The Mentor

by Monticelli, Rita Carla Francesca

  “She’s coming to London on vacation for New Year’s Eve.” He could tell his son was excited about it. He really liked this girl.

  “So she helped you with your French, you said?”

  “Yeah. She’s really patient. She showed me a ton of websites and interesting blogs where I can practice.”

  “I like blogs.” When they’d started becoming trendy, Eric had followed a few, back when they were a lot more intimate. People wrote about themselves then, protected by anonymity. Those days were nothing like today’s social networks. The fact that they’d been anonymous helped people express what they were thinking honestly, directly, and readers all pitched in with advice. He’d found it to be an interesting way to observe humanity. Now blogs had become first and foremost a marketing tool, and they’d lost their original appeal with him.

  “There’s this one that’s really cool,” Brian said before his phone beeped again, interrupting the conversation. He typed in a response to his friend with an incredibly rapid dance of fingertips across the screen. “You’d like it,” he continued. “It’s all about murder.”

  Eric couldn’t help but laugh, which obviously annoyed Brian a tiny bit. “Sorry, sorry,” said Eric. “It was just the way you said it. I work with this stuff every day, you know.”

  “Yeah, but this one’s special. At first it seemed like a real story, but then we realized it was all too over the top to be true. It’s like a novel about a serial killer.”

  “It keeps getting better and better,” said Eric. There was irony in his voice, but Brian didn’t seem to pick up on it.

  “It’s written by this killer who murders the people who destroyed her family, then frames one of them for the murders she’s committed.”

  What?

  “Unfortunately she stopped posting three months ago, just when things were heating up. She’d hidden the murder weapon in this guy’s car and then ran away.

  Eric hit the brakes. He stared out at the road ahead while a thousand different thoughts raced around in his head. Adrenaline was coursing through his veins, keeping him from moving.

  “Dad, what’s going on?” Brian reached over and shook his arm gently. “You okay?”

  The car behind them started honking, so Eric pulled his SUV over to the side of the road.

  He turned to look at his son. “Was . . . When . . . Was the blog in French?” he stammered.

  “Yeah, it was . . . What’s the matter?”

  “Who is the blogger?”

  The boy shrugged. “Who knows what her real name is. She signed her posts Mina.”

  “Fuck me . . . ,” muttered Shaw. He’d heard the name in his head even before it came out of his son’s mouth. He was breathing too quickly. He needed to calm himself down. Maybe it was all just a coincidence. “Where does the story take place?” he asked Brian. He wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to hear the answer, but Eric knew he wouldn’t be able to rest until he’d found out more. Surely it was an anonymous case. A story like that wasn’t really very original. There were probably lots of examples in books and movies.

  “Here in London,” his son said.

  Eric closed his eyes, fighting a feeling that the world was crashing down around him.

  “Here, I’ll show you.” Brian took his tablet out of his backpack. “It’s saved in my favorites.” He quickly opened his browser and jumped straight to the blog. “Look,” he said, holding the tablet up so his father could see.

  Eric was almost afraid to take it. Finally he reached out, took the tablet, and started reading. Almost instantly, he was hooked. He ran down the pages, trying to understand the meaning of the French words.

  “It’s not easy to understand,” said Brian. “Claudie had to help me a little.” He leaned over to see where his father was in the blog. “If I’d known you were interested in it, I would have told you about it earlier. You could ask Miriam to help you translate it.”

  “Leave Miriam out of this!” shouted Eric. His son stared at him, open-mouthed and confused. “I’m sorry,” he said, trying to calm down. “It’s not you. Listen, can you e-mail me a link to this site?”

  “Yeah, of course.” Brian couldn’t hide his curiosity. “What’s up? Why won’t you tell me what it is?”

  Eric took a long, deep breath. He didn’t want to scare his son. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s nothing. Probably nothing. It’s just some . . . nothing. It reminds me of an old story I read a while back, that’s all.”

  Eric went into his office and locked the door behind him. At this hour, the building was practically deserted, but he wanted to make sure he wouldn’t be disturbed. Someone, Jane for example, might find it strange to see him in here working on his birthday. He certainly would have preferred to spend the evening somewhere else, but he couldn’t put this off.

  He turned on his computer and waited patiently for it to warm up. It always seemed too slow when he really needed it. One last glance out of the glass door to the office. No lights, no noises.

  Eric opened his e-mail and saw the message from Brian. He clicked on the link and found himself staring at the blog.

  Mina’s Blog.

  That was the title. Simple, straightforward. It looked like any other website, equipped with minimalist, welcoming graphics. But the content froze his blood. Evidently it didn’t have the same effect on its numerous subscribers, who left plenty of commentary after the entries, evidently believing them nothing more than very convincing stories. But for Eric, they were far more than that.

  Every detail checked out. In the sections where his rusty French, learned thanks to his close connection with Miriam and her extended family, wasn’t good enough, he cut and pasted segments into Google Translate.

  With every line, every paragraph, all the little pieces of the puzzle fell into place. All the little inconsistencies he’d spent so much time trying to ignore suddenly became too much to push away.

  He knew it. He’d always known that she must have been involved, but he’d never wanted to believe it. Garnish had been too enticing a lead to let go, and his death had been far too convenient. The truth of this case died along with Christopher Garnish, and that had been enough for Eric, at least until now.

  Now that he found himself faced with the cynicism in those words, with the complete and utter absence of remorse, with Mina’s wickedness and malice, Eric couldn’t lie to himself any longer.

  He still hoped that somehow he was wrong. After all, what was he looking at? A blog? A work of fiction? But no. He was sure she was the author . . . The details were too precise, too accurate. She hadn’t even hidden the names with pseudonyms. She must have been completely sure no one would ever make the connection. Or maybe she wasn’t afraid it would happen. It was just supposed to be a story. If it had been something different, she would undoubtedly have erased it already. Why leave clues behind her? Why, after she’d spent so much time and energy carrying out the perfect vendetta?

  Unless she wanted to leave crumbs, wanted to be discovered. There were only a very few people on the planet who could connect that blog, that name, to the real facts. Eric might well be the only person who had all the information necessary to do so.

  He released the breath he’d been involuntarily holding back. No. It couldn’t be true. They were certain a man was involved in those murders. They had the video from outside the building where the first victim was murdered. The fake woman dressed in black was undoubtedly a man. It couldn’t be her.

  He typed in his password to access the evidence online and watched the video.

  There was the person dressed in black, walking into the building. The gait was awkward, the shoulders too large for the hips. It had to be a man. Little Sayyid had seen that person walk out of the victim’s apartment that same day. The same clothing with traces of blood from Thompson, McKinsey, and Ridley had been found in Garnish’s car. The blog didn’t ta
lk about that clothing directly.

  He fast-forwarded the video until he saw the person in black leave the building twenty minutes later. The same awkward gait. The killer moved toward the video camera.

  That was strange. The killer left in the opposite direction from which he—or she—had arrived.

  Once the figure in black disappeared, Eric’s gaze was drawn to a young man walking behind the killer, all the way at the end of the frame. He had a courier company’s logo on his jacket and was carrying a package under one arm. He was wearing a baseball cap down tight on his head.

  He stopped the video, then ran it backward as slowly as he could.

  At a certain point the young man seemed to pop up out of nowhere behind the figure dressed in black.

  “What the hell . . . ?”

  He backed up to the point where the suspect walked out through the building’s main door, then forward just one frame at a time. The camera angle was set in such a way that it covered the view of the entrance for a number of seconds. The young man appeared immediately after the suspect walked out.

  He’d come from inside the building.

  He rewound the video again. If the young man had come out of that building, then at some point he must have gone in too.

  No one had entered the building during the twenty minutes that passed from when the figure in black had gone in and when he or she came out again. A number of different people had walked past on the sidewalk: a mother and her child, a teenage couple . . . No one had so much as glanced at the entrance to that building.

  He reached the point where the figure in black went in, then continued until he saw the killer disappear from the top corner of the image. But he didn’t stop there. He ran the video back for a few more minutes until another figure appeared in the doorway, walking backward across the screen.

  The courier.

  The courier came from the same direction he went when he left, but he was holding the same package. Why hadn’t he dropped it off? He’d gone in, stayed inside for more than twenty minutes, then left again carrying what appeared to be the same package.

  They’d been so focused on that bizarre figure dressed in black from head to toe that they’d completely ignored a classic clue that should have jumped off the screen to any investigator.

  He froze the image. The courier looked like a young man. He was wearing jeans and a puffy jacket. He had a pair of dark sunglasses on beneath his cap and kept his head low. It was just barely possible to make out his chin and lower lip.

  Eric tried to zoom the image, but the details were blurry and didn’t reveal anything that might make the person more recognizable.

  He went back to the full picture, enlarged the entire screen, and started analyzing it frame by frame, looking for something. Not even Eric was sure exactly what.

  At a certain point his attention was drawn to the package. It was a cardboard box with a label stuck on top, but it was impossible to read what was written on the label. The courier kept the package tucked against his chest with his left hand.

  Eric turned the zoom back on, pulling in until a hand and forearm filled up the entire screen. The resolution wasn’t the best, but he could see well enough.

  He felt tears well up in his eyes. What was he supposed to do now?

  He turned the key in the lock slowly, trying not to make any noise. He didn’t usually go in like this without knocking when he knew she was at home. But if he’d rung the bell at this hour of the night, he would only scare her, and that’s not what he wanted to do. He preferred to surprise her before confronting her. Eric had no idea how all this would end. All he felt was an unstoppable desire to have the truth out on the table. He wanted clarity. The only thing that counted now was the truth; he’d worry about the consequences later.

  He opened the door a crack and listened. The room was filled with dim lamplight. He could hear water running in the background. He went in and closed the door gently behind him. She was taking a shower, so she couldn’t have heard him come in.

  Eric swallowed. He couldn’t do anything but wait. That seemed easy enough, but his nervousness was killing him. Every passing second made the wait more difficult. Images of the victims filled his mind, flanked by images of little Mina. How could that young girl have turned into such a merciless monster?

  Deep in his heart, Eric felt responsible. He knew he shouldn’t, but a small, wormlike sense of guilt kept winding its way through his mind. That was the reason why he hadn’t mentioned his suspicions and discoveries to anyone, and it was the reason why he still hadn’t decided what he was going to do. He kept telling himself that first and foremost he wanted to understand. But what was there to understand, really? His mind could barely conceive of those facts, those acts, and no justification would be enough to clear them. Yet somehow he still kept hoping there might be something that would make everything right again.

  A quick whirring noise made him start and turn around. The fan on the notebook computer sitting on the table had fired up.

  Maybe he should look for a little more information before he talked to her.

  He walked over to the computer and brushed his fingers across the touchpad. The screensaver disappeared and the access window popped up in its place, asking for the password. Without even thinking about it, he sat down and typed in “19940403.” April 3, 1994: the day Mina’s family had been brutally massacred.

  As soon as he hit return, the desktop opened up on the screen. The background was a photo of the two of them together, taken not more than a month ago. The pairing of that image and the date he’d used to get into the computer gave Eric the chills. Icons kept popping up, one after another. Soon the screen was almost entirely covered. They’d been arranged in such a way that they covered up the faces in the background. In addition to the usual computer program icons, there were a number he didn’t recognize. It took him a little while to find the documents folder.

  He stopped. He thought he heard noises in the other room. He waited a few moments, then the water started running again.

  He took a deep breath to calm himself and then opened the folder, finding a myriad of subfolders inside. What on earth did he think he was doing? Was he really going to check them all, one by one? He certainly didn’t have enough time. It looked like she catalogued everything. There was a folder for every case she’d ever worked on, along with others for photographs, music, film, and so forth. Knowing her, he’d expected things to be better organized. But that was precisely the point, wasn’t it: Did he really know her?

  He ran the cursor down the sidebar. Then his eyes fell on a folder titled, simply, “Eric.” He felt nauseated for a moment, but he had to open it. Inside were other subfolders, divided by year starting in 2000. He double-clicked on the year 2000 and found himself looking at an amazing number of images. He could see from the thumbnails that some were scanned newspaper articles. Opening one by chance, he saw that it was the story of a murder case. His name was mentioned in the article heading. It was the same with the others.

  There were photographs too, several hundred of them, showing him on the street or at the scene of a crime, going into or coming out of his apartment building. Eric felt his stomach turn over.

  Gripped with a growing sense of anxiety, Eric moved on to another year. It was filled with the same kinds of files—only there were a lot more this time. There were more and more each year, until he came to the preceding year. There was no folder for the current year.

  She’d started keeping tabs on him back when she was still a young girl. Every cell in his body screamed for him to get out of there, to go as far away as possible. He was angry, and he felt stupid for never having picked up on any of this, but he had to keep going forward. Mina’s morbid fascination with him didn’t prove anything. He was looking for something else entirely on that computer.

  He went back to the documents folder and kept scrolling
down until he found a subfolder with the name “Garnish.” Inside were other subfolders divided by year, this time starting from 2010. Photographs taken secretly in a range of different circumstances. Some showed the man in the company of Thompson, McKinsey, Ridley, and Dillon, though the people were always with Garnish separately, never all together. There was even a folder containing copies of the police reports for each of them, apparently taken from the archives. He found the oldest one of all in there, the one containing details of the massacre that had occurred twenty years earlier, which had been just another interrogation for him.

  Somehow Mina had reconnected all the information. Unlike Eric, she had the advantage of having been there when the crime was committed. She had seen the men who murdered her family with her own eyes. Back then they hadn’t even considered interrogating her because she’d been too young and in complete shock. They’d assumed she’d hidden when it started and hadn’t seen a thing. Besides, who would have believed the word of a seven-year-old girl who’d just seen her family brutally murdered? They weren’t even sure she was capable of understanding what had happened, much less identifying those responsible. They had completely underestimated her.

  Here was the proof he’d been looking for.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement in the doorway to the bedroom.

  She was standing there, pointing a pistol at his head. “Jesus Christ, Eric!” she said, lowering the gun. “What the hell are you doing here? I thought you were a thief!”

  Eric stood up slowly from the chair, finding it hard to breathe. He’d been so completely concentrated on the files on the computer that he hadn’t heard the shower turning off.

  She stared at him, sensing something was wrong. She was barefoot and wearing a pair of gray pajamas. Her hair was wet. The gun was still in her left hand, but now she lowered it down at her side. Her eyes moved from his face to the open notebook computer on the table, and then her expression hardened.