Intimate Relations: A Finn O'Brien Crime Thriller

by Rebecca Forster

  "No safe. Nothing."

  He pushed the clothes back so that they hung neatly. Cori was in the drawers.

  "Nothing here. No lockbox, not even for the jewelry."

  "Perhaps it's not real and not worth protecting."

  "It's real," Cori said.

  They left the closet and stood together in the big bedroom. The bed was wider than a normal king size. It sat on a platform that faced a wall of glass. The headboard was upholstered in blue velvet. Roxana —and whoever might be with her in the morning—would see the sunrise over the hills. At night, they could watch the sunset. If Roxana wanted privacy, a remote panel near the bed lowered the shades. The bedside tables were solid blocks of black marble . There were no drawers. Nowhere to tuck away a diary, an address book, or a calendar. The bedroom was as slick and clean as a showroom. Even the huge picture over the bed seemed generic. It was nothing but a canvas with a swath of black painted across it.

  The bathroom was the same. Roxana would have lounged in a claw-foot tub, looking through walls of glass. There was a freestanding sink and a vanity. Both were very modern, very clean. It felt like a stage where Roxana acted happy and made herself beautiful for her audience.

  "Did you notice there are no real pictures?" Cori asked.

  "Except for the one of herself," Finn said.

  "And that's a big one. But it's strange not to have something to remind yourself of family, or friends, or travel. Or what about all those magazines she's been in?" Cori said. "Wouldn't you think she would frame those tear sheets?"

  "Some people are not sentimental," Finn said. "Or this is not her only home. Perhaps this is—"

  "A playpen?" Cori said. "Roxana might have been bringing the Asylum men here. You know, take more pictures, more fodder for her side business."

  "If she played that game at the party the other night, someone would have known her name."

  "Not necessarily. They could bring the role-play home or not own up to knowing her name. Besides, when we talked to them the woman was dead. If they had an issue with her they weren't going to broadcast it. The only reason we knew about Jeremiah Stotler is because of Bev."

  "True," Finn said. "Let's do a title search and find out if she owns any other property. And if it's true that her side business was blackmail, then there must be a record of deposits somewhere."

  "If she used banks," Cori countered. "Bitcoin or PayPal are the thing these days. This woman was nineteen; she made her living on line. She's not going to waste her time on calendars or deposit slips."

  "Then where is the computer Sam was looking for?" Finn said. "This place is clean. Not so much as a dead insect about."

  "Karyn knows her business," Cori said.

  "I'm a friggin' cleaning freak, don't you know."

  Karyn came in and threw herself on the bed. Dressed, her hair still wet, she had the glow of someone for whom all was right with the world.

  "We're admiring your handiwork," Cori said.

  "To tell you the truth, it was a pretty easy gig. No parties. Nothing like that. I could scrub the whole place in three hours and she paid me for five."

  "Do you know anything about her personal life? Friends you might be able to identify?" Finn asked.

  "No, sorry. I cleaned the house, and it was like I wasn't even here. I get that a lot. The men always notice me, but the women act like I'm a toadstool." Karyn twirled a lock of hair and checked out the ends. "When I'm rich and famous, I'm going to be nice to everyone."

  With that, the girl fell back on the mattress, spreading her legs and arms like a kid making a snow angel. She looked at Cori. She turned her head to Finn and gave him a look that he couldn't quite decipher. She wiggled her fingers, and tipped her chin up. Cori suppressed a laugh when Finn crossed his eyes.

  "Oh, come on you guys. What kind of detectives are you? This is a clue."

  Karen stopped wiggling her fingers and pointed straight up. Cori and Finn looked at the ceiling.

  "And we're looking at what?" Finn asked.

  Karyn laughed and scrambled up. She knee-walked over the mattress to the giant picture above the bed.

  "Not the ceiling, silly. The picture."

  With one hand she held the side of the big, unframed picture. The fingers of the other one ran along the bottom of the canvas. The next time Karyn flashed them a mischievous grin was just before they heard a click and a whir. The click was clear and had come from inside the bedroom; the whir was faint and was coming from the closet. Karyn scrambled off the bed.

  "Come on. You're not going to believe it."

  Finn and Cori followed her back to the closet, but it looked different now. Some of the shoes and purses were gone and in their place was an opening and beyond that...

  "Well, I'll be," Cori said. "A panic room."

  21

  "If you see a jar that says drink this, don't," Cori said.

  Karyn giggled. "I would if it made me taller."

  "'Tisn't a panic room," Finn said.

  They were in an eight-by-ten room. There was no bed, no food, and, something he found very interesting, no obvious way to call outside for help. The room was a state of the art studio filled with recording equipment, lights, cameras, and desktop computer. There was a full soundboard and a bank of screens. From her social media posts, it was clear Roxana recorded all around her house, not in the sterile environment of a studio.

  "Did Roxana say what this room was for?" Finn asked.

  "Are you kidding?" Karen sniffed. "She didn't know I knew about it, so of course she wouldn't say anything. I found this when I was cleaning, you know, dusting under the painting."

  "Who dusts under a painting?" Finn asked.

  "I told you she was good," Cori said. "I'd hire you if I could afford you."

  "It's a gift," Karyn said. "Anyway, I almost peed my pants when that wall opened up. Then I couldn't figure out how to get it closed, and I almost peed my pants again. I knew Roxana would fire me if she thought I was snooping—which I wasn't— but then I figured out how to close it."

  "And where would that little doohickey be?" Cori asked.

  "It's a button under the brown Louis Vuitton bag. It took me forever to find it."

  Finn went into the closet, lifted the bag, and saw the button. Whoever had constructed this room had done an excellent job. The mechanism to close the hidden door rested in an indentation that looked to be nothing more than a flaw in the wood. He shook his head in admiration and then smiled as he imagined Karyn rummaging through the place, half out of her mind as she looked to cover her tracks. He rejoined the women just as Karyn was showing Cori how to operate the equipment.

  "Is our warrant good for this?" Cori asked.

  "We are in the house," Finn said. "What are you showing us, Karyn?"

  "Okay," she said. "So this is like top-of-the-line recording equipment. I mean, it would cost me a fortune to do a high end audition tape if I had to pay for a studio decked out like this."

  Her fingers ran over the computer keyboard. The center screen populated with file folders. She leaned across to the soundboard and adjusted the levels.

  "When I figured out that Roxana was gone more than she was home in the last year, I started using this place."

  She sat back and crossed her arms. Her long hair had dried into waves and curls. She smelled like chlorine and sunshine. Karyn tipped her head back, splitting her attention between Finn and Cori. Finn could see a spattering of freckles across her nose.

  "I made a couple of audition tapes, and that was it," Karyn said. "I swear. I mean, what was I hurting? I didn't take anything. I was really careful."

  "I don't think Roxana will be caring any now," Finn said.

  Karyn smiled and he saw the girl she had been before dreams of Hollywood entered her head.

  "I don't really care about her, but I wanted you guys to know that I wasn't trying to take advantage. I just work so hard, you know? She had so much."

  "You're good as far as we're concerned," Finn
said. "Besides, if snooping was a crime, half the world would be in jail."

  "What's this?" Cori held up a cap of some sort with little buttons dangling from it.

  "Oh, it's for MoCap—motion capture," Karyn said. "The studios use it for like super hero stuff. Video games. You put it on your head, put those little round things on your muscle points, and it records your movements. I don't know if Roxana ever used it. Could be she was thinking about doing some sort of app of herself."

  Cori put it aside. She had no idea what the girl was talking about.

  "So, Karyn," Finn said. "If you've something you think we should see, now would be a good time to bare your soul."

  "I already bared everything and you're interested in my soul? That's funny." Karyn giggled and then raised her hands over the keyboard like a maestro. "Okay, then. Let's get this show on the road."

  Cori settled on a stool in the corner of the room. Finn perched on the edge of a desk behind Karyn. She clicked on the first file folder. It was labeled Lips. The screen pulled up a close-up video of Roxana Masha Novika's beautiful, naked lips. The picture was so close they could trace each delicate vertical line. There was a dusting of blonde down on her upper lip. When her lips closed in a certain way, there was a small dimple on her cheek.

  Roxana formed words, silently at first and then they heard her voice when she repeated them. That voice was both sultry and innocent. It was rich the way the heady scent of a rose is tempered by the sharp thorns. Finn sat up straighter. Cori leaned forward. They glimpsed her teeth, the front ones slightly larger than they should be, but charming nonetheless. They saw her tongue as she formed each word. The languid lull of her voice was seductive. No one would ever hear her speak again, but they were hearing her now.

  I...

  I want...

  I want you...

  I...

  I love...

  I love you...

  Finn glanced over his shoulder at Cori. It took her a moment to tear her eyes away from the screen. Karyn swiveled in her chair.

  "What did I tell you?" she said. "Crazy."

  "What in all the heavens is this for?"

  Finn had traded places with Cori. He now sat on the stool and Cori leaned against a wall. Karyn had pushed her chair back, and put her feet up on the edge of the soundboard. She was close enough to the keyboard that she could maneuver the cursor. She had stopped clicking the file folders in order. Each represented a different body part.

  Some were more interesting than others. It was Cori who had cried uncle after watching five minutes of Roxana's elbow flexing. They had fallen silent as they watched her brown eyes. Over the course of the video, as Roxana turned at different angles, those eyes became hazel and gold and then brown again. Her lashes were long and thick.

  "She looks like she's doing some kind of exercise," Cori said.

  She and Finn had seen the battered pulp of this woman's face at the crime scene. For Cori it was hard to reconcile what she was seeing on the screen with the horror of Roxana on the coroner's table. They both started when Karyn snapped them out of their trance.

  "It kind of is."

  "What?" Finn said.

  Karyn turned her head so the detectives could see her move her eyes in the same way Roxana had. Her gesture was at once mechanical and graceful. She stopped after a second.

  "It kind of is like an exercise. It's for the editor," Karyn said. "This way he can choose a different angle, or a different look when he edits the film."

  "So you think she was making a movie?" Finn asked.

  "I don't know." Her fingers tapped out a little tune on the arms of the chair. She tipped her head one way and then the other. "Honestly, I've never seen anything like this. The lips I get. The eyes. But elbows? Toes? Fingers? She has a good ten minutes on her kneecap. That's just over-the-top."

  "This whole thing has been weird from the beginning," Cori said.

  Karyn dropped her feet and pulled the chair up close.

  "You haven't seen anything yet," she said. "But I'm not sure you want to see it."

  The cursor hovered over a file labeled vagina. Karyn waited for their decision. Cori shook her head, and held up her hand. Finn said:

  "Sure, we've seen enough for now."

  They would open each file eventually, but screening something this intimate in Roxanna's own house didn't feel right. For Finn it was hard to reconcile the physical beauty of this woman and her lovely voice with the person she was in life. He would have been led astray by her as would any man. But there was a difference between being led astray and being overwhelmed by such passion that you would want to destroy her. What was it that drove such a person to kill? The discovery of her callousness? Or was it that Roxana shared herself with millions of people she didn't know? Perhaps it was her greedy heart? Or maybe it was rejection? Rejection was the greatest human hurt of all.

  "I've got something interesting here," Cori said.

  Finn turned to see her pulling a metal box from a desk drawer.

  "You want me to shut this down?" Karyn asked, as Finn joined Cori.

  "Unless there's something else besides her body parts on there," Cori said. "Any other files? Ones that aren't video or audio?"

  "Like emails and stuff?" When Cori nodded Karyn said. "Sorry, she had a laptop for that."

  "With a silver decal of a woman on the front?" Finn asked.

  "Yep," Karen said. "That's the one."

  "Can you see if you can find it?"

  "Sure, but I've gotta run in about twenty minutes. I've got an audition for a soap."

  Finn and Cori thanked her for her help and had her write down her contact information. She went off to search for the computer, as Cori opened the fireproof box.

  "Bingo." She smiled. "Paper trail."

  Cori handed him a packet of paper. It was folded in thirds, and bound in pale blue cover stock. White string wrapped around the pouch and was secured around a grommet. Finn opened it and started to read while Cori continued to sort through the other contents of the box.

  "I've got a key, and I've got codes," she said. "I told you she wouldn't use banks. She's got a code for ADA, Ethereum, and Bitcoin."

  "And I've got a contract," Finn said. "It is drawn up by the same corporation that sent Sam on his errand. And look who else is mentioned in such a fine legal document. Mr. Enver Cuca."

  Finn held out the papers for Cori to see. Before she could react, Karyn was back.

  "Hey you guys I'm out of here. Been really good to meet you."

  Before she took her leave, she cast them a naughty look and pulled the computer from behind her back. She gave it a merry little shake.

  "Look what I found."

  On the front of the tablet was a shiny, silhouette decal of a naked woman, the kind of thing you'd see on a trucker's mud flap. Roxana Masha Novika was about to start talking.

  22

  "My eyes are going to fall out of my head if I have to stare at this computer screen one more second, O'Brien."

  Cori threw herself back in her chair, stuck her legs out in front of her, and let her arms dangle by her sides. Her head lolled, her eyes closed. When no sympathy was forthcoming, she opened one eye. Finn hadn't heard a word, so intent was he on his own research.

  "Lot of fun you are." Cori pushed herself upright, picked up her mug, and saw that it was empty. "Want me to bring you back some coffee?"

  "What?" Finn spoke but it took him a second to tear his eyes away from his screen. "I'm sorry. I'm getting nowhere with this. That corporation on Roxana's contract has ten different iterations in as many countries. It's a circle I can't close. We're going to need to go back to the cybercrime folks."

  "We'll be lucky to get in the queue a year from now." Cori picked up his mug and held both in one hand as she perched on the side of his desk. "What about Lapinski?"

  "He's got his own work," Finn said. "Besides, it's a fine line asking him to be so deeply involved. You've already sent him the video."

  "It's no
different than getting a statement from a witness, place of employment, blah, blah, blah," Cori said.

  "Except that we've provided him evidence."

  "A video recorded by a Ring doorbell that he could have gotten the same way I did?" Cori rolled her eyes.

  "All I'm saying is we need to be cognizant, Cori," Finn said. "And wouldn't the contents of that computer be just a bit over the line?"

  "I wasn't going to give him free rein. Just a few tidbits. Geeze." She chuckled. There was no mistaking her weariness for the job or her fondness for the subject that was Thomas Lapinski. "But it would be cool if we could pull him in on this fulltime. He's kind of amazing isn't he? That man is so darn smart and. . ."

  Finn laced his hands behind his head ready to listen to her sing the praises of the attorney, but Cori came to her senses, smoothing over the hint of affection she had for the man.

  "Still, you're right. We don't have a darn thing for all his work on that Ring image," she said.

  "He explained it was a problem with the quality of the video. Sure the man can't work miracles," Finn said.

  "Say it ain't so." Cori leaned over Finn's desk to peruse the mess of papers and the image on his computer screen. "Are you finding anything in the phone records that will help?"

  "Not what I had hoped for," he said. "I've six months of Roxana's records, and not one call to the Cucas’ numbers."

  "Do you have all their numbers?"

  "Two cells and a land line. If there's another it would have to be a burner."

  "Entirely possible," Cori said. "The little miss was involved in some pretty rotten stuff. Burners wouldn't be out of the question. Look at the poor reverend she dug her claws into. He nearly had a heart attack when we showed up on his doorstep."

  The interview with the man of God had been a hoot. From his bad dye job to his brood-mare caps and matchy-matchy leisure outfit, he was everything Cori knew he would be. The minister would look great on television with the right lighting—he might even look sexy and diabolical in a mask and tuxedo at an Asylum party— but without his girdle and make-up there wasn't much to recommend him.