Intimate Relations: A Finn O'Brien Crime Thriller

by Rebecca Forster

  "I doubt Ding Xiang really needed investors. I think what he wanted were men who were powerful, embedded in the mainstream, and shared his vision. They also had to possess a certain unhealthy attitude toward the fairer sex. Asylum members had already proved themselves open to indecent pleasures and a willingness to pay for them. In that context it makes all the sense in the world."

  "Too bad Stotler didn't make the cut."

  "I'm thinking Mr. Stotler is a bit cold for Ding Xiang's liking. The man actually tried to protect the companion Roxana, after all. Stotler has no such soft spot," Finn said.

  "Yeah, but in the end Ding Xiang saved his own butt," Cori reminded him as she held out a piece of paper. "Speaking of which, there's a message for you."

  Finn reached across their desks, took it, read it, and tossed it.

  "Bev is back in her apartment," Finn said, half smiling as he glanced at Cori. "But I've a feeling you knew that."

  "Someone's got to have your back," Cori said without apology.

  "I'm one lucky man to have you," Finn said. "Still, I am sorry she has been banished from Shangri-La."

  "Stotler will snap his fingers for her now and again," Cori assured him.

  "And I'm sure if Mr. Stotler snaps, Bev will be happy to jump." Finn shook his head, not in dismay but in confusion. His ex was a mystery these days. "Still, I'm happy she had nothing to do with the murder."

  Cori thought she should tell her partner that she was glad too, but she answered her phone instead.

  "Lapinski's here." Before the phone was on its cradle, the man himself appeared.

  "Hello, folks. Ready to call it a day?"

  "Five minutes," Cori said. "Finn, is Gretchen meeting us at Mick's?"

  "She is, and I've only to rearrange the files to send off tomorrow. It won't take long."

  Finn turned back to his computer screen. Thomas settled himself on the edge of the desk, keeping one foot on the floor for balance. He unbuttoned his jacket.

  "Take your time," Lapinski said as he leaned over Cori's desk. She gathered up the final reports to keep them from prying eyes.

  "You know everything you need to know," she said.

  "And some things you may not." He tapped his nose and grinned. "I took a look into AIing Inc. The place has a subsidiary of its own. A very elite cyber security firm in Switzerland that's heavy into R&D on Artificial General Intelligence."

  "Like the Alphabet project?" Finn asked as he clicked on one file and then dragged another across the screen. "Feeding books and such into a machine and the machine learns to think?"

  "Kind of, but you're talking about simple pattern recognition. AGI is more intuitive. If I read it right, this place is working on breaking down and then recreating the connection between human emotions, actions, and reaction. I thought all that was something light years away. There's work in Germany that associates sensory information from the nervous system and connects it with environment. Another one called NLP—natural language process—is also fascinating. If Ding Xiang was able to combine all these disciplines, your doll could have appeared to be alive and thinking. She would be both proactive and a reactive. "

  He shook his head, becoming uncharacteristically somber.

  "I can't imagine the programing it took to incorporate all those videos of Roxana. That woman spent hundreds of hours moving her body and mouthing words, but it had to take thousands to make it all work seamlessly in the program."

  "That explains the studio in her house. I get that," Cori said. "What I don't get is the fake apartment."

  "It appears the place was a training ground." Finn looked up from his work. "People reported seeing a woman moving like she was drunk, but it was the companion learning. Emi said they had to repair her when she bumped into things. I think once they put the thing to bed each night, Ding Xiang would either remotely activate her or pay the companion a visit. He wanted to test her in a duplicate of the real woman's environment."

  "I agree," Thomas said. "They had six months to watch her learn. If Ding Xiang didn't like a certain outcome, his team referred back to the files of the real woman and reprogrammed the fake one. It sounds like he wanted her to be as natural as possible, not just some sort of robotic handmaiden."

  "Roxana was just as sick as Ding Xiang," Cori pointed out. "What normal woman would agree to have herself duplicated?"

  "Why not when the payday was so good?" Finn said. "Stotler had ruined her career, so she would be out of the spotlight anyway. Once Ding Xiang tired of his companion Roxana, he would release the real woman from the contract and she could go back to doing whatever she liked. Living a quiet life might be difficult for someone like her, but he wasn't holding her prisoner. "

  "She would still know that doll existed," Cori insisted.

  "And that would mean nothing to her. She might even have taken some perverse pleasure in it. Ethics are in short supply these days," Thomas said. He turned to Finn. "Is someone working on breaking into that chip?"

  "Certainly they are," Finn said. "But I won't hold out much hope. Ding Xiang is as brilliant as you say. Destroying the chip is child's play."

  "I'd love to know what makes that guy tick," Thomas said.

  "Whatever it is, I hope he takes it somewhere else." Cori picked up the blueprints and gave them over to Finn.

  "And how did the great man come and go?" Thomas asked as he watched the hand-off.

  "Years ago a portion of The Brewery was sold off to small manufacturers," Finn said. "The one closest to the property line still had a grain chute that went directly to the Cuca's place. When Ding Xiang identified them as the only ones who could build his girl, he had to figure out how to protect the project and not draw attention to himself. He did his homework, bought that building, secured the lease with the Cucas, and had his team reopen the passage way. The man is meticulous in his planning."

  "But where was the door?" Thomas asked.

  "In the wall behind the bed area," Cori said. "From inside it looked like a crack in the concrete that's why we didn't notice it. We had to open it from inside the chute to figure it out."

  "I imagine the same people who camouflaged the mechanism in Roxana's closet also created the hidden door. It was a thing of beauty." Finn hit send and smiled. "Done."

  "Good for you." Cori put her hands together for her partner, and then veered back to the topic at hand. "Ding Xiang made all these grand plans, but Emi trumped him with a simpler one: destroy the companion. She was going to bash its head in, but Ding Xiang decided to be a showman and parade the real girl and the companion in front of the Asylum crowd. Emi didn't know that he'd sent the real Roxana upstairs or that Enver put the fake in the closet. She assumed it was the companion on the bed just like it had been for six months."

  "Wow," Thomas said. "When you think about it, it's amazing what that man accomplished. The idea, the execution, the cooperation. Incredible."

  "Just not admirable." Finn reached for his jacket. "Because you can doesn't mean you should."

  "That's a conversation you should have with Ding Xiang. A man of faith versus a man of science. Aren't you even the least bit curious where the world can go with all this, Finn?" Thomas asked.

  "I only want to go to dinner," Finn said. "I've a real stomach that needs real food."

  "Actually," Thomas said as he helped Cori on with her jacket. "There is one more thing. Why this specific girl?"

  "I know the answer to that because Roxana backed up all the messages she got from Ding Xiang before she opened them." Cori reached for her purse. "The very first time he contacted her, he proclaimed his love and it never let up. The poor guy was totally awkward but he was smitten. They were a perfect match. Neither of them worked in the real world. Crazy, huh?"

  "Crazy complicated and simple all at the same time. He loves her, she loves money, the Cucas love a challenge, and then Emi Cuca ruins everything because her husband fell in love with the thing he created," Finn said.

  "Can we all say Frankenstein," Cori dr
awled as she put the top on the evidence box.

  "That woman must have freaked when she realized her mistake." Thomas put out his hand and Cori went ahead. Finn fell in step behind the lawyer.

  "Emi was a nut bag too," Cori said. "I think she was so fixated on that doll that the murder registered as a messy mistake. She said she had no idea what she was going to do with the body, she just wanted the companion gone."

  "Don't give her too much sympathy, Cori. She was smart enough to clean her hands and face and to put that smock over her bloody clothes," Finn said. "Not to mention the fact that she was very smart about the murder weapon."

  "Which was what?" Lapinski said as they funneled into the hall.

  "A metal femur. Emi sealed it into the leg of a companion after she did the deed," Cori said. "That's why we didn't find blood after that one point in the workroom. We would have never found it in that doll unless she told us where it was."

  "And after all that, the Roxana companion was still in the house," Finn said. "The body had no face, so Officers Hunter and Douglas didn't know that they were looking at a duplicate of the victim when they opened that closet. If they had, this investigation would have been over before it was begun."

  "And good old Enver can't keep his hands off the thing, so Emi goes off the rails," Cori said. "Do you guys think Enver knew his wife killed the real Roxana?"

  "I don't know." Finn sighed. He shook his head. "He hated Ding Xiang so much, he probably thought he'd done it. "

  "But there would be no reason," Lapinski said.

  "Is there reason to any of this? It's the D.A.'s problem now, thank goodness."

  Finn stepped out of the way to let an officer pass in the hall. That's when he heard Captain Smith call to them. Lapinski went on alone as the detectives detoured into the captain's office. She spoke without preamble.

  "The mayor wants to know when you'll complete The Brewery file."

  "All of it is going off tomorrow," Finn said. "The lawyers will have their work cut out for them."

  "Not really. The D.A. is planning to plead Emi Cuca out if only to keep a whole lot of important people from being dragged into this," Captain Smith said. "A public trial is in no one's best interest, and the circumstances make a murder conviction iffy. The woman's attorney would argue that her intent was to destroy property not take a life. Intent is what the law is all about."

  "Inventive defense," Cori said.

  "And a true one," Finn added.

  "And none of our concern," the captain said. "We did our jobs. Let's move on. Dismissed and good work."

  The detectives took their leave, allowing themselves a fist bump on the way out of the building. Lapinski was leaning on the hood of his car. He pushed off and met them half way.

  "Problems?"

  "A pat on the back," Finn said.

  "Well deserved." Lapinski grinned and took Cori's arm to guide her to the curb.

  "We couldn't have done it without you, Lapinski." Cori kissed him on the cheek when he opened the door for her.

  Finn added 'many thanks' as he zipped up his jacket. L.A. was finally feeling a bit of a chill. He said, "You know, there is something about this that all those rich men will never understand."

  "What's that?" Lapinski asked.

  "If they had thrown in with Ding Xiang, money would flow into their pockets and they would have perfect sex with perfect, ageless women. Yet for all their grand plans of populating the world with manufactured people, all they did was expose the raw power of humanity. Love, jealousy, the protective instinct," he said. "It was all those real things in Emi Cuca's heart that brought them down."

  "Ain't love fantastic." Cori chuckled and swung her legs into the car.

  "It could be," Thomas said. Cori rolled her eyes as he closed the door. Finn put a hand on the attorney's shoulder.

  "Sure, she'll come around," he said.

  "Darn right. Thomas Lapinski never loses a case. See you at Mick's."

  Finn walked to his car. When Cori and Thomas drove past, he raised a hand. Traffic was light in East L.A. What there was of it rolled leisurely past the small houses and sad strip malls. A mother pushed a stroller down the sidewalk while two small children skipped beside her. The sun was going down. The day was ending. People would eat, and make love, and kiss their children, and sleep. They would wake up and do it all over again the next day and the day after that. Most people would never know that living among them were men who dressed up like goats and treated women like animals. They could never imagine anyone wanting to substitute metal and rubber for the warmth of a living, breathing human being.

  As he got behind the wheel of his car and started the engine, Finn thought of Gretchen. There was nothing more exciting than a woman who spoke her own mind and moved by virtue of her own free will. Then his Irish heart corrected itself. The only thing more exciting was a grown woman who could do all that and still make room for rainbows and unicorns. That was a woman he didn't want to keep waiting.

  Finn pulled into traffic, leaving behind any thought of Emi and Enver Cuca. He was no longer curious about Ding Xiang, the man who would be God. He didn't wonder if the body of Roxana Masha Novika would ever be claimed, and Finn O'Brien even forgot the faceless doll that lay, not on a bed of fine linen, but in an evidence room, a thing of no use to anyone.

  If you liked this, you may enjoy: Before Her Eyes

  By Rebecca Forster

  In a remote mountain community, the execution of a grocer and the abduction of a world-renowned model leave Sheriff Dove Connolley searching for a connection, two killers and a woman who is running for her life. Obsessed with finding Tessa Bradley before it's too late, Dove's investigation leads him into a shadowy world where nothing is as it seems, hope is bought and paid for and death has many faces.

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  Thank you for taking the time to read Intimate Relations. If you enjoyed it, please consider telling your friends or posting a short review. Word of mouth is an author's best friend and much appreciated.

  Thank you.

  Rebecca Forster

  About the Author

  Born a Midwestern girl, raised in Southern California, Rebecca Forster earned her MBA and worked in major advertising agencies before she wrote her first book on a crazy dare and found her passion.

  Now a USA Today and Amazon best selling author, Forster is known for her legal thrillers and police procedurals. Over three million readers have enjoyed her fast-paced tales that are known for deep characterization and never-see-it-coming endings.

  An avid court watcher, she is also a hands-on researcher. Rebecca is a graduate of the DEA and ATF Citizen's academy, local police firearms programs, and is a Leaders to Sea participant who adds landing by tail hook on the USS Nimitz to her resume in search of authentic details for her books.

  Rebecca has taught at the acclaimed UCLA Writers Program and various colleges and universities. She is a sought-after speaker at bar and judges' associations, philanthropic groups and has made numerous appearances on radio and television. Rebecca is also a repeat speaker at the LA Times Festival of Books. She volunteers as a patient/family advisor at Torrance Memorial Medical Center and volunteers at middle schools to bring the joy of writing to students. In her spare time, she plays competitive tennis, and travels extensively counting Albania as her number one destination.

  Rebecca Forster is mother to two grown sons, and is married to a Los Angeles Superior Court judge.

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