Strange Flesh (54 page)

And again I watch Gina’s harrowing final minutes. But this time, framed by his forensic inquiry, I’m watching through Billy’s eyes. The video takes on the cast of subliminal witchery one finds in the ice cubes of liquor ads.

At the end, we freeze on the shot of Gina’s hideous demise, and Billy says, “If you look closely, this video proves beyond a doubt that she was murdered.”

Then he starts his assault. His leading elements are reminiscent of those late-seventies Zapruder reconstruction “documentaries,” trying to establish that JFK was assassinated by time-traveling Martians. Gina couldn’t possibly have lifted the meteorite ballast. The light patterns on her face indicate fire traveling
toward
her. The ME’s photos show conclusively that her wrists were recently bound. Some nonsense about the blood spatter being the wrong shape.

The case is meretricious: Gina had plenty of mech-E from MIT and
could figure out how to lift anything; there were any number of reflective surfaces in the apartment; her wrists already looked like uncooked funnel cake; and the right combination of model parameters could get Billy’s “expected” blood spatter to form a portrait of Mao.

But like a true showman, Billy saves his best for last. And here’s where he makes me sit up and take notice. Now he just looks closely at the video itself. A part of it I’ve seen but never really scrutinized, since it occurs well after Gina is clearly dead.

About three minutes after she dies, her body shifts slightly. Maybe from the drill’s vibration. Maybe her muscles relaxing in death. The movement causes her head to tilt slightly to her right. Billy freezes there on a single frame. The video is high def, so he’s able to zoom extremely close on Gina’s left eye. So close that I can just distinguish the reflections on its glassy surface.

And for me those tiny glimmers have the power of a collapsing star.

There’s an old legend that says the eyes of a murder victim will capture the face of his killer. This belief was held widely enough in the early twentieth century that forensic photographers devoted a whole branch of their nascent art to the detailed recording of a corpse’s eyeballs, and in some cases even attempted to “develop” images off the deceased’s retinas through some rather gruesome means. The idea is lunacy of course, but exactly the sort of thing that would appeal to an artist like Billy. Maybe the concept sprang to mind when he was confronted with Gina’s agonized eyes at the time of her death. I can just see him examining them minutely, since that image was the last remaining evidence of the now impassable pathway to her soul and its tragic mysteries. At some point he must have noticed the subtlest motion. Then he realized that in combining a high-res camera with the half-mirror of her eyes, he had a situation where the superstition actually proved true.

They’re tiny, picked out in pixels of lightness against the deep black of her pupils. The outline of two figures standing side by side. Her head must have come to rest at just the right angle of reflection from some light in the room. There’s not enough detail to get a very clear picture, but one attribute stands out: they both have blond hair. Almost white.

Billy slaps up a frame counter and lets twenty seconds tick by. During this, you can see the couple’s heads turn toward each other. The man steps forward until he’s directly in front of the body, perhaps touching it.
Then he moves back, and they both walk off to the right until they disappear at the margin of her pupil.

Billy can run all the hypotheticals he wants, and I’m unlikely to pay much heed. Lawyers consistently show that, much like statistics (or people), you can torture models into saying anything. But now he’s showing me something I can see with my own eyes. An image recorded on video. And what it means:

Gina wasn’t alone when she died.

Not content to rest his case there, Billy wraps up with a seductive reconstruction of his theory of events. There were two people with Gina that night. They drugged her, bound her hands, placed her in the chair, set up the lighter fluid, put a lighter by her hand. She revived slightly and spoke her last words. Not addressing the camera; addressing them. They stood just behind the meteorite and lit the cardboard tube on fire.

When certain she was dead, they unbound her hands and left the room.

As stand-ins for the murderers, he uses these indistinct wisps from Gina’s eyes. Then he focuses on them for yet another unmasking.

Gradually, the foggy pixels begin to coalesce into more specific visages. Of course, he chooses his blond bêtes noires. Olya Zhavinskaya stands there directing half-closed bedroom eyes at her accomplice, Blake Randall.

He asks, “And what was their motive for this crime? Why not hear it in their own words?”

An audio loop begins. The sound is slightly muffled, but I can understand the words pretty clearly. Blake must be closer to the mic, since his voice is loud and instantly recognizable.

He says, “. . . why she still feels that way. It’s unfortunate. Do you think you’ll be able to bring her around?”

Olya’s voice is less clear but identifiable from her accent. “She can refuse me nothing. I make things very unpleasant.”

“Ah . . . ‘The way to a woman’s heart is the path of torment. I know of no other.’”

Olya says, “Eh? I don’t know. G is very difficult. I think maybe the right path is through her rib cage.”

“A bit unsubtle, darling, don’t you think?”

“Mmm, but I’m tired of petting her always.”

“Well, be patient. I’m sure you’ll be irresistible in the end.”

Blake’s intonation on his line about “a woman’s heart” suggests that he’s borrowing the words. I guess their source even before searching for it.

So was this conversation what stimulated Billy’s whole jihad against his brother? Blake glibly quoting Sade’s dating tips?

It explains Billy’s use of the marquis’s words in his electrocution speech. When did he record this? An early jewel from his surveillance at GAME? Or he could have been listening through the mic on Blake’s compromised laptop. Regardless, in the context of all his other evidence, the dialogue plays like a confession.

We fade back in on a shot of Billy himself addressing the camera. He’s sitting a few feet away from where I found the video. His face bears a glazed, sorrowful expression. He’s wearing the same clothes as yesterday.

Your viewing this video means that I am dead. Murdered. I’ve never been one to apologize for my art, but I’m afraid this fact may be cast into doubt by my recent endeavors. My death will be seen in the context of suicides both in my family and among my colleagues at GAME. My communications with my brother will be used as evidence to support these lies. I regret that I’ve given them the weapon. But that cannot be helped now. Here is the truth, for those willing to listen.

Upon receiving evidence of my friend Gina Delaney’s murder, I could not proceed any further with my artistic response to her death. I had to take action against the perpetrators. My intention was to finish
Savant
with evidence of two final crimes: the one you just saw, and a companion piece showing my revenge against my brother and his whore. But I suppose that has not come to pass.

I don’t argue that my hands are clean. I have never claimed to be innocent. But I cannot abide the idea of my brother standing before the world pretending to virtue. He is a grotesque fiend and must be known as such.

He is aware that I’ve begun to discover the truth about him, so for the past several days, I have been evading men he has sent to silence me. Abetting him
in this have been the pornographer Benito Mondano, Blake’s security goon John McClaren, and their mercenary James Pryce. There are others as well, a whole black mob of them, but you will find that these are the principals in my execution.

My only desire now is for the world to hear this shred of the truth I’ve been able to uncover. The truth about IMP, the truth about my family, and the truth about the horrible murder of at least one innocent young woman. Whether you believe it is up to you. But the facts are there, and I hope that this testament makes it impossible for my brother to keep them from the light.

The screen cuts to black.

I look out my window as I collect my thoughts and notice lights going on across the street. A garbage truck pings as it stops on its way up the block. Billy’s case spins through my head. Most of it isn’t too compelling: the weight of the rock, the ephemeral light analyses, the marks on her wrists distinguishable only to him . . . Something about that snags my train of thought.

The marks on her wrists
.

Billy’s phantom binding marks would be hard to detect because of Gina’s real scars, put there by her repeated suicide rehearsals. Yet Olya had told me that Gina had cut herself in the bathtub the night before she died. Though the wounds weren’t deep enough to be life threatening, there would have been serious cuts that should have shown up in the morgue photos. But they exhibited no recent damage. So why would Olya tell me a story like that?

Unless she was trying to make it seem like Gina was recently suicidal.

I can feel myself start to integrate into Billy’s theory all the little discontinuities and suspicious details one observes in an investigation. I force myself to stop.

I look down at the viscera of Billy’s last connection to the outside world. In the dim predawn light filtering into my apartment, I can see reflected against the wall a blinking glow from the phone’s indicator LED. The sedate pulse tells me that it’s connected to the net. In ten hours, Billy’s orders will send his story into the public domain.

There’s a part of me that just wants to let the program run, come what may. It makes me grind my teeth to realize it, but Billy’s video has seeped into me. God help me, but I believe him.

But you just had to name me, didn’t you?

I bring my bottle down hard on the fragile electronics. The light goes out, leaving the room still and dark.

Billy’s created enough bedlam with his
Unmasking
already. A ring of privacy activists have started combing databases and news accounts to assemble a literal postmortem on the incident. The tally so far stands at forty-one arrests (mainly for the people caught with kiddie porn and not fast enough to wipe their drives before the police barged in), fourteen civil lawsuits, eighty-nine divorce filings, seventeen emergency custody hearings, five resignations of public officials, almost a hundred terminations “for cause,” three more suicides, and one domestic murder.

Of course, another ghost rattling her chains is Gina. But if Olya and Blake are really guilty, what then?

The police would be one option, but how does that play out?

I walk into Nash’s office with the story that one of his suicides was actually a murder, and I know this because of a secret multimedia game created by another dead artist. Billy’s death was clearly effected with professional élan, and his killers left nothing incriminating except his video about Gina. While intriguing, it would be pulped into pixel soup by any reasonably sober attorney—never mind the kind of legal firepower Blake Randall could deploy. The video Gina shot is compromised as evidence, since I personally corrupted the official copy. I can’t imagine, in a country where Phil Spector remained free for half a decade, that Olya and Blake wouldn’t walk. And I suspect neither could a prosecutor with half a brain.

Billy must have made a similar calculation. Is this what pushed him into the role of self-appointed avenger, or failing that, what prompted him to make sure his case reached the public?

And what about his case? If what he says is true, that means, Jimmy, that you’re in business with people who murder innocent girls. And, knowing this, maybe your life is in danger as well.

Like Billy said, “He knows you know. Do you think he’ll let you live?”