Dark Web (14 page)
The Assistant District Attorney surprised Swift as he approached his car outside the diner. Mathis was crossing the street, his black coat collar turned up, his movie-star hair blowing about in the wind. Mathis had come up from New York, and no one bothered to hide the fact they thought he was a hotshot. He was young, yet a reputation for efficient, precise convictions had preceded him.
Swift had been avoiding his calls all morning since their run-in at the substation.
“John, hold up,” Mathis said, picking up his pace to a trot. Swift’s hand had rested on the car door, and now he withdrew it and tucked it into his pocket.
“How’s it going?” Mathis said as he approached.
“Good,” said Swift. He nodded towards the diner. “Great hash browns.”
Mathis’ look darted in the direction of the diner, but only for a second. His eyes were crisp and bright blue and fixed Swift with a glare.
“I’ve been trying to reach you.”
“I know.”
Mathis searched Swift’s face for signs of guile or disrespect. Swift felt the breakfast settling into his stomach, and realized he was soon going to have to pee out all that coffee.
“Some place we can talk?”
Swift nodded at the car. “Step into my office. It’s going to be a bit chilly though.”
Swift opened the driver’s door and slipped in. He started up the vehicle and turned on the heaters to full blast as Mathis got in the passenger side, an unconcealed look of disgust on his face.
“My dog, Kady, she sheds,” Swift said.
Mathis looked like he was trying to sit with no single part of his body actually touching anything. Swift thought about offering him a napkin to put under his delicate butt, and had to force himself not to smile. He watched as Mathis did his best to get comfortable among the dog hairs. It wasn’t quite working out for him.
“Look,” he said, seeming to stare at every single hair with venom, “I know I came on a little bit strong this morning, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get off on the wrong foot with you. I respect you, and I think you’ve handled things the right way so far.”
Swift wondered where this was going.
“So,” Mathis said, “we’re meeting with the press in a half an hour.”
Ah that was it. “Speaking of the press, I just got a call from Mike Simpkins. Very distraught. They’re sprawled out all over his front yard. News channels from Plattsburgh, Burlington, papers from Placid, Saranac, Westport, all of it. I told him we would get them off his back.”
“How?”
Drive them all to a burnt down warehouse; tell them it’s Disney World,
thought Swift. “Hopefully our statement will slake their thirst. What are we going to say?”
“What do we know since three hours ago?”
“Mathis, you’ve got to let me work this case. We’re focused on the body, the three kids, processing the car, and on the laptop. If we can find any of the victim’s latent prints in the car, if we can find evidence of any correspondence that resembles a threat from one or all of our three boys in the box, then we can tie it all together.”
Mathis was blank-faced. “The car, any damage, the prints, I get. That’s our hope. But I’ve prosecuted cyber-crimes before. Searching for evidence by back-tracking is going to take too long. They’ll be back at home way before we uncover anything.”
“So, okay, we’ll pick them up and charge them then.” This was the last thing Swift wanted to do, deal with a sprawling, protracted investigation.
“Pick them up?” Mathis counted off on his fingers. “Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York. Then we’re talking about the FBI.”
Swift shrugged. “Maybe we should make some calls.”
Mathis seemed to be boiling beneath the surface. So much for making amends. Swift watched the young ADA’s face darken. He knew Mathis wanted this case, had convinced the DA he could handle it soup to nuts. And New Brighton was a one-horse town; something like this came along once in a very long time. It was the ADA’s chance to make a name. The last thing Mathis would want would be to relinquish it to federal authorities because it went over state lines.
“There’s got to be something else,” Mathis said.
“With the online thing?”
“Yes, with the online thing.”
Swift swiped a hand across his chin. He felt the stubble there. “We’ll work as fast as we can, that’s all I can do.”
Mathis’ eyebrows went up. “Was the victim gay?”
Swift shot Mathis a look. “What?”
“Was . . . he . . . gay. Homosexual.”
Swift scowled. “He wasn’t anything. He was barely thirteen.”
“Oh, come on, you know what I mean. But thirteen, you knew whether you liked boys or girls, didn’t you?”
Swift thought back. Sure, he could remember middle school, a girlfriend here, a girlfriend there . . . But he hadn’t lost his virginity until college. Partly due to his parents’ religious strictures, partly because he was awkward and shy.
“I guess,” he said. “But, no, I don’t know.”
“The parents didn’t say anything?”
“About his sexuality? No, it didn’t come up.”
“What did you talk to them about? What have you asked them?”
Swift considered the mother’s description of her son’s unique personality, the autism spectrum, but he said nothing. It wasn’t material yet. It would only cause Mathis to start hunting for ways to fly the Hate Crime banner. Maybe, Swift considered, something like that was involved. From the outset he’d suspected the gang of three to be complicit in some way, whether they’d harassed the poor kid to the point of breaking him, or whether they’d outright murdered him. In some way they had contributed. But there were no facts until the forensics on the car came back, until Kim Yom could find something substantial in her backtracking of internet correspondence, and until Janine Poehler finished her autopsy report and submitted it. He had no cause of death, no murder weapon, and no solid link to any suspects. Except, maybe, the biological father.
But then there was the money, too. The family seemed to be either in financial straits or fiscally backed in a way that they kept quiet about.
“John? I get the feeling there’s something . . .”
“What’s the situation with counsel?”
Mathis blinked, but answered quickly. “Two of them have lawyers now. Lawyers hired by their parents.”
“But Darring isn’t one of them.”
“How did you know?”
“A guess.”
“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.”
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.