Panther's Prey

by Lachlan Smith

  “Please,” she said, looking up into the face of the person holding the camera or, more likely, the phone that had been used to capture these moments. Her tongue licked her lips dryly. “Please, Leo, why are you doing this?”

  I tore the buds from my ears with a cry that momentarily silenced the restaurant. Across from me in the booth, Mauldin, ignoring the disturbance I’d caused, reached across and took my chin, pressing his thumb painfully into the hollow beneath my jaw, forcing my head up until he was able to look me in the eyes.

  “You understand now?” he asked in the gentle tone inquisitors learn, a voice as caressing as the purr of a cat toying with maimed prey. “The stakes are quite high for all of us,” he went on. “You, me, and Lydia. We each have everything to gain or lose. I’d hate to think we weren’t pulling for the same side.”

  The other video clips were worse. I watched each of them, sitting in the booth across from Mauldin, because I had to know what was at stake for me. Each showed Jordan pleading for her life, begging, which was evidently where her faceless, voiceless attacker’s pleasure came from. His face wasn’t shown, but in each video, Jordan’s voice had been made to speak my name. The fakery was undetectable to me. From video to video, her spirit declined. By the third one she was weeping uncontrollably as her attacker violently raped her, her body shaking with seizure-like spasms, his face carefully kept out of the frame.

  The final video showed her after she’d been bound on the toilet in the position in which Rebecca and I’d found her. “Please, Leo, let me go,” she said, her voice slurred after hours of brutal abuse. “I won’t tell anyone it was you. I promise.” Prom-ith is how the word came out. Then the camera was covered for an instant, and when the lens was uncovered a strip of duct tape had been placed across Jordan’s mouth. The last frames of the video showed the door slowly closing, never to be opened again while Jordan remained alive.

  For a long time I couldn’t breathe. I stared down at the phone on the tabletop, beyond rage. Mauldin’s face was almost sorrowful, as if he pitied what I was going through. I knew better. I knew I had to keep my cool for Jordan’s sake. Obviously the videos, though undetectably altered, were legitimate. Mauldin possessed them either because he was the killer or because they’d come into his possession from the person who’d made them—a person whom Jordan no doubt would have been able to identify if she’d lived. In his mind, the pleasure he’d taken in her terror must have outweighed the risk of leaving her alive.

  Suddenly I remembered Lydia taking the cell phone from her attacker’s truck. Her power over Mauldin was now crystal clear. His employee had raped and murdered Jordan, perhaps at Mauldin’s direction or perhaps not. In any case, Mauldin had protected him and Lydia had found this out.

  “There must have been a video that showed his face,” I said. “And Lydia must still have it. As long as she stays happy and healthy, it never goes public. Is that your deal?”

  Mauldin shook his head like nothing I said possibly could matter to him. “The clips you just watched would be enough to put you in prison for the rest of your life. Given that risk, I’m surprised you’re willing to go on blaming others for your crimes. Rodriguez has confessed. He’s in prison. All along, you’ve had the key to his freedom right there on your phone. Who knows where else you have it, even? It’s really none of my business. In fact, I’m not even sure what you were watching there. But if I were you, I’d take a hard look in the mirror before you accuse anyone else.”

  His words reverberated in my ears. Presumably no Internet-connected device I owned or used was safe from Kairos’s tampering, the insinuating electronic fingers of Mauldin’s sophisticated friends. When Bo Wilder had used his proxy to place the murder gun in my hands, it had been a lesson in his power over me. Mauldin and Kairos had raised such instruction to a higher level.

  “What do you want from me?” I asked.

  “You tell me what you want,” Mauldin insisted.

  “Nothing from you.”

  “That’s a shame. I want people to want things. The act of exchange creates trust. Trust allows people to let down their guard.”

  “I pity Lydia if she ever lets down her guard with you.”

  “Granted. It’s always possible she’ll soon learn she’s not cut out for this business. You ever fish? When a fish wants to fight you, sometimes the best thing to do is let her run with the line. Maybe Lydia will spit out the hook and maybe she’ll swallow it. If she swallows, I’ll reel her in, slice her open from cunt to kisser, and slop out her guts.”

  The sudden crassness was shocking, as he intended it to be.

  “Is that what your people did with Tom Benton?”

  “I don’t know where Tommy is. My guess is he’s living the good life now, thanks to all that money he embezzled. We should all be so lucky.”

  Mauldin’s face left no doubt Benton was dead and who was responsible. Then his look softened and he placed his hands on the table, preparing to rise. “Look, I know you must be thinking all sorts of terrible things about me right now, but I’m not a bad guy, and not an unreasonable one. I had no reason to want Jordan dead. I was as shocked and saddened by her murder as everyone else. What’s more, I’m a businessman. Believe me. These kinds of rumors put Kairos at a terrible competitive disadvantage. We simply can’t have them.”

  I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself but my throat was so dry I couldn’t talk. In my mind again I saw Jordan’s anguished face and heard her cry: Leo, no, please, Leo.

  “Think about it,” he said. “Think about everything we just discussed.”

  He left me sitting in the booth and walked out.

  Ten minutes later I was puking in the alley. When I was finished I leaned against the brick wall, waiting for the feverish sweat that had sprung out all over my body to turn cold. When it did, I took out the phone and thumbed to the videos again. Though a desperate part of me hoped it would all turn out to have been a dream, the videos gone, these digital files were the only evidence connecting Kairos and Mauldin with Jordan’s murder. If I could get an expert to examine the phone, it was possible he could trace the path the videos had taken in being placed there and perhaps identify the server they’d come from, enabling me to connect them to Kairos. At the very least, I should be able to prove the videos had been altered, that Jordan in fact hadn’t spoken my name.

  But the videos were gone. There was no sign the files named “Jordan1” through “Jordan6” had ever existed on the phone, or anywhere else. The folder was empty, just as it’d no doubt been before Mauldin had instructed me to look at them.

  I stared in disbelief at the screen. Then I threw the phone to the pavement. I slammed my heel on it, stomping again and again until it shattered. Then I ground the parts against the concrete, making sure nothing was left but a pile of twisted metal and grit.

  I stood breathing hard in the alley, momentarily sated.

  Then, with renewed energy, I hurried at a fast walk back to the Seward, where ten minutes later I repeated the assault on my laptop, beating it against the tile floor in my bathroom until the neighbor downstairs banged on the pipes.

  Chapter 25

  Mauldin’s technology-based extortion confirmed to me that he, not Cho, was the one in bed with the Chinatown mafia. No mere construction CEO had access to the expertise displayed in his threatening gambit. It was, of course, both a repeat and an amplification of the methods Kairos had used to discredit Cho.

  After a week of sleepless nights, I decided to pay a visit to Jordan’s father. The truth could bring him no peace, but he deserved to know what I knew. Also, I had a plan for turning Mauldin’s threats on their head.

  Walker had lost weight, his already gaunt frame reduced to a skeletal appearance, so that his shirt gaped slightly at the throat. Most shocking, though, was his hair, which had gone completely white since I’d last seen him.

  We met in his tiny office at the city attorney’s suite. Walker was a true civil servant, and it showed in everything from hi
s drab sport coat to the neatly labeled file boxes stacked waist-high under the window behind his desk. He listened motionless as I brought him up to date, his head leaning against the back of his chair as if he lacked the strength to hold it up. If knowing the truth about his daughter’s last hours gave him comfort he didn’t show it. “There’s something else you need to know,” I said when I’d described what I’d seen. “The videos have been altered. When Jordan’s begging for her life, it’s my name she speaks.”

  I watched him and wasn’t surprised to see a flicker of suspicion. He was likely wondering whether the answer had been in front of him from the start. Purposefully, I went on. “What all this means is at the very least, Mauldin covered for Hastings, his errand boy. Even if he didn’t okay Jordan’s murder, he protected the man.”

  “They’re hoping the doctored video will silence you,” he said. I couldn’t look at his face for more than an instant because of the pain I saw there.

  “Mauldin’s right. I have no proof Kairos was behind it, other than the file I located identifying the man I saw as a Kairos employee.”

  Walker ran his hands through his hair. “This is all so awful. I don’t think I told you, but Benton came to see me before he left. To let me know of his supposed feelings for my daughter. In the heat of the moment I may have wrongly accused the man. From what you’re saying now, Mauldin had him murdered because he wouldn’t go along with the cover-up of Jordan’s death.”

  “Benton was a link in a chain,” I said. “Afterward, when he realized the part he’d played, I think he found it hard to live with himself.”

  “He wanted forgiveness, he said. ‘Forgiveness for what?’ I wanted to know. ‘I can’t forgive you if you won’t tell me what you’ve done.’ He wouldn’t, but he promised me he’d never practice law again. Thinking I’d approve. I chose this line of work. I don’t spend my days moaning over how miserable I am. The law’s my livelihood, and now it’s all I have, and I’ve always practiced it honorably. It doesn’t disgust me, and I don’t disgust myself. That’s what I tried to share with Jordan after she took up the profession. That’s what Tom Benton ripped away from her. He made her despise herself and regret her choices. She felt I’d deceived her, perhaps. Maybe that makes me responsible for her death, since she learned her regard for the law from me.”

  I let my sympathy go unspoken. Probably it helped to have a listener, but, at the same time, he wasn’t speaking for my benefit, or because he expected a response. “I’m glad you didn’t have to see the videos,” I told him. “I hope you never do.”

  “But I need to see them,” he said, looking up. “No matter how horrific they are, I need to know what happened.”

  “Because of the demonstration Mauldin put on for me at the bar, they’re counting on me backing down. I don’t intend to back down.”

  “I believe you, Leo, but how can we control what the police—” He broke off.

  “We know whom we’re dealing with now, and what the tactics are. Remember, they handled Cho the same way, discredited him by framing him. In his case, they cooked up a video showing him having sex with a fourteen-year-old kid in some place in Chinatown.”

  “And it worked,” Walker said. “Or it would have worked, if Benton hadn’t sent that letter to the judge. You think the police are just going to take your word for it that the videos of Jordan’s death have been doctored to make her say your name?”

  “No. That’s why we’re going to need the best network forensic tech we can afford to hire. One who can work in real time. Their little demonstration tells us how it’ll happen. We’ll need to find someone capable of detecting the intrusion when it occurs, monitoring it, and tracing it back to its source. We document it, then we go to the police.”

  “And how do you plan to provoke this intrusion, as you call it?”

  “Simple,” I said. “You’ll file a wrongful-death lawsuit against Kairos and Mauldin. We’ll name Carl Hastings as Jordan’s killer and do exactly what Mauldin warned me not to do. That is, we’ll allege he was an employee of Kairos, acting at his boss’s direction.”

  Walker was staring at me strangely.

  “What?” I asked.

  He looked bemused. “I’m just surprised. That’s all. It’s a very civilized tactic for a man with your reputation. I was envisioning a midnight meeting in a ruined factory, night-vision goggles, that sort of thing. This sounds too straightforward. Though sensible, of course.”

  “You want justice. If the police won’t or can’t hold her killers accountable, we have to do it ourselves. The question is: should we use the legal system, or is there another way you want to go?” On the tip of my tongue was the other option I’d considered during recent sleepless nights as the horrible images from the videos cycled through my mind.

  That is, I could tell my father about my encounter with Mauldin and be reasonably sure he’d contact Bo Wilder to arrange for his swift end. But doing this would mean obligating myself to the man, Wilder, for life. Not to mention, it’d be wrong. I’d once believed justice and revenge were the same, but I’d learned there were crucial differences, chief among them being what happened afterward. Justice stopped the cycle of violence, but retribution had a life of its own, each act sparking the next in an endless chain.

  “I’m a lawyer,” I said. “No matter how much I’d like to take a can of gasoline to this man Mauldin’s house and light the place on fire, I believe in the rule of law.”

  “So do I,” he said. “Okay, then. We’ll sue the bastards.”

  Over the next weeks, we consulted experts and settled on Marty Ferris, whom Jeanie had recommended. I acquired a new cell phone and laptop. To each, prior to its activation, our expert attached a device that allowed him to remotely mirror every piece of data it sent or received. If anyone tried to plant a video on the computer or phone, he’d see it happening in real time, and, more importantly, he’d be able to meticulously document the event. In addition, he’d make every attempt to trace the illicit connection to its source, though this, he warned me, would be extremely difficult. He’d also preserve the video, analyzing it for signs of alteration.

  With our expert retained, we met on a Saturday morning at the Walkers’ house to draft the complaint, which would trigger, we hoped, the reaction Mauldin had threatened.

  Framed photos of Jordan at all stages of her life seemed to occupy every surface in the house. I wondered how her father could stand it, and I noticed his eyes seeming to flit from place to place like a climber seeking holds over a precipice. His wife was out, he explained. She spent most of her spare time with Jordan’s sister and the grandkids these days. He offered me a seat at the kitchen table and poured us coffee. Paranoid about using a computer that could be infiltrated by Kairos’s hackers, he insisted on working longhand. He had a stack of yellow pads for each of us and a box of new pens. Also, he had several treatises he’d brought home from the office, every source we could possibly want to consult about the intricacies of the law that would govern the case.

  Between the two of us, we set out to tell the story of Jordan’s death in numbered paragraphs that Mauldin and Kairos would be required to admit or deny. Walker was a meticulous drafter, far more prone to fiddling with sentences and word choice than I was. He insisted on including much that at first seemed to me irrelevant: Jordan’s upbringing, her community involvement. “A complaint like this, you have to draft it for the press,” he told me, as if he’d been filing civil actions all his life. “It’s the details that bring her alive. Mauldin, he probably won’t even read it. But Rachel Stone will.”

  His details were the kind that at the memorial had turned me off, being what I thought of as a public façade over the real, live woman I’d known. I realized that I’d known her only briefly, but in that limited sense, I’d known her well. My interest was narrower than her father’s, yet no less intense for that. The paragraphs where my name appeared were the springs of the trap we were setting for Jacob Mauldin.

  In several c
oncise, declarative sentences, the finalized document narrated my arrival at Lydia Cho’s, the carnage that followed, and my identification of Carl Hastings as an employee of Kairos. For now, however, I omitted any explanation of how I’d made this connection. Finally, there was my encounter with Mauldin: “Mauldin showed Maxwell videos depicting the rape and murder of Jordan Walker, obtained from the phone of Kairos’s former employee,” and “Mauldin threatened that if Maxwell revealed what he knew, he would be framed for Jordan Walker’s murder.”

  Walker filed the complaint the following Monday in Superior Court. The next day, he called me on a burner phone I’d picked up, a throwaway with no camera or data capabilities. Mauldin was successfully served. Everything was ready. My phone and laptop were safe in the offices of our network technician, hooked to his monitoring equipment.

  For three days, nothing happened. Then, for the second time in the past several months, I was awakened by a knock on my door. It was the police, with a warrant to seize and examine the contents of every electronic device I possessed.

  I agreed to accompany the officers to Southern Station to answer Detective Chen’s questions while the men searched my room. Once seated at the interview table, I signed the form acknowledging I was speaking to the police voluntarily. Then I explained to Chen exactly what Walker and I had done.

  Chen listened without interruption, then said, “And your explanation for destroying your phone and computer is?”

  “Altered videos had appeared and disappeared on my phone. Mauldin had as good as told me that they could plant incriminating evidence on any device I owned whenever they chose.”

  “But, according to you, the evidence was already gone, so—”

  It wasn’t lost on me that destroying evidence was the reaction of a man who’d just been confronted with proof of his crimes. “If I’d been thinking clearly I’d have taken the phone to an expert immediately. Or gone to the police. But I was just too freaked out.”