like you’ve convinced yourself,” he said.

  Just then, an email popped up on my computer screen and I saw it was from Chi Chi.

  “Look, I’ve gotta run. I’ll call you if I hear anything.”

  I disconnected and opened up the email.

  The message was done in Chi Chi’s typical terse style:

  * * *

  Email was encrypted and used a rerouting service. But I traced it back to a chat room. You need to come over here and see this.

  * * *

  Having finished my first giant thermos of coffee, I refilled it, locked up my office and headed down to my car.

  Chi Chi lived just north of Grosse Pointe in a suburb called St. Clair Shores.

  I knew it well.

  On the way, I thought about the dead body on Belle Isle and then about Barry Kemp.

  There was no way they could be related.

  But the description of the killing seemed awfully similar.

  I vowed to keep an open mind.

  When it came to the kind of killing I’d seen at Barry Kemp’s place and what Nate described, I knew I wasn’t dealing with someone logical.

  Someone was full of rage.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chi Chi’s place was an anomaly, just like the woman herself. Over the years, the homes along the right side of Jefferson Avenue, the ones with frontage on Lake St. Clair, had been torn down and replaced with McMansions.

  Except for Chi Chi’s house.

  It was an original cottage, probably built in the 1920s. Small, with wood trim and a wide, expansive yard. The open space was the biggest shock because in all of her neighbors’ homes, every usable square inch of the building lot had been taken up by the new construction. Square footage was king, right? Every hour literally nearly bumped up against the next house over. You can pass salt-and-pepper shakers through the windows from one house to the next.

  I parked in the driveway, behind the one-car garage. Even though Chi Chi was single, she usually had a lot of family around so I was surprised to see an empty driveway.

  After a quick knock on the front door (no doorbell) it opened and I stared into the face of a much older version of Chi Chi, probably sixty years older than my former client, but with the same wide, oval face, dark eyes and sly smile.

  If the woman had a name, I had no idea what it might be.

  “Mama,” I said.

  “John,” she answered. We hugged and I stepped inside, took off my shoes and accepted a cup of tea. The tiny house was always full of wonderful smells. Usually tea, mixed with some exotic spices.

  “She in her office,” Mama said, her voice thick with a Vietnamese accent.

  I walked down the house’s only hallway, turned in at the first doorway. It was a converted master bedroom, featuring a beautiful picture window that looked out on the lake. The natural light would have filled the room, if not for the blinds that were partially obscuring the view.

  This was done so the tiny person behind the giant computer screens could watch the magic she was creating unfold, without glare from outside light.

  Chi Pham was well under five feet tall, and I didn’t even bother to hazard a guess at her weight. Sometimes she reminded me of the tiny gazelles you occasionally see on the Discovery Channel, running from cheetahs.

  But this one didn’t run from anyone.

  When I’d helped clear her in the bogus lawsuit her former employer tried to bring, I practically had to hold her back.

  “What kind of crap are you into now?” she asked. She swiveled in her giant office chair – a monstrosity made of brown leather, the kind you usually imagine a judge from the 1800s would be using. Her feet dangled, and her body left tons of room on each side. You could have fit three of her into that chair.

  “The usual crap,” I said. “The John Rockne kind of crap we all know and love.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “You hungry? Want Mama to make up something?”

  “No, that’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got a stomach full of coffee, and now tea.”

  Chi Chi leaned back in her chair and put her feet up on the desk. She was wearing a pair of throwback Nike sneakers. Probably size 3.

  As I settled into the more modest chair next to her desk. I rolled over closer to her so I could see her screen, which right now had a bunch of weird letters on it. Coding, I figured. Whatever the hell that meant.

  “First off, you had asked me to look into lawsuits regarding Barry, or Bertram, Kemp. I’ve found nothing so far, at least that I can make sense of. I need another couple of days.”

  “Okay,” I said. “And I want to pay you for your help.”

  She ignored me. “So what was attached to these messages that were sent to you?” she asked. And then, “No! Let me guess. Something sexual.”

  Her little almond face, with the large, expressive eyes beamed back at me, full of mischief.

  “Yeah, something like that,” I said, picturing the main image of Judy Platkin orally servicing someone.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said.

  “And what led you to that conclusion?”

  Chi Chi laughed. “You know I have to show you what I did, right? I can’t just tell you, that’s no fun.”

  I was tempted to say that having fun wasn’t exactly the objective here, but since she was doing me a favor, I let her have her moment.

  She swung her feet back down and they dangled, at least six inches from the ground.

  “Okay, I already told you it was encrypted, but not very well,” Chi Chi explained. She tapped a key on her keyboard and the scrambled jumble of letters reshaped themselves into actual words.

  “Still, there was one more hurdle,” she said. I peered at the screen. There were words, but they didn’t make any sense. It read like a scrambled word puzzle.

  “You see, this isn’t actually content, it’s asking for a password,” Chi Chi said. “It was fairly well disguised because if you didn’t know what you were looking at, you would assume it was a message.”

  She then carefully highlighted certain letters in the mix of words, hit the return key, and everything vanished momentarily until a new screen popped up.

  I recognized the form.

  It was a chat room.

  The rooms had ominous labels:

  * * *

  Mrs. X’s.

  Swingers.

  Pegs.

  G-Master.

  G. Licky

  TeamBottom.

  Gold Back Door.

  NoLimit.

  * * *

  “What the hell is this?” I asked.

  Chi Chi laughed.

  “Oh, my little innocent private investigator,” she said. “You really have to get out more, John.”

  “Sex?” I asked.

  She nodded. “The real naughty stuff,” she said, a wickedly sly smile appearing on her face. “Bondage. S & M. Partner swapping.” She peered closely at me. “Are you into this kind of stuff?”

  “Oh sure,” I said. “Anna and I love spanking each other and strangers whenever we get the chance.”

  Chi Chi grunted. “Yeah, right.”

  She tapped some more keys. “There’s not much really here to show you. It looks like users pop in, exchange messages and leave. It’s not a very robust interface and there’s no way to trace the identities of the people participating.”

  “Other than the sex stuff, did you see anything strange?”

  “Yeah, the traffic is low. Like, really low. It makes me wonder if this is something else. If it serves a different purpose.”

&n
bsp; I puzzled over that and then filed it away.

  Well, it made sense. It would seem that the person who sent me the porno pictures of Judy Platkin, probably was involved in this sex chat room somehow.

  And then a crazy idea hit me.

  “So this is a chat room, right?” I asked.

  Chi Chi moved her head side-to-side. “Not quite,” she said. “It does function partially as that, but it looks like there was a calendar, some obscure references to other groups and even a web cam option although I haven’t been able to figure out how that works.”

  “So correct me if I’m wrong,” I said, thinking out loud. “These kinds of people, they don’t have sex together online, right?”

  “Well, the web cam people do.”

  “Ok, but are they all doing it via web cam? Wouldn’t that get boring after awhile. How do you spank someone virtually?”

  “That’s a fair point,” Chi Chi said.

  “You said there is a calendar, right?”

  “No, I said there was a calendar.”

  I looked at her, confused.

  Chi Chi sighed. “Do you know how Google will often cache things that were posted online?”

  I vaguely remembered how that worked, but she interpreted my pause as if I didn’t understand her.

  “Basically, if I post something and then delete it right away, Google remembers the post and will cache it,” she explained. “This chat room I’m showing you isn’t live anymore. Someone wiped the whole thing clean. But I found a way to find the cached version, and believe me, it wasn’t on Google. It took a lot of digging on my part. By tomorrow, you won’t even be able to find this version anymore, which is why I took a lot of screen grabs for you.”

  My head was spinning a little bit.

  “Can you tell when it was deleted?”

  “Sure,” Chi Chi said. “Last night, just before midnight.”

  Right after Judy Platkin gave me the slip downtown.

  “Why did you ask about the calendar?” Chi Chi said.

  It was just a hunch, but I had a feeling I was right. “Well, these people need to get together to really do their thing, right?”

  “I believe that’s how anatomy works.”

  And then, out of the blue, another thought struck me. The homeless guy near Ford Field. What had he said? I desperately thought back and then suddenly, I had it. He’d said something about crazy white people and them being half-naked.

  “So if they had a calendar, this website or whatever the hell it was, might have been more like a virtual club that was kind of like a gateway to a real club.”

  “Could be,” Chi Chi conceded.

  It made a lot of sense to me, too.

  And I figured I knew the perfect location for a clandestine sex club.

  It would be in a warehouse district devoid of people.

  Like the one where Judy Platkin had mysteriously disappeared.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Since my main job was to stick my nose in everybody else’s business, I figured my sister might as well be next.

  “Put me through to the Chief of Police, please,” I said. “This is the Ferrari dealership and we have some news regarding the new car she ordered.”

  Silence filled the other end of the line until I heard Ellen’s voice.

  “What do you want, John? I’m busy with a homicide case if you’d forgotten.”

  “Well, ironically, that’s why I was calling. Did you find out anything at Barry Kemp’s place?”

  Another patch of silence and then I heard Ellen’s door shut.

  “Why should I tell you?” she said. “I haven’t gotten shit for my offer of collaboration. And now you want me to feed you information?”

  “I’ve got some stuff, but I figured you would want to go first. As I remember from my childhood you just always had to be first.”

  “Cute,” she said. “Well, we did discover one minor detail.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It seems the body parts at Barry Kemp’s didn’t come from Barry Kemp.”

  “What?” For a second I thought she might be screwing with me, but I knew her too well.

  “Whose were they?”

  “No idea,” she said. “We’ve got the blood out to the lab and told them to put a rush on it. But while the body did belong to a male, the dental records definitely did not match Barry Kemp’s. And while I know what a hardened investigator you are, you somehow missed that the arm found near the corner had none of the musculature definition Barry Kemp is so proud of.”

  Now I was embarrassed again. How had I missed that?

  Because I didn’t look, that’s why. The carnage was so extensive and I was worried about contaminating the crime scene.

  “And don’t try to tell me you didn’t want to contaminate the crime scene,” she said, reading my mind and beating me to the punch. “You ran out of there like a scared little bunny.”

  The bunny reference always got to me.

  “Well, I’ve got some information for you,” I countered.

  “Shocker.”

  “It seems there’s a sex club of some sort that has something to do with this case. I just haven’t found out how.” I filled her in on my trip downtown, to the warehouse and my encounter with the homeless guy by Ford Field. Since she was the reason I had followed Dave’s cell phone locations around the city, I knew she couldn’t get mad at me for making some assumptions.

  “That’s all you’ve got?” Ellen asked. “Why didn’t I realize I’d be getting the raw end of this deal?”

  “I’m assuming that’s a rhetorical question.”

  “Try to do some better detective work, John, or don’t call me again.”

  Just when she was about to hang up and I was sure I would be talking to a dead phone line, she added something.

  “Oh, by the way. Barry Kemp’s lawyer, a guy named Gadlicke, said he would only talk to you. You’re supposed to call him ASAP.”

  Now I heard the disconnect.

  It always amazed me that we were brother and sister. I mean, I am who I am.

  And she’s a total pain in the ass.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  A lawyer wanting to talk to me. That never sounded good. Somehow I felt like a kid being called to the principal’s office.

  I called and got a same-day appointment, which made me a little nervous. Usually high-powered attorneys have schedules backed up for weeks. Or maybe he was just anxious to talk to me.

  This case was putting a few miles on my car, I thought, as I headed out to Bloomfield Hills, the rolling bluffs full of giant, sprawling homes, luxury cars in winding driveways and the smell of investment bankers in the air.

  At an intersection I saw a modern office building, probably built in the 1980s, that showed no signs of any attempted remodeling. I pictured people in polyester, smoking cigarettes and snorting coke in the bathroom.

  There was an empty space near the front door. In fact, there were a lot of empty spaces. Either Gadlicke’s law firm wasn’t the kind that generated a lot of foot traffic, or the firm had seen better times.

  Which surprised me, because when I searched the web, it had looked like he had a team of fifteen lawyers, and covered all kinds of areas, including medical malpractice.

  What, I thought, something wasn’t true on the Internet? Shocking.

  Inside the building, I caught a whiff of old people and stale coffee.

  The elevator doors were covered with a faux wood pattern and I heard them at least two floors before they actually arrived. When the doors opened, it sounded like an audio clip of a submarine being sunk by a torpedo.

  Inside, I gave my odds of getting to the seventh floor about fifty-fifty.

  As luck would have it, I made the trip. The doors banged open and I jumped out of the death trap with a plan to take the stairs down after my meeting.

  There was only one hallway leading to one door on the floor, so I followed it to the sign that read Gadlicke & Associates. The
brass-plated door handle turned under my hand and I pushed my way inside.

  The lobby was a wall of dark green carpet, office chairs that looked like they belonged in a dentist’s office decorated thirty years ago, and a plywood reception desk that resembled a bar in a bankrupt pool hall.

  There was a hallway that went around the desk and there must have been a silent door alarm because a guy suddenly appeared at the desk.

  He didn’t look like your average receptionist.

  More accurately, he looked like an offensive linemen in the NFL. Easily standing 6’5” or so, way over three hundred pounds, all of it stuffed into a suit that looked like it was from the Wal-Mart Office Collection. It was a jarring sight.

  Why in the hell did Barry Kemp choose this place for his law firm?

  “I’m here to see Mr. Gadlicke,” I said, realizing I didn’t have a first name.

  Dead silence. He looked at me and I felt like he was staring at me like I was a mosquito on his arm, deciding if it was worth the effort to squash me.

  He turned without saying a word and disappeared down the hallway. I could actually feel the vibrations as his mass rumbled deeper into the office.

  After several minutes where one of the recessed lights above me blinked out, I again felt the earth’s tremors and it reminded me of the scene in Jurassic Park where the puddle of water started getting ripples every time the T-Rex was about to appear.

  “Mr. Gadlicke will see you,” he said.

  “I’m excited,” I replied. I walked past the plywood reception desk, which I noticed had no phone, pens or paper. I made a hard left at the Human Tower of Meat and walked down the hallway.

  I heard no people talking, saw no one, perceived absolutely no sign of life until I got to the last office at the end of the hall.

  There was a desk with a man seated behind it, surrounded by four chairs, all occupied.

  Two of the chairs each barely contained a man the same size and muscle mass as my escort.

  The third chair held a thin, pale, freckled man with curly orange hair. He looked like the comedian Carrot Top after a hunger strike.