by Mike Markel
“Tell them you’re a cop?”
He nodded. “Assured them we weren’t looking at them for anything illegal. We just needed some background information on one of their videos.”
“Oh, then I’m sure they’ll get right back to us.” I thought for a second. “Until we can get hold of Abby, best we can do is interview Krista again. Sound good?”
“Sure. You want to ask her about the dollars-per-fuck sheet from the fraternity? See if she was the prostitute?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to do that. When we talked to her before, she was real clear about how she wasn’t a prostitute. So even if it was her at the fraternity, she’s not gonna admit that. Prostitution is illegal; making porn videos is legal. I think that’s the better way to get to her. Besides, if we pile all this shit on her at once, she might just shut down completely.”
We headed out to the parking lot behind headquarters and drove over to Krista’s apartment. Light, thin clouds had turned the sky a pale blue. The TV had said the sun would burn it off by noon.
We climbed to the second floor of the apartment complex and walked past a woman taking her young daughter to the school bus stop. I knocked hard on Krista’s door.
I heard her footsteps approach. There was silence for a moment; she was probably looking through the peephole. I held up my shield. She opened the door.
She looked annoyed and impatient. I didn’t know whether she got off work at two or three in the morning or had to stay later to grunt along with some asshole before he headed off to work or went home to the wife and kids. Either way, she couldn’t have appreciated having to talk to us at eight am.
She was dressed in panties and a loose, sleeveless T-shirt that revealed most of her chest, but she didn’t seem uncomfortable with me and Ryan seeing her like that. Probably the one good thing about being in her line of work when you’re young and trim: not a lot of body-image anxiety. “What you want?”
“We need to talk with you, Ms. Moranu. It’s about Virginia.”
She didn’t say anything as she stood back to let us enter.
“We need to bring you in to headquarters, have you make a statement.”
“Really? Now?”
“Really. Now.”
“I need twenty minutes. Shower. Fix my hair.”
“I’ll give you thirty seconds. Put on a pair of jeans and some shoes. You look fine.”
She stared at me for a few seconds, then turned and walked back toward the bedroom. I got the feeling she was pretty good at deciding whether she had to comply when someone told her what to do. This time she concluded, correctly, that she did.
It wasn’t much more than thirty seconds when she re-emerged from her bedroom. She had put on a bra, a more modest T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and running shoes. Somehow, she had also managed to comb her hair. She could have passed for a young mom—a young mom with a skinny waist and big boobs.
We drove her to headquarters and set up in Interview 1. She kept her movements to a minimum, but I could see her eyes darting around. She took in the battered steel table and the big mirror. She turned her head slightly; I saw her notice the camera setup hanging from the ceiling in the corner of the room.
Ryan went over to the controls on the wall and turned on the system.
I announced the time and date and the names of the people in the room. “Ms. Moranu, we want to get some information from you about the video in which you appear with Abby Demarest.” I held her gaze and waited for her to respond.
Finally, she spoke. “Don’t know about video.”
Ryan had his tablet out. He slid it across the table to Krista. She looked at it for about five seconds. From all her face revealed, it could’ve been a detergent ad. She slid the tablet back to Ryan.
“That’s the video,” I said. “And that’s you. The other person is Abby Demarest, a student here at Central Montana State University. A student in Virginia Rinaldi’s course.” I stared at her. “Can we get past the denials, Ms. Moranu? Save us all some time? The sooner you answer our questions, the sooner you get back to your apartment. Do you understand me?”
“What you want?”
“Why did you make this video?”
She was silent.
“I need you to answer my questions, Ms. Moranu. Why did you make this video?”
“I like to do sex.”
I laughed. “Come on. You do sex for a living. I like being a cop, but you don’t see me doing it off the clock—and recording it. Why did you make this video? Did you get paid for it? Who set it up?”
“Video is legal. Why you ask me this?”
“Yes, making this video was legal. Putting it online was legal. Killing Virginia Rinaldi wasn’t. You’re in a porn video with a student from your girlfriend’s class. Someone kills your girlfriend. You understand why we’re curious? You can’t give us an alibi for yourself. And your pimp is a dangerous guy. You need to help us unravel this. So, let me ask the question a different way: Did Christopher James Barrow set this up? Is he trying to get you into porn?”
She turned her body a few degrees and looked at the wall. “Don’t know what you mean.”
“How did you hook up with Abby? Did she approach you? She knew you from that time you were the guest speaker in Virginia’s course. Was it Virginia? Did she arrange it?”
“Don’t know who Abby is.”
“Who ran the camera? Was it Christopher James Barlow? Virginia? Someone else?”
Krista just shook her head. Maybe she meant she didn’t know. It certainly meant she wasn’t going to tell me and Ryan.
I opened the folder that Ryan had put on the table. I pulled out the photo roster of the students in the course. “Do you recognize any of these students? Did any of them shoot the video?”
She shook her head.
“How did the video get online? Did you arrange for it? Did someone else?”
“Didn’t know it was online.”
I’ve done hundreds of interviews. Krista was an extreme example of a suspect who was so afraid of something—something bad that she’d already done or something that might happen to her—she wasn’t going to tell us anything, even if it was in her best interest to talk.
Maybe she was afraid she was bisexual or a lesbian. Maybe she was afraid of her pimp. Only one thing was clear: She wasn’t sufficiently afraid of me. I needed to try a new approach.
I turned to Ryan. “Would you please excuse us, Detective?”
Ryan looked a little surprised, but he must have realized we had hit a wall with Krista. He nodded, stood, and left the room.
“I need to take a break,” I said to Krista. I stated the time, then stood and walked over to the control box, turned off the recording system, and returned to my seat. I moved slowly to give Ryan time to get set up in the hallway where he could look into the interrogation room through the mirror.
“Elena, I know you’re frightened—and you’re upset about Virginia. But I need you to understand what is happening. Virginia was murdered. We know that. It wasn’t an accident. And you’re right in the middle of it. If you don’t help me, the system’s gonna come down on you. You’re a prostitute—and you’re here illegally. Once we go public that it’s a murder investigation, and it comes out you were living with Virginia, who do you think the good people of Montana are gonna want to see arrested? You need to be clear on this: If you’re found guilty of murder, or even of manslaughter, you’re not gonna be deported. Not in a Montana courtroom. You’ll do the time—at least ten or fifteen years—right here. Or, if the jury really likes Virginia and thinks you took advantage of her before you killed her, you could get the needle.” I paused. “You really want to start working with me.”
She was staring down at her hands, her fingers interlaced on the table in front of her. She wouldn’t look at me.
“Elena.” After a few seconds, she raised her eyes. She wore a big frown. “Listen to me. I’m forty-three years old. Divorced. I have a son, age seventeen, who won’t tal
k to me, and the odds are very good he’s gonna end up in prison in the next year or two. I’m an alcoholic. That’s how I lost my family. And I lost my job. I went through a bad period. A very bad period, where I did a lot of degrading things with men.”
Finally, I had her attention. Her expression softened. “I hated myself. Hated what I had become. Then something happened.” I paused. I had her now. “I met someone. A woman. A woman who had been through a lot, just like I had. I’m not gonna go into details. It’s still too painful. As wonderful as it was, I was so scared. Not scared that people were gonna find out. Nobody gave a shit about me and who I was sleeping with. Why should they? But I was scared because I didn’t know this about myself, didn’t know that I could love a woman completely. Everything I knew about myself—it was suddenly gone. I didn’t know who I was. I was frightened.”
Krista nodded. “What happened?”
“She died. She was a working girl, like you. And a heroin addict.” I bit the inside of my cheek with some force. In a second I tasted the warm blood. I felt a tear form and slide down my face. “She died.”
“I am sorry.”
“I know something about where you are right now, Elena. I know you think you’re never gonna be able to get past this. But believe me, you will. It’s gonna hurt for a long time. But you need to believe me that some really bad shit is gonna happen to you if you don’t tell me the truth. I don’t have a choice. My partner, Ryan? The guy? And the chief of police. They’re the same kind of guy. You’re a hooker. They’re not exactly gonna bust their balls to help you.” I shook my head. “I’m the only one who can help you now. I’m all you’ve got, Elena.”
Her voice was soft. “What do you want to know?”
“I need to understand what happened with that video.”
“Abby came to me. She offered me three-hundred dollars to have sex with her.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I said yes. When I got there, I saw it was for filming. I never did filming.”
“What did you do?”
“I say I do it for five-hundred dollars.”
“Who did the filming?”
“A man. I don’t know him.”
I passed the photo roster of Virginia’s students over to her again. “It wasn’t one of these guys?”
She shook her head. “Not one of them.”
“And nobody associated with Christopher James Barlow?”
“Not that I know.”
“Okay, so some guy shot the sex scene. Abby gave you the five hundred and you left?”
“Cash and I go.”
“She didn’t say anything to you about putting the video on the Internet?”
Krista shook her head.
“And you haven’t heard from Abby since you made the video?”
“No hear from Abby.”
“Anything else you can tell me about the video?”
“Nothing. Honest.”
“All right, Elena. I’m gonna have an officer drive you home.”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
After she was gone, Ryan came back into the room and sat down.
I looked at him. “Well?”
He shook his head. “I don’t believe her.”
“Why?”
“She’s not curious about why a college girl wants to screw her?”
“Maybe the girl’s got some issues she’s trying to work through,” I said. “Krista pockets the five-hundred bucks, which is her rate.”
“She lets a guy shoot her doing a lesbian scene—she’s not interested in what he’s planning to do with the video?”
“Her line of work, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s been videoed before.”
“You remember she said she ‘never did filming.’”
“I took that to mean she never did video to put online.”
“You do realize that Krista’s in the business of faking it, right?”
“I’ll let you know when I interview someone who isn’t faking it,” I said.
He paused a moment. “That prostitute you fell in love with? You never mentioned her.”
“The heroin junkie?”
“That one.”
“I was lying. You know, to make Krista feel she wasn’t the biggest skank in the room.”
He nodded. “Good strategy.”
“But the story was half true. It was in LA, a while ago. The cop was someone who busted me. I was the hooker addict.”
Ryan looked at me, his beautiful blue eyes a little wider than usual. His voice was low. “You never told me …”
I closed my eyes, put up a palm, and shook my head, too ashamed to even speak. I managed to squeeze out another tear.
I’m going to stop doing things like that to him. I really am.
Chapter 18
Ryan and I stood there a long while before anyone answered the door at Alpha Phi Sigma around nine that morning. Finally, the door opened and a guy told us Martin Hunt was at the Rec Center.
“I’m impressed,” Ryan said as we got back in the Charger.
“Gotta look buff to get your time in the mattress room.”
“How hard do you want to push him?”
“Hard as we can. He’s a bad guy. He exploits women—prostitutes and the girls on campus. I imagine that’s the way he lives: by taking advantage of others. I wouldn’t be surprised if he lies, steals, and cheats his way through life.”
“You think that dollars-per-fuck idea is his?”
“I don’t think it; I know it. I can just see him hitting up four other shitheads for a hundred each and promising them they’ll get laid. Then he comes up with the idea of roping in five more. So he gets them all laid, gives them back half their money, and he’s a big hero.”
“Or he was the guy who goes free because he set it up.”
I turned to him. “You did that in college, didn’t you?”
He laughed. “My mother used to organize tours to Europe for the Church. If she signed up fifteen people, she’d go free.” He put on his innocent expression. “Ask my dad.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’m gonna do now. Get him on the phone, will ya?”
We approached the new Rec Building on University. It had a glass front so you could see the people on the equipment. There were only half-a-dozen students on the treadmills on the second floor. I didn’t see anyone on the weight machines on three.
I parked in a metered spot, and we walked into the big lobby. A bright-eyed young girl at the reception desk gave us a smile as she saw us enter through the glass doors.
Ryan said, “I bet you’re right. I can see Martin Hunt thinking that way. One question, though: How’d he get the prostitute to go along with it?”
I stopped walking. “Roofies.”
“If he did, he could go away for some years.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Which is how we’re gonna get him. Everything’s a transaction to him. So if he sees that obstructing us is more expensive than cooperating with us, he’ll give us what we want.”
“What is it we want, exactly?”
“Couple things. I want to know who killed Virginia Rinaldi—and how and why. And if I can send Martin Hunt someplace where you don’t want to spend any time in the mattress room, I’m good with that, too.”
The girl at the reception desk asked if she could help us. I showed her my shield and told her we were looking for a student named Martin Hunt. She checked her screen and gave me another smile. “He’s here.”
“Where’s the elevator?”
Ryan pointed to the left, where a small neon sign read “STAIRS.” “This is a gym, Karen, a three-story gym.” He started walking to the stairs.
We climbed to the second floor and did a quick circle, past the treadmills, stationary bikes, rowers, step climbers, and other kinds of torture equipment I’d never seen before, lined up neat and clean, each with a computer screen on the front. Large-screen TVs hung from the ceiling. Club music thumped from big speakers on the ceiling. It was good to see my tax dollars financing hig
her ed.
But we didn’t see Martin Hunt. We climbed up to the third floor, which was full of all the shiny chrome strength contraptions and rack after rack of black dumbbells. We began our own brand of circuit. Finally, we spotted Martin Hunt doing bench presses on a machine. He was pushing those handles hard, grunting and breathing heavily.
“Mr. Hunt,” I said.
He lowered the handles and looked up at me and Ryan. It took him a second to place us. He sat up and wiped his face with a towel. “Detectives.”
“That’s right.” I reminded him of our names. “We need to talk to you at police headquarters.”
“I got a class in forty-five minutes.”
“No, not today, you don’t.” I turned to Ryan. “Escort Mr. Hunt to the locker room, get him showered.” Much as I wanted to make him miss the shower, I decided against it. Unlike the black-and-white Chargers, our unmarked model had cloth seats. “You can shower and get dressed in five, can’t you, Mr. Hunt?”
“Absolutely,” he said. He flashed me an obnoxious smile to show me how, being younger, smarter, and better looking than me, he wasn’t worried.
I walked around for a few minutes, looking at all the cool toys. When I went to college, the gym had a few sets of barbells and free weights and two Universal gyms. There was a narrow pool in the basement that smelled like bleach. No climbing wall, no indoor running track, no yoga studios, no squash or racquetball courts. No sauna. No smoothie bar.
About six minutes later, Ryan and Martin Hunt emerged from the men’s locker room. Martin’s medium-length brown hair, full and wavy, was uncombed. He had a day’s growth of beard. His brown T-shirt with the Alpha Phi Sigma logo showed off his pretty good torso. His gait had a bit of a swagger, as if he wanted people to see that, yeah, a couple cops stopped by to talk to him.
I looked forward to seeing if he still had that swagger in an hour.
We put him in the Charger and drove him toward headquarters. A minute into the trip, he said, “So, you making any progress on the case? Professor Rinaldi?” He said it with forced casualness, like he was my neighbor faking some interest in my job. I decided to exercise my right to remain silent. I checked him out a few times in the rear-view mirror to see how he was doing. He looked a little preoccupied. I chose a slow route to headquarters to give him a little time to marinate.
