Looking Glass

by Andrew Mayne

  “With better parking spaces,” she adds.

  “I’m not the one Park should be worried about. You don’t even hide the knife.”

  “No need to when all eyes are on you.” She gives me a wink, then goes back to her cubicle.

  It’s a tempting thought, to be sure, but I’m still not ready to throw away my moral compass, even if I can’t read it.

  A few minutes later I get an instant message from Park asking me to come to his office.

  “What’s up?” I ask from the doorway.

  “Close the door and have a seat.”

  You can tell the really important office in an intelligence-contracting company, because it’s the biggest one with no windows.

  Park has dozens of screens on his walls showing all kinds of bullshit stats meant to impress whatever government spook who comes in here curious where all their money is going. What they don’t know is that Park can flip a switch and play Overwatch on them when he thinks nobody is watching.

  He leans back and wipes his eyes. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “How about my own office so I can play my games in privacy, too.”

  This gets me a sharp look. I clearly pushed the wrong button.

  He jabs a finger at me. “That’s the problem. That’s why no university will hire you right now.”

  “Actually, I had that attitude before. The reason they won’t hire me is because campus-safe-space snowflake types are a little uneasy with a professor who was acquitted of stealing a corpse and accused of shooting a man in cold blood.” Did I mention the Joe Vik thing was complicated? It was Jillian who shot Vik, but I took the heat. I may have denied Red State America a female vigilante hero, but I also spared her more drama than either of us could have imagined.

  Park is in a weird position. He knows DIA values me more than him. His project is just a video game if it lacks good players. Birkett told him to hire me, and he did so reluctantly. Now he’s stuck with me if he wants to keep this enterprise going.

  For me, the game is seeing how he takes his frustration out on me. There are only so many ways he can maneuver. The smart one would be to ask me how he can stop acting like an asshole and turn this sham show into something useful. Which is the last thing he’ll ever do, and that’s because Park is under the delusion that he’s smarter than me.

  He doesn’t realize that brilliance is a kind of binary thing. You either got it or you don’t. If you do, a 130 IQ and a 170 aren’t that different, so long as you know how to apply what you got.

  Richard Feynman, my personal hero and one of the greatest physicists who ever lived, scored a 128 on his army IQ test. That wouldn’t have gotten him into Mensa. Meanwhile, the guy with the highest IQ on record is a bouncer at a nightclub and spends his free time reading fantasy novels. Tell me that guy is smarter than the man who corrected Stephen Hawking’s science papers.

  “If you’re not happy, you’re welcome to leave any time you want,” says Park.

  “If I take you up on that right now, how long before you text me? Will I make it to the front door? My car?” I’m not one to enter dick-measuring contests, but I’ve been on edge.

  “You don’t know the kind of power I have here,” Park replies acidly.

  I glance at his gaming monitors. “What? Your video-game league?”

  “Cavenaugh may like you, but you don’t know how they work. You’re one fuckup away from their shit list. If you make them look bad, things could be even worse. If you make me look bad, you have no fucking idea what I can bring down on you. I know things about you. I didn’t just hire you because Birkett wants to fuck you. I looked into you. There are things about that whole serial-killer fiasco that don’t add up. Things involving people close to you.”

  He’s talking about Jillian. Does he know she pulled the trigger? Does he know something else?

  I can only imagine what kind of data he has on his terminal. That’s not quite true—I got him to give me special privileges without realizing it—but I’ve never actually probed around.

  What I do know is that threatening me is one thing, but mentioning Jillian is something else entirely. I owe that woman more than just my life.

  Ever since she picked me up off the pavement of her diner when a meth-head hooker and her boyfriend beat the shit out of me, she’s been the bright, shining beacon in my life, even when I’m not so sure what I’m supposed to do with that light.

  I stand up. Park’s eyes widen. I take my company phone from my pocket—the secure one that costs more than my truck—and throw it into his TV wall, smashing a plasma screen and sending out a small shower of sparks.

  I then lean on his desk, knuckles down, and push my face into his.

  “The last guy to threaten someone I cared about? I shoved a lethal injection needle into his neck.”

  I realize two things in that moment. One is what I already suspected: I am not the same man who went into that forest to hunt Joe Vik. The other: I’ve just made Park piss himself.

  “I can have you arrested!” Park yells at me as I head for the door.

  “And I can have Cavenaugh bail me out and kick you out of here by tomorrow.”

  It’s an empty threat, but next to me coming for him in the middle of the night, it’s what he fears the most.

  I’m halfway home when I get a call from Birkett on my personal phone.

  “What the fuck did you say to Park? He’s on the phone yelling at Cavenaugh that you should be put into custody.”

  “He made a threat.”

  “Like what? He was going to fire you?”

  “No. Like he had intel on someone I care about.”

  There’s a long pause. “Shit. That just doesn’t fly. I’ll look into that. Maybe you should stay away from the office for a little while.”

  “You think?” I reply sarcastically. “I wasn’t planning on coming back. Plus, Park would probably have me arrested.”

  Birkett laughs. “That ain’t gonna happen. The only reason he has his little project was so I could get my hands on you … for the DIA. Cavenaugh isn’t the only one who wants whatever is up your sleeve.”

  “It’s empty.”

  “Don’t let them hear that. And bullshit. Anyway, just go out of town while I work on this.”

  “Already planning on it.”

  “Any place in particular?”

  “Yeah, somewhere I can take my mind off this: Compton.”

  “Hilarious.” She doesn’t hear me laugh. “Oh, shit … You’re one weird son of a bitch.”

  I’m an angry one, too. I’ve realized that all those empty compartments aren’t so empty. They’re filled with rage. I need to channel it on something other than some douchebag like Park. I need to catch a killer.

  After the Grizzly Killer case, I realized Joe Vik wasn’t the only one with a troublesome, risk-taking gene. My own DNA told me what I already knew: I’m as much of an outlier as he was. Different in my particulars, perhaps, but still apart from most humans on this planet.

  Like Joe Vik, I need to hunt.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  COMMUNITY WATCH

  William Bostrom greets me at the door with a broad smile. His house is in a working-class neighborhood in Willowbrook. The cars in the driveways aren’t all new, but the yards are nicely kept and it’s a far cry from the image most people have of South Central Los Angeles. That’s not to say we aren’t a half mile from gang territory, but it’s not some urban dystopia filled with burned-out cars and constant gunfire.

  “Before we get started, I don’t want to raise any false hopes,” I explain.

  “Understood.” He guides me over to his dining room table, where he’s laid out stacks of folders in neat rows, exactly what you’d expect from an accountant. “I’ve got every missing-persons report I could get over here. I’ve got folders of all the registered sex offenders over here.” He points to a map covered with red x’s. “This shows Chris’s route home, all the possible places he might have gone, and I put x’s
over all the offenders.”

  “That’s a lot of x’s,” I reply as I sit down.

  “Most of them are guys who picked up hookers. But I needed something to start with.”

  I looked at all the documents. “Normally I like to work with electronic data. It’s easier to sort that way. I know a twenty-four-hour scanning service.”

  “I’ve got that covered already. I made my own database.” He points to a laptop at the far corner of the table. “Started it a few weeks after Christopher went missing. I can e-mail you the files.”

  “Please do.” I drop my bag and pull out my own laptop. “The first thing we want to do is to take all of the missing-persons data and look for some kind of anomaly.”

  “Like what?”

  “Are there more missing children in this area than a city with a comparable demographic? Like Atlanta?”

  “You mean where black people live?”

  “More or less. White victims get more coverage and are handled differently, or at least that’s my perception.”

  “And black folk don’t talk to the police when something goes down.” He thinks for a moment. “How do we look for anomalies?”

  “I have a piece of software.”

  “MAAT? The thing you used to get Joe Vik?”

  “More like MAAT 2.0. It’s designed to find predator patterns. I call it Predox.” Other than Jillian, William is the first person to whom I’ve admitted that Predox is real. After my encounter with Cavenaugh’s overzealous enthusiasm for any half-baked tool that could be used for better or worse by the military, I decided to keep it on the down low.

  To be totally honest with myself, when William brought me this case, somewhere in the back of my head I started thinking it was time to field-test Predox.

  “I’ve read the paper you wrote on MAAT, but explain it to a simple accountant,” says William.

  “Do you know how they beat Garry Kasparov in chess with a computer?”

  “Raw numbers?”

  “Not quite. There are more possible game-board configurations five moves into chess than all the particles in the universe. That’s why even though you can win chess in a handful of games, chess masters can still give computers something of a run for their money.

  “Deep Blue, the computer that beat Kasparov, was designed to evolve strategies. It didn’t calculate every possible move—just the ones that would beat him. If a different chess master sat down that day, one that Deep Blue hadn’t been programmed to beat, then the outcome might have been different.”

  “So there’s still a chance for humans,” replies William.

  “No. Not a prayer. Computers are getting better than we are at chess, go, and a hundred other things. And when they catch up, they still keep getting better. Our only hope is figuring out how to work with them and put enough of ourselves in them that they stay our friends.

  “The way Predox works is that I taught him to think like a scientist. When I give him a set of data, he uses part of it to build a hypothesis based on a correlation: all redheaded people are Irish. After he has his hypothesis, he tests it with the other set of data. If it confirms the hypothesis, then it becomes a theory until he encounters a Lebanese girl with red hair and has to modify his theory.”

  “Kind of like Bayesian statistics?” asks William, who works with numbers all day.

  “Very much. What makes Predox special is that he also gets better at understanding data. He can take an image and recognize it’s probably a woman and start making certain inferences—even ones that are nonobvious. He can tell you with a high probability if the photo was taken by a stranger you handed the camera to or a friend. Friends stand closer. It can also tell you how tall the photographer was by the angle of the photo. That’s not even counting what he can read in facial expressions.”

  “Have you thought about selling this?” asks William.

  “There are other tools out there.” I don’t tell him I’ve had offers, or that that’s what I’m most afraid of. “Predox makes the best tool only for its intended purpose.”

  “Finding bad guys.”

  “No. Helping me think.”

  “Predox is you.”

  William catches me off guard. I’d never thought about it that way. While I’d tried to make an all-purpose research tool, what I’d really done was program a computer to follow the same steps I would to solve a problem.

  “Something wrong, Dr. Cray?”

  “It’s Theo, by the way. Just Theo. And no. Everything is fine.” I’d gone silent because I had a realization that Predox might not only think the way I do; in some fashion, it might also have my own biases. There might be better ways to solve a problem that I was ignorant about. I needed to be mindful of that.

  We spent the next few hours entering data from the Department of Justice’s statistics database and the FBI’s public ViCAP data set, setting Predox up to look for correlations and anomalies. Nothing stood out immediately above the statistical noise.

  This was what I was afraid of. In Montana, the population was far smaller and a serial killer stood out like a sore thumb if you knew where to look.

  Los Angeles has a population twenty times that of Montana. That means you could hide twenty Joe Viks there, or a hundred slightly less prolific serial killers.

  If Christopher’s abductor didn’t have a very high rate of activity, he’d be impossible to detect with my system.

  I spend the next several hours trying to massage the data and get the most out of the missing-persons reports. I even flick through the photos, looking for something that Predox can’t find.

  In the end, it’s my worst fear as a scientist: nothing. Not even weak conclusions to calibrate. Just an empty data set.

  I find myself staring into space, vision blurry. William puts a hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay. Get some rest and I’ll show you where Chris went to school in the morning. If nothing hits you, then I’ll take you back to the airport.”

  This man accepted his loss a long time ago, now he’s just trying to make sure it’s okay to put it all to rest.

  There’s one more thing I can do. It’ll put me in more hot water, but right now I’m in the “zero fucks to give” zone.

  I’d bet anything that Park hasn’t pulled my clearance yet. That means I can do a records search and have a request sent to LAPD and the FBI for anything they have relating to Christopher or other abductions. It’s bending the rules and possibly illegal, but hell.

  I log in to the data acquisition request system and put in a pull request.

  Tomorrow I’ll find out if it went through or if I’m going to jail.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  LATCHKEY

  “Chris would usually get himself up and make breakfast before heading to school,” William tells me as we stand in his driveway. It’s a cool Los Angeles morning, and children ride by on bicycles as they head to school.

  “Did he walk or ride?” I ask.

  “Ride. Most of the time.” William unlocks his garage door and raises it to show me the interior.

  The walls are lined with secure metal cabinets. He notices me eyeing them. “Accounting records.”

  “Don’t you use a service to store them?” I ask.

  “Most of them. But for some clients I need to be able to have easy access.” He walks over to a bicycle leaning against a stack of file boxes.

  It’s a BMX bike with Transformers stickers. “They found it where he was abducted.” He sighs. “Just yanked off the street.”

  I take a photo of the bike with my phone. There’s nothing unusual about it, but the ordinary is where the extraordinary likes to hide.

  “And nobody saw anything?” I ask as William locks the garage door.

  “Not that the police told me. And nobody I spoke to. Any luck on getting those files?”

  “I have a request in. We should know later today.”

  We start down the sidewalk, heading toward Chris’s elementary school, which has the rather uninspired name 134th Str
eet Elementary School.

  Cars are pulling out as people head in to Los Angeles traffic and off to work. William’s neighbors are mostly a mix of black and Hispanic people, although I notice a few older whites.

  “Did Chris have any friends he went to or from school with?”

  “Nothing on a regular basis. Kids at that age are always changing alliances. Chris was also a bit of a loner. It’s easier to be a black nerd now … maybe not so much then.”

  I was a solitary kid even before my dad died. Having one more excuse to retreat into my head only made me that much more of an introvert.

  As we walk along the sidewalk, I glance into open windows and take note of the houses with extra-thick bars and security cameras.

  We reach a large, open field that’s a greenway for the tall electrical towers connected to the power plant that snake their way through Los Angeles. William points to a patch of weedy grass near the sidewalk. “That’s where they found his bike.”

  There’s a fair amount of traffic, but not a lot of houses nearby. It’s easy to see how afternoon commuters wouldn’t think anything of a car that slowed down to talk to a boy riding his bicycle along.

  “Was Chris the kind of kid that would talk to strangers?” I ask.

  “He knew better. But he was a friendly kid. He’d talk to anybody, but he’d never get in a car with them.”

  Which suggests that Chris may have been pulled from the street and off his bike. But out here in the middle of the day, that would attract some attention. It’s one thing to ignore a kid talking to the driver of a car, but to not tell the police you saw a child dragged into a vehicle?

  Chris’s abductor must have been very lucky that day or had a vehicle like a van that would make it easy to shield what he was doing from drivers.

  But a van or some other premeditated way to snatch a kid implies some forethought, bolstering William’s fear this wasn’t an isolated incident. I won’t know about that until I have more data.