by Reece Hirsch
Chris drew a deep breath, leaned in close across the table, and told Zoey the entire story, holding little back. Chris knew that if he was going to get Zoey to help him, it would have to be about Sarah, and it certainly couldn’t be about BlueCloud.
When he was done, Zoey made a show of studying him. “Well, I wouldn’t have taken you for the type.”
“And what type is that?”
“The sort of guy who goes batshit in middle age, dates younger women.”
“Well, batshit is a little strong.”
“And I can understand why the police are skeptical—the evidence for kidnapping sounds pretty thin. But they also probably don’t appreciate how unusual it is to have both of those emails originating from Spain.”
“Exactly,” Chris said. “So do you think they could be kidnappers?”
The amused expression disappeared from Zoey’s face. “I think that if Enigma and Ripley, and the people they work with, want to hurt you, then they would be capable of kidnapping—and worse. But I have one question for you.”
“Yes?”
“Why would they kidnap Sarah? You’re the one they want, right?”
Chris paused, taking another sip of his beer. “That’s a good question, and I don’t know the answer. But I get the sense that this may be some kind of game that they want me to play. I think they want me to come after her, but I don’t know why.” The thought hadn’t really crystallized until that moment.
Zoey regarded him with an expression that he couldn’t quite read. “Is your life always this intense?”
“No, not so much, actually,” Chris said. “Look, you talk like you know things about them. I need to know what you know.”
Zoey listened to the band for a while, weighing her answer.
Finally, she spoke. “I do know someone who has done business with them. And he’s here in the Bay Area.”
“Who is it?”
“Eddie Reiser. He’s really a slimeball’s slimeball. He’s some sort of high-tech pornographer, that’s all I know—and all I care to know.”
“What sort of business does he have with Ripley and Enigma?”
“I have no idea, but I saw his name and website mentioned once in an IRC post by Enigma.”
“Where do I find him?”
“His website is PantherSex.com.”
“Thank you,” Chris said.
“Don’t thank me yet. You haven’t met Eddie Reiser. Prepare to be slimed.”
“I’ll wear my parka,” Chris said.
CHAPTER 12
To find Eddie Reiser, Chris started with the website, PantherSex.com, which touted itself as an “online spectator brothel.” Chris had to hand it to Reiser—he had done the near-impossible—he had discovered what appeared to be a new way to pervert human sexuality online.
Although Chris hated to contribute to Reiser’s coffers, he bought an entry-level online subscription for fifty dollars and browsed the website. Apparently, the online spectator brothel experience involved accessing live feeds from webcams from a series of bedrooms that were staged like porno movie sets. One room looked like a Las Vegas honeymoon suite. Another room had a mattress that was in the middle of what looked like a polar bear exhibit at a zoo. Looming over the bed was an enormous stuffed polar bear. Chris could not even begin to imagine who the audience might be for this. He chalked it up to one of the forty-seven Rules of the Internet—if it exists, there is porn of it.
Chris completed an online registration form for those who wanted to be one of the performers in the spectator brothel. He provided a prepaid credit card and fake name that he used for investigating online scams. He would have to provide his credit card information. A half hour later he received an email that read, “Welcome to PantherSex.com!” and provided an 800 number that he was to dial if he was ready for “the wildest action on the Internet.”
He called the 800 number and got a breathy, recorded female voice: “Are you ready for some wild action? Please stay on the line and an operator will be with you soon.”
After about three minutes of waiting, a sleepy-sounding woman operator picked up the phone. “Welcome to PantherSex.com. What’s your name?”
“Sam.”
“Hi, Sam. So you’ve checked out our website and you’d like to be a part of the online spectator brothel experience?”
“That’s right. Sounds like fun.”
“Are you a police officer or affiliated with law enforcement in any way, Sam?”
“No.”
“Sorry, but we have to ask. What’s your credit card number?”
Chris provided the information and waited while the operator ran the card and presumably performed some sort of background check on him.
The woman returned. “Okay, when would you like to book your session?”
“What’s your earliest availability?”
“Hmm, let’s see,” she said. “Oh, we had a cancellation for the eight o’clock spot tonight. Does that work for you?”
“That’s perfect.”
“Are you looking for a male or female partner?”
“Female.”
“Any special requests or restrictions that we should know about?”
“No.”
“Great. You should arrive at least a half hour early for orientation. Come to 2578 Windward Lane, off Highway 1, just south of Pacifica.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Great.” The operator paused. “Oh, I see that you’re in luck.”
“How’s that?” Chris asked, really wanting to know.
“You’re in the Polar Bear Suite.”
As Chris drove south down Highway 1 to Pacifica, the dusk and gauzy fog gave the light a strange gray-green cast. It was impossible to locate the setting sun, and everything was evenly lit as if by fluorescent bulbs. Pacifica was only a twelve-mile drive from San Francisco, but it felt like a very different place. San Francisco is famous for its fog, but Pacifica is the true fog capital of the Bay Area. The community was also known for surfing beaches like Linda Mar and ocean-view apartment buildings that occasionally toppled from crumbling cliffs into the sea.
Chris pulled off onto an unlikely looking private road just outside Pacifica. There wasn’t even a mailbox on the street, but there was a security camera mounted on a tree. The narrow, paved road wound up a hillside to a large, well-maintained brick and clapboard ranch house. If the police ever did decide to raid Reiser’s establishment, he would have plenty of warning. Chris knew, however, that state and federal authorities did not consider Internet vice to be an enforcement priority, unless it involved child pornography or exploitation.
There were six cars parked in the driveway, so he assumed it was a busy night at the Internet brothel. Chris walked up to the front porch and rang the doorbell. There was a Christmas wreath still on the door and, if he didn’t know better, he would have assumed that the place was home to a well-off family that enjoyed its privacy. That impression ended the instant that Eddie Reiser opened the door. Eddie was wearing a Taylor Swift T-shirt, a studded leather vest, and curly, greasy-looking brown hair that was styled in what could only be described as a mullet. He strode quickly up the hallway and opened the door without hesitation.
“I’m Eddie. And you must be …?” He consulted a small clipboard. “Sam Cantrell.”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
“You ready to get down, Sam?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, we need to talk about that, Eddie.”
“You’re lucky. The Polar Bear Suite is usually booked weeks in advance.”
Eddie grabbed him by the bicep and hustled him down the hallway into the living room, which was tastefully decorated with traditional furniture. The sofas were covered in plastic slipcovers, probably to make it easier to spray down the area with disinfectant.
“I’ve got someone who’s looking forward to meeting you. And, let me tell you, she’s ready to go, if you know what I mean. Have a seat.”
“Eddie, we really need to talk
.”
“Hang on there, stud. I’ll be back in a minute and you’ll both get a chance to ask your questions.”
The slipcover squeaked as Chris sat on the couch. He examined his surroundings, which looked like they might have come straight out of a Thomasville Furniture catalogue, except that the details were wrong. There were hunting prints on the walls, cherry furniture, and tasteful damask fabrics on the sofa and chairs, but the coffee table held a porcelain dish full of condoms rather than mints, alongside DVD cases for porno videos.
Eddie returned with a woman in her early thirties who looked a little like a biker chick, with a hard face that was not unpretty. The woman wore jeans and a faded western shirt with pearl buttons that was open halfway down to her navel. Eddie ushered her over to the couch, and Chris stood to greet her in what he quickly realized was a bit of misplaced chivalry.
“Melinda, Sam. Sam, Melinda.”
Melinda met his gaze, and then her eyes traveled the length of his body, all the way down and back up again. She was very businesslike about it.
Chris turned to Eddie. “I need to speak with you in private for a minute.”
Melinda turned to glare at Chris. “Oh, give me a break.”
“No, no, this has nothing to do with you. I just need to speak with Eddie about something.”
Eddie motioned for Chris to join him in the kitchen. “We’ll be right back,” he said to Melinda. “Don’t worry. I haven’t lost a man yet.”
Once they were in the kitchen, Eddie launched into a practiced spiel. “So you’ve got cold feet, right? It’s a natural reaction. But once you’re in the heat of things, you’ll completely forget about the audience.”
Chris raised his voice a bit to cut through Eddie’s patter. “Eddie. Listen to me. I didn’t come here to have sex. Signing up was the only way I knew to get your address.”
Eddie slammed his palm on a granite counter top. “I knew it! You’re a damn vice cop. I’m callin’ my lawyer.”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Then who are you?”
“I’m looking for some people that I believe you’ve done business with—they go by the online names Enigma and Ripley.”
Eddie seemed flustered. Finally, he said, “You didn’t answer my question—who the fuck are you? Did they send you here?”
“My name is Chris Bruen. I’m a lawyer investigating a matter for a client.”
“Get off my property!” Eddie said. “What, it’s not enough that they rip me off, but now they send some dickwad lawyer to intimidate me? Well, I will not be intimidated! Get out, man!”
Eddie reached into a drawer on the kitchen island. After the sound of clattering kitchen utensils, he came up with a pistol and pointed it at Chris’s chest. “I said get out!”
“Easy there, Eddie,” Chris said, raising open palms. His heart hammered as he imagined a headline in the next morning’s Chronicle about the law firm partner shot to death by an Internet pornographer after signing up for sex in the Polar Bear Suite. “They didn’t send me. I’m not here to cause you trouble. I just want to find those hackers. A friend of mine is in danger and I think they’re responsible.”
“So are you working for a client or helping a friend?” Eddie said, still agitated but regaining some calm from the gun in his hand. “You’ve got to work on your story, man.”
“How did they rip you off?”
Eddie paced around the kitchen, apparently deciding whether it was in his interest to talk to Chris. “You really want to get those bastards?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, that’s what I do.”
“So you put people like me in jail?”
“Not you personally. Tell me about your problem with Enigma and Ripley. But first, please, Eddie, the gun?”
He slowly lowered the pistol. “Well, I dealt with Enigma. I don’t know that other one. He wanted to market some of my videos online to the Asian market. You know, the Japanese love their porn, but they like it cute—all Hello Kitty and shit. He was going to repackage the sex tapes, create a website with a different look and feel. I thought we were going to make some good money off it.”
“And what happened?”
“He did what he said he was going to do—up to a point. He created the website, posted the video, and the site was apparently pulling a lot of traffic.”
“So what was the problem?”
“The asshole refused to pay me. They kept all of the subscription fees and content that I provided. Told me to go fuck myself.”
“So what did you do?”
“Well, I did a little research about who I was doing business with. Sure, I should have done that before. Maybe I’m too trusting.”
“Yeah, that’s probably it,” Chris said.
Eddie shot Chris a look but continued. “I learned pretty quickly that Enigma was part of a bad crew. Everyone who knew them told me to write the thing off as a loss and let it go. Enigma said that if I pushed the issue, they were going to come out here, take my entire business, and bury me in the backyard.”
“And you believed him.”
“Fuckin’ A I believed him. I’m not about violent crime. Some call this ‘victimless crime,’ but I say, ‘how is this even a crime to begin with?’ In my business, everyone gets their rocks off, everyone walks away happy.”
“Tell me how I can find them.”
“I spoke to Enigma a couple of times on the phone.”
“Did you ever get an email address or a number?”
“No, he always contacted me. But there was one time when Enigma called me—it must have been last July or August—and I could tell it was an international call from the number on the caller ID.”
“I don’t suppose you know which country?”
“Nah.”
“Never mind,” Chris said. “And there’s nothing else you can tell me about them? Did you ever talk to a woman? Anyone named Ripley?”
“Nah.”
Melinda shouted from the living room, “Eddie! What the hell?”
Eddie looked hopefully at Chris. “As long as you’re here and all …”
Chris responded with a look that could not have been clearer. “I think I’d better be going now.”
“Okay, but listen, you should go out through the kitchen door. I don’t think Melinda is the type to respond well to sexual rejection.”
“Good idea.”
As Chris stepped through the kitchen door onto the back porch, Eddie whispered, “If there’s any reward involved, remember that I’m a victim here. They stole my intellectual property.”
“Based on what I’ve seen,” Chris said, “there’s nothing intellectual about it.”
“Listen, man. One more thing. If you do manage to find him, he can’t know that I helped you. When he said he’d kill me, I believed him.”
Melinda shouted Eddie’s name again from the living room, louder and angrier this time.
“Sure, Eddie. Now you’d better get back to your customer.”
Chris tiptoed down a gravel path alongside the house, past the living room window where Melinda was still waiting. The curtains were open, so he ducked low to the ground as he passed. While he was willing to pursue a crew of ruthless international cybercriminals, he was not about to tangle with Melinda.
The moon was a dim night-light glowing through the clouds as he pulled his car onto Highway 1 and headed north back to San Francisco, weighing his options. Eddie had not given him much, but Chris was going to run down every available lead. If he was right, Sarah had been abducted more than twenty-four hours ago, and his chances of finding her were dwindling with every hour that passed.
CHAPTER 13
Chris pulled off of Pacific Coast Highway into the parking lot of Pacifica State Beach, better known as Taco Bell Beach. True to its nickname, there was a modern blond wood structure right on the sand that housed a Taco Bell. During the day, the place was frequented by surfers who ate chalupas on the patio in wet board shorts. At night, the clientele consis
ted mainly of high school kids and the usual assortment of non-calorie-counters.
Even with the windows rolled up, Chris could hear the surf pounding about a hundred yards away. As he dialed his cell phone, he gazed out at the moonlight glinting off the serrated crests of the dark waves.
The phone rang several times, then a gruff voice answered: “The caller ID says Chris Bruen, but that’s impossible.”
“Been a long time, Charlie,” Chris said.
“It’s been so long that I just assumed you were dead, and then here you are, calling me on my cell at ten at night. Imagine my surprise. I was just having a beer and watching Law & Order—one of the good ones with Vincent D’Onofrio.”
“It’s good to talk to you again.”
Chris could hear Charlie suppress a yawn on the other end of the line. “If it’s so good, then we would have done this sooner. I thought you’d forgotten about your old buddies at DOJ now that you’re making the big, sweet law-firm dollar. How’s private practice treating you?” Charlie McGuane had been a deputy prosecutor in the Computer Crimes Section when Chris had been at the DOJ. During their run together as a team, Chris and Charlie’s string of successful convictions was rivaled only by their series of massive bar tabs at The Irish Bank.
“I’m getting along. I heard you’re a chief prosecutor now. Congratulations.”
“Thanks. Just filling the power vacuum that you left behind. But, I have to ask, buddy, why are you calling after all this time? And why at this hour?”
“I have a favor to ask. I need you to pull some phone records for me. Tonight. And you don’t have to say it—I know I’m going to owe you big-time when this is done.”
“Would you like to tell me why you want this?”
“I’d rather not. It’s important, and it’s personal. Someone I care about may be in a lot of danger.”
“Have you tried law enforcement? They’re sometimes quite effective.”
“This is not something that they’re particularly interested in. The records belong to an online pornographer named Eddie Reiser, so that might provide some cover if you need it.”
