Charon's Net

by Gemma Herrero Virto

  CHAPTER THREE

  Natalia opened the door and walked towards her living room. She thought about saying hello, but the thunderous music that was coming from in there would prevent Gus from being able to hear her. She stood still for a few seconds before she was able to enter the room. This was not her living room, it couldn't be. There were several ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, empty coke cans, screwed up sheets of paper cast on the floor... And that was leaving out the cigarette smoke enveloping the room. Gus greeted her with a nod and lowered the volume. She remained standing for a few more seconds, unable to completely believe the destruction this young man had been able to wreak in a single day, and wondering to what extent his capacity for destruction could go. She took a breath, and tried not to think about it, and also to ignore the enormous stain of something uncertain that extended across her new rug.

  “Hello," she greeted him, forcing a smile. "How's the day gone for you?"

  "Super boring; that's why I put the music on. I hope you don't mind," Natalia shook her head, her gaze lost and unfocused. “The first few hours were exciting but, if I have to read this for one more minute, I think I'm going to end up jumping out of the window. I've started with Bianca's chat threads, and so far I have sixteen of them reviewed. I've got fifty-nine more for her, and fifty-six for Vanessa, and that's without counting the hundreds of emails and messages that I also have to read through. And even if I scroll through the chat threads at full speed, it's going to take me days."

  “But it has been useful, hasn't it?" said Natalia, in an attempt to encourage him. "Have you found any important pieces of information?"

  “So far, I've only found out that the killer is the corniest, tackiest person on the face of the Earth. He spends the day saying that like 'I love you so much', 'how I've missed you', 'I can't live without you'... I haven't found a single sentence that’s original, enough to make me think ‘Good job, mate... you’ve really outdone yourself there’. The guy flirts using a mixture of words from of ballads and romance novels. And the girls go crazy for him. But do you women really go in for that kind of crap?”

  Gus's face was a reflection of such despair that Natalia could not help laughing. She knew that it could not be as hard as he was making it out to be, but she did not envy him the task of spending hours there alone, reading the same things over and over again, and trying to keep the concentration up so as not to miss a single important detail.

  “Come on, tell me how it works and I’ll go along helping you on the other computer.”

  Gus explained the buttons that brought up all the old chat screens and, a few minutes later, they both fell silent. Natalia was feeling excited. She was reading the words of a serial killer, trying to hunt him down and, even though it was true that his sentences did appear devoid of any real sentiment, she was sure that in the end he would say something that would allow them to get closer to him. The whole thing must have been exciting for Gus too, but she understood that, after a few hours, he must have ended up very tired. Besides, Charon was using such an uncomfortable font to read...

  “Each person in ICQ uses a different font, right?” she asked, turning towards Gus.

  “Well, not everyone. You can use the default one that comes with the program, but the majority of people tend to choose another one. Look,” he closed the chat thread he was reading and proceeded to show her Bianca’s messages with other people:

  Ghost: −‘I had a history exam today, something about the industrial revolution, I think... It remains to be seen what my mum’s going to do when she sees the zero.’

  Aroha: −‘I’m going out this Saturday with that boy from my class I told you about. Well, we’re actually going in a group, but I’m as nervous as if it were just the two of us.’

  Jeroen: −‘Shit, I’m all out of cigarettes and I’m climbing the walls ... Wait a second, I’m going to go and see if I can nick one from my sister.’

  Natalia continued looking at the messages for a short while. The people would choose a font and keep it for months at a time, as if it were a means of expressing their personality, of revealing something about themselves to the others through a medium as cold and impersonal as a computer program. She lit a cigarette whilst she thought about the viability of what had just occurred to her. The fonts were not designed by the user, one had to choose from a selection on the computer, and therefore it would not have as much validity as a handwriting style, in which every stroke has continually evolved in accordance with the personality over their lifetime. But the act of choosing one font and not another could express something... In any case, she was not going to lose anything by trying it.

  “Do you think there could be any validity in carrying out a graphological analysis on the font that Charon has chosen?” she asked Gus.

  “I’ve no idea. To me, the graphology thing seems about as scientific as a horoscope.”

  “Don’t be naïve. It is a science. When I was doing my Masters degree in forensic psychology in Madrid I met a girl who was very interested in graphology. She analysed several pages of my handwriting, and told me about my personality as if she had known me all her life.”

  “I know several ladies in my neighbourhood who would tell you the same thing about a local woman who reads cards,” mocked Gus. “But there’s nothing to lose in trying it. Do you want me to print you out a sample?”

  Natalia nodded as she looked in her diary. There was Raquel’s number. The only thing she needed to do was to call her the following day, and send her the document by fax, asking her to carry out a complete graphological study.

  In that moment, the doorbell rang. Natalia ran to open it. Carlos greeted her and came in behind her. He greeted Gus, and sat down beside him.

  “How’s it going for you? A lot of work?”

  Gus moved the mouse to pause the printing of the chat thread and looked at him with an air of despair:

  “You can’t even imagine it. This is blindingly boring. I can’t believe the number of hours this guy’s capable of filling with crap like ‘I adore you’, ‘I would die for you’, ‘I need to see you’... If I were a girl, I would have told him to get lost within half an hour, but can you guess what happens?” Carlos tried to intervene, but Gus did not give him the opportunity. ‘They love it; they’re drooling over him. To tell the truth, I’m understanding women less and less by the day because look, here you have a guy like me, who isn’t one for boasting, but I’m witty, a good conversationalist, intelligent... And do you think I pull? No, they fall in love with a moron who repeats the same thing over and over again... Shit, if this is what girls want, I wish they’d told me years ago. The stuff this guy says, I could say in my sleep...”

  Carlos could not help laughing. Natalia appeared with a tray on which there were some coffees and a clean ashtray:

  “The truth is that we women aren’t like that,” Natalia sat down in the other chair and looked at them with a professional air. “Bear in mind that they were very young girls, with a very low level of socialisation, all of which is tied to the self-esteem problems that adolescence causes. Those girls were craving for someone to tell them they love them, and neither one of them had any previous romantic experiences, so they had nothing to compare it to. Besides, I am certain that the killer will have had to put up with a ton of rejections before finding his victims. I don’t think he would have been so lucky as to have found these two girls his first time around.”

  “Yes, that is true. It can’t have been easy for him to find them... And from now on, it’ll be even harder,” Carlos smiled nervously. “Tomorrow, they’re putting out a press release where they’re going to announce that the killer contacts his victims via the Internet.”

  “Why?” Natalia confronted him, furious. “What if he goes and hides, and we lose him?”

  “Well, if he does hide, at least he’ll have stopped killing, and that will give us more time to find him,” replied Carlos.

  “But we could lose him forever. That was abso
lute idiocy. Do you want to have a killer loose forever, or something?” Natalia raised her voice even more.

  “And do you want to find another body because we didn’t warn people to be careful?” retorted Carlos, demonstrating that he also knew how to talk loudly.

  Gus, who up until now had been very quietly seated between the two of them whilst they were beginning to shout, murmured an ‘excuse me’, and took advantage of the moment to go to the bathroom.

  “And what if he goes and changes his username or web chat program but keeps on killing? How are we going to find him then, genius?”

  “Well, Gus will find him again. I think that our first obligation is to protect the lives of innocent people. And you can drop that tone with me... I’m not the one to blame for you not going and making yourself famous in four days with this case,” reproached Carlos.

  "Who says I want to make myself famous? I'm only trying to do my job properly, unlike you, who can’t go twenty-four hours with your mouth closed."

  "Listen to me carefully, little Miss big-shot..." Carlos's patience was beginning to run out. "Aguirre already knew how the killer contacted his victims. He found out from Roberto, remember? It was the sergeant who decided to tell the public, so I haven't been able to do anything, but at least I'm trying to find a positive side to the matter, such as the fact that, for example, Aguirre has promised to leave me in peace from now on, and not make any other press releases.”

  "Of course from now on, once everything has already been wrecked. You should have consulted me beforehand. We're not going to get anything now, and it'll be your fault...”

  "Look, if you're so afraid of failure and think the best thing to do is to give up, say so. Gus and I will grab all this junk and go off somewhere else. That way you'll be able to carry on playing at being a little princess without ever staining your shoes with shit. Is that what you want? To behave like a coward?"

  Natalia shot him a look that was loaded with hatred:

  "As far as I'm concerned, you can do whatever you want," she stood up quickly and headed towards the kitchen, trying to avoid him noticing that her voice was breaking. "I don't care in the slightest about you or your damn investigation."

  The kitchen door slammed shut. Natalia sat down on a stool and hid her face in her hands. She was not going to cry; she would not give him that satisfaction. She straightened up in her seat and lifted her head, trying to get rid of the lump that had taken hold of her throat. How could he be so stupid? He didn't know her at all. Who would have ever thought he was about to judge her like that?

  She tried to relax. After all, Carlos wasn't entirely to blame, although if he had told her from the start that the idea of making the news public had been Aguirre's, she would not have attacked him like that. And then he just didn't know how to stop... Carlos was right about a few things. In spite of the fact that she had carried on in an investigation that posed a threat to her career through loyalty to him, she kept thinking that, if in the end they managed to catch the killer, Aguirre would not be able to deny her the praise, the congratulations, a promotion... She was too obsessed with achieving success. In six months she would have the title of prosecutor, and would be authorised to direct a forensic laboratory. That would be the moment in which she could be assigned to another, more important position, perhaps to direct her own forensic science team. She could not allow a failure to hold her back for several years in a grotty old job. She had to be the number one, to get the best assignment, and prove that she could succeed on her own account. And for that, she needed to catch the killer; she needed that trophy on her CV, and neither Carlos, nor anybody else, was going to get in her way.

  She sighed, and went back to feeling overwhelmed. Why did she have to punish herself with so much pressure? She felt guilty for the hurt she might have caused Carlos with her attitude, although he himself was not much less to blame. The truth is that he had behaved very rudely towards her, and that was not something she was going to easily forgive him for.

  In that moment she felt like a silly little girl. What was she going to do? Not talk to him? Stop breathing until she turned purple? She knew that Carlos was not the apologising type, and nor was she a specialist when it came to admitting mistakes. The only thing she had to think about was whether she believed they would manage to do that, and continue forward without giving it any more importance, or whether to leave that very instant in order to devote her energies to achieving success some other way. She got up, and made her way towards the living room. On reaching the door, she took a deep breath, and stood up even straighter. She always had time to leave; she had six months left before she would be able to be assigned to another post.

  ***

  Carlos was sitting alongside Gus, and they were both reading a chat thread on one of the screens. Carlos raised his gaze on hearing her enter. She sat down in the chair and observed the computer screen:

  "Listen, does this thing go on for much longer?” he asked in a bored voice.

  "Not at all... Just twenty-five more minutes of 'I love you so much', 'how wonderful you are'. What, are you getting tired or something?”

  "I have to admit that you were right. This is the most treacly thing I've read in all my life."

  "And that's just after ten minutes of torture for you. Imagine how I’m feeling after nine hours of it... Just thinking that I have several days’ work left gives me the urge to walk out right now."

  "Do you think you're going to get anything out of this?" Carlos asked him.

  "I don't know... I don't believe he betrays himself by telling us where he lives, but we might just be able to find something interesting. So far I’ve found a few things," he gathered up the pieces of paper he had scattered on the desktop, and set to reading. "Let's see, he met Bianca on the 15thof May, so their relationship lasted some four months. Approximately 10 days after meeting online, they were already talking about love. He met Vanessa on the 20thof August. Their courtship was rather shorter; only two months before they met last Friday."

  "So Bianca made it more difficult for him?" asked Carlos, as he noted everything down.

  "That's what's had me surprised. Bianca had been going along asking him for a date ever since the end of June. That's why I've written it down, and taken note of the chats threads in which he is stalling," he handed out a piece of paper to Natalia. "Here you have a list of all the threads in which I think there is relevant information; that way you only have to search for them on this list. In the rest of them, they're just talking about how they miss each other, about kid problems in school, and things like that... Let's see if you can tell us anything."

  "Why do you think he took so long to set that date, Natalia?" Carlos asked the question without looking up from his notebook.

  "I won’t be able to know with any certainty until I read them... It could be that he is playing with her, like a hunter chasing his prey, or perhaps he still didn't feel the necessary courage to do what he did... We won't know until we find out more things about his personality."

  "Well that's where we're going to have problems, because that's precisely the other matter I wanted to discuss with you," Gus carefully searched amongst his papers and showed them another sheet covered in handwritten notes. "It seems our guy is very shy, because he NEVER talks about himself."

  "What do you mean he never talks about himself? It's a conversation between two people, he must say something about himself," Carlos grabbed the piece of paper from his hands. "What are you supposed to have written down here?”

  “An account of all the times in which Bianca asks him a personal question and he gets out of it with excuses. He’s slipperier than an eel. Apart from the details that appear in his ICQ information, he’s not revealed anything else.”

  “And how does he get out of answering?” Natalia looked at him with incredulity, fearing that the lack of information was more down to Gus’s ineptitude than Charon’s ability.

  “You’ve got to acknowledge that the guy works hard
here,” Gus took the piece of paper back out of Carlos’s hands, and read. “He uses such ingenious things as ‘my life is not that interesting’, ‘I’d prefer it if we keep on talking about you, darling, you’re so wonderful...’ or ‘there’s not much to tell about my life, I feel like I was born the day we met’. Enchanting, right?”

  “Well I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to keep reading to see if you find anything in the end,” said Carlos.

  “Shit... I’m going to end up jumping out of the bloody window.”

  “I think you ought to carry on to see whether reading so many lovely words will sweeten your character and stop you from saying so many swearwords,” joked Natalia. “Perhaps Vanessa was more insistent, and managed to get something out of him or maybe upon having more confidence with Bianca he ended up letting slip some piece of information... After all, we’ve got four months of daily conversations. They can’t all only be filled with ‘I love you’.”

  “You’d be surprised how capable he is of drawing out that topic, this bore. Anyway, fine... I hope that at least you’ll get something out of all this.”

  “Well, a person can hide details about their life, but not their way of talking, their expressions... I believe we’ll be able to draw some hypothesis about his personality.”

  “Okay, tell me about everything you find to see if I can begin searching for something. I’m certain that we’ll advance as soon as you give me some information,” Carlos smiled at her, in an attempt to erase the argument entirely. Natalia returned a timid smile at him, and turned her attention back to the sheet of paper. “Have you got anything more from the girls’ post mortems?”