Strange Flesh (40 page)

I
f I worried over the source of the foreboding Mercer conveyed, she doesn’t leave me hanging for long. On my desk sits a thick stack of time sheets for my work to date on the twins’ behalf that Billing wants me to initial. The paperwork is generally in order, but someone has “mistakenly” appended a number of forms for various other Red Rook employees from the same client code, but a different case number. I almost just toss them in the burn bin, but one of the entries stops me. Listed among all the opaque acronyms for our shady activities is inventoried six hours for a system penetration of someone code-named E10_Vinyl. Nothing unusual there; we do it every day. But among all the enciphered identifiers is the confirmation line for the computer that got penetrated, which includes its IP: 192.0.2.112.

That’s the internet address for
my
home computer.

My brothers in arms have turned their knives on me. Of course one’s own medicine always tastes the bitterest. But after taking a panicked inventory of my actions over the past couple weeks, I conclude that they’ve been mostly innocent with respect to Blake. Since I’ll still be working closely with Red Rook in my new position, the philosophical perspective seems best. Besides, leaving a known penetration in place can accord you a stronger position than the person who put it there, since you now have control over a trusted information source.

Perhaps I adhere to some quaint notions of company loyalty, but I’m a little shocked that Red Rook agreed to instrument one of its own
employees. Though I guess a cold warrior like Mercer would approve of “watchers watching the watchers” involute security schemes. Since there’s no way these papers ended up on my desk by accident, I conclude that at least she had the good grace to give me a heads-up. What motivated her to do that? Occam’s razor leaves me with the words: she likes me.

Thank God for that.

An hour later I finally get a message from one of
my
RATs indicating that Nash has logged in to the NYPD’s evidence repository. I wait until he signs off for the day before starting my search. Because he was the principal investigator, I have full access to download the file on Gina Delaney’s death.

Along with the sundry reports and morgue photos, there’s a digital video with a default name from the camera that shot it. Once the transfer finishes, I run a program called MephistoFilese that corrupts the original beyond any hope of redemption. My adding an erroneous storage location entry for the camera’s memory card and then switching its status to “item lost” should make retrieving the original nearly impossible. Now I’ve got the only accessible copy.

I pull up the video on my laptop.

Gina’s pale face fills my screen. Tears flow freely past her closed eyelids and down her cheeks. There’s a low whirring sound that must be the drill behind her. For a moment, her head sways unsteadily on her neck, and then she opens her eyes. Their sparkling amber is now dilated black, as though she’s taken a heavy dose of tranqs. Her gaze rests on a point just above and to the left of the camera. She inhales haltingly and then starts to say something, but her face contorts as she tries not to cry. She jerks her head, the movement restricted by the cords binding her to the garrote. She lets her neck go slack and sobs.

After a few seconds of this, she makes a clear effort to calm herself, taking deep trembling breaths. She closes her eyes. When they open again, she’s found a certain stillness.

She says in a nearly inaudible voice made husky by her tears:

I guess you thought
I’d play the daughter of Lot,
But I will not.

The extreme close-up makes it hard to distinguish what happens next. The restraints bite more deeply into the skin of her neck and chin, like she’s pressing forward against them.

Then there’s the short scraping sound of a cigarette lighter.

The right side of Gina’s face receives a warm, flickering light. This seems to wake something inside her. Her eyes become less glassy and start darting around. Maybe she’s making a last-minute inspection of her setup. She rotates her head slowly to the right, perhaps testing the tautness of the line. Then back to the left. She repeats the process more quickly, and then I realize:

She’s shaking her head.

Her eyes are bright now with panic.

The drill bursts through her mouth, spraying the camera lens with drops of blood. Her body goes limp from the huge hole torn into her spine. I have to close my eyes.

When I open them, Gina’s face is still there, mutilated by the razor-toothed hole saw, which spins on with mechanical abandon. The video rolls for another twenty minutes, and by the end of it, I know I’ll see that image for the rest of my days.

A
cquiring Gina’s suicide video finally gave me a good card for my hand. But I still need an opportunity to play it. I check in to see where the rest of Billy’s gamers are.

Savant
’s forum has come alive with controversy over a post by someone named Clay_Media proposing that Big Ben Mondano was a member of the Pyrexians. An idea that would unify, as good conspiracy theories do, the two primary strands of speculation concerning the party backing
Savant
. Initially, I assume this is Billy again seeding the story behind his game, but I become unsure, since the post mostly inspired an effort to comb Exotica’s back catalog for Pyrexian imagery: black candles, red rings, antique medical equipment, coded messages inscribed on their victims. I suspect this line of inquiry will actually lead them
away
from any kind of connection to Robert Randall.

That said, I’m worried that the
Savant
players’ growing numbers and organization will eventually allow them to find their way inside Billy’s gingerbread house. And that will complicate my work. I contemplate a subtle disinformation campaign, but before I can solidify any ideas, my duties to the Dancers call.

Olya’s discovered a new vibration in Fred’s corpus spongiosum, and she and Xan are at loggerheads about whether this is a bug or a feature. I’ve been called to help Garriott investigate, but perhaps more importantly to procure late-night fuel for the team.

On my way over, McClaren pulls up and invites me into his Town Car. His news is that Charles Delaney, Gina’s father, had called the NYPD out of the blue to demand a copy of his daughter’s suicide video. Nash put him off with some claptrap about “evidentiary sequestration” and phoned McClaren. They ran Delaney’s bank accounts, which showed two recent deposits of just over nine thousand dollars apiece. The conclusion: Billy is trying to use him to get the video, the “final piece” he mentioned to Blythe. McClaren orders me to Boston to see if he can be bribed into leading us to Billy.

Garriott and I finish our urological procedure on Fred more quickly than I’d anticipated, allowing me to leave GAME at three
AM
. Needing to sleep on the way, I opt for a train that gets into South Station five hours later.

Somerville is a suburb north of Harvard’s Cambridge that’s been transformed into a postcollegiate Eden, filled with organic cafés and bars thronged with recent grads. But if you wind up on the wrong side of McGrath Highway, you’ll find a neighborhood whose residents didn’t all get the “inexorable gentrification” memo: East Somerville. It’s only about two miles from the neoclassical halls of MIT, but as with most old Eastern cities, you can span whole galaxies just by crossing a street. I’m amazed Gina made the transition.

The Delaneys’ house stands on a blighted block of slumping three-story railcar tenements framed by giant denuded elm trees that look like they were last pruned by WPA employees. Despite the hopeless aspect of the block, there’s a yellow Mustang with dealer’s plates parked askew at the curb.

Eleven Cross Street is a small rectangle of leprous brown shingles. Its only gesture at decoration is rusting steel bars on the windows, which seem to have been bored into the building’s surface at random.

I ring the bell and wait a long time before someone starts wrestling with the warped wooden door. At first there’s just a thin gap into the dark of the vestibule, but then the door swings open on a woman who begins the painfully slow process of climbing down a short cement staircase to
open the metal security door in front of me. I think she might be in her midsixties, but she has the sick thinness and carriage of a woman well into her eighties. She’s draped herself with a worn housedress, and her dull gray hair listlessly crowds her face. Her eyes speak of sleepless nights, and her breath speaks of a seven
AM
encounter with a gin bottle.

“Mrs. Delaney? Hi—”

“You’re here about Geenie?” she asks in a reedy whisper.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Before she can continue, a deep voice booms out from behind her. “Ruthie, get your ass back in here. I’ll take care of this guy. Go finish your breakfast.”

Ugh. I can tell I’d prefer sharing her kind of breakfast to dealing with the owner of that voice. Mrs. Delaney scuttles off without another word.

Charles Delaney is scrawny and unkempt, with a large flat head framed by patchy stubble that in some places aspires to be a beard. He’s wearing greasy jeans and a plaid flannel shirt, underneath which a moth-eaten T-shirt proclaims,
OBAMANATION: WIPING OUT AMERICA, ONE BABY AT A TIME
. He looks me over with a jittery scowl but eventually says in a cigarette-scarred bray, “Well, get yourself in here. It’s colder than ass out there.”

Against my better judgment, I put out my hand. “James Pryce, it’s nice—” But he’s already walking away from me down a narrow hallway.

I almost take off. Charles Delaney is disturbing. You see him and think base-head. You smell him and think opossum. His wife’s clearly hanging on by her fingernails too. If his daughter suffered from mental instability, the genetic component has certainly been confirmed. The grim abode tells me that her environment wasn’t helping anything either.

I follow him down the hall. What I first took for a limp proves to be a stagger. Like his wife, the guy is drunk as a lord at nine
AM
. He heads straight back to a flimsy door with a Yosemite Sam “Back Off” mud flap stapled to it.

It opens onto a den obviously meant as an off-limits refuge for the man of the house. The room has a sixties basement quality, with artificial wood paneling adorned with outdated Boston sports posters, a beat-up Naugahyde couch, and a giant duct-taped recliner. The low coffee table is covered with Natural Light tallboys dragooned into service as sloppy ashtrays. I’d expect to see an old TV set with a jury-rigged antenna, but
instead there’s a brand-new sixty-inch Sony LCD inexpertly bolted to the wall. A badass surround-sound system sits in boxes on the floor.

Delaney collapses onto the couch and takes a swig out of a bottle of Midleton Irish Whiskey, which stands in glaring contrast to the dead cans of discount beer. He doesn’t offer me any. There’s evidence here of an epic Home Shopping Network binge: a lacquer stand of samurai swords, a wall full of valuable Red Sox cards mounted in mahogany frames, and two leather gun cases, which I’m hoping do not contain actual weapons.

I sit on the recliner and start with, “Thank you for taking the time to meet with me.”

He snorts as though I’ve said something idiotic.

“So your wife might have mentioned that I’m working on a documentary that in part deals with the work your daughter—”

“Yeah, I know all about you and your ‘documentary.’ You want to dig shit up about Geenie. So go ahead and ask your questions. I’m a fucking open book.”

“Well, first of all, my condolences on your daughter’s death. You must have been shocked—”

“No, I always knew my girl was heading for hell.”

“Hell?”

“Suicide is a mortal sin, ain’t it? You can’t just go picking out the parts of His Holy Word that you happen to like, right? Not like those Episcopal faggots.”

“I guess it depends—”

Suddenly heated, he leans toward me. “It don’t depend on shit. The Word is the Truth. You better fucking believe that. Yeah, I can tell you don’t like me saying that shit about my own daughter. But I don’t need you judging me. That’s for the Lord, not someone like you.” Then he takes a long pull off his bottle and relaxes back into the couch. “But you know . . . I’ll probably end up joining her there. Way things have gone for me.”