Strange Flesh (14 page)

With that, Olya marches off. Xan and Garriott make comic faces at each other.

I ask, “Why do you put up with that? Not like you’re Spetsnaz troops trying to kill Chechens.”

Garriott laughs. “Olya’s like a Soviet supercollider. You’re not sure the wiring’s all straight, but she does generate strong impulses in a man.”

Xan adds in a low voice, “Women too.” Garriott glances at her inquiringly but then looks down and sighs.

Xan grabs his arm. “Come on, let’s share a cab. You okay, James?”

Without waiting for my reply she takes my cheek and lightly kisses me good night. The tingle left from her lips takes me well past okay.

Since losing Erica, I would normally let myself obsess over even a casual kiss from a woman like Xan. Which might lead to a risky online search for a surrogate. But tonight, my mind wants only to hammer away at this vein of secrets I’ve discovered at GAME. I hurry home so I can start delving into today’s most pressing lead:

Billy was in love with a dead girl. And he doesn’t seem inclined to let her rest in peace.

P
eople with elite tech degrees usually maintain pretty extensive online identities. But Gina has left only a void. Old links to her pages on various social networking sites now come up empty. Her blog returns “404—page not found.” While she appears in the alumni list at the PiMP website, her profile has been removed. After dredging up the name of her main NODSkin, Joanne_Dark, I see that she’s been “transcended,” NOD’s euphemism for having terminated the underlying account. She seems to have taken pains before her death to wipe out any online evidence of her life.

A lot of recent websites are totally dynamic and therefore hard to record. But leave it to the creaking IT systems of a university to save the day. The Wayback Machine crawls of the PiMP site from September of ’12 give me a hit on Gina that includes a fairly recent résumé.

She describes her academic specialties as “Interface Design and Social Computing.” Her picture shows an old City of Heroes avatar in place of herself. She did her undergrad at MIT: a Course Six (electrical engineering) degree awarded in 2003 with a minor in mech-E. Right out of college she racked up some pretty impressive publication credits for work she did at Monotreme Research on novel collaboration environments. Then a stint at her lab’s spin-off, Ichidna Interface, which made prototypes of new training gear for the military market. In 2012, she headed to PiMP for another degree. Her skills section is a dense block of trendy
acronyms. For personal interests, she simply lists “pwning.” Gamer slang for “owning” or dominating other players.

Her death on October 29 of last year didn’t elicit a whole lot of media interest. Mentions in the major papers rate only a brief unembellished blurb, as if the reporters were quickly frustrated by a lack of forthcoming information. A weepy
Washington Square News
article quotes friends evincing shock, one going so far as to say, “She’s the nicest, most talented person I know.” Her parents didn’t have any comment for the student reporter.

In contrast, the write-up on the other recent GAME suicide, Trevor Rothstein, diplomatically refers to his “struggles with substance abuse,” and his mother’s requiem strikes a weirdly positive tone: “We’re just happy he’s finally at peace.”

Gina’s death leaves one with nothing but questions.

Why does an attractive, brilliant, successful young woman commit suicide? And why do people grimace whenever they mention her death?

I send an email to McClaren reminding him of his offer to hook me up with the officer who handled Gina’s case.

With disturbing promptness he replies:

Go see Detective Paul Nash tomorrow at the Union St. Station House. He’ll be expecting you. Nash is a friend, but for op-sec keep your current cover. He’s been told the twins are “privately supporting” your work.

T
he staff sergeant at the precinct office sends me to a small conference room on the second floor. Standing up to shake my hand is Detective Paul Nash, a tall man in his early forties. I expected an overweight mustached guy, so it’s interesting to find this clean-cut, soft-spoken person who looks like a business retreat leader and whose tan indicates a lot of time spent on the links. As we sit, he asks what he can do for me.

“Well, I’m mostly here to talk about Gina Delaney, but before we get to that, can you tell me anything about Trevor Rothstein?”

He cocks his head. “Not my body. But since he was sort of connected to Gina, I heard about it. What do you want to know?”

“Was there anything unusual about the case?”

Nash shrugs. “Nothing unusual about a dead junkie. These are people who poison themselves daily.”

“His was like any other overdose? Nothing noteworthy?”

“Just that he wasn’t already dead, the amount of smack that guy was doing.”

Trevor seems like a blind alley, so I switch gears. “Okay. So you caught the call for Gina Delaney.”

He slides me a file containing her casework.

“Of course that can’t leave the room,” he says.

“I see. I’m just trying to understand what happened.”

“The pictures make that pretty clear.”

I open the envelope and pull out a report that is several pages of forms
stapled together and a set of glossy eight-by-ten photographs of the scene. The first is the worst: a wide shot of Gina slumped against a horrible contraption, impaled through the mouth by a large circular cutting bit. Called a hole saw, I think.

The close-ups of her corpse are bad enough, but the Byzantine sickness of her machine makes my fingers shrink from touching the photos that follow. Restraining cords, pulleys, burnt cardboard tube, blood puddle on the floor. I’m struck by the lethal similarities to Billy’s
Getting Wet
video, which now seems tame in comparison.

When planning their end, most people don’t look to Rube Goldberg for inspiration. Or maybe it’s surprising that the many artist suicides over the years are so unbelievably pedestrian.

I say, “Bizarre way to go.”

Nash nods grimly. “I think all suicides are bizarre. But this . . .” He whistles.

“You get any idea what led her to this particular method?”

“I suppose you’ve seen that
Getting Wet
video she made? Normally I’d say it’s this gasper obsession people have, but the drill makes that seem wrong. ’Course, she
was
an engineer. She had all the tools at hand. But to be honest, we don’t really know.”

“It didn’t seem like there was much press interest in the story.”

“True. We suppressed the details, for the family’s sake.”

I flip through a series of pictures, presumably taken by the medical examiner, depicting the extent of her injuries. The coverage of her back shows that the drill bit went in smoothly, creating a surgically precise two-inch hole. The facial photos reveal the horrendous mess of her mouth. A full-length shot shows some scratches on her torso, as well as jagged stripes of scar tissue on either wrist.

Nash sees my finger hover over this detail. He says, “This wasn’t the first attempt. Maybe the machine was meant to take it out of her hands.”

“They do follow orders,” I mumble. Paging through the paperwork, I pause at the ME’s death certificate. “No autopsy? I thought they’re required for suicides.”

“Generally, yes. But in this case the family requested a religious exemption. They’re an offshoot of some Pentecostal denomination. Can’t have organs missing come Judgment Day.” Nash frowns. “There might have been a hearing, but at the time, the ME was dealing with a bad meth
package hitting East New York and a shipment of contaminated beef getting served through a food bank for the elderly. There wasn’t any doubt about the cause of death, so I guess they just let it go.”

“What did her family have to say about all this?”

Nash pinches his temples and lets out a long breath. “Not a whole lot. Dad was ready to explode. Barely keeping it together. Her mother looked like she was planning to join her daughter any minute. I got the impression that the Delaney home was not a happy one.”

I lift an eyebrow. But he just shrugs.

I return to the shot of her back. Another image I’ve seen of Gina flickers through my mind.

“Huh. The entry wound here. It’s right over her tattoo.”

“Tattoo?”

“She had a little Jack of Hearts playing card inked there on the back of her neck. The wound obliterates it.”

“There are easier ways to remove a tattoo.”

“Yeah. But she was part of this group of artists into virtual reality, so it’s interesting she’d want to destroy that symbol. Her brand of membership. If that was a big part of her identity, maybe this reads as a repudiation. Like she’s saying she wanted out of the Jack—”

Those words suddenly click for me. “Jacking out” was exactly what Gina was doing. Taking out her jack. Decoupling from life. The same act Billy was simulating with his video to Blake. But he also used the term explicitly. What was the line? “
I know you’ve often wished that I’d just jack out like she did.
” I’d thought he meant his mother, but having seen Gina’s fatal wound, I’m now certain he was talking about her.

But why refer to
her
death in his message to Blake?

Nash seems disinterested in my theories but politely prompts me: “What’s that?”

“Ah, never mind . . . She leave a note?”

“No. This one was all electronic. Almost no paper in the entire apartment. Except these framed pictures. Like most people have shots of their friends at parties? She’s got a bunch too, but they’re all video game characters. No books, just one of those tablet things. We fired up her computer to see if she might have left a statement, but she’d wiped it.”

He sees me starting to interrupt and puts up his hand. “We checked
the hard disk: it was overwritten up and down. Completely destroyed her phone too. Really just erasing everything about herself that she could.”

“So you have a dead girl, this ugly mechanism, some previous attempts, but if you don’t mind my asking, how did you establish for sure that this was a suicide? I don’t mean to be ridiculous, but couldn’t—”

“Yeah, I thought the same thing at first. But she taped it.”

“She taped it?”

He nods.

“Can I see it?”

Nash twists his face into a portrait of unease. Thinks for a moment, but then says, “The thing’s in total lockdown. We had problems a while back with people leaking shit to snuff sites, creeps, even the straight press. This, well, this is bad enough that if her mother ever saw it, I don’t think she’d last the day. Other kids see it, maybe it sparks their imaginations. I can’t have anything like that on my conscience. I’m sorry.”

“Okay. Maybe I don’t need a copy. Can you just show it to me?”

“Look, I’ve been real cooperative here, per my understanding with your friend. But I’m afraid I just can’t do that. Why do you need to see it anyway?”