Traumatized. RIP Trip
Several of her friends had responded with abbreviated commiserations:
STBY R U OK?
Saw it on the TV news. U must be in total shock.
Beth noticed the exchange had happened only seven hours earlier. She scrolled down to her previous comment.
An ex of mine has been murdered! Trip Stillman former rhythm guitarist of Blood Legend found dead by his folks!
There were more responses to this:
OMFG You were only dating him last summer!
Beth was chilled by the message. Instead of requesting friendship, she opened a Google page and entered:
Trip Stillman murder
She got two news results and clicked on the first, which was a website for the Billings Gazette.
New Billings resident, Trip Stillman, was discovered unconscious at his home by his mother and father early this morning following a violent assault by an unknown assailant. He was rushed to West Corner County Hospital but died soon after being admitted.
New Billings? As far as Beth knew, the handful of students on the coach had been from a college in a place called Kalispell in Montana.
A homicide investigation has now been launched by the Billings Police Department. They are now questioning neighbors and asking for eyewitnesses.
Beth decided to watch the remaining crash clips one after the other. She’d initially planned to watch one a day but figured sitting through all of them was the best way to get the ordeal over and done with. She braced herself against the back of Jody’s armchair, touched the screen and felt the pulse pound in her reconstructed jaw.
The second clip had been uploaded by “dustboy” and was shot safely and steadily to the right of her attack on the crowd, then shakily thrust forward as police and paramedics subdued her. She could see the spittle on her chin as she sagged in their grip.
As the four of them turned and headed to the ambulance, they staggered in the rippling draught from the overhead helicopter. The police officers and paramedic didn’t even glance back towards the camera. What could they have done to stop the recording? They were probably used to performing to rows of phones at every populated crash scene they attended.
But Beth couldn’t deny she’d been guilty in the past. If she encountered an accident roadblock, she couldn’t stop herself glimpsing the wreckage when the police allowed her vehicle to pass. What was she looking for in that momentary glance? Was she hoping to see the people involved sitting safely on the roadside, or something more horrific that would make her feel grateful it hadn’t been her turn that day?
Was recording it any worse than wanting to look? But to her mind, it was inexcusable that the spectators had not only shot it for their consumption, but with the express intention of sharing and turning it into entertainment currency.
What was going through their heads when they were capturing it? Watching from their position was like standing in their shoes. Very few of them made any comment throughout. None that was coherent, anyway. It was as if they were in awe of what they were recording. Or were they holding their breath in the hope of appropriating something they couldn’t normally download? She could almost interpret their mood, suspense as well as boredom. If not enough was happening in front of them, they shifted from foot to foot and cast their phones about the site to try and catch something worthy of their battery power.
She saw Cigarillo Man talking to the police in the third clip that had been uploaded by “Spike666”. The camera had found the coach on the grass verge and he was standing outside, answering questions. He tried to light up again but the officer cautioned him not to. She’d been right. He was the driver, Ferrand Paquet. She could see he was wearing a pair of jeans and some brown leather loafers. She mentally crossed him off the list.
As she watched the fourth, uploaded by “smilingassassin”, she realised she’d become strangely detached, as if reducing what had happened to a tablet screen had somehow compressed her emotions as well. She examined the stats for it. Beth was viewer 7, 133, 448. All those people had seen this moment from her life long before she had, the bulk of them probably when she’d still been lying in the hospital. Her eyes were drawn to the last comment.
Boring. No guts.
But this clip did contain something the others didn’t. No glimpse of any suspicious spectators but something significant while it lingered on the scene after she’d been restrained. She pulled the slider back and watched again.
The black female paramedic was gripping Luc’s hand and staring intently down at him. Luc had his head lifted slightly and said something to her. She put her ear to his mouth.
Beth watched her own dark silhouette pass in front of the lens as she was led away. She barely resisted the reflex to crane around herself.
They came into view again. When Luc finished speaking, the paramedic straightened and stood motionless, whatever he’d said sinking into her abstracted features. It was only her fellow paramedic that snapped her out of it when he returned and asked for help to raise Luc’s trolley.
Chapter 15
“But I’m nearly nineteen.” And he must have said it as many times.
Marcia O’Doole considered rising from her perch on the edge of Tyler’s low bed frame. It was hardly a position of authority. He was seated higher on a swivel chair in front of his laptop. She told herself that confronting him at the scene of the crime was the best approach, but it felt as if she was kowtowing to him, and she acknowledged that that was what she usually did. Not on this occasion, though. “What else would I have found if I’d looked in some of your other files?”
“I can’t believe you went snooping.” He’d alternated between the two statements for the last five minutes and hadn’t shifted his pout from the screen.
Marcia looked at his downy fair stubble and the acne peppering the lower half of his face. His ears glowed like they always did when he was embarrassed, jutting crimson from underneath the blue camouflage bandana that covered the remainder of his yellow curls. Her hair had been the same shade at his age, but at forty-seven, she’d long given up on calling her silver hair platinum blonde. “I understand you’re at an age when you like looking at that sort of thing...” She regretted it before the words had formed on her lips.
“Mom.” Tyler said in exasperation, and visibly squirmed.
“These aren’t just naked ladies, though.” She tried to jettison her awkwardness by recalling the material she’d discovered. “Why would you want to see women doing those sorts of things?” Her mortification started to surface. She had to remember that, despite his height, he was still just an impressionable kid. She was sure his online gamer buddy, Howie Judd, was responsible. His parents had never exerted any control over the movies he watched or the violent virtual games he played, so she was sure his files had to be brimming with the sort of clips she’d found in her son’s. She hoped that was the case. Peer pressure and morbid curiosity, it had to be.
“It’s an invasion of privacy,” he countered petulantly.
She wondered exactly who he was quoting. “How can it be an invasion of privacy when the computer belongs to me?” She’d had that one prepared, although she knew it wasn’t her best tack. But it was one of only two she had. The second was just coming and she already hated herself for playing it. “And if you’re going to spend your allowance on paying lawyers to sue me for that, perhaps I should suspend that as well.”
He folded his arms across his chest. “Can’t believe you went snooping” was all he could muster.
This was Ted’s job. But Tyler’s father had fled and probably had worse on his computer. Although she did wonder if there was anything more degrading than the acts she’d glimpsed in her son’s secret archive. “I’m going to put a parental lock on it.”
“I’m nearly nineteen,” he enunciated as if she were deaf.
“But your brother isn’t. I hope you haven’t exposed him to any of this.”
He didn’t answer, which meant he had
.
She sighed. Marcia knew she was shutting the barn door after the horse had bolted but hated to think of those images being downloaded into their home. “I’m so disappointed in you.” He was just a teenager. It was the equivalent of kids pulling the legs off spiders, an unwholesome compulsion that had to be curbed. “Don’t you think the girls in those photos have moms and dads?”
He turned and looked at her as if it were a stupid question. “They have more than I have, then,” he deflected.
Marcia ignored the retort. “How d’you think they’d feel if they saw their sons or daughters doing those things?”
“But they’re porn stars. They’re paid thousands of dollars.”
“Thousands of dollars? Come on. A lot of them regret doing those things when they’re older. If you were doing them...”
He smirked slyly then, and Marcia didn’t like it.
“If you did those things because you needed the money and then regretted it, how would you feel if thousands of people were still looking at you degrading yourself years later?”
“But I won’t ever do those ‘things,”’ he said with a contempt she liked even less.
“I certainly hope not, but I don’t want you to forget that those are real people who probably aren’t as fortunate as you.”
“People upload it all the time... besides, porn stars have cool cribs and swimming pools.”
He was right. This wasn’t a good argument. Porn had become aspirational. Why would a teenager think that it was anything but cool? It was glamorous, hinged on the one thing that possessed every kid’s thoughts and offered cash for no talent. What was not to like? But that’s because they bought the glossy packaging and not its squalid flipside. “Don’t ever download anything that could get you into trouble...”
“Of course I won’t. I’m not stupid.” He just sounded exasperated now.
What did she expect – contrition? “Look, I really don’t want to stop you from looking at sexy girls – or boys, if that’s what you like.”
“Mom.” He squeezed his eyelids shut as if he could hide from the humiliation there. “I’m not thirteen.”
“Just get rid of the extreme stuff. I’ll trust you to do this for me.”
“And what do you class as extreme, Mom?” He was mocking her now. Probably for the benefit of his fifteen year-old brother, Kevin, they both knew was listening at the door. “Bukkake?”
“Facials are for health spas, Tyler.”
He opened his eyes, obviously shocked that she knew what he was talking about. “So download as many bikini girls as you can this afternoon, because they’ll have to sustain you until you’re...”
“Twenty-one?” There was his trump card. Nobody knew if he would ever make it there.
Marcia couldn’t let him use it against her. Not in this argument. She had to be a parent, not a bereaved parent in waiting. “As of this evening, I’m locking you down.”
She got up from the bed and walked to the door. She could hear Kevin’s footsteps along the landing before she reached the handle.
“I’m nearly nineteen...” Tyler said, but without as much ebullience.
Marcia walked out of his room without another word, locked herself in the bathroom and silently squeezed a tear. Her sons weren’t the only ones who had furtive moments behind closed doors.
Chapter 16
“Parlez-vous anglais?”
“Yes.” But the weary female voice didn’t sound willing to.
Beth stared through the lounge pane at the automated window-cleaner on the office block opposite and prepared for her belated enquiry to be rebuffed. She’d put the call through to the admin department of SAMU – Service d’Aide Médicale Urgente – that was the central control function for emergency services.
“I was in a traffic accident in Normandy, on the Route du Fresnay, a few months ago and have only recently been discharged from hospital here in the UK. Thing is, if I could, I’d like to personally thank one of the paramedics who attended me there...’
The woman the other end was silent.
“I obviously don’t know her name. Would it be possible to find out if I give you the details of the incident?”
Beth could hear the woman’s sigh boom against the mouthpiece.
“Un moment.”
The office atmosphere cut out and a low hiss filled her ear. Beth had just resigned herself to the fact that she’d simply put the phone down on her when it connected to a ring tone.
“Administration?” an effete male voice stated.
“Parlez-vous anglais?”
“Un moment. Nathalie!”
“Can I help you?” a brighter female voice said.
She hoped Nathalie would be less implacable and explained her predicament. Nathalie took the incident details from her and made no promises, but said she’d do her best. Beth was told to call back at the end of the day.
“Is there some way of editing the clips together?” Beth had been leaning outside the bathroom waiting for Jody to emerge.
He only had a faded purple towel around his waist and self-consciously knotted it tighter to his paunch. “What for?”
“To put them all in sequence.”
Jody pouted his lips and theatrically examined the underside of his wet ginger eyebrows. It was his way of thinking or, at least, giving the impression he was. She’d never been able to guess which.
“Watching them separately makes me feel like I’m missing something...’
“Missing what?”
“I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think it would help if I could watch them sequentially.”
“I doubt it, and I’m not sure how you would lift a clip from a YouTube page...”
Or was he not prepared to think of a way?
The constriction of the towel made him walk in short steps to his room. He looked like a geisha girl. “Let me have a think,” he said over his shoulder as he quickly closed the door after him.
*
Kelcie Brooks was the one person you could rely on to post the most mortifying images of her friends on Facebook. In fact, her online community joked that it was so instantaneous, it was almost as if she’d uploaded them before the events had happened.
She liked that she’d been given that label of lovable infamy. Kelcie had always lacked in social skills, found it difficult to interact even with her close inner circle of school friends. But Facebook allowed her to communicate with masses of people and to present an outwardly likable persona, bolstered by her obsessive habit of bombarding them with virtual ice creams and gifts.
But it was her eye for a compromising digital still, however, and her alacrity to share it with her 1577 friends, that had brought her the renown she craved, and at parties people tended to try and get on her good side before they got drunk.
Kelcie knew she would always have a humdrum existence. But she comforted herself with the fact that all the party animals destined for greatness would live to regret their indiscretions in the future. Just as they’d achieved some semblance of professional respectability, Kelcie would be standing by to flourish the evidence.
Lying face down with their knickers bunched at their knees, exposing their breasts with their eyes rolled into their heads, collapsed on the tiles with dried vomit about their lips. It was harmless fun for them now, but she knew the images would be bargaining chips in the future. Payback would come sooner or later for Kelcie as well as the people who didn’t take her seriously.
Kelcie wasn’t a bad person, and she didn’t mind being branded at teaching college as the requisite quiet one who might be a lesbian but nobody cared to find out. For Kelcie, dating was exclusively what she did online. She found older, married guys who used fake names and posed as singletons, and, using the promise of her sexy avatar, gradually extracted info from them so she could track them to their Facebook page and dig out photos of them with their wife and family.
It was then child’s play to locate their wife’s profile. How would they like t
o hear about what hubby was up to? She’d built up quite a database. That was the fun part, being in possession of so much damaging information.
Kelcie loved her secret agenda, was fond of the idea that behind her quiet demeanour, there was a plan she’d methodically instigated long before anyone suspected it. She’d archived everything. With one click she could open a folder with the name of one of her close friends and examine a selection of images they’d definitely want buried in the future.
But it wasn’t only stills. She had hundreds of phone clips that awaited their YouTube debut. When her friends awoke the morning after and tried to remember what had happened, she knew the last person they would recall would be strait-laced and dumpy Kelcie lingering quietly out of sight.
She realised that without the slip-ups of other people’s lives, her own presence was barely discernible, but she was very comfortable sitting in the margins. It was a safe place. She knew secreting herself there made it unlikely that anything exciting would ever happen to her, but that security was reward enough.
Security was very much a part of her philosophy. Earlier that evening, she’d been doing something else that nobody would ever have suspected her of: target practice at the Flathead indoor firing range. As a single girl, it was a safeguard she took seriously. She’d taken her beloved M1911 single action pistol, and as she did every week, she’d thought about all the human outlines in her sights as those she could easily shoot down in the future. She was so in love with the notion of using the pressure of her finger on an iPad screen rather than a trigger to wreak carnage.
Tonight, Kelcie was doing what she did most evenings, collating her friends’ media CVs curled up on the couch with her iPad on her legs and the TV soaps turned down. She had two windows open at once – Facebook and her archive. It was quite a therapeutic process. Kelcie smiled when she happened to be exchanging “likes” and comments with one of the people she was cataloguing.
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