by Peter Watts
Accompanying the article is a grainy photo, a still capture from the video. Before the Regulator kicks in, Ruth feels her heart skip a beat. The image shows a man on top of a woman. Her head is turned to the side, directly facing the camera.
“That’s your girl, isn’t it?”
Ruth nods. She recognizes the bed and the nightstand with the clock and wicker basket from the crime scene photos.
“The Chinese are hopping mad. They think we had the man under surveillance when he was in Boston and released this video deliberately to mess with them. They’re protesting through the backchannels, threatening retaliation. The Feds want us to look into it and see what we can find out about how the video was made. They don’t know that she’s already dead, but I recognized her as soon as I saw her. If you ask me, it’s probably something the Chinese cooked up themselves to try to get rid of the guy in an internal purge. Maybe they even paid the girl to do it and then they killed her. That or our own spies decided to get rid of her after using her as bait, in which case I expect this investigation to be shut down pretty quickly. Either way, I’m not looking forward to this mess. And I advise you to back off as well.”
Ruth feels a moment of resentment before the Regulator whisks it away. If Mona’s death was part of a political plot, then Scott is right, she really is way out of her depth. The police had been wrong to conclude that it was a gang killing. But she’s wrong, too. Mona was an unfortunate pawn in some political game, and the trend she thought she had noticed was illusory, just a set of coincidences.
The rational thing to do is to let the police take over. She’ll have to tell Sarah Ding that there’s nothing she can do for her now.
“We’ll have to sweep the apartment again for recording devices. And you better let me know the name of your informant. We’ll need to question him thoroughly to see which gangs are involved. This could be a national security matter.”
“You know I can’t do that. I have no evidence he has anything to do with this.”
“Ruth, we’re picking this up now. If you want to find the girl’s killer, help me.”
“Feel free to round up all the usual suspects in Chinatown. It’s what you want to do, anyway.”
He stares at her, his face weary and angry, a look she’s very familiar with. Then his face relaxes. He has decided to engage his Regulator, and he no longer wants to argue or talk about what couldn’t be said between them.
Her Regulator kicks in automatically.
“Thank you for letting me use your office,” she says placidly. “You have a good night.”
The scandal had gone off exactly as the Watcher planned. He’s pleased but not yet ready to celebrate. That was only the first step, a demonstration of his power. Next, he has to actually make sure it pays.
He goes through the recordings and pictures he’s extracted from the dead girl and picks out a few more promising targets based on his research. Two are prominent Chinese businessmen connected with top Party bosses; one is the brother of an Indian diplomatic attaché; two more are sons of the House of Saud studying in Boston. It’s remarkable how similar the dynamics between the powerful and the people they ruled over were around the world. He also finds a prominent CEO and a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, but these he sets aside. It’s not that he’s particularly patriotic, but he instinctively senses that if one of his victims decides to turn him in instead of paying up, he’ll be in much less trouble if the victim isn’t an American. Besides, American public figures also have a harder time moving money around anonymously, as evidenced by his experience with those two Senators in DC, which almost unraveled his whole scheme. Finally, it never hurts to have a judge or someone famous that can be leaned on in case the Watcher is caught.
Patience, and an eye for details.
He sends off his emails. Each references the article about the Chinese Transport Minister (“See, this could be you!”) and then includes two files. One is the full video of the minister and the girl (to show that he was the originator) and the second is a carefully curated video of the recipient coupling with her. Each email contains a demand for payment and directions to make deposits to a numbered Swiss bank account or to transfer anonymous electronic cryptocurrency.
He browses the escort sites again. He’s narrowed down the girls he suspects to just a few. Now he just has to look at them more closely to pick out the right one. He grows excited at the prospect.
He glances up at the people walking past him in the streets. All these foolish men and women moving around as if dreaming. They do not understand that the world is full of secrets, accessible only to those patient enough, observant enough to locate them and dig them out of their warm, bloody hiding places, like retrieving pearls from the soft flesh inside an oyster. And then, armed with those secrets, you could make men half a world away tremble and dance.
He closes his laptop and gets up to leave. He thinks about packing up the mess in his motel room, setting out the surgical kit, the baseball cap, the gun and a few other surprises he’s learned to take with him when he’s hunting.
Time to dig for more treasure.
Ruth wakes up. The old nightmares have been joined by new ones. She stays curled up in bed fighting waves of despair. She wants to lie here forever.
Days of work and she has nothing to show for it.
She’ll have to call Sarah Ding later, after she turns on the Regulator. She can tell her that Mona was probably not killed by a gang, but somehow had been caught up in events bigger than she could handle. How would that make Sarah feel better?
The image from yesterday’s news will not leave her mind, no matter how hard she tries to push it away.
Ruth struggles up and pulls up the article. She can’t explain it, but the image just looks wrong. Not having the Regulator on makes it hard to think.
She finds the crime scene photo of Mona’s bedroom and compares it with the image from the article. She looks back and forth.
Isn’t the basket of condoms on the wrong side of the bed?
The shot is taken from the left side of the bed. So the closet doors, with the mirrors on them, should be on the far side of the shot, behind the couple. But there’s only a blank wall behind them in the shot. Ruth’s heart is beating so fast that she feels faint.
The alarm beeps. Ruth glances up at the red numbers and turns the Regulator on.
The clock.
She looks back at the image. The alarm clock in the shot is tiny and fuzzy, but she can just make the numbers out. They’re backwards.
Ruth walks steadily over to her laptop and begins to search online for the video. She finds it without much trouble and presses play.
Despite the video stabilization and the careful cropping, she can see that Mona’s eyes are always looking directly into the camera.
There’s only one explanation: the camera was aimed at the mirrors, and it was located in Mona’s eye.
The eyes.
She goes through the NCIC entries of the other women she printed out yesterday, and now the pattern that had proven elusive seems obvious.
There was a blonde in Los Angeles whose head had been removed after death and never found; there was a brunette, also in LA, whose skull had been cracked open and her brains mashed; there was a Mexican woman and a black woman in DC whose faces had been subjected to post-mortem trauma in more restrained ways, with the cheekbones crushed and broken. Then finally, there was Mona, whose eyes had been carefully removed.
The killer has been improving his technique.
The Regulator holds her excitement in check. She needs more data.
She looks through all of Mona’s photographs again. Nothing out of place shows up in the earlier pictures, but in the picture from her birthday with her parents, a flash was used, and there’s an odd glint in her left eye.
Most cameras can automatically compensate for red-eye, which is caused by the light from the flash reflecting off the blood-rich choroid in the back of the eye. But the
glint in Mona’s picture is not red; it’s bluish.
Calmly, Ruth flips through the photographs of the other girls who have been killed. And in each, she finds the tell-tale glint. This must be how the killer identified his targets.
She picks up the phone and dials the number for her friend. She and Gail had gone to college together, and she’s now working as a researcher for an advanced medical devices company.
“Hello?”
She hears the chatter of other people in the background. “Gail, it’s Ruth. Can you talk?”
“Just a minute.” She hears the background conversation grow muffled and then abruptly shut off. “You never call unless you’re asking about another enhancement. We’re not getting any younger, you know? You have to stop at some point.”
Gail had been the one to suggest the various enhancements Ruth has obtained over the years. She had even found Doctor B for her because she didn’t want Ruth to end up crippled. But she had done it reluctantly, conflicted about the idea of turning Ruth into a cyborg.
“This feels wrong,” she would say. “You don’t need these things done to you. They’re not medically necessary.”
“This can save my life the next time someone is trying to choke me,” Ruth would say.
“It’s not the same thing,” she would say. And the conversations would always end with Gail giving in, but with stern warnings about no further enhancements.
Sometimes you help a friend even when you disapprove of their decisions. It’s complicated.
Ruth answers Gail on the phone, “No. I’m just fine. But I want to know if you know about a new kind of enhancement. I’m sending you some pictures now. Hold on.” She sends over the images of the girls where she can see the strange glint in their eyes. “Take a look. Can you see that flash in their eyes? Do you know anything like this?” She doesn’t tell Gail her suspicion so that Gail’s answer would not be affected.
Gail is silent for a while. “I see what you mean. These are not great pictures. But let me talk to some people and call you back.”
“Don’t send the full pictures around. I’m in the middle of an investigation. Just crop out the eyes if you can.”
Ruth hangs up. The Regulator is working extra hard. Something about what she said—cropping out the girls’ eyes—triggered a bodily response of disgust that the Regulator is suppressing. She’s not sure why. With the Regulator, sometimes it’s hard for her to see the connections between things.
While waiting for Gail to call her back, she looks through the active online ads in Boston once more. The killer has a pattern of killing a few girls in each city before moving on. He must be on the hunt for a second victim here. The best way to catch him is to find her before he does.
She clicks through ad after ad, the parade of flesh a meaningless blur, focusing only on the eyes. Finally, she sees what she’s looking for. The girl uses the name Carrie, and she has dirty-blond hair and green eyes. Her ad is clean, clear, well-written, like a tasteful sign amidst the parade of flashing neon. The timestamp on the ad shows that she last modified it twelve hours ago. She’s likely still alive.
Ruth calls the number listed.
“This is Carrie. Please leave a message.”
As expected, Carrie screens her calls.
“Hello. My name is Ruth Law, and I saw your ad. I’d like to make an appointment with you.” She hesitates, and then adds, “This is not a joke. I really want to see you.” She leaves her number and hangs up.
The phone rings almost immediately. Ruth picks up. But it’s Gail, not Carrie.
“I asked around, and people who ought to know tell me the girls are probably wearing a new kind of retinal implant. It’s not FDA-approved. But of course you can go overseas and get them installed if you pay enough.”
“What do they do?”
“They’re hidden cameras.”
“How do you get the pictures and videos out?”
“You don’t. They have no wireless connections to the outside world. In fact, they’re shielded to emit as little RF emissions as possible so that they’re undetectable to camera scanners, and a wireless connection would just mean another way to hack into them. All the storage is inside the device. To retrieve them you have to have surgery again. Not the kind of thing most people would be interested in unless you’re trying to record people who really don’t want you to be recording them.”
When you’re so desperate for safety that you think this provides insurance, Ruth thinks. Some future leverage.
And there’s no way to get the recordings out except to cut the girl open. “Thanks.”
“I don’t know what you’re involved in, Ruth, but you really are getting too old for this. Are you still leaving the Regulator on all the time? It’s not healthy.”
“Don’t I know it.” She changes the subject to Gail’s children. The Regulator allows her to have this conversation without pain. After a suitable amount of time, she says goodbye and hangs up.
The phone rings again.
“This is Carrie. You called me.”
“Yes.” Ruth makes her voice sound light, carefree.
Carrie’s voice is flirtatious but cautious. “Is this for you and your boyfriend or husband?”
“No, just me.”
She grips the phone, counting the seconds. She tries to will Carrie not to hang up.
“I found your web site. You’re a private detective?”
Ruth already knew that she would. “Yes, I am.”
“I can’t tell you anything about any of my clients. My business depends on discretion.”
“I’m not going to ask you about your clients. I just want to see you.” She thinks hard about how to gain her trust. The Regulator makes this difficult, as she has become unused to the emotive quality of judgments and impressions. She thinks the truth is too abrupt and strange to convince her. So she tries something else. “I’m interested in a new experience. I guess it’s something I’ve always wanted to try and haven’t.”
“Are you working for the cops? I am stating now for the record that you’re paying me only for companionship, and anything that happens beyond that is a decision between consenting adults.”
“Look, the cops wouldn’t use a woman to trap you. It’s too suspicious.”
The silence tells Ruth that Carrie is intrigued. “What time are you thinking of?”
“As soon as you’re free. How about now?”
“It’s not even noon yet. I don’t start work until 6:00.”
Ruth doesn’t want to push too hard and scare her off. “Then I’d like to have you all night.”
She laughs. “Why don’t we start with two hours for a first date?”
“That will be fine.”
“You saw my prices?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Take a picture of yourself holding your ID and text it to me first so I know you’re for real. If that checks out, you can go to the corner of Victory and Beech in Back Bay at 6:00 and call me again. Put the cash in a plain envelope.”
“I will.”
“See you, my dear.” She hangs up.
Ruth looks into the girl’s eyes. Now that she knows what to look for, she thinks she can see the barest hint of a glint in her left eye.
She hands her the cash and watches her count it. She’s very pretty, and so young. The ways she leans against the wall reminds her of Jess. The Regulator kicks in.
She’s in a lace nightie, black stockings and garters. High-heeled fluffy bedroom slippers that seem more funny than erotic.
Carrie puts the money aside and smiles at her. “Do you want to take the lead or have me do it? I’m fine either way.”
“I’d rather just talk for a bit first.”
Carrie frowns. “I told you I can’t talk about my clients.”
“I know. But I want to show you something.”
Carrie shrugs and leads her to the bedroom. It’s a lot like Mona’s room: king-sized bed, cream-colored sheets, a glass bowl of condom
s, a clock discreetly on the nightstand. The mirror is mounted on the ceiling.
They sit down on the bed. Ruth takes out a file, and hands Carrie a stack of photographs.
“All of these girls have been killed in the last year. All of them have the same implants you do.”
Carrie looks up, shocked. Her eyes blink twice, rapidly.
“I know what you have behind your eye. I know you think it makes you safer. Maybe you even think someday the information in there can be a second source of income, when you’re too old to do this. But there’s a man who wants to cut that out of you. He’s been doing the same to the other girls.”
She shows her the pictures of dead Mona, with the bloody, mutilated face.
Carrie drops the pictures. “Get out. I’m calling the police.” She stands up and grabs her phone.
Ruth doesn’t move. “You can. Ask to speak to Captain Scott Brennan. He knows who I am, and he’ll confirm what I’ve told you. I think you’re the next target.”
She hesitates.
Ruth continues, “Or you can just look at these pictures. You know what to look for. They were all just like you.”
Carrie sits down and examines the pictures. “Oh God. Oh God.”
“I know you probably have a set of regulars. At your prices you don’t need and won’t get many new clients. But have you taken on anyone new lately?”
“Just you and one other. He’s coming at 8:00.”
Ruth’s Regulator kicks in.
“Do you know what he looks like?”
“No. But I asked him to call me when he gets to the street corner, just like you, so I can get a look at him first before having him come up.”
Ruth takes out her phone. “I need to call the police.”
“No! You’ll get me arrested. Please!”
Ruth thinks about this. She’s only guessing that this man might be the killer. If she involves the police now and he turns out to be just a customer, Carrie’s life will be ruined.
“Then I’ll need to see him myself, in case he’s the one.”
“Shouldn’t I just call it off?”
Ruth hears the fear in the girl’s voice, and it reminds her of Jess, too, when she used to ask her to stay in her bedroom after watching a scary movie. She can feel the Regulator kicking into action again. She cannot let her emotions get in the way. “That would probably be safer for you, but we’d lose the chance to catch him if he is the one. Please, I need you to go through with it so I can get a close look at him. This may be our best chance of stopping him from hurting others.”