Last Call (27 page)
Jack said,“What’s on this website?”
“I’ve never seen it,” said Charger, his voice trailing off to a playful whisper. “But from the sound of it, I’d say it has something to do with Santa’s naughty list.”
Theo narrowed his eyes.“You better not be messin’ with us.”
“If anyone’s messing with you, it ain’t me. It’s Isaac.Thanks for the gum,” said Charger, winking at Jack. He pushed away from the table, walked to the door, and pressed the button on the wall.The door opened, and Charger told the guard he was ready to go.
“See you around, boys,” he said on his way out.The door closed, leaving Theo alone with Jack.
“You think he’s for real?” said Theo.
“Let’s visit that website and find out.”
Jack removed his notebook computer from his briefcase and powered it up on the table. The jail made a high-speed wireless Internet connection available to attorneys, and Jack’s Wi-Fi picked up the signal.Theo watched as he typed in the address. Even with a high-speed connection, it took a moment for the page to load.
The banner emerged first—“Reality Bitches” in bold red letters.
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Below it were several boxes, empty at first, and then one by one, the images popped into place.
The first was the face of a pretty redhead who was
maybe
old enough to vote. A string of letters tumbled across the screen and then settled into place to spell “Party Bitch.”
Then the second box developed, a brunette called “Head Bitch,” followed by “Nasty Bitch,”“Latina Bitch,” and several others, until the final box emerged.This last image, however, was much slower to come into focus than the others. It also seemed to be a much lower resolution, a little grainy, the color and lighting of much lower quality.
She was “Reality Bitch.”
Theo slapped the table and walked away.“Damn you, Isaac!” he said, kicking the wastebasket across the room.
“What is it?”
Theo turned and faced Jack, mad enough to put a fist through the wall. He needed to hit something—or someone.
“Theo, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said, trying to breathe in and out, the way Trina had taught him to get himself under control. “There’s nothing wrong at all.”
“Tell me,” said Jack.
Theo walked back to the table, glanced one more time at the screen, and then looked at Jack. “That’s her,” he said. “That’s my mother.”
Theo wasn’t handling it well. Uncle Cy wasn’t doing much better.
So Jack had to deal with it.
The old photograph of Theo’s mother on the website was only the beginning. One click of the mouse set the image in motion, a stream of XXX video. Even if the woman hadn’t been Theo’s mother, Jack would have had a difficult time watching. He had his own theory as to why Isaac might have wanted Theo to see it, but he needed a professional’s evaluation before talking it over again with Theo and his uncle.
At one o’clock he was in a conference room at the FBI’s field office. Andie was seated across from him, and his open notebook computer lay on the table between them. Jack typed in the website address and hit enter.
The LCD screen blinked, the Reality Bitches homepage lit up—and Andie blinked too.
“You okay?” said Jack.
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m trying to be professional, but the exis-tential in me can’t help but see the absurd side of surfing porn sites with you.”
“This isn’t pornography,” said Jack.“It’s obscenity.”
“Oh, well, that makes me feel better already.”
There was humor in what she was saying, but Jack knew she wasn’t making light of the situation. Few law enforcement officers had witnessed the depravity Andie had as a criminal profiler and hostage negotiator, and everyone had his or her own way of staying sane.
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She said,“Does Theo have any idea where this came from?”
“None.”
“How about Uncle Cy?”
“He didn’t want to see it any more than Theo did. I asked him if he knew of any hard-core porn films she might have made. He didn’t. But he said it wouldn’t come as a surprise to him.”
“Can Theo put an approximate date on the photo?”
“It’s hard to get him to take a really good look at it. But I can tell you that she was thirty-one years old when she died.”
Andie studied the photograph on the screen.“She looks like a teenager here. Pretty girl.”
“The image is pretty low resolution, so I’m sure that doesn’t help.”
“Our tech guys can improve that.”
“Do the computer enhancements later,” said Jack.“Right now, I just want you to watch this.Tell me if you have the same reaction I did.”
“What was your take on it?”
“Watch first. I don’t want to sway you.”
“All right,” she said, drawing a breath.“Let’s see—no, wait.Tell me her name.”
She had reached across the table and grabbed his wrist. Jack didn’t pretend to know her every touch—they’d never more than kissed—but he knew instantly that this moment had nothing to do with him. It was between Andie and the woman on the screen—a real person, a human being, not just some pervert’s five-minute fantasy in cyberspace.
“Portia,” said Jack.“Her name was Portia Knight.”
Andie let go of his wrist.“Okay. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
“It might be easier to see if we switched off the light.”
Andie considered it, then leaned back and flipped the wall switch.The room went dark, and the glow of the screen that bathed them in strangely colored light only added to the eerie feeling of anticipation.
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Jack clicked on the photograph with his mouse. The frozen image jerked into motion, and Portia came to life.
Theo’s mother was in a dark room, her body illuminated only by the camera’s harsh spotlight. The expression on her face could only be described as wary, the nervous smile of a young woman who was beginning to realize that perhaps she was in over her head.
Her hair was pulled back tightly, making her face clearly visible.
“Theo got her eyes,” said Andie.
She was moving, and as the camera angle widened, it was clear that she was dancing. Her breasts were fully exposed, and she wore only a red thong, gold hoop earrings, and gold stiletto heels.
Andie said,“Can you turn up the volume?”
“There’s no sound.”
Even with no music, Portia’s movement on-screen seemed smooth and rhythmic, as if Theo’s appreciation for all things musical hadn’t come entirely from his uncle. Behind her, in a ragged semicircle, a crowd of men stood and watched her dance, all of them smiling, most of them holding large plastic cups in one hand and a smoldering cigar in the other. With such bad lighting, and with the camera’s focus entirely on the dancer, the spectators and background images were distorted and obscured.
Andie said,“Looks like this even predates VHS recorders. Probably a handheld sixteen-millimeter.”
“I guess that would have been state of the art when Portia was a teenager.”
“Yeah, early seventies.”
Jack said, “And from the amount of jerky footage, I’d say the cameraman was one of the drunkest guys in the room.”
On-screen, Portia showed her back to the camera, and the cameraman zoomed in on her ass. She bent over and grabbed her ankles, knees straight, and slid the thong down her legs, kicking it across the room with a flick of her foot. The cameraman tried to follow the thong as it sailed into the crowd, but it was just a blur.
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She continued to dance nude, wearing only her spiked heels.
One of the men came forward and started dancing with her. Stag-gering would have been a better word for it. Portia didn’t pay much attention to him, but that only made him bolder. It was a silent video, but the other men appeared to be shouting and egging him on.The closer he came to her, the more she pulled away. He stumbled after her, apparently trying to kiss or lick her breasts, but he managed only to spill his cup all over her.
Portia stopped dancing. From her reaction, the contents of the cup must have been ice-cold. She said something to him. He spoke back to her, clearly angry. Another man tried to pull him back into the crowd. He made some kind of remark to Portia as well.
She responded in kind—the same nasty body language—and he threw his drink on her. Another man did the same. Soon, plastic cups filled with beer were flying through the air. Portia was being pelted. She gathered up her white tube top and orange hot pants from the floor, but another man snatched them right back. Suddenly surrounded, she started looking for an escape route. Cups were still flying, and even with no sound it was clear that people were shouting and that things were getting out of hand.
Portia ran.
The cameraman followed.
So did the mob.
The screen was one bouncy frame after another as the cameraman and his drunken friends chased Portia out of the room and down the long hallway. The heels snapped off her shoes, and she gathered speed. She glanced back over her shoulder, tripped on a step, and hit the floor hard. She lay there, naked, sprawling.
Two men grabbed her, their images a blur in the confusion.
Portia kicked and punched, but other men grabbed her arms to restrain her. Someone else took her legs.The cameraman zoomed in on her face. Portia was screaming.
Jack looked away from the screen. He’d watched it twice al-238
James Grippando
ready and didn’t need to see it again. He glanced at Andie, her face aglow with the on-screen events. Even with no audio, it seemed as though Andie could hear Portia’s screams.The notepad in front of her had not a single notation on it. Andie simply watched the filmed frenzy unfold on the computer.
It went on for several minutes. Close-ups of the penetration, close-ups of the terror in Portia’s eyes. The men’s faces, of course, had been carefully edited out. When it was over, the red letters tumbled back onto the screen to spell out a final message in lieu of credits. It read:“Reality Bitches get what they deserve.”
Jack closed the website.
Andie was silent. Then she looked at Jack and said, “I’m glad Theo didn’t watch.”
“So you see it like I do? This is not acting. ‘Reality Bitches’
means it’s real?”
“No doubt about it,” she said. “Theo’s mother was raped. Before she was his mother.”
Andie ate dinner at her desk.This was becoming a bad habit.
Nearly four months had passed since her last date
with Jack. Fifteen weeks since he’d wigged out over her remark about Theo and called it quits. One-hundred-something days without another date of any promise. Two-thousand-plus hours without any hope of . . .“it.”
Suddenly, she was counting minutes as the theme song from
Rent
played in her head.
She popped open another diet soda and unwrapped her spicy tuna roll from the local sushi-on-wheels.The bright side was that she was impressing her supervisors and proving herself worthy of advancement to the elite criminal profiling unit at the FBI Academy in Quantico.
With every dinner alone at the office, however, the computer dating option seemed less absurd.That so-called cyber expert she’d blown off on Miami Beach had been dead right about one thing: it was hard for a female FBI agent to find love outside of law enforcement.Andie got plenty of interest from men who wore badges.That was one reason she’d been so attracted to Jack.That and . . .“it.”
Funny how with certain people you just knew “it” would be good.
She glanced at the phone. Every now and then, she felt the urge to call her former supervisor to see if returning to Seattle was an option. Jack, however, had made that impossible. Even though he was in and out of her life in the span of two weeks, people would have said she jumped on a plane and flew across the country after getting dumped by the former governor’s son.
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A few more dates with Jack, and maybe it would have been true.
Good thing he wigged out.
Her appetite was gone.The files on the floor called out to her.
Each stack was its own case, another investigation, a different victim. Andie had one of those filing systems where the work piled up—literally. Even so, she couldn’t stop herself from going back to her computer and that movie again.
The FBI’s tech experts had cleaned up the downloadable version of the film and burned it onto a disk, which she now inserted into her PC. It still had its shortcomings—shaky frames, grainy images, poor lighting.The geek masters were good, but they weren’t magicians.
Andie let the frames advance in slow motion. It was like laying out the pieces to a puzzle with two parts. One, who raped Theo’s mother? Two, why did Isaac want Theo to see it? So far she had the faces of two drunks—the heckler and his friend—in a dark room somewhere in the early 1970s.Those guys were in their fifties now, and it would be impossible to find and identify them if she didn’t nail down the location. The answer had to be on this disk, and Andie was determined to dissect it from every angle. Portia’s strip-tease in the darkness. Her argument with the drunks.The ensuing frenzy, the mad chase down hall, the—
Andie hit pause. Something had caught her eye.
She rewound several frames, still in slow motion, and watched even more intently. A flash of light brightened the screen, and she hit pause to freeze the image. The white flash had been the camera’s spotlight reflecting in a mirror on the wall. She advanced one more frame—and there he was.
The cameraman.
Whoever had posted this film on the Internet had gone to some effort to protect the guilty, carefully editing out frames that would reveal the attackers’ identity. Apparently they’d missed this LAST CALL
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split-second appearance of the cameraman in the mirror. Andie burned the image to a separate CD and took it upstairs to the tech floor. By definition, these guys had no life, and of course someone was still there after hours.
“Benny, can you help me again?” she said, catching her breath.
Crumpled candy wrappers and empty soda cans littered the work area around Benny’s computer monitor. He swiveled in his chair to face Andie, but his mouth was too full to respond. He held a half-eaten Twinkie in one hand and a soda can in the other.