by David Hosp
I look at Yvette, and I can see that she’s nervous. That’s unusual for her. I can’t remember ever seeing her scared before. She hides it well, of course, cracking a few quiet, inappropriate jokes, but I know her well enough to see the tension in her upper lip.
‘They’ll be back,’ I say.
‘I know,’ she says. ‘Nearest donut shop’s three blocks, though. It could take them a while.’ She forces a smile.
‘They’re taking it seriously. That’s good.’
She shrugs. ‘I guess that depends on your perspective. How do you think they’re going to handle this back at the office? You think they’re gonna like this?’
‘They’ll like it better if we head it off before the public finds out. We leave it and it becomes a bigger problem, then we’re all screwed. As long as we keep the company out of the public eye, it’ll be fine. Besides, either way, people are in danger.’
There is a quick knock at the door and it opens before we can respond. Paul Killkenny walks in, followed by a short, round, balding man in his fifties with the look of someone who gave up caring about life before I was born. The bags under his eyes are dark and puffy and wet.
Killkenny is carrying a manila file and nods to us. ‘Nick, Yvette, thanks for coming in. This is Detective Sergeant Tom Welker.’ The older man nods at us, but does not offer a hand and moves no closer. ‘He’s in charge of the investigation into the West Roxbury murder, at least for the moment. I’d like you to tell him what you told me.’
Yvette regards them carefully. When she speaks, she is deliberate. ‘We don’t know anything for sure,’ she says. ‘We just figured we should talk to you. Y’know, just to be sure?’
Killkenny sits down across the table from us, puts the file on the table. ‘I know, and we appreciate it. I wouldn’t have called you in unless we thought there was a chance you could actually help. Why don’t you tell the Detective Sergeant about the fantasy with the feathers.’
‘Hold on,’ I say. I’m determined to help them, but I don’t want this going too far down the road without getting some assurances about where that road may take us. ‘We’ve come forward voluntarily, but we need to know that our company is going to be protected.’
Killkenny has been focusing on Yvette, but now he turns to me. He holds my gaze for a moment, then smiles, shaking his head at me like I’m an idiot. ‘What kind of assurances are you looking for, Nick?’ he asks. ‘This is a murder investigation.’ He lets that phrase hang in the air for a moment. ‘You understand that, right? A girl was killed. Now, do you want to help, or don’t you?’
‘We’d like to help,’ I say. ‘But I need to know that our names, and the identity of the company, will be left out of it. I don’t think that’s unreasonable.’
‘You don’t?’ Killkenny sits there looking at me. He opens the file and puts three pictures on the table, face down. I’m staring at the backs of the pictures with dread, and I’m not even sure why. When I was young I was arrested several times for petty stuff – usually for things that others had done, and nothing that I was ever charged with, but I’ve had enough experience to recognize the stagecraft of a police investigation. I understand that Killkenny’s goal is to keep me off-balance. It’s an effective tactic.
He flips over the first picture and reveals the image of a young woman. She is covered with a sheet from just below the armpits, her eyes are closed and her blonde hair is spread out on a steel table. She would be beautiful were it not for the dark-blue stains around her lips and under her eyes.
‘Her name was Amanda Hicks,’ Killkenny says. ‘She was a local girl, grew up in Marlboro. Good kid, from what we can tell. Worked as a part-time secretary and model, and she was trying to make it in the local acting scene. She’d done some small local roles and was thinking about moving to New York to give it a real try. That’s not gonna happen now, you understand?’
‘I’m sorry for her,’ I say.
‘That’s mighty fuckin’ white of you, Nick.’ Killkenny looks at Yvette. ‘From what Nick told me, I’m guessing she looks an awful lot like the girl who was in the snuff-scene you saw, right? She was found strapped to a chair, covered in feathers.’
I look over at Yvette. She is staring down hard at the picture, and while she’s holding herself together, I can tell that she is horrified. The clarity of her memory is etched on her face. Killkenny sees it, too, I have no doubt.
‘Four and a half years ago she told her friends she did a “modeling” job for a little company called NextLife. Got paid a thousand bucks. From what we can gather, it was her biggest modeling paycheck ever. No one ever saw any advertisements with her in them.’
Yvette and I are both staring at Killkenny now, not comprehending. He has us, I know, and there is nothing I can do about it. I have to know more; I have to understand.
He flips the next picture over. Another young woman stares up at us in the same pose, against a similar steel table. This one has darker hair and finer features. A deep-purple bruise on her neck runs around from just under the ears. There is a pattern to the bruise, diagonal lines through it. ‘Her name was Janet Schmidt. College girl; played field hockey over at BC. Good student, very popular. She was found hanging in her apartment over by the college two months ago. She was wearing black hip-boots and a variety of restraints. The assumption was that she probably got mixed up in a BDSM scene that went wrong, and the others there just ran. You’d be amazed what college kids in the big city get themselves into these days. We’ve been working the case, running down the pervs in the local latex scene, but we’ve come up with nothing. Thing is, though, after I talked to Nick, I had them pull her financial records and go through them. You know what we found?’ I have a bad feeling about what he’s going to tell us. ‘We found a thousand-dollar deposit from NextLife, right around the same time Amanda Hicks was doing her modeling for the company. We don’t know for sure yet what the check was for.’
He lets that sink in for a moment, then flips over the last photograph. ‘She was the first, as far as we can tell,’ he says. The woman in the picture has deep bruises on the side of her face, and a bad cut on her chin. I have the impression that she was probably very attractive, but it’s difficult to tell because it looks as though her skull has been caved in on one side, so her appearance has no symmetry to it. She reminds me of a Picasso painting of a beautiful woman. ‘Patricia Carnes. She was killed more than a year ago. The violence here was so bad, we’ve always figured it was just a straightforward random act of sickness. We never had any leads; never had any suspects. Doc tells us she was raped twice. Once after she was already dead. You wanna guess what we found when we went back and looked in her bank account yesterday?’
I’m looking at pictures, my mind spinning. I’m still not sure what it all means.
‘What are you saying?’
Killkenny leans back in his chair. ‘We don’t know at this point. All we can tell is that these three girls were all raped and killed, all three of them got paid the same amount of money around the same time by your company four and a half years back.’
‘That could be a coincidence,’ Yvette says.
Killkenny looks at Welker, who still has neither moved nor spoken. ‘It’s possible,’ he says. ‘But we’re cops. We don’t believe in coincidences. And we sure as shit don’t believe in them when we’re talking about a connection like this between three dead girls. Plus, you add in the similarities between the NextLife cyber-fantasy you saw . . . It’s something we have to look into.’
‘But what’s the connection?’ I ask.
Killkenny shakes his head. ‘I have no idea. That’s why we’re looking for your help. We need to know exactly what these girls did for the company. We need to find out as much as we can about the person whose fantasy Yvette was watching. You need to help us put the pieces together to figure out what the hell is going on here.’
I’m looking at the pictures, thinking about what the girls must have looked like while they were alive, thinking a
bout what they must have gone through when they died. I’m also thinking about the eyes of the girl in De Sade’s fantasy that I’ve walked twice, and the way the spark in her eyes went dead. ‘If we help you with this, will you try to keep our involvement out of the papers? Keep the investigation quiet for now?’
Killkenny glares at me. ‘Were not looking to jam you up with your company, Nick,’ he says. ‘We’re just trying to figure out who killed these girls.’
‘I need some assurance,’ I say.
‘I can’t promise anything,’ Killkenny says, ‘But to the extent possible, we’ll keep the investigation quiet. I’m going to be joining the investigation formally, so if you’ve got any concerns as we move forward, you can come to me.’
I look over at Yvette. She is still staring at the first picture, the one of the girl from the feather fantasy. She nods.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘We’ll tell you what we know.’
CHAPTER NINE
Mine is the first generation raised online. I was six years old when Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, simplifying navigation on the growing but still largely underutilized and esoteric Internet. By the time I was sixteen the dot-com bubble was getting ready to pop, and the entire world was plugged in. I sometimes wonder whether the early innovators had any concept of the Pandora’s Box they were opening when they set out to create our entirely new world. I suspect they viewed the free availability of information as only a good thing. And, indeed, it has brought much good with it. It has allowed for the education of millions upon millions of children who had previously been cut off from information and opportunity. It has facilitated the exchange of knowledge and research that has sped development of medicines and useful technology. It has provided an outlet for the free expression of ideas and dissent, and been a key ingredient in the overthrow of some of the worst dictatorships in history.
Every good must have its evil, though. Ease of access to information has also led to an explosion of new crime. With the push of a button, criminal organizations can transfer funds from their illicit activities to safe havens around the world, or steal someone’s identity and confiscate their entire net worth, or wipe out businesses or even governments.
Technology has also weakened the tangible human connections that form the basis of societal cohesion. Those of us in the connected masses indulge in a depth of electronic navel-gazing and self-fascination that the world never before knew was possible. Actual experience no longer seems paramount; posting evidence of experience online for the world to see is what matters now. People these days upload the images of their exploits literally as they happen, without taking the time to fully enjoy the moment. It’s as though they can’t quite distinguish between what happens online and what happens in the real world. It seems unlikely that the inventors of these technologies foresaw these consequences of their innovations.
And there is no chance that those early pioneers could have anticipated the economic turmoil their creations would bring. In the second half of my short life I’ve seen the rise and fall of business empires that, in times past, would have taken decades to build, and longer to crumble. It was only a few years ago that we all believed AOL would never be challenged as the dominant player on the Internet, and MySpace was the definitive social networking platform. Companies like Pets.com, which at one point seemed to have created the definitive platforms in their respective spaces, are now distant memories. Today fortunes are still willed into existence overnight, and disappear with as little effort or warning.
No one understands this better than Josh Pinkerton, the founder of NextLife. At thirty-nine, he is a veteran of the Internet business battlefield. NextLife is his third company. He started the first – Boats.com – in early 2000, when he was in his mid-twenties and angel financiers were desperate to shower millions upon every entrepreneur with a domain name and a half-baked business plan. He raised ten million dollars in his first round of financing; twenty in his second. It was all gone within six months, washed away along with more than six trillion dollars in investments in similar start-ups when the bubble burst. Pinkerton went from being a pauper to a millionaire and back to a pauper in a matter of weeks, and the experience taught him to make sure that, no matter what happened to any company he was involved with, his financial position would be protected.
He applied that lesson to his second start-up, which sustained its success for long enough that Pinkerton was able to pull three-quarters of his equity out of it before it crashed. It was a company called Adspace, and it promised to revolutionize the manner in which Internet companies would be able to track and target advertising. At the time it was acquired by Google in 2006 industry insiders predicted that the technology it had developed would be the answer to the prayers of website developers and CEOs from Silicon Valley to Boston’s Route 128 corridor. The predictions were overblown, but the technology did help Google begin to develop strategies that would result in a moderate advertising profit. In exchange, Pinkerton walked away with sixty million dollars in cash and Google stock.
He was happy . . . for about a month. But he quickly discovered that while sixty million dollars might make him comfortable, it would never make him a player. Not a real player. Not the kind of player who could grant or crush dreams with a smile or a frown. He found that he was unsatisfied with the metaphorical pat on the head the real deal-makers gave him, and so he set out to create a company that would change the rules; something that would make people gape in wonder, and would make him a legend with resources beyond those ever contemplated by a single individual.
NextLife is his chance of fulfilling that goal. It’s widely recognized as a company of breadth and vision, which will either succeed in changing the way everything online works or will lie upon the scrapheap of the Internet junkyard – the largest wreck in the short but spectacular history of Internet failures.
I know this. I understand the pressure Pinkerton has put on himself – and that he therefore places on others. And so I am also fully aware of the wrath that my cooperation with the police will bring forth. It’s not that Pinkerton is a bad guy per se. It’s just that he’s so singularly focused on NextLife’s success that he regards anything which threatens that success as anathema. No, more than that: he views any such threat as an enemy . . . a living, breathing foe to be vanquished at all cost. I get this, and so I am careful when I approach him to explain that the threat is the fact that the murders may be connected to the company, not the fact that the police have become aware of the possible connection. I also stress that I am friends with one of the detectives who will be coordinating with the company. I think this will mitigate the concerns he’ll have. I am wrong, of course.
I’m in his office, a 1,000-square-foot palace perched on the top floor of the NextLife building, on the southeast corner. I’m standing in front of his desk. NetMaster, Pinkerton’s gargantuan head of security, is standing to my right, just slightly behind me, as if he’s there to prevent me from running. The views, like those in the conference room a floor below, are spectacular, but one hardly notices them. The room itself is so overwhelming in its eclectic ostentation that even with the floor-to-ceiling windows, anything beyond the boundaries of Pinkerton’s base of operations seemingly ceases to exist. It’s like the decorator was given an unlimited amount of money and instructed to satisfy equally both a well-heeled captain of industry and a nine-year-old boy with ADD and a twisted sense of humor. Modern art, loosely representational in style, with bold strokes of outrageous color covers one wall. They are expensive works – I recognize at least one Picasso in the center – and they assault the senses with their contrasting interpretations of the human form. It’s like a ten-million-dollar collage made up of the fractured dreams of a dozen disturbed geniuses.
There is a bar along the second wall. Not the heavy oak kind one might expect to find in the office of an indulgent CEO’s office, but an Art Deco stainless-steel version of a 1950s soda fountain. The furniture throughout most of the space
is a mix of 1960s high-end design – where function has been sacrificed entirely to form, with low-slung chairs that force the spine into an uncomfortably prone position and sofas with no backs. They are placed in a deliberately chaotic arrangement, all facing the centerpiece of the room: a gigantic crystal desk angled in front of the corner where the two giant walls of glass meet, looking out and down upon Boston’s skyline.
The desk is magnificent and bizarre and alarming. It has the general design of what one might expect in a desk – drawers, a writing surface, places for pens and papers and personal items, both trivial and precious – but it is entirely transparent. It looks as though it might have been carved from a single block of perfect crystal, and there is no way to tell how the drawers and working parts came together in a way to make it functional. Pinkerton keeps nothing in the drawers and so, standing before him, it’s like he is some sort of magic force – some deity hovering, suspended between a world that’s real and one that’s nothing more than a figment of his own imagination. I confess that I have always admired the impact the office has on most people, and the forethought it must have taken to put all of it together. I can also say, truthfully, that I have never found it particularly intimidating myself. I think that goes back to where I grew up. In Charlestown the guys with real power – the guys we knew we had to be worried about – didn’t need illusions to make their point. You just knew not to fuck with them from the way they looked, and the way they stood and made you feel just being around them. Pinkerton never really had that, and so I’m not intimidated by him. The worst he can do to me is fire me, and I feel secure enough now to believe that I’ll find another job with medical benefits for Ma.
Still, that doesn’t mean I’m thrilled that I have to have this conversation, particularly with NetMaster standing there behind me. I haven’t been around him enough to know how full of crap he is, but his mere size is intimidating.