by Jack Heath
Thistle examines one of the posters. “Who’s this?” she asks.
Joseph walks over and starts telling her about the stats of the guy in the photo. I use the opportunity to slip back into the corridor, looking for places Shannon might be hiding.
I check the bathroom first. Only two towels on the rack, both dry. Just two toothbrushes. Lots of makeup stuff, but nothing fancy. Mostly foundation, blush and eyeshadow. No eyeliner, lipstick or mascara.
It’s the kind of makeup cabinet a woman might have if she’s used to hiding bruises.
Uneasily, I check the master bedroom. King-size bed, two bedside tables, rows of suits and dresses hanging in the walk-in. Nothing suspicious.
The last remaining room is locked from the outside with a bolt. I quietly slide it back and open the door a crack. This room has a single bed, neatly made, and not much else. Old mystery novels line the shelves. I check under the bed. Nothing. There’s a bedside table. In the drawer I find a bible, like at a motel.
Whose room is this? And why would it have a lock on the outside?
“Please.”
I whirl around. Francine is standing right behind me. I get a whiff of her rose perfume.
“Will you please just leave?” she whispers.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
One door leads to death, the other to freedom.
One guard always tells the truth, the other always lies. You get one question. What do you ask?
“You think Joseph is abusing Francine?” Thistle asks.
“I think there’s a ninety percent chance that’s what’s happening,” I say. “It looked like a time-out space. Like somewhere he would put her when she disobeyed.”
Thistle glances in the rearview mirror at the shrinking house. “They could be in a consensual BDSM relationship.”
“There would have been other signs. Handcuffs in the dresser, or a paddle under the bed.”
As I talk, I’m going through sixteen fat files about the other missing men. Learning about their jobs, their families, their friends, the jobs of their family and friends... Speed-reading isn’t always good for comprehension, but it’s useful for spotting connections. It brings all the facts closer together.
So far, though, all I’ve noticed is that none are married, which makes sense, given that they all used the same dating app: nTangle.
Thistle’s voice is grim. “Do you think Shannon knows?”
“That lock looked like it had been there a long time. He knows.”
“If I were to ask the Houston PD to investigate, not much would happen. Not without more evidence. But I’ll file a report, anyway. Any sign of Shannon?”
“None,” I say. “And neither parent seemed nervous enough to be hiding a fugitive, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I would.” Thistle takes the exit off the loop back toward the FBI. “How did you know about the IVF?”
“I didn’t, really. Just a feeling. Rich couple, only one child. Did you see the size of that AC? It looked about Shannon’s age, and hot flashes are a common side effect of IVF. Plus, Francine was moving like she’d had abdominal pain in the past. Although now I’m thinking Joseph may be hitting her.”
“Well, you rattled him, that’s for sure,” Thistle says. “Did it piss you off, what he said about adoption?”
“No,” I say. “That’s ancient history.”
She knows what I mean. “Not for me. I remember getting all dressed up whenever couples came to visit. It was like the world’s worst job interview. And you’d meet them, and you’d think it was going really well and that they liked you. You’d start thinking of them as Mom and Dad. Then you never hear from them again. You wonder what you did wrong, and that makes you self-conscious with the next couple... I wanted a mom and a dad so badly. But the Luxfords would spend tens of thousands of dollars rather than risk ‘raising someone else’s kid.’ It pissed me off.”
For a moment, the only sound is the humming of tires on blacktop.
“Sorry,” Thistle says. “I know no one picked you.”
I look out the window. “It’s okay. It might have been easier for me, in a way. I could always tell the couples didn’t like me, so I wasn’t left wondering if they’d be back.”
“Scary Timmy?” Thistle says.
The nickname takes me right back to the playground. “Right. Scary Timmy.”
“For what it’s worth, I think it was their loss,” Thistle says. “You would have made a good son, if anyone had been smart enough to take you home.”
She’s wrong, but I’m touched. “Thanks. Anyway, seems like we both ended up better off.”
“How so?”
“It could have been either of us behind that locked door.”
I’ve reached the final file—Daniel Ruthven, the victim we started with. The one who worked in construction, and whose phone ended up at the dump. I’ve read the file before, but this time I notice something I ignored before.
“nTangle,” I say. “The dating app they all used.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s made by a company based in Houston,” I say. “In the CBD. Ian McLean works there.”
“Daniel Ruthven’s roommate?”
“Right.”
“That connects him to all the victims.” Thistle sounds excited. “Let’s go talk to him.”
My stomach growls. “Drive-through first,” I say. “I’m starving.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
What two things can you never eat for breakfast?
Ian McLean is in his twenties, bearded, with kind eyes in a gentle face. The red sweater adds to the illusion that he’s a young Santa, not yet gray or fat.
“Took you long enough,” he says, but the words sound exhausted rather than aggressive. He has the voice of a smoker. “You know I reported Danny missing five days ago?”
Thistle and I follow him into the open-plan office. I was expecting the Silicon Valley start-up aesthetic—beanbags, pool tables, pets—but instead it’s more like the control room of a nuclear submarine. The only light comes from dozens of monitors filled with statistics and pie charts. Headphoned workers tap urgently at their keyboards. Some are eating a late lunch at their desks.
“How long has Daniel lived with you?” Thistle asks.
“Uh, he was at the apartment when I moved in, three years ago,” McLean says. “I guess maybe five years? His old roommate might know.”
“We’ll need contact details for him.”
“Her. I’ll have to talk to the real estate company. They’d have those details.”
McLean leads us into a glass-walled meeting room. No one else in there. A big TV in the corner with a camera on top, for video conferencing. We sit on swiveling chairs with mesh backs.
“What do you do here?” Thistle asks casually. “For nTangle.”
McLean looks wary. “What does that have to do with Daniel?”
Thistle backpedals a little. “I mean, do you work long hours? How often do you see Daniel?”
“Oh. I’m in charge of cyber security, so I work late if there’s ever any kind of major attack on nTangle. But that hasn’t happened in a couple weeks, so I saw Daniel every day. We used to play Madden most nights.”
“Your app is free, right?” I ask. “So no one’s bank accounts are attached to it.”
“Yes, but there are still attacks,” Daniel says. “If they ever got in, hackers could steal users’ photos, their email addresses, their names, data about the places they’ve been, the people they’ve met, their desirability score—all that is worth money. People can use it to create real-seeming profiles on social media, and those profiles can disseminate information for companies, or for political purposes.”
“Desirability score?” Thistle says.
“The ratio of winks to profile views. The app uses this score to pair up
people who are equally desirable. If an attractive user keeps getting paired up with ugly users, they might uninstall the app. And if the attractive users leave, the unattractive ones won’t hang around for long. Users can’t see desirability scores, not even their own—unless they work here, obviously. I’m a point one eight.” When neither of us looks impressed, he says, “Anything over point one five is really good for a man.”
“Different people have different tastes, though,” Thistle says.
“The app learns each user’s preferences,” McLean says. “But it turns out everybody wants basically the same thing. Someone thin but not too thin, young but not too young, and rich.” He doesn’t add but not too rich. “Users can pretend to be less shallow than that, but the data tells a different story.”
I’m thin at least. “Were Daniel and his old roommate romantically involved?” I ask.
“I don’t think so. Danny didn’t talk about her much. And I don’t think he’d ever had a serious girlfriend.”
“He was dating, though, right?” Thistle says. “With your app?”
“Well, trying to,” McLean says. “I recommended it to him, helped him take a good headshot. But he mostly didn’t get very far. Women would click wink on his profile, but when they met him in person, it would never go any further. He’d buy them dinner or a drink, and then they’d part ways.”
“Did that make him angry?” Thistle asks.
“It made me kind of angry,” McLean says. “Daniel is a sweet guy. It seemed unfair to reject him just because he was carrying a few extra pounds.”
“Yeah, that’s harsh,” Thistle says.
She doesn’t let the sarcasm slip into her voice, but I can hear it, anyway. A fat woman is judged more severely than a fat man. And I heard somewhere that white people get many more clicks—or swipes, or whatever—than people of color. I wonder if Thistle has been dating since I last worked with her. I wonder if she tried an app.
“But did Daniel take it personally?” Thistle asks.
“He was actually pretty upbeat about the whole thing. I mean, he’d seem disappointed when he’d come home, but the next day he’d just try again. Plenty more fish in the sea, he’d say. As though that was a good thing.”
“It’s not?” I ask.
“No—that’s the whole problem. Why would a woman date a guy who looked like Danny when her phone tells her there are millions of more handsome guys within range?” He shakes his head. “Too many fish. Great for nTangle, but bad for Danny. That’s why I was so relieved when he didn’t come home that night.”
I’m interested now. “You last saw him when?”
“December 2. He’d met someone—I mean, a woman had sent him a wink—and he was going on a date with her.”
“Where were they going?”
“He didn’t say. In fact, I think he didn’t know. She came to pick him up.”
“From where?”
“Our place. We tell users not to give out their home addresses, but he was pretty desperate. He said he didn’t give her the apartment number, just the building number. He thought that would be safe enough.”
“So you didn’t see her.”
McLean hesitates. “Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?” Thistle says. She manages to sound curious rather than eager. “Tell us what you did see.”
“I wasn’t spying,” McLean says. “I was just washing the dishes. But I looked out the window, and saw Daniel get into a car.”
“What kind of car?”
“I think it was blue, maybe? Dark, anyway.”
“What brand?”
He looks apologetic. “I’m not really a car guy, you know?”
“Expensive? Cheap?”
“Uh, midrange, I guess. But I saw the driver, kind of. Through the windshield.”
“What did she look like?” I ask.
“Blond hair. Red lipstick. Nice jawline, no double chin. She looked older than him—thirty, or maybe a good-looking forty.”
He might not be a car guy, but he’s definitely a woman guy.
“I thought that was a good sign,” he said. “Maybe she would be willing to date a chubby guy, because she was a bit past her sell-by.”
Thistle chokes on something, and coughs.
“You okay?” McLean asks.
She waves away his concern with a hand.
“The woman used the app,” I say. “So you can tell us who she was?”
“I can’t,” McLean says. “But the company can, if you get a court order.”
“How was Daniel’s demeanor?” I ask. “When he got in the car.”
McLean shrugs. “Normal, I guess. Like he was meeting her for the first time. They didn’t kiss or anything.”
Thistle has recovered. “You see which way they went?”
McLean shakes his head.
“What kind of porn did Daniel like?” I ask.
McLean looks taken aback. “Excuse me?”
“You guys have been roommates for years,” I say. “You must know what he’s into.”
McLean looks at Thistle. Now he’s worried about offending her.
“We’ve heard it all before,” she says. “It would have to be pretty weird to shock us.”
“Well,” McLean says, still uneasy, “we never really discussed it. So, I guess just the normal stuff?”
“Normal?” I ask.
He looks even more uncomfortable. “You know. Blow jobs and anal, and...look, I don’t even know. We didn’t talk about it.”
“So,” I say, “if I mentioned giants...”
“Like, uh, giant cocks?”
“Giant women. That wouldn’t ring any bells for you?”
He just looks confused. “What? No! He was a sweet guy, like I said. He wasn’t even dating for the sex. He just wanted someone to love him.” He stares through the glass at the army of coders, refining the app. “Everyone needs that.”
“You know, Danny isn’t the only one missing,” Thistle says.
“What do you mean?”
“There are fifteen others who match his physical description.”
He stares at us, puzzled.
“Sixteen men in total,” I put in. “All white, heterosexual, carrying a few extra pounds—and users of your app.”
McLean is starting to go pale. “Wait. You’re talking about a killer? Using nTangle?”
I lean forward in my chair. “And you lived with one of the victims,” I say.
“You’re very connected to this, Ian,” Thistle adds.
McLean is breathing faster. “Oh God. I don’t understand. What are you saying?”
Thistle and I look at each other. McLean definitely looks nervous. But is that because he’s guilty, or because he’s not?
“We’re not saying anything at this point.” Thistle slides a business card across the table. “But do us a solid—call us if you’re planning on leaving the state.”
* * *
“Thoughts?” I ask as we head for the car.
“I don’t think I’d send him a wink,” Thistle says.
“No. But is he hiding anything?”
“Not enough, in my view. Like Shannon.”
I climb into the passenger side. “How’s that?”
“Talking about attractive users, and his own desirability score. It reminded me of how Shannon admitted to hitting on those freshmen. How he made that girl fetch you a coffee. I hate this fucking ‘be yourself’ culture. If you’re an asshole, you should at least have the decency to hide it.”
I never thought of my dishonesty as a character strength. It’s a shame I can’t tell her about it. “But do you think he might be our guy?”
Thistle starts the car. “No. You saw him—he was shitting his pants. If we’re right, our perp has killed seventeen people, including Biggs. H
e would have done a better job at acting calm.”
“Maybe the anxiety was the act.”
“You think?”
“I think it’s worth going to his house,” I say.
“We don’t have a warrant.”
“We don’t need one. I just want to see if his story stacks up. What he said about the woman he saw out the window.”
McLean and Ruthven’s apartment building isn’t far away. It turns out to be two-story, brick, with narrow windows that wouldn’t let in much light. Bird crap trailing down the sides. Not the kind of place with a doorman, though all the ground-floor stairwell doors are locked.
I know from the file that we want number eleven. I push the buzzer.
“You expecting an answer?” Thistle asks.
“Shh.” A buzzing is faintly audible from one of the apartments above our heads. I point. “Sounds like it’s coming from up there, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Push it again.”
I do. The buzz is coming from the top-level apartment on the left.
“Yeah, you’re right,” Thistle admits.
I walk back to the car and turn to look up at the window. A dark square of glass, turned into a parallelogram by the angle. A bottle of detergent balanced on the frame, so it probably is above the kitchen sink. If there was a woman, and she did park here, McLean might have seen her face as he washed the dishes. Maybe.
“With a court order, we can find out who the woman was,” Thistle says.
“Right.” I get in the car. “But I think we should treat any information from nTangle as though it’s coming directly from McLean.”
Thistle nods slowly. “He could have made up a fake profile to go with his story.”
“Right.”
I buckle my seat belt. Thistle starts the engine.
“Where are we headed?” she asks.
I give her the address of a factory in Deer Park. It’s after four, but we should still have time to investigate my idea.
Thistle starts driving. “I don’t have a sense of what Ruthven was like,” she says. “Although when a man like McLean describes someone as ‘a sweet guy,’ I’m inclined to be skeptical.”