Lilith: a novel

by Edward Trimnell

When they walked in, they were immediately spotted by a young African-American man who stood behind the front desk. He was wearing a blue golf shirt with the clamshell logo and the gym’s name sewn onto the left breast.

  Alan and Maribel were dressed in business attire, and they weren’t carrying gym bags. The young man instantly discerned that they weren’t members.

  “Can I help you?” he said evenly.

  “We’d like to speak with Lorelei Monroe, please.”

  Alan had been prepared to flash his badge, but that didn't prove necessary. The young man must have detected officialdom. He scurried away to find Lorelei.

  “Wait here please. I’ll get her.”

  In the rear of the main room, an aerobics class was being conducted to the beat of a Madonna song. The song had been immensely popular during the late 1980s. A large version of the clamshell logo adorned the back wall. Branding, Alan thought absently.

  The desk attendant returned promptly with a woman wearing a pink and silver spandex workout suit. She had long brunette hair. The woman was instantly recognizable from the printout of the Facebook profile.

  “I’m Lorelei Monroe,” the woman said, without waiting for the front desk attendant to introduce her. “Alec here says you wanted to see me.”

  Alec nodded first to Alan and Maribel, then to Lorelei.

  “Thanks, Alec,” Lorelei said. “I’ll take it from here.”

  “How can I help you?” Lorelei said. Alan assessed her initial reaction as curiosity and mild apprehension, but definitely not fear. This meant either that a visit from the police was the last thing she expected, or she had been expecting them and had prepared herself well in advance.

  “I’m Detective Grooms from the Ohio Department of Criminal Investigation,” Alan said. “And this is my partner, Detective Flynn. We have badges, but you’d probably prefer that we be as inconspicuous as possible. You’re not in any trouble, Ms. Monroe, but we need to talk with you about a very serious matter. Is there someplace here where we can talk privately?”

  Lorelei seemed momentarily flustered now, but she steadied herself.

  “Uh—sure. I have a private office near the aerobics area. It’ll be a little cramped with three of us, but we can speak in private.”

  “That will be fine,” Alan said.

  Lorelei led them down an aisle along the side of the main workout room, away from the exercise machines. In between the machines and the aerobics area, there was a section of the gym that had been set aside for free weights. Several men, most of them muscular and under thirty, watched Lorelei as she led her visitors.

  The Madonna song changed to something screechy that Alan did not recognize as Lorelei ushered them into her office. It was indeed cramped: There was barely room for a desk and two visitors’ chairs. The bookshelf behind the desk overflowed with books about exercise and physiology. A promotional poster for a particular brand of protein powder decorated one wall.

  “Please have a seat,” Lorelei said. She closed the imitation wood door of the office. The front wall of the office was glass, but it was reasonably soundproof with the door closed.

  Lorelei sat behind the desk, and Alan and Maribel sat in the two visitor’s chairs.

  “What’s this all about?”

  Alan laid a manila folder on Lorelei’s desk and opened it. He had been discreetly carrying it with him all along. For the time being, he left the folder closed.

  “You have a public Facebook profile, isn’t that correct?”

  Lorelei returned a puzzled look. “Well, sure, doesn't everyone?”

  “No not everyone, exactly,” Alan said. “A few of us old dogs are holdouts.”

  Alan’s daughters were both on Facebook, but Alan had resisted the trend. First of all, the ODCI strongly discouraged it: If a detective’s face was out on the Internet, he or she could potentially become useless for undercover work.

  But more than that, Alan simply had no driving urge to reconnect with high school classmates from thirty years ago, or even army buddies from twenty-five years ago.

  Yes, it would have been nice to say hello to a few old friends and see what became of their lives. But for the most part, Alan knew, it would be difficult to restart a decades-old relationship that had been limited to begin with, and dependent on a very specific set of circumstances. Alan suspected that many Facebook users used the site to create a personal virtual reality of sorts, where their pasts remained frozen in amber. But that was an illusion. The real-world reality was that people changed, people moved on.

  “There’s nothing illegal about being on Facebook, is there?” Lorelei asked.

  “No,” Alan said. “Of course not. Would you say that your Facebook page receives a lot of traffic?”

  Lorelei paused before answering. “Well, I use my Facebook profile for personal connections,” Lorelei explained. “And I’m pretty active on there. But why are you asking me this?”

  “Please, Ms. Monroe,” Maribel cut in. “You’re not in trouble here. We just need to get an idea of how you use Facebook.”

  Lorelei gave Maribel and Alan a smile that wasn't really a smile.

  “Has my Facebook profile been used in the commission of a crime or something?”

  “We’ll get to that in a minute. Please, Ms. Monroe: Go on.”

  “Well, okay. I use Facebook for personal contacts, but I also use it for work. I make my money here at the club in two ways: I receive an hourly wage, but I’m one of the personal trainers here, too. My Facebook page helps me attract clients.”

  “How does that work?” Alan asked. “The personal training, I mean.”

  “If a member of the club wants to hire me as a personal trainer, they make an appointment. I charge thirty dollars an hour. And the club gets a twenty percent cut.”

  Alan nodded. On the surface, at least, Lorelei’s explanation made perfect sense. But was there anything below that surface?

  Alan now opened the manila folder that he had placed on Lorelei’s desk. The fitness instructor had, somewhat understandably, been stealing glances at it.

  Alan lifted a printout from the stack of papers inside the folder and handed it to Lorelei.

  “Do you recognize this, Ms. Monroe?”

  Lorelei took a few seconds to study the printout.

  “These are my photos, of course,” she said. “But hey, wait a minute, this is a profile from a dating website.”

  She laid the paper down on the desk and looked at Alan and Maribel.

  “What is this about? I feel like you two are beating around the bush, trying to entrap me here. Then you show me this dating profile with my photos in it, and—I haven’t ever even done any online dating. I mean, not ever. I’m engaged, in fact.”

  She gestured to a photo in a standing frame atop her desk: Lorelei and a bookish-looking but handsome man, obviously on vacation in a tropical location. The man was standing behind Lorelei and he had his arms wrapped around her. Their fingers were intertwined.

  “You might not be doing any online dating,” Alan said, “but someone is setting up online dating profiles using your pictures.”

  Lorelei laughed. “You mean like—false advertising? A bait-and-switch type of thing?”

  “I’m afraid it's a bit more serious than that,” Maribel replied.

  Alan and Maribel then told Lorelei exactly how her photos had been used. When they were done with their explanation, the color had drained from Lorelei’s face.

  “Oh my God. You mean to tell me—a serial killer.” Then another thought occurred to her. “You don’t mean—you don’t think that I’ve been going around killing people, do you? Because, listen: I don't know anything about this! I’ll take a polygraph test or whatever you need!”

  “No,” Alan said, holding up both hands in a take-it-easy gesture. “We actually don’t think that you had anything to do with this.”

  “Well, that’s a relief to hear.”

  “But we do think that the person—or people—behind these killings
might know you. And that’s the main reason why we’re here. Yours weren’t the only photos used in the fake dating site profiles in this case. But the other photos have all been traced to stock photos—European models—grabbed off the Internet at random. While its possible that the killer might have grabbed your photos at random, too, it’s just a bit too much of a coincidence. You live here in Columbus, and the very first killing was in Columbus.”

  “So what we need,” Maribel said, “is for you to tell us if you have any idea who might have taken your photos.”

  “How could I possibly know?”

  “Perhaps you don’t,” Alan allowed. “But can you think of anyone you know who might have done this? Has anyone expressed any overt or covert hostility toward you of late? Remember: Even though photos of women were used as bait, we don’t know yet if this serial killer is a man, a woman, or multiple people.”

  “I have no idea,” Lorelei said. “I—I don’t know anyone who would do something like this. This—this is sick. Totally sick. I’m so sorry for what happened. And I know this sounds selfish, given that people have been killed, but I feel violated.”

  “You have been violated, Ms. Monroe,” Alan agreed.

  Such was the mixed blessing of the Internet. Alan had noticed over the years that there was something cultlike and self-important about online culture. Anyone who described the Internet as anything but a boon to progress was dismissed as a fogey or a Luddite.

  In the roughly twenty years of its modern, commercial incarnation, the Internet had created whole new ways of life, and billions of dollars in economic opportunities. That much was true. But Alan had also read that the Internet had bankrupted much of the music industry through online piracy. The Internet had provided places where child pornographers, Islamic extremists, and cranks of every kind could find a podium and like-minded associates.

  And the pervasive reach of social media, coupled with the ease of anonymously copying digital photographs, had associated Lorelei with the deadly activities of Lilith. Lilith had accomplished this much with a handful of mouse clicks and keystrokes.

  Alan removed a business card from his pocket. He placed the card face-up on Lorelei’s desk. Maribel did the same. Then Alan took the printout that Lorelei had been reading, and tucked it back into the manila folder.

  “If you think of anyone, Ms. Monroe, please give Detective Flynn or myself a call. Will you do that?”

  “Absolutely,” Lorelei replied. She was noticeably less poised now than she had been at the start of the interview. “My photos—can this person still use them? Do I need to suspend my Facebook account? I suppose I could do that.”

  “I don't think that’s really necessary or even helpful at this point. The killer already has your photos stored on a hard drive somewhere.”

  “Are you going to catch him?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  Alan took another look at the photo of Lorelei and the man on the tropical beach:

  “What sort of work does he do, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Ryan is a dentist,” Lorelei said. “He’s been out of dental school for three years. Ryan is working with a group of dentists right now, but he’d like to start his own practice in a few years.”

  Her hands were laid out across the top of her desk. Lorelei involuntarily glanced at the engagement ring on her left hand. “We’re getting married in September.”

  “Congratulations, Ms. Monroe.” Alan stood to leave, the manila folder tucked under one arm. Maribel followed his cue and stood, too.

  On the way out, he asked, “Oh, what is your fiancé’s name?”

  Lorelei arched her back and sat upright in her chair.

  “You aren’t going to contact him, too, are you?”

  “That shouldn't be necessary, Ms. Monroe. But we need to cover all the bases. I’m sure you understand.”

  “His name is Dr. Ryan Gaines,” Lorelei said tersely. “You can find him in all the Columbus dental directories.”

  Alan nodded. “Thank you again. We’ll let you get back to work now. We appreciate your taking time to talk to us.”

  As soon as they were in the Explorer, Maribel asked: “What do you think?”

  “I think that Lorelei Monroe had absolutely no idea that her photos were being used to lure men to their deaths. I think that she was genuinely shocked and horrified.”

  “That was my impression, too. Right from the get-go. So Lorelei isn’t Lilith.”

  “Lorelei isn’t Lilith.”

  “But what about the other, more likely possibility. Do you think that the killer knows her? Or has some connection to her?”

  Alan paused to consider this. Once again, he thought of his daughters: He did not spy on Frances and Emily, but the girls were still teenagers, and he did occasionally take stock of what they were doing on Facebook and other social media sites.

  He had noticed that both of his daughters had hundreds of Facebook “friends”. Emily’s friend list exceeded eight hundred.

  It had seemed to Alan that no one could actually have eight hundred friends; but in the online world, the power of networking brought people into brief and tenuous contact with hundreds, sometimes thousands of strangers. Emily reported that some of her classmates had more than a thousand Facebook friends.

  At the time of the father-daughter discussion about the often indiscriminate and random nature of Facebook friending, Alan had merely shaken his head at it all; but now he thought of it again. If Lilith had found Lorelei’s photos on Facebook, then there might be no real connection between them at all.

  “They might not even be Facebook friends,” Alan said. “Her profile seems to be public, with no real restrictions on who can view it. We had no trouble accessing it from the office, after all. And you know how the Internet works. People go on social media sites, and they click from one link to the other, and they randomly end up in different locations—virtual people-watching, if you will.”

  “Maybe, but there is still a strong chance that the killer found Lorelei’s photos by doing a local search. So the connection is probably there, even if Lilith and Lorelei aren’t formally connected in any way on Facebook. The killer clearly visited her profile.”

  “Along with a thousand other people,” Alan said. “And you heard what Dave said about the killer using public WiFis and untraceable devices. So it would be a long-shot and a needle in a haystack, at best.”

  “We had to check it out, Alan.”

  Alan put the Explorer in gear and backed out of their parking space. “Yes, we did. But it doesn't seem to have gotten us any closer to finding out who Lilith is.”

  10.

  Dave pushed out from behind his cubicle when he heard them walk in.

  “How did the interview with Lorelei Monroe go?”

  “It was a dead end,” Alan said.

  “Lorelei isn’t Lilith?” Dave asked.

  “Lorelei isn’t Lilith.”

  “And she doesn't have any idea who Lilith might be?”

  “No.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “Yes, I’m inclined to believe her.”

  Dave sighed. “Well, we didn't really expect it to be that easy, did we?”

  “No. They almost never are.”

  But nor were they usually this slippery. There was usually some thread to grab hold of, even if it was a small thread.

  During the return drive from Columbus, Alan had thought about the evidence they had from every angle; and he was convinced that so far, they had next to nothing of real value.

  “Oh,” Dave said. “Lieutenant Seeger dropped by while you two were gone.”

  “Let me guess: He wants an update.”

  “He wants an update.”

  Alan let out a long breath of air. “Okay, I’ll give him a call this afternoon, if he doesn't stop back before then.”

  “The lieutenant indicated that he was going to stop back yet this morning. Apparently the attorney general has taken an active inter
est in these homicides, and she has some ideas.”

  Alan did not miss Dave’s tone of irony. Maribel smirked.

  Martha Cowler was the state’s attorney general. As such she represented the very top of the ODCI organizational chart. She also had a reputation for being an armchair sleuth who double-guessed the men and women in the ranks.

  “I’ll deal with Lt. Seeger when he comes by.”

  Maribel said, “You might remind Lt. Seeger that we were assigned responsibility for this case less than forty-eight hours ago.”

  “That won’t make any difference—either to the lieutenant or to the attorney general. Anyway, I’ll handle it.”

  “Speak of the devil,” Dave said, at a barely audible volume. He abruptly looked over Alan’s shoulder.

  It was the lieutenant. He hadn’t been lying when he’d told Dave that he’d check back.

  “Hello, LT,” Alan said.

  Lt. Seeger nodded. “Detective.”

  Lt. Seeger was in his early fifties. Unlike Alan, Dave, and Maribel, who were in plainclothes, the lieutenant was in uniform. The lieutenant was always in uniform, even though his position would have allowed him to wear civilian attire.

  Like Alan, Lt. Seeger had done time in the military before pursuing a career in law enforcement. Unlike Alan, the lieutenant still clung to the formalities and awe of hierarchy that were gospel in the military.

  Alan knew all about hierarchy, both in military and in civilian life. In the army, there had been politics, of course. But the inflexibility of the military system meant that you didn't question the brass—especially if you were an enlisted man, as Alan had been.

  Civilian law enforcement was far murkier. In civilian law enforcement, you answered to a combination of law enforcement professionals, elected officials, and civilian appointees—who were always politically connected and politically motivated.

  Politicians and political appointees weren’t necessarily malicious. But they seldom understood the full implications of the decisions that their positions entitled them to make. For this reason, it was simply impossible for Alan to regard them with the respect that he had generally accorded, say, a full-bird colonel in the U.S. army.