Death of an Escort

by Nathan Pennington

  The water damage there was extensive. After several hours, the plumber told us that a pipe was defective, and had merely given way. Then he admonished us never to buy cheaper pipes made in China. And he shook his head like we were idiots.

  The rest of the day was spent working with contractors and the insurance company.

  The next day, I called my client Macy.

  "We need to meet," I told her. "We need to review, and I've got more questions for you." About that button.

  "Hi Ray," she said. "I'm out of town."

  "Out of town?"

  "Charity work," she said. "We'll have to meet when I get back. Oh, I have to go."

  She hung up. Charity work?

  Next I called Brass Works Wholesale.

  "Is Mr. Richardson in?"

  "Yes. Who's calling, please?"

  I hung up. I'd go see him in person. The drive all across down didn't take long. The time was about ten in the morning (I'd gotten up late), and the rush hour traffic was gone.

  At Brass Works, I parked in one of the three visitor spaces at the front of the parking lot. I went in.

  The receptionist looked up and smiled at me. This one looked different than last time. "Yes?"

  "I need to see Mickey," I said.

  "Do you have an appointment?"

  "This isn't business," I said. "It's personal, and I'm not taking no for an answer."

  I walked by her into the office. The last thing I saw on her face was confusion and indecision.

  I pushed Mickey's door open and walked in.

  He looked up. "You, again?"

  "It's me," I said. "We really need to talk."

  "I have a business to run," he said.

  "No, let's talk," I said. "Let's talk about TrueVoyeurLive.com."

  His face changed. There was fear and anger. It reminded me of a cornered animal.

  "So, you know about the site?" I asked.

  "You need to leave," he said.

  I sat down. "I visited the site, and I found out that you have to subscribe to see the good stuff. So I did."

  "You what?"

  "I subscribed," I said. "The trial, you know?"

  He stared at me. The fear was growing in his eyes.

  "And I found out that one of the models on the site was Kelly Brandt, your fiancée," I said.

  Right now, he looked much paler than when I entered, I thought. It seemed like the color was draining out of him.

  "Here's the thing," I said. "I couldn't verify that the site was yours, but I got pretty good reason to think that it is."

  "Oh yeah?" He asked. There was a tremor in his voice.

  "The ownership of the site is marked as private. But that's only for civilians," I said. "Any domain registrar can see the real info. Of course, that would assume that you put in the correct info in the first place. You probably spoofed it. If you didn't, that would have been stupid on your part."

  He cleared his throat.

  "Now," I said. "Let's get to the interesting part. Kelly is a model on the site. She's not identified by name. None of the models on the site are, but you know that."

  "I really don't know what you're talking about," he said.

  "I don't believe that, and I'll explain why in a moment," I said. "But let's stick with Kelly Brandt for a moment. There is a page that was supposed to go up with a video of her on Saturday. That's the day she died. The page is there, but the video isn't."

  He stared blankly, but it wasn't at me. He was staring off at nothing.

  "I need that video," I said. "Give it to me, please."

  "There isn't any video, and I don't know what you are talking about," he said again.

  "Then explain to me how," at this point I slowed way down emphasizing each word. "Explain to me how you have multiple fiancées in town. Explain to me how you are dating a stripper at the same time. And explain to me how they are all models on this site and have no idea that they are. Explain that to me."

  "You're crazy," he said hoarsely.

  "Did you kill Kelly?" I asked.

  "No!"

  "Something went wrong?" I asked. "She found out? And to keep her quiet, you killed her?"

  "No!"

  "Did she find out she was being filmed?"

  He didn't answer.

  "And are you going to have me killed now too? Like Kelly?"

  "This is crazy talk," he said. He got up. I watched him closely. As much as he was denying it, it was clearly affecting him. He went to a small fridge and took a bottle of water out.

  The bottle shook in his hands as he tried to get the cap off.

  "Was Kelly's death accidental?" I asked.

  "I really have no idea," he said.

  "And I find that hard to believe. I think we both know why," I said. "And I'm warning you. I'm going to be a lot harder to take out than Kelly was. Better not try it."

  Some color returned to him. "Do you hear yourself?" His voice went up in volume. "Do you hear yourself? You're crazy. You're talking about me murdering you, and you're accusing me of murdering my fiancée—"

  "One of them," I said interrupting.

  He sat down and his eyes narrowed on me.

  "You're too damn nosy. That's not good."

  "Threatening me?" I asked and smiled.

  "Fuck you," he said vehemently.

  "How much does an apartment at the Casino Royale Hotel cost?"

  "What?"

  "You ought to know," I said. "You lease one."

  "What's your point?"

  "Wholesale is a business with slim margins. Sure, you're a successful businessman, but you lease a place there? That doesn't add up. As far as I know, that is mostly for rich out-of-state types with massive fortunes. It's odd that you can afford a place there and your condo too."

  He leaned forward. "It's time for you to leave."

  "If you killed her, I'm going to find out," I said.

  "It was suicide. Kelly committed suicide," he said.

  "Why?"

  "How would I know?"

  "You ought to know her pretty well, right? You were to be married, right?"

  "Get out," he said.

  "Okay," I said. "But I'm going to make one more promise."

  "What?" he asked.

  I got up and walked to the door. "If it was you, if you did kill her, I'm not going to take you to the police."

  "So?" he said.

  "I'm going to take you out to some deserted area. I'll finish you off myself over several hours. I'll make you feel sorry before you die."

  He didn't react.

  I closed his door behind him, and walked toward the front to exit. He was a tough one to read. His cage had been rattled for sure. Was it him? I didn't know. His denial of killing Kelly was different than his denial of the porn site.

  One, I knew he was lying about, and he wasn't a very good liar. But about Kelly, he'd seemed more sincere.

  However, I expected to be jumped sometime within the next twenty-four hours. He had too much to lose. I'd uncovered his dirty little world, and I may have uncovered the murderer too.

  With the money he had, he'd have someone on my tail before the day was over.

  I felt my pocket. There was my knife and my brass knuckles. Illegally concealed, I also carried a small semi-automatic pistol.

  The rest of the morning I spent doing odd errands constantly watching over my shoulder.

  Lunch consisted of two bananas I bought at the grocery store and took to my office. I turned my computer on and checked my email. There was one from the Google alert I set up on Kelly Brandt's name.

  I'd set up alerts on variations too. Things like "Kelly Brandt", "KellyBrandt", "KBrandt", "KellBrandt", "Kell Brandt", and "KellyB".

  This hit happened on the term KellyBrandt. Google picked it up in a forum. Looking at the forum name, I had a bad feeling about this. PwnHer.com/forum was the base of the URL.

  I clicked through. It was a pornographic forum, but not the normal kind, if there is such a thing. This was
oriented toward the violent side. The logo was a woman who was bound with ropes. She was cut and bleeding. To top that off, she was also naked and looked like she was despairing.

  This was most definitely not my kind of a site.

  And I realized all this sex and porn exposure was my own fault. I'd taken on a client whose mother was a sex worker, but I needed the money. Witness the lunch I was eating. Two bananas.

  The link I clicked loaded a thread about some of the most violent rape scenes.

  It looked like the posters were competing to see who could find a link to the most revolting rape scene. Revolting to me. Apparently, by their comments, they were turned on by this stuff.

  Post sixteen on the second page was the one that had a link to the Kelly Brandt scene. The post read like this . . .

  Chapter 10

  "Not sure where this is from. She's hot, and she fights back. Feisty bitch and she never gives in the whole scene. She actually gets a bite out of the guy half way. Bloody."

  Under that was a link to 4SharedU.com, a file sharing network. Part of the link had "KellyBrandt" in it, and that was what Google alerts had found.

  I clicked the 4SharedU.com link and I was taken to the landing page for the file. 4SharedU.com urged me to buy a premium membership in their file sharing website so I could have faster downloads.

  I ignored the hype and clicked the link for the free download. A timer started counting down. It said I had to wait forty-five seconds for the download link to show up. Under that it urged me again to stop waiting and buy a premium membership and avoid waiting.

  I stood up and walked over to my office door. I felt the need to stretch. Really, I felt the need to brace myself for what I was about to see.

  The seconds ticked by. At the end of the forty-five second wait, a download link appeared. I clicked it, and my web browser asked me if I wanted to download the file. I clicked yes, and the download began.

  It was going to take several minutes, and I didn't want to hold still. I picked up my keys and locked the office behind me.

  The hallway felt better. I realized I was anxious about what I was downloading. In the back of my mind, I knew that rape and other devious things were a dark subset of porn. I knew that there were guys out there that got off on that stuff. Heck, some guys could only get off on that stuff.

  They were sick, and needed help, but they were out there. Now, here I was going to come face-to-face with it.

  To make it even more twisty, it was apparently a video of the dead woman Kelly Brandt. And according to Kelly's daughter, my client, her mother was against porn. She didn't participate. She had no use for it.

  Despite that, she seemed to be showing up in a lot of porn, and not nice stuff either.

  First a voyeur site, and it seemed to be real, not staged. And now a rape scene. That was totally gross.

  I didn't want to watch a rape scene.

  And something was really strange here. How does someone who's all against porn end up in all this porn?

  The real question was how trustworthy was Macy, my client? I was going on her word. Perhaps, she was the one I should be questioning. My hand dropped into my pocket. Past the brass knuckles, all the way at the bottom, I felt the giant button.

  We needed to talk. I took out my disposable cell phone and punched in her number.

  "Ray?" she answered.

  "Hi," I said. "Are you back in town?"

  "I will be this afternoon," she said. She sounded all bright and cheerful. Not at all how I felt.

  "Good," I said. "I need to see you this afternoon."

  "You've made progress?" she asked.

  "I'll tell you when I see you," I said. There was one big hang-up with suspecting her. She'd hired me. Her mother's death was ruled a suicide. If she had something to do with it, why hire me? I had no answer for that one.

  The download would be done or almost done by now. I let myself back in. It was seconds away from being done.

  When it finished, there was a momentary pause while it copied from the temporary download folder to the computer desktop. There I double clicked it.

  It opened in Windows Media Player. It was a clip of a video. There was no front matter. It went straight to the video.

  It was very clearly the naked body of Kelly Brandt. The camera zoomed in on her face. Her nose was bleeding.

  The camera pulled back. A guy was pulling his pants down. Two others were holding her down.

  She was fighting and screaming, but they had her pinned. I paused the video. This was sickening.

  With the video paused, I saw something I hadn't noticed before. Very faint and a little small in the corner was a watermark. It looked like text, but I couldn't make the letters out.

  That was probably the clue to where the video had come from. I took a screenshot of what was showing on the computer screen by pressing the PrtScn button, which was to the right of the F12 button.

  Then I opened a paint program and pressed Ctrl and the "V" key to paste the picture in. I cropped around the logo and enlarged it. It was even more fuzzy and distorted now.

  I saved the image as it was now and opened it in Gimp, a freeware image editing program. Now I sharpened the picture. I had to do it several times, but the outline of the word was now visible.

  It was YouDisgustMe.com.

  With some trepidation, I typed that into my web browser. It loaded a black background. Huge white text warned me that I should only proceed if I was eighteen years old or older.

  I clicked the enter link. The website's background stayed black, but thumbnail images began loading.

  They weren't nice looking pictures. This was a rape site, however, unlike the voyeur site; this one didn't say it was "the real thing", or anything crazy like that.

  I searched in the box for Kelly Brandt. Nothing came up. I searched the site for Brandt. Nothing again.

  This time I searched for Kelly, and I got lots of hits. I started scrolling through the thumbnail images. Six down, I recognized Kelly Brandt. She was tagged as performer Kelly-Star.

  I clicked the link for Kelly-Star and a page came up that loaded a dozen thumbnails of Kelly Brandt. Each was a video of her being raped. I tried to click on a link, but I was redirected to a signup page, and I was prompted to enter my credit card info for full access.

  I did a WHOIS search on this site, and the privacy guard was not enabled. That was odd. I could see who registered it, but then I realized that it wasn't real.

  When you purchased a website name, you had to enter your info such as name and address, phone and email address. In theory, when someone wanted to know who owned the website, they could do a WHOIS search. It was free and many websites offered this ability.

  For an extra fee, you could have a privacy guard put on your info. Now this didn't hide it from the authorities or domain name registration sites or from Google for that matter. But John Q. Public couldn't see who owned the website.

  However, there was a much better way to cover your tracks if you didn't want anyone to know who owned the website.

  Spoof, or make up, the info. Put in a fake name and address. Use a fake email and phone.

  This was what had been done here. It was obvious because the site was listed as belonging to John Smith, 123 Main Street, New York, NY 10001.

  The company used to register the domain was Registry-Rocket.com. I typed the website in and discovered something I hadn't known before.

  This company let you buy a domain name with e-gold. E-gold was an untraceable internet-only currency. It was mostly used by people in countries with high rates of credit card fraud, and by the undesirable element. There had even been whispers in the past that terrorists used it to move money and skirt money laundering laws.

  I now did a WHOIS search on Registry-Rocket.com, and found that they were based in New York City as well. I did further research on them, and they seemed to be legitimate.

  It didn't make sense to me that a company, such as Registry-Rocket.com, would let so
meone get a domain name without any further traceable info on them. That would leave the registrar open to legal action if the untraceable party did something illegal like spam or hosting child pornography.

  Most likely, Registry-Rocket.com's New York address wasn't the real headquarters, but just a token office. If I had to guess, I'd say they had to be owned by someone outside the US and in a place the US couldn't get to them legally.

  The thing about New York City, however, tickled something in the back of my brain.

  Yes, that was it. Father Patrick O'Sullivan, the pastor of my church, was from New York City.

  It hadn't been that long ago he'd moved here, and he'd said he had lots of family still in the New York area.

  It was worth a shot. I picked up my office phone and called the church.

  "This is Patrick," the father answered in his calm voice.

  "Father, this is Ray Crusafi," I said.

  "Bless you Ray," he said. "I didn't get to give you thanks for all your hard work at the church rummage sale."

  "Not a problem, Father," I said.

  "How can I help you, Ray?"

  "Could we meet?" I asked. "This is better done face-to-face."

  "Is it urgent?" he asked.

  "If you're busy, it can wait," I said, but I sounded disappointed.

  "I'm open right now," he said. "Just having lunch. Come over. We'll talk."

  "Thank you Father," I said. We hung up.

  Before leaving, I deleted everything off my computer. I dropped the video in the encrypted folder on my computer. Then I started the Scrambler program to wipe away the tracks of what I'd been doing on my machine.

  Checking the hall before exiting, I stepped out and locked up.

  At the church, I was able to let myself in. The doors were unlocked. Father Patrick was like that. He said that all through history churches were always open. They were to be a place of refuge whenever it was needed, he said.

  I had tried to tell him that today was different. Lots of people were up to no good. Some were even dangerous.

  It had been then that he'd reached under his robe and showed a massive handgun he was carrying. It was a 44 magnum, one of the most powerful handguns.

  He smiled. I then told him carrying like that was illegal, and he nodded.

  We had gotten along really well after that.