Chasing the Dime

by Michael Connelly

  "Sure, Henry, whatever you want. What are you working on now?"

  "Nothing. Just some bullshit paperwork."

  "Then you're ready for tomorrow?"

  "I'm ready."

  Condon nodded.

  "Either way we win," he said. "Either we take his money or we put in the patents, go to the press with Proteus and come January there will be a line like fucking Star Wars at ETS to talk to us."

  Pierce nodded. But he hated going to Las Vegas for the annual emerging-technologies symposium. It was the most crass clash between science and finance in the world. Full of charlatans and DARPA spies. But a necessary evil just the same. It was where they had first courted one of Maurice Goddard's front men ten months before.

  "If we last until January," Pierce said. "We need money now."

  "Don't worry about that. My job's finding the money. I think I can come up with a few intermediary fish to hold us until we land another whale."

  Pierce nodded, feeling reassured by his partner. With the situation he was in, thinking forward even a month seemed ridiculous.

  "Okay, Charlie."

  "But, hey, it's not going to matter. We're going to land Maurice, right?"

  "Right."

  "Good. Then I'll let you get back to work. Tomorrow at nine?"

  Pierce leaned back in his chair and groaned. His last protest on the timing.

  "I'll be here."

  "Our fearless leader."

  "Yeah, right."

  Charlie knocked sharply on the inside of the door, perhaps some sort of signal of solidarity, and left. Pierce waited a moment and then got up and locked the door. He wanted no more interruptions.

  He went back to the printouts. After the short report on Lilly Quinlan came a voluminous report on William Wentz, owner-operator of Entrepreneurial Concepts Unlimited. The report stated that Wentz sat at the top of a burgeoning empire of Internet sleaze, from escort services to porno sites. These sites, though directed from Los Angeles, were operating in twenty cities in fourteen states, and of course reachable by the Internet from around the world.

  While the Internet companies Wentz operated might be viewed as sleazy by most, they were still legal. The Internet was a world of largely regulation-free commerce. As long as Wentz did not provide photos of underage models engaged in sex and slapped the proper disclaimers on his escort sites, he operated largely in the clear. If one of his escorts happened to be taken down in a prostitution sting, he could easily distance himself. His site clearly said in a prominent disclaimer that it did not promote prostitution or any sort of trade of sex for money or property. If an escort agreed to take money for sex, then that was her decision and her web page would immediately be eliminated from the site.

  Pierce had already gotten a general rundown on Wentz's operations from Philip Glass, the private detective. But Zeller's report was far more detailed and a testimonial to the power and reach of the Internet. Zeller had uncovered Wentz's criminal past in the states of Florida and New York. Contained in the printout package were several more mug shots, these depicting Wentz and another man named Grady Allison, who was listed in California corporate records as the comptroller of ECU. Pierce remembered that Lucy LaPorte had mentioned him. He skipped past the photos and read Zeller's opening summary.

  Wentz and Allison appear to be a team. They arrived from Florida within a month of each other six years ago. This after multiple arrests in Orlando probably made things tough for them there. According to intelligence files with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE), these men operated a chain of strip joints on the Orange Blossom Trail in Orlando. This was before the Internet made selling sex, real or imagined, so much easier than putting naked chicks on a stage and selling blow jobs on the side.

  Allison was known as Grade A Allison in Florida because of his skill in recruiting top talent to the stages of the Orange Blossom Trail. Wentz and Allison's clubs were called

  "No Strings Attached," as in full nudity.

  IMPORTANT NOTE: The FDLE box connects these guys to one Dominic Silva, 71, Winter Park, FL, who in turn is connected to traditional organized crime in New York and northern New Jersey.

  BE CAREFUL!

  Their pedigree as mobsters didn't surprise Pierce. Not with the way Wentz had been so calculatingly cold and violent when he encountered him in person. What he did find to be an odd fit was the idea that Wentz, the man who could calmly wield a phone as a weapon and wore pointed boots for better bone crunching, could be the man behind a sophisticated Internet empire.

  Pierce had seen Wentz in action. His first and lasting impression was that Wentz was muscle first and brains second. He seemed more the caretaker of the operation than the brains behind it.

  Pierce thought of the aging mobster mentioned in Zeller's report. Dominic Silva of Winter Park, Florida. Was he the man? The intellect behind the muscle? Pierce intended to find out.

  He went to the next page and found a summary listing Wentz's criminal record. Over a five-year period in Florida he had a variety of arrests for pandering and two arrests for something listed as felony GBI. There was also an arrest for manslaughter.

  The summaries did not include final disposition of these cases. But reading them —arrest after arrest in five years —Pierce was puzzled as to why Wentz was not in prison.

  More of the same questions came up when he went to the next page and reviewed the arrest summaries of Grady "Grade A" Allison. He, too, seemed to have a recurring pandering pattern. He also topped Wentz in the GBI category with four arrests. He also had an arrest labeled "sexbat-minor," which Pierce interpreted to be a charge of having sex with a minor.

  Pierce looked at the mug shots of Allison. According to the attendant information, he was forty-six years old, though the photos showed a man who might be older. He had grayblack hair greased back on his head. His ghostly pale face was accented by a nose that looked like it had been broken more than once.

  He picked up the phone and called Janis Langwiser again. This time he did not have to wait as long for her to take the call.

  "Couple quick questions," he said. "Do you know what pandering is, in the legal sense of the word?"

  "It's a pimp charge. It means providing a woman for sex in exchange for money or goods. Why?"

  "Wait a minute. What about felony GBI? What is GBI?"

  "That doesn't sound like anything from the California penal code but usually GBI means 'great bodily injury.' It would be part of an assault charge."

  Pierce considered this. GBI, as in hitting someone in the face with a phone and then hanging him off a twelfth-story balcony.

  "Why, Henry? Have you been talking to Renner?"

  He hesitated. He realized he shouldn't have called her, because it might reveal that he was still pursuing the very thing she had told him to stay away from.

  "No, nothing like that. I'm just looking at a background check on an employment application. Hard to figure out what all of this means sometimes."

  "Well, it doesn't sound like anybody you would want to have working for you."

  "I think you're right about that. Okay, thanks. Just go ahead and put this on my bill."

  "Don't worry about it."

  After hanging up, he looked at the last page in the report from Zeller. It listed all of the websites that he had been able to link Wentz and ECU to. The single-space listing took up the entire page. The sexual permutations and double entendres contained in the site names and addresses were almost laughable but somehow the sheer volume of it all made it more sickening. This was just one man's operations. It was staggering.

  As his eyes scanned down the list they held on one entry —FetishCastle.net —and he realized he knew it. He had heard of it. It took him a few moments and then he remembered Lucy LaPorte telling him that she had first met Lilly Quinlan at a photo shoot for the FetishCastle site.

  Swiveling his chair to face the computer, Pierce booted up and went online. In a few minutes he arrived at the FetishCastle home page. T
he primary image was of an Asian woman wearing black thigh-high boots and little else. She had her hands on her naked hips and had adopted a stern schoolteacher pose. The page promised subscribers that herein were thousands of downloadable fetish photos, streaming videos and links to other sites. All free —with a paid subscription, of course. The coded but easily decipherable list of subject matter contained within included dominants, submissives, switches, water sports, smothering and so on.

  Pierce clicked on the JOIN button and jumped to a page with a menu offering several different subscription plans and the promise of immediate approval and access. The going rate was $29.95 a month, chargeable each month to a credit card of your choice. The menu was careful to note in large letters that the billing record would appear on all credit card statements as ECU Enterprises, which would of course be easier than FetishCastle to run by the wife or boss when the bill came in.

  There was an introductory offer for $5.95, which allowed access to the site for five days.

  At the end of that period your credit card would not be charged further if you did not sign up for one of the monthly or yearly plans. This was a one-time offer per credit card.

  Pierce pulled out his wallet and used his American Express card to sign up for the introductory offer. Within minutes he had a pass code and user name and he entered the site, coming to a subject tab page with a search window. He went to the window and typed in "Robin" and hit ENTER. His search returned no hits. He got the same result with a search for "Lilly" but then had success with "girl-girl" after remembering that it was how Lucy had described the modeling session with Lilly.

  He was connected to a page of thumbnail photos, six rows of six. At the bottom of the page was a prompt that would allow him to go to the next page of thirty-six photos or to skip ahead to any one of forty-eight other pages of girl-girl photos.

  Pierce scanned the thumbnails on the first page. They were all photos containing two or more women, no men. The models were engaged in various sex acts and bondage scenes, always a dominant female and her subservient subject. Though the photos were small, he did not want to take the time to click on each and enlarge it. He opened a desk drawer and took out a magnifying glass. He leaned close to the monitor screen and looked for Lucy and Lilly, able to work his way quickly across the grid of photos.

  On the fourth screen of thirty-six he came across a series of more than a dozen photos of Lucy and Lilly. In each photo Lilly played the dominant and Lucy the submissive, even though Lucy towered over the diminutive Lilly. Pierce enlarged one of the thumbnails and the photo took over the whole computer screen.

  The set had an obviously painted backdrop of a stone castle wall. A dungeon wall, Pierce guessed. There was straw on the floor and candles burning on a nearby table. Lucy was naked and chained to the wall with handcuffs that looked shiny and new rather than medieval. Lilly, dressed in the apparently requisite black leather of a dominatrix, stood in front of her holding a candle, her wrist cocked just enough for the hot wax to drip onto Lucy's breasts. On Lucy's face was a look that Pierce thought was meant to convey agony and ecstasy at the same time. Rapture. On Lilly's face was a look of stern approval and pride.

  "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were gone."

  Pierce turned to see Monica coming through the door. As his assistant she had the combination to his office door lock because Pierce was often in the lab and she might need access. She started to put a stack of mail down on his desk.

  "You told me you were only going to be —"

  She stopped when she saw the computer screen. Her mouth opened into a perfect circle.

  He reached to the screen and killed the monitor. He felt lucky that his face was discolored and scarred. It helped hide his embarrassment.

  "Monica, look, I —"

  "Is that her? The woman you had me impersonate?"

  He nodded.

  "I'm just trying to . . ."

  He didn't know how to explain what he was doing. He wasn't sure what he was doing.

  He felt even more stupid holding the magnifying glass.

  "Dr. Pierce, I like my job here but I'm not sure I want to work directly for you anymore."

  "Monica, don't call me that. And don't start with the job stuff again."

  "Can I please transfer back to the pool?"

  Pierce reached up to the monitor for his sunglasses and put them on. A few days ago he wanted to get rid of her, now he couldn't bring himself to look at her disapproving eyes.

  "Monica, you can do whatever you want to do," he said while staring at the blank computer screen. "But I think you have the wrong idea about me."

  "Thank you. I'll talk to Charlie. And there's your mail."

  And she left, pulling the door closed behind her.

  Pierce continued to turn slowly back and forth in his chair, staring at the empty screen through dark glasses. Soon the burn of humiliation dissipated and he started to feel anger.

  Anger at Monica for not understanding. At his predicament. And mostly at himself.

  He reached over and pushed the button and the screen came alive. And there was the photo, Lucy and Lilly together. He studied the wax hardening on Lucy's skin, a frozen drip hanging off one pointed nipple. It had been a job for them, an appointment. They had never met before this captured moment.

  He studied the look on each woman's face, the eye contact they shared, and he saw no hint of the act he knew it to be. It looked real in their faces and that was what stirred his own arousal. The castle and everything else was easily fake but not the faces. No, the faces told the viewer a different story. They told who was in control and who was manipulated, who was on top and who was on the bottom.

  Pierce looked at the photo for a long time and then looked at every one of the photos in the series before shutting down the computer.

  27

  Pierce never made it home Wednesday night. Despite the confidence he had portrayed in his office with Charlie Condon, he still felt his days in the hospital had left him behind the curve in the lab. He was also put off by the idea of returning to his apartment, where he knew a bloody mess and cleanup awaited him. Instead, he spent the night in the basement at Amedeo Tech, reviewing the work conducted in his absence by Larraby and Grooms and running his own Proteus experiments. The success of the experiments temporarily energized him, as they always did. But fatigue finally overcame him in the pre-dawn hours and he went into the laser lab to sleep.

  The laser lab, where the most delicate measurements were taken, had one-foot-thick concrete walls and was sheathed in copper on the outside and thick foam padding on the inside to eliminate the intrusion of outside vibrations and radio waves that could skew nanoreadings. It was known among the lab rats as the earthquake room because it was probably the safest spot in the building, maybe in all of Santa Monica. The bed-sized pieces of padding were attached to the walls with Velcro straps. It was a common occurrence for an overworked lab rat to go to the laser lab, pull down a pad and sleep on the floor, as long as the lab wasn't being used. In fact, the higher-ranking members of the lab team had specific pads labeled with their names, and over time the pads had taken on the contours of their users' bodies. When in place on the walls, the dented, misshapen pads gave the lab the appearance of having been the site of a tremendous brawl or wrestling match in which bodies had been hurled from wall to wall.

  Pierce slept for two hours and woke up refreshed and ready for Maurice Goddard. The second-floor men's locker room had shower facilities and Pierce always kept spare clothes in his locker. They weren't necessarily laundry-fresh but they were fresher than the clothes he had spent the night in. He showered and dressed in blue jeans and a beige shirt with small drawings of sailfish on it. He knew Goddard and Condon and everyone else would be dressed to impress at the presentation but he didn't care. It was the scientist's option to avoid the trappings of the world outside the lab.

  In the mirror he noticed that the stitch trails on his face were redder and more pronounced than the da
y before. He had rubbed his face repeatedly through the night, as the wounds burned and itched. Dr. Hansen had told him this would happen, that the wounds would itch as the skin mended. Hansen had given him a tube of cream to rub on the wounds to help prevent the irritation. But Pierce had left it behind at the apartment.

  He leaned closer to the mirror and checked his eyes. The blood had almost completely cleared from the cornea of his left eye. The purple hemorrhage markings beneath each eye were giving way to yellow. He combed his hair back with his fingers and smiled. He decided the zippers gave his face unique character. He then grew embarrassed by his vanity and decided he was happy no one else had been in the locker room to see his fixation at the mirror.