“There was no family to contact. He’s a foster kid.”
Swift raised his eyebrows.
“And he’s waived his right to an attorney,” Mathis went on.
The two men looked at each other as the vents blasted warming air around them.
“Something’s up with that guy,” Swift said about Darring.
Mathis nodded. “About that we see eye to eye. And that’s why you need to get back in there; you need to press him. He knows something, John, and you’ve got to get it out of him.”
They fell into a brief silence, considering. Swift pulled a stick of gum from the console and unwrapped it. Another round with Darring? He supposed he’d been interrupted before, and never quite got back to it. Plus, Mathis clearly wasn’t going to let it go. He wanted a confession.
“Call me Swift,” the detective said. “Only my mother calls me John.”
Mathis frowned. “Your mother still alive?”
Swift popped the piece of gum into his mouth. “No.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Swift was back in the small room looking at Robert Darring across the table.
“How come you waived your attorney privilege? And why do your friends think they need one?”
“I can’t answer that. You’ve kept us separate. But my guess would be their parents hired them. They’re probably just worried.”
“Why do you think they’re worried?”
“Miko and Sasha, they’re rich kids. Their parents live in nice little suburban neighborhoods. They think places like this are the Wild West. Something out of Deliverance. Ever see that movie?”
“But not you. You don’t worry about that, that we’re going to keep you here unjustly, take you out behind the shed, drag you through the manure.”
“No. I don’t.”
“And you don’t have family to worry, either.”
“I don’t, correct.”
“No one? You’re not married, no wedding ring. Girlfriend?”
“No.”
“What do you do for work, Robert?”
Darring shrugged. “Whatever.”
“Odd jobs, you mean?”
“Sure.”
“How do you support yourself?”
“I gamble.”
“You gamble? Doing what?”
“Online poker, a little bit.”
“How’s that work?” Swift was pretty sure online poker was outlawed.
Darring’s dark, muddy eyes darted at Swift. “It’s legal in Nevada, Delaware, and New Jersey.”
He left it at that. Swift wondered if the poker-playing had something to do with what they called proxy servers. He was learning from Kim Yom about that — you could trick your IP address to make it look like you were somewhere else. Like a state where online poker was legal. Or, maybe you hopped on the George Washington Bridge and played from a friend’s house across the river.
He let it go for now. “And you also play this game, ‘The Don.’”
“I play a lot of games.”
“And that’s how you know the victim.”
“Didn’t we already go over this?”
“We did.” But there’s a bigger audience now, thought Swift. Captain Tuggey had been joined by the substation Lieutenant and the ADA, who were all observing through the other side of the two-way mirror. “I’m just being thorough. So, you were a foster child?”
“I was.”
“Never adopted?”
“No.”
“What happened to your real parents?”
Now Swift saw the homely, pock-marked face seem to fold in on itself. Darring’s eyes seemed to glaze over. “They weren’t suited for parenthood.”
“What happened?”
“I was taken by Child Protective Services when I was two years old.”
Swift made a note of this. He was sure that Mathis was also there in the observation room next door. They’d pulled a file for Robert Darring, but it was completely clean. No convictions, no priors as an adult. Not even a parking ticket. He lived in Williamsburg, Queens, NY. He had a valid driver’s license. They were looking into employment records, too, but Mathis would have to tap the Department of Labor for that, which took time.
There was, however, a sealed juvenile record. Mathis was trying like hell, he’d told Swift, to crack that open. He needed a judge to grant permission, and he was working hard to get it.
“Really? Two years old. So you have no memory of them.”
Darring was still staring off into some memorial distance. “I do remember my crib. I remember that I could push against it, you know, shove it from the inside, and it would move across the floor.”
“So, you entered into the State’s protective custody; how long until you were in a foster home?”
“Couple weeks, I guess.” Darring wandered slowly back from his past. It was remarkable — like watching someone emerge from a trance. Swift made a mental note that the young man could be unstable. He was, at the very least, eccentric.
“How is this going to help you find out what happened to Braxton?”
“Ever heard the name ‘Fresco?’”
Darring was silent for a moment. Swift watched him closely, wondering if he’d hit on something.
“Sure,” Darring said casually. “Jacque Fresco. Real out-of-the-box thinker. One of my heroes, really. And Braxton’s, too. Probably why he chose it for his player name.”
“In The Don?”
“Yeah, right.”
Swift could almost feel the Captain and the ADA buzzing behind him in the little observation room. The kid was freely admitting that he knew the identity Braxton had used in the game. It wasn’t proof of guilt, but Swift felt it was a step in the right direction. The other kid who’d been interrogated so far — Hideo Miko — hadn’t wanted to admit this. Now all they needed was a threat or indication of violence among the messages in the game or, hell, from the server in San Francisco if they had to go Federal.
“Every little thing might help us find out what happened to Braxton. Your cooperation is the best thing for us, to help us figure out what occurred.”
Now that shrewd look returned. “I thought you knew what happened, you were ready for a conviction, but wanted to give me a chance to explain and show my side of things.”
Swift smiled. “Okay . . .” He held up his hands for a moment, palms out. “I guess you caught me acting as-if. It’s hard-wired into me, you know?”
“Hard-wired?” Darring suddenly seemed to grow interested.
“Yeah, you know. It’s an expression. Hard-wired. Something you’ve been programmed to do. Or programmed yourself to do.” Swift tilted his head to the side. “You’re familiar with that expression, right?”
“Of course. It just struck me.”
“Why?”
Darring let out a loud sigh, an exhalation that seemed to deflate his whole body, and he leaned back deeper into the chair he was sitting in. He turned his head to the side and stared at the wall. For a moment Swift thought he had just shut down on him. That the conversation was over, and the kid was clamming up.
Then Darring spoke again. “We’re going to all live completely online someday,” he said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. Like, right now, we have our phones and laptops and tablets. More and more we’re online, we’re checking our phones, sitting down at the desk. On email, social networking, conducting business. But soon, and I’m talking just a couple of years, we’re going to be online all the time. Google Glass, Oculus Rift; just the beginning. And it’s an awkward beginning. It’s clunky. The future will look nothing like these.”
“What will the future look like?”
Darring’s dark eyes contained something that seemed to live behind them, shifting as he spoke, a shadow behind a curtain.
“I lied. Well, I didn’t tell the whole truth.”
Swift felt a tiny thrill. “About?”
“I’m a day trader, too. I take my poker earnings and I invest them
. Biggest thing right now? Biotech stock. The things these companies are doing are amazing. Alzheimer’s research. Oh man. They’re able to outfit a chip, right here,” and Darring put a finger to his temple, “that uploads your thoughts. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
Now he turned his body to face Swift directly.
“Ever heard of Kurzweil? Another out-of-the-box thinker like Fresco. Kurzweil plans to live forever, and he’s going to, too. Like that movie with Johnny Depp. We’re living more and more digitally. Even now, if you die, you have an afterlife online, on all of your social media sites. Everything you ever did is still on the web. But that? Just the Stone Age. We’ll look back on that like we look back now on living to age thirty and painting on cave walls.”
“It’s really something,” Swift said, feeling a bit lost. He was aware that technology was growing exponentially, but remained skeptical when he heard claims like this about people living forever in a digital capacity. Or even in a physical sense — there were only so many pills and organ replacements. Nature designed creatures to rise and then expire. There was no cheating it.
Darring went on, as if reading Swift’s thoughts. “Everyday people, they may know a little, and they may doubt it, or maybe they think it’s quaint, but what I’m talking about is a complete evolutionary leap.” He became reflective again, looking inward once more. Swift’s ears pricked up; Darring’s tone was confessional.
“I’ve been obsessed for a while with liminal trance states. The relationship between narrative and immersion. There’s a great book by Janet Murray. What is it? ‘Hamlet and the Holodeck.’ Great stuff.”
“What’s immersion, Robert?”
“Hmm? Immersion is a phenomenon. It’s where you enter a kind of hypnotic, trance-like state and lose all sense of body awareness.”
Darring appeared to have floated in and out of the present moment several times already during the interview. Normally when you had someone in the box, even for suspicion, even if they hadn’t done anything, they were on vigilant alert. They were completely present. If they weren’t, they were either a career criminal who had become desensitized to the process, or in an altered state, or mentally deficient. Swift hadn’t considered another possibility, that someone, like Darring, could have been institutionalized in a different way. By the internet.
“I like to read,” offered Swift. It seemed to make a connection because Darring’s face lit up — as much as the nondescript face of a twenty-three year-old poker-player could be said to light up.
“Exactly. That’s one of the times when it happens. Or, when you’re in a movie theater watching a film, and you just completely lose all of your body awareness, and the body, the mind really, enters a landscape of imagination, of archetype and myth. Know what that is?”
“No.”
“It’s a dream landscape. It’s not bound by the normal Euclidean meat-puppet limitations. It’s not bound by the rules you and I live with every day, the rules you try to enforce every day. Let’s call it ‘the enchanted space.’ So, for me, you know, I’m extremely interested in the techniques and rhetorical technologies we use to hack subjectivity.”
“‘Hack’ subjectivity?”
“Perception and awareness, man. Moment to moment; that’s how Erik Davis defines subjectivity.”
The kid was throwing out one name after another. Swift had scribbled the names Fresco, Kurzweil, Janet Murray, and now he wrote Erik Davis. While he wrote he said, “I’m trying to follow along here. Some of this stuff is over my head, you know?”
Then he looked up and flashed another smile. “Okay. Most of it.”
Darring was patient. “Look, when you watch a movie, you’re basically inhabiting a dream space for a couple of hours. Cinema is the spectral machinery of the mind.”
“And that’s how it is online, too? In a game like ‘The Don?’”
Darring shook his head. “That’s different. That’s interactive. That’s a whole other thing.”
Swift sighed and looked at his notes, all the names, and felt like scratching them out. Where was this taking him? The kid was enamored of technology, that was one thing, but how did it open up his connection to the victim?
“You said Google Glass . . . Oculus Rift; I haven’t heard of that. Can you tell me what that is?”
Darring raised a hand and circled it around his head. “You know. Virtual gaming headset. But cooler.”
Swift felt something in his chest, as if a knife had slipped under his skin and the cool blade pressed against his heart. Darring was gesticulating. He took his left hand and circled it around his right, saying, “You can wear the glove, too, but I think that’s primitive. All you need is the wristlet, and you can use both of your hands. It just attaches here,” and he clamped his hand around his wrist.
Swift suddenly felt the need to unbutton the cuffs of his dress shirt and roll up his sleeves. Braxton’s body showed ligature marks around his neck and wrist. Could be from a helmet. Could be from a glove.
Darring’s own hands returned to his lap underneath the table. He looked vaguely like a kid who’d been disapproved of, though Swift had said nothing, done nothing but adjust his shirt sleeves.
“I’m interested in engineering neural nirvana with chemical technology,” Darring said quietly, now almost apologetic. “Electronic technology, rhetorical technology, whatever it might be. I want to make subjective experience a work of art. That’s my newest obsession.”
Swift felt the hairs standing up on the back of his neck.
“And Braxton Simpkins, did he factor into this?”
Darring was silent for a moment, and then said, “Yes.”
Swift could practically feel the ADA jumping up and down in the next room.
Swift leaned into the table, settling himself. He was going to miss dinner with Brittney Silas. But he could be in court by the morning.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Deputy Cohen listened as the GPS instructed him towards Tori McAfferty’s home.
“Turn left on Military Turnpike,” the emotionless voice commanded. After a few minutes, “Turn right onto Salmon River Way.”
Along Salmon River Way, the homes of South Plattsburgh were modest, some well-kept, others in junky disrepair. Cohen had come from a neighborhood like this, but north of Plattsburgh, in Chazy. The median household income ranged somewhere in between twenty-five and sixty thousand dollars. ATVS and Snowmobiles decorated many yards. The houses were small, many of them single-wides, with double-wides and a few modest stick homes. One in five had an above-ground pool.
Tori McAfferty’s house was brick red, a studs-and-drywall home built sometime in the past thirty years. There was a small garage off to one side, too small to fit a car in. More of a shed. Large elms and maples demarcated the back yard and surrounded the house in a semi-circle. There was a white van parked in front of the shed with a decal embossed on the side.
MCAFFERTY PLUMBING AND HVAC SOLUTIONS
Cohen turned the police car into the dirt driveway to the house and shut off the engine. He reported his position to dispatch. He ran the plates of the van on his Mobile Data Terminal and found the vehicle registered to McAfferty. Discreetly, keeping one eye on the house in front of him, he checked his service weapon. He pulled out the magazine and examined it and then slid it back into the grip. Cohen then opened the door, retrieved his nightstick from the passenger seat and slid it into the loop in his belt.
Deputy Trainer was en route, but had gotten held up at the jail dealing with an unruly inmate who’d been in county for a couple of weeks after a second drunk driving charge. It was the same kid who’d tried to turn his first arrest, the previous summer, into a case of excessive force against the troopers. Trainer was coming, he’d promised, and Cohen knew he should probably wait, but he couldn’t help himself. He liked the Sheriff’s Department, but working a homicide investigation was undeniably more engaging. Years pulling duty at the jail, or doing pick-ups for mental health, had left him bor
ed and maybe even a little depressed. His wife could see it — she said he carried it on him. His kids, two of them, one in elementary and one middle-schooler, didn’t look at him the same way they did when they were younger. Back then the uniform had impressed them, the gun on his hip, the insignia on his sleeves, the star-shaped badge on his chest. Now he no longer seemed to exist.
Cohen stood looking around. There was less snow here, just a windblown dusting. The area was lower in elevation than New Brighton and the air was a bit warmer, maybe by five degrees. There was even a hint of spring in the air, a humidity.
He started walking up to the house when he saw a shape darken the doorway at the entrance. A moment later, the door swung inward.
A woman with her dirty blonde hair pinned up on top of her head stood grasping the knob. She was pretty in a haughty sort of way, with cheekbones as sharp as scythes, and some acne blurred over with foundation make-up. She wore sweat pants, a sweatshirt, and a skeptical expression. Cohen guessed she was in her late twenties.
“Can I help you?”
“Good afternoon, ma’am. Tori McAfferty live here?”
Cohen stood at the bottom of a block of concrete stairs. She looked down on him, scowling. “This is my house.”
“Okay. You’re the owner?”
“I am. What do you want?” She was looking around, up and down the street, maybe to see if there was anyone else with him.
“Is Mr. McAfferty in? I’d like to speak with him.”
“What about?”
No one had yet told Tori McAfferty about Braxton Simpkins’ death, and the name wouldn’t be released by the media since the victim was a juvenile. His last name was different, too, and no information had been given about the boy’s biological father until Mike Simpkins had told Swift late that morning. Typically the Sheriff’s Department assisted the County Coroner with death notifications, particularly when they were some way outside of New Brighton, where the coroner happened to live. Deputies were frequently dispatched to deliver the bad news. A year before, Sheriff Dunleavy had squeezed a few drops from the budget to send Cohen and two other deputies to a training session. Cohen was racking his brain as he stood in front of McAfferty’s house for what, if anything, he’d really retained from that training.
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