In Digital We Trust

by Rahul Bhagat

  IN DIGITAL WE TRUST

  Rahul Bhagat

  First Edition

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Copyright

  ONE

  IT was a miserable day to be outside. The afternoon sky was overcast and foggy. On the ground, bare trees waited for spring. It had rained heavily the night before, and a drizzle, on and off, continued in its aftermath.

  A police trawler braved the swollen, muddy river and cut across the waves. It slowed as it approached the human body bobbing in the water. A couple of crows, disturbed by intruders, screeched and reluctantly flew away from their feast.

  On the shore, a knot of people, most in police uniform, had gathered at the wharf to wait for the trawler to return with the body. Standing among the group was Detective Martin Stump. Six feet tall and somewhat heavyset, Martin had tightly curled white hair and a thick, bulbous nose. He wore half-rim glasses and a dark trench coat. Next to him stood a young woman, Natalie, with her black hair trimmed in a bob cut. It gave her face an almost angelic look. She was short, probably five feet two or five feet three, and looked out of place in that group of mostly middle-aged people.

  Detective Stump gazed out at the river and awaited the arrival of the trawler. Five more years, he reminded himself. Five long years before he would be eligible for retirement. He glanced at Natalie and thought, given the way retirement age was creeping up, that it would probably be seventy-five by the time she retired. He was done with this shit, ready to hang his hat. And honestly, he didn’t understand the world anymore. It was changing so fast. Vehicles that drove themselves, digital assistants that talked and behaved like real people, walls that turned into giant TV screens. The landscape had become frighteningly unintelligible; he just wanted to fade into the sunset.

  In his heart, Stump thanked the police chief for assigning him easy cases like this one. The chief knew he had sacrificed a lot, and was letting him coast to retirement.

  He looked at Natalie and said, “This is what the job is. Nothing glamorous.”

  She shuddered, pulled her coat tighter, but didn’t say anything.

  The trawler was back. It docked with a gentle thump, and two burly men brought a black body bag down the ramp. They carried the thick plastic bag, glistening in the rain, away from the dock and placed it under the shed, on the hard concrete floor. Water droplets gathered in puddles on the bag and flowed down its side in rivulets.

  One of the burly men opened the zipper and revealed the contents inside. A fully clothed man, bloated and bleached, wearing a blue windbreaker, lay curled up in a semi-fetal position. The body gave off an offensive smell.

  Natalie let out an almost imperceptible gasp when she saw the body and took a small step back. Stump noticed that; he tapped her shoulder and extended the bottle of Vicks Vaporub to her.

  “Rub it under your nose. Otherwise, the smell will linger in your head for days,” he said.

  The coroner, hands safely in gloves, turned over the body and quickly checked the area around the neck and shoulders. She stood up and said, “Clear case of drowning.”

  “How can you tell?” Natalie asked.

  She gave her a quizzical look. “I was wondering, who are you?”

  “Graduate student at the police academy, specializing in cyber crimes,” Natalie said.

  Detective Stump stepped into the conversation. “She’s with me. She’ll shadow me for the next three months. It’s part of her internship.”

  The coroner shrugged and proceeded to explain. “Of course, we need an autopsy to confirm the cause of death, but there are indicators. Look at the position of the neck.” She pointed at the dead man. “Facing down. If he had died on the ground, rigor mortis would have set in with his neck sideways.”

  “I see.” Natalie nodded.

  “Second, there is usually a frantic struggle before the person drowns. This final fight can be so intense that it ruptures muscles, especially in the shoulder and neck area. Look at this.” She gestured Natalie to come closer for a better look at the purple and red bruises on the body’s neck. “Injuries like this tell us that the victim was alive in the water at the time of death and not placed there already dead.”

  Detective Stump noticed something white in the dead man’s ears. “What’s that?” he asked.

  The coroner pulled out the wireless device. “Bluetooth earphones. Probably listening to space age music when he jumped.”

  After completing her inspection, the coroner zipped the body bag and told Stump the medical examiner's report would be ready in a couple of days.

  Natalie and Stump walked back to their car.

  “What next?” she asked.

  “Let’s follow up with the jogger who reported him jumping off the bridge,” Stump said. He stopped and looked at Natalie. “You’ll witness a lot of death in your career, something you’ll have to get used to. It gets easier with time.”

  “Oh no. I can take the gore and blood,” Natalie replied. “I gasped because he looked so much like my cousin Justin. Justin is my best friend from childhood, and you know, just the thought of him dead was shocking. I feel so bad for this man. Whatever made him check out so soon?”

  “People have their demons,” Stump said and started walking again.

  TWO

  BY the time they reached Cartier Bridge, about half an hour upstream, the rain had stopped and the fog was starting to lift. It looked as if they might even get a peek at the sun. Stump and Natalie got out of the cruiser and stood in the small gravel parking lot by the roadside. The ground here was much higher, and the wind blew stronger. The road in front of them steadily rose and reached the level of the bridge a short distance away.

  Another car pulled up, and a wiry guy emerged from it. He was the jogger who had reported seeing the victim jump from the bridge. It had been over twenty-four hours since he reported it. Bad weather and a raging river had made it difficult to spot and retrieve the body.

  “Mr. Frinkel?” Stump addressed the man. “Thanks for coming out to see us here.”

  “Not a problem. Anything I can do to help,” Mr. Frinkel said.

  He told them that he ran on this bridge most evenings.

  “I like the sweeping vista,” he explained. “I park here in this gravel lot, run across the bridge to a park on the other side, loop around the park, and come back. It’s a good six-mile route.”

  Martin Stump took out a picture of the dead man and showed it to Mr. Frinkel.

  “You saw this man jump from the bridge?” he asked.

  Frinkel bent his head for a closer look. “Yes, that’s him.”

  “From what distance?”

  “About two, three hundred feet.”

  “And you are positive about it?”

  “Yes, I am. I passed him on the way to the park. He was wearing a bright-blue jacket. Hard to miss,” Frinkel explained.

  “Let’s check the spot where he jumped from,” Stump said with disinterest and started walking toward the bridge. Natalie and Frinkel followed along.

  Cartier was an old cantilever bridge built in the mid-twentieth century. It carried four lanes of traffic and had a pedestrian sidewalk on the right side. As they approached the bridge, its thick crisscrossing metal beams loomed over them. Rows of rivets ran along the side
of rusty beams. The sidewalk was wide, almost six feet across, and was separated by a metal railing from the traffic. A similar railing was on the other side, but here it was topped by a wide metal bar that made it easy to stand on.

  “Tell me from the beginning,” Stump said to Frinkel.

  “Yesterday too, it was cloudy. As usual, I parked my car, completed my stretches, and started running,” Frinkel said. “As I was running, I saw this guy up ahead, walking back and forth on the sidewalk, waving his hands and talking to himself. He was in the middle of the path, and I felt annoyed. I thought, ‘What a jerk, no concern for others. How are people going to get past him?’ But when I got closer, he saw me, stopped talking, and moved to a side. Our eyes met, and I could clearly see he was very stressed.”

  “You had a good look?” Stump asked.

  “Yes.” Frinkel nodded. “But my mind moved on to other things. I kept running, crossed the bridge, looped around the park, and came back on the bridge. As I was running, away in the distance, I saw someone in blue standing on the railing. I got closer, and I realized it was the man I had passed earlier. But then he abruptly got down and started pacing again. I was thinking that maybe I should stop and see if he needed help. But then all of a sudden, no warning, he got back up on the railing and jumped. Jumped right in front of my eyes.”

  “And you immediately informed the police?” Stump asked.

  “Yes,” Frinkel said.

  They had arrived at the spot where the man had jumped from. Stump and Natalie looked around for any clues, but there was nothing. The railing was high; it came almost to Natalie’s nose as she stood against it and looked at the horizon. Stump went next to her and looked down at the boiling, angry river, its rain-fed, muddy water swirling and forming eddies. He felt dizzy and turned back. Mr. Frinkel stood in the middle of the sidewalk, kicking a rivet on the floor of the bridge.

  “You said he climbed down the first time?” Stump, a little absentminded, asked Frinkel.

  “That’s right. Probably someone was trying to talk him out of it. He was talking to someone,” Frinkel said.

  Back at the parking lot, Stump thanked Mr. Frinkel and told him he’d be in touch if they needed him again.

  On the way back to the station, Natalie asked Stump, “Do you think it’s odd that he hesitated before jumping?”

  “Not really. It’s common for people to have cold feet in moments like that. I’d like to know who he was talking to and why that person didn’t alert anyone. It’s been over a day, and we still don’t have a missing-persons report that matches his description.”

  “That’s a cake walk. No problem.” Natalie perked up. “I’ll get in touch with his cell phone carrier for a log of his calls.”

  THREE

  LATER that week, Detective Stump asked Natalie to meet him in his office. They had received the coroner’s report, and he wanted to review the suicide case.

  He looked around his office. It was just a small, squarish room with enough space for a large desk and a couple of visitor chairs, but he felt grateful to have it. For years, he occupied a cubicle in the large, open space outside, and he hated it. He hated the crowd, the cacophony, the constant movement of people around him.

  The wall that separated his office from the corridor outside was a living wall, and he fiddled with the controls and made it transparent. The entire wall was made up of large multipurpose video display tiles. With a finger tap, one could turn it into a transparent glass wall, or into a giant TV screen, or into an opaque wall with any pattern one could imagine.

  Natalie came into the office and took a seat opposite him. Looking at her, he marvelled how quickly she had settled into her role. Even with him, she had developed a sense of informality that would have been impossible for others. He was known to be a little aloof; the man tended to keep to himself. But Natalie was different; she wasn’t exactly a shrinking violet. He had seen that in her conversations with the coroner.

  “Is that your daughter?” Natalie asked Stump and pointed at the picture behind him.

  There was a long cabinet along the back wall, and above it, a narrow, rectangular window that spanned the entire length of the wall. He had two pictures on the cabinet, one with a kid, and the other was a group photo. At the far end of the cabinet, there was a fish bowl with a large goldfish in it.

  Stump turned back and picked up the picture of the kid from the cabinet. The picture was taken in the backyard of a house. He was sitting on his butt, and a young girl, her hair in a ponytail, stood beside him. She was leaning against him, with one arm around his neck, and both had hundred-watt smiles.

  “Yes. That’s Melodia, my daughter,” Stump said with a smile.

  “You look so young,” Natalie said.

  “That was a long time ago. She is twenty-four now, probably looks like you.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Oh, I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

  Stump abruptly turned back and picked up the other picture from the cabinet. It was a group picture of teenagers surrounding Stump and a priest.

  “And this here is my church group. I mentor these kids,” he said.

  “Nice,” Natalie said and craned her neck to look at the picture in Stump’s hand.

  She pointed at the fishbowl and asked, “Do you have a name for your fish?”

  “No, just Fish. Valerie was retiring and moving to Florida. She left the bowl in my office with a note to take care of it. That’s how it ended up here. Do you want to close the door? I’d like to review the suicide case now.”

  Natalie got up and closed the office door. Stump fiddled with the controls and managed to turn the living wall from transparent to a grey pattern with a video screen in the middle of the wall. He opened the case file on the screen. When Natalie saw the drab background color of the living wall, she walked over to the manual control and changed the pattern into pink rose petals.

  “That was such a depressing design; you need some color in your office,” she said.

  “Oh God, no. Too bright,” Stump protested.

  She changed the pattern to slices of orange.

  “Tone it way, way down.”

  She changed it to a blue-green underwater shot of an ocean.

  “More.”

  Patterned gravel bed of a Japanese rock garden.

  “That’s better. Let’s review now. What are the facts of the case?” Stump asked. He felt a little irritated.

  Natalie came back and sat down in her chair.

  “Death from drowning. Coroner’s report confirmed,” she said. “What a terrible way to die, by suffocating. Why not just take a pill and go to sleep?”

  A struggle started in Stump’s mind. One the one hand, he felt annoyed by Natalie’s chatter, but he also felt a fatherly feeling toward her, and that part of him didn’t mind it at all. He took a deep breath. “Let’s focus on the case, Natalie. What do we know about the victim?”

  “Gabriel Rhee, twenty-nine years old, ran a successful family catering business for airlines. Wife Nancy, married for two years. No kids.” Natalie rattled off the details.

  “Good. Anything we don’t know?”

  “Who was he talking to? His phone records show that the last call was to his brother, about an hour before he jumped,” Natalie said.

  “He could have been just talking to himself. Very stressed people tend to do that. It looks like a straightforward case of suicide to me.”

  Natalie nodded. “What do we do next?” she asked.

  “Every case requires the due diligence," Stump said. "We establish Gabriel’s movements in the hours leading up to his death. Who did he see? What did he do? And piece together a timeline of his activities — to rule out any foul play.”

  FOUR

  DETECTIVE Stump checked Gabriel’s address and knocked on the door. It was answered by a woman in an embroidered skirt that went down to her ankles. The top was equally ornate. She was Gabriel’s wife, Nancy, a tall and thin woman with
long, cascading hair, green eyes, and high cheekbones.

  When she opened the door, Stump found her looking distraught, but she sounded well and stayed in control. There were signs of a grieving widow; Stump could see a red tinge in her eyes.

  Nancy ushered them inside. The living room was large but crowded with stuff. Stump and Natalie took a seat on a couch flanked by aboriginal totem poles. Nancy sat across from them. The wall behind her sported a large picture of a rising sun with text under it in an unfamiliar script. There were peacock feathers in a vase and dreamcatchers hanging from the ceiling.

  Natalie immediately got down to business and started building a timeline of Nancy’s activities on the day of Gabriel’s suicide. Nancy didn’t report her husband missing because it was nothing new. He regularly disappeared for days without telling her.

  The interview didn’t reveal any new leads. After completing the timeline, Natalie pretended to have missed recording some details and requested Nancy to repeat them. This was intentional. Stump had instructed her to use this technique to find out if she was lying or trying to mislead.

  Stump thought the kid was doing a commendable job and would do well in life.

  A voice from Nancy’s phone interrupted the conversation.

  “Hey, Nancy—it’s Simon. Sorry to interrupt, but you have a meeting with Derrick in half an hour. This is about going over investor pitch deck. You want me to switch it to a virtual?”

  “No, let it stay tactile,” Nancy said, her voice very businesslike. “I’m leaving. Tell him to wait for me in the office.”

  “Want me to instruct the car to wait at the curb?”

  “Sure, Simon.” Nancy softened. “You’re a sweetheart. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Oh, shut up. This is nothing.” Simon giggled.

  Stump looked at Natalie; she nodded to confirm she was done.

  “I had a few more questions. Do we have time?” Detective Stump asked Nancy.