Flesh Wounds

by Stephen Greenleaf

  He examined me once more. “When else?”

  “Whenever. Which is why I’m trying to help her out.”

  He frowned. “You sure that’s what you’re doing? Or are you trying to fuck her up?”

  “Sure I’m sure,” I said, then matched his grin. “I think.”

  “That’s cool,” he said, and seemed to mean it. He lit a cigarette and relaxed. Maybe he knew enough about sex to write a column; what he didn’t know enough about was cancer.

  “I need to find your sister so Peggy can get married on schedule,” I said.

  “I told you before—I don’t know where she is.”

  “But you know Mandy. And you know why what happened to her happened to her.”

  “What do you mean, happened?”

  “I mean why she went from a beautiful young model to an addict and a prostitute within the space of a year.”

  “What difference does it make why it happened?”

  “Because Nina was a model, too. Now she’s disappeared. Something similar may be happening to her.”

  He looked beyond me at the window, a cocky, complicated young man with a lot of smarts and a lot of guts and a big need to seem on top of the world. But underneath, he was still a kid with a girlfriend and a sister, both of whom were in need of a hero, neither of whom he could figure out how to rescue.

  He got up, walked behind a freestanding screen to what I assumed was a bedroom, then returned with something in his hand. “This is what happened to Mandy.” He waited while I examined it.

  It was a photograph, folded, wrinkled, stained, and chipped, of a couple engaged in sexual intercourse. They were young, from the look of their trim taut bodies, and they seemed engaged in a mutually eager exercise. They were Mandy Lorenzen and her brother, Todd, their faces clean and clear and unmistakable, their copulation thrilling to behold until you remembered their degree of consanguinity.

  I turned it over. On the back was a message, scrawled with felt-tip pen and fury: “You are no longer my children, you are something foul and evil—I will do everything I can to destroy you as you have tried to destroy me by your godless deeds.” It could only have been written by a father.

  I returned the photo to Jeff. “How did you get this?”

  “Mandy carried it in her purse. She kept taking it out and looking at it before she shot up. She wouldn’t show me, so I took it. When I saw what it was, I didn’t give it back.”

  “What does she say about it?”

  “She says it didn’t happen.”

  “It looks like it happened.”

  Jeff stood and loomed over me. “Don’t you get it yet, detective? Nothing is real. Not anymore. Every image is any lie they want to make it; whoever owns the digits makes the truth. The eyes are victims, man; you can’t believe them, you can only close them down.” His voice dropped to an agonized rasp. “Her old man didn’t understand. I tried to tell him, but …”

  “Who did this to her?”

  “Richter.”

  “Why?”

  “Blackmail.”

  “Of who?”

  “Her old man.”

  “I’ve been to Richter’s apartment. It didn’t look like he had any blackmail money.”

  “He had other apartments.”

  “Where?”

  Jeff went to the door and leaned against it. “You’re from out of town, right?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re not technical, right?”

  “All the tech I’ve got is my digital watch.”

  “You’re tough, she says.”

  “Peggy?”

  He nodded. “She told me about you, once. About some shit with this big deal consumer guy. She said you went after him even though he carried a lot of weight.”

  “That was my first case. A guy named Roland Nelson ran something called the Institute for Consumer Awareness. He wasn’t all he was cracked up to be.”

  “So you’re not afraid to take on the big guys.”

  “It’s sort of an avocation.”

  He stood up. “Come on.”

  “Where we going?”

  “Gas Works Park.”

  I followed him and Codpiece out the door. As we reached the street, a huge jet swooped too low for comfort, as though it wanted to land in the next block. A moment later, that’s just what it did.

  CHAPTER 24

  “Where are we going?” she asks as they drive up Madison toward the freeway.

  “His weekend cabin.”

  “This isn’t the weekend.”

  “And it isn’t a cabin.”

  “What is it?”

  “An ego manifestation.”

  They cross the I-90 bridge in silence. When they zoom through Mercer Island and Bellevue without slowing down, she says, “Where is this joint, anyway?”

  “The Issaquah suburbs.”

  “I didn’t know Issaquah had suburbs.”

  “They’re the best kind of suburbs—invisible.”

  They take the Issaquah exit and turn south, toward densely forested hills. The sun is setting to their right; the shadows spilling across the road could be bloodstains. “Was it hard to convince him to see me?” she asks within the cone of silence created by the engineers at Porsche.

  “Not at all. He was about to suggest it himself.”

  “Why?”

  “I showed him our last video.”

  “The one in the Japanese garden?”

  “Newer.”

  “You mean it’s one I haven’t seen?”

  “Not yet. But I’m sure you’ll see it tonight.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  “Because that’s what he does.”

  That she is about to become fodder momentarily chills her. “What else does he do besides show skin flicks?” she asks innocuously.

  “Use your imagination. I can’t believe you want to go through with this,” he adds after a moment, jealousy a husk around each word.

  “It sounds like fun,” she laughs teasingly, knowing he is hoping she will bow out, knowing he is miserable. “What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks in the next moment.

  “What?”

  “That look.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit. You’re pissed at me.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You’re upset that I’m going to spend the evening with your boss.”

  “What if I am?”

  “You don’t need to be.”

  “The hell I don’t. You don’t know what he does to people.”

  “Are you talking violence?”

  “He doesn’t have to bludgeon people to get what he wants. He can just buy them.”

  “He can’t buy me.”

  “Yes, he can.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I thought the same thing about myself and he bought me in two hours. He owns every ounce of me now.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I? Delivering you to him like some kind of Christmas fruitcake. And he’ll devour you just as fast.”

  “Hey. It’s no problem. Fruitcake lasts forever.”

  Our destination wasn’t the park itself, but a building just west of it. Jeff pointed with his finger as I drove past, toward a two-story building of no obvious functional bent, white stucco and blue trim and flat roof with parking for four out front. At the moment, the spaces were filled with police cars.

  “Shit,” Jeff muttered, and directed me to turn around in the driveway that served the Harbor Patrol, then to park in a lot that served a shipyard.

  “What is that place?”

  “Richter’s lab.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. I’ve been in there.”

  “When?”

  “Two weeks ago.”

  “Was Richter with you?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “How’d you find it?”

  “I tailed him.”

  “Why?”


  His eyes turned to ice and his jawline buckled. “Because when I found out what was going on with Mandy, I decided to shut him down.”

  “How did you go about it?”

  “I broke in the place. When I saw what he had, I got ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  Jeff looked toward the graffiti that was smeared across the iron and steel remnants of the abandoned gas plant that occupied the adjacent park. The blatant vandalism seemed to fuel his already frothing ire. “Ready to destroy his inventory. And ready to castrate the son of a bitch.”

  “Because of Mandy?”

  “And Nina.”

  “What did he do to Nina?”

  “He made pictures of her I didn’t like.”

  “The Erospace exhibit,” I said.

  He looked at me. “You saw it?”

  “Yep.”

  “What’d you think?”

  “Marginal art; juvenile politics.”

  “Yeah, well, what I thought was rape. Her and Mandy, both. Rape and slavery. The bastard used their bodies like he owned them. Then he traded their flesh for cash.”

  He was gripping the door handle so hard I was afraid he was going to tear it off and chew on it. I gave him a moment to cool. “I’m kind of surprised by your reaction,” I said finally.

  “Why?”

  “I’m surprised you found Erospace offensive, given what you do in your column.”

  “Hey,” he bristled. “My column’s about sex. Daring sex and equal sex, both sides willing and able to take some risks and use some new nerve endings. I tell them how to do it safely and I tell them how to do it better by trying stuff that never occurred to them.”

  “How’s that different from Richter?”

  “A guy like Richter isn’t about sex, he’s about power. He’s basically an assassin.”

  “Of what?”

  “Dreams and desires. Women see his legitimate work and agree to pose for him and go into the studio thinking it’s about ideas and ideals and art. Richter takes what they’ve brought to the table and turns it upside down and pisses on it.”

  “They agree to appear nude. They sign releases letting him use the work however he wants to.”

  Jeff’s eyes sparked with the heat of his rhetoric. “They don’t have the faintest idea what digital photography is capable of. They don’t know that he can corrupt and destroy them with a couple of clicks of a mouse. They don’t know what they’re agreeing to.”

  “Maybe they do know it. Maybe they don’t care.”

  He shook his head. “There’s always been porn and there always should be, probably. There’s nothing wrong with a hard-on, and there’s nothing wrong with a woman tickling her cunt if that’s the way she wants to earn her living. And some do. Feminists claim they don’t believe it, but some women get a charge out of turning men on and some get off on demeaning them. But Richter takes it further. He makes Mandy sleep with her brother. He turns Nina into a fucking fascist. He makes a woman define herself in ways she’s never thought of. With tools like Richter has, he doesn’t need consent. A couple of candid snapshots and he’s got all the raw material he needs.” Jeff paused and wiped his eyes. “I have a hard time remembering he’s dead.”

  “What kind of tools are you talking about?” I asked.

  Jeff pointed toward the stucco building. “Tools like the ones in there.”

  “What are they?”

  “Hardware and software, man. Multi-fucking-media.”

  He made the term obscene. “Tell me how they work. If you know,” I added.

  “Oh, I know. When I figured out what had been going on, I read up on it, then got some guys at the paper to show me how it works. When I got back inside, I was going to wipe the whole thing out.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Richter fucking died on me; they put the lab off limits.”

  I gestured toward the building. “Tell me what’s inside. How did he come up with that picture of Mandy and her brother?”

  Jeff leaned against the car door and closed his eyes. When he spoke, his voice was tinged with awe, as though he were describing an alien civilization that had terrible tools of destruction and didn’t appear to be friendly.

  “First you need input,” he said. “Input can come from a digital still camera, or, in a year or so, a digital video camera, too, although they only get you to a couple of million pixels, so definition isn’t all that sharp. More commonly, it comes from film stock or a slide transparency or a printed photograph; that gets you to 18 million pixels. In Richter’s case, the input was usually an Ektachrome negative from the medium format Hasselblad he used in his studio. That was the shot he had of Mandy. The shot of Todd he got from a school picture he took with his Nikon.” Jeff chuckled dryly. “It’s the only reason he took the job at the schools, the asshole, to get photos of rich kids. Raw materials,” he added gloomily.

  “We’ve got input,” I said. “The input goes into what.”

  “A scanner. Richter used a Nikon LS-3500, but there are all kinds of them, with various degrees of sensitivity.”

  “The scanner does what?”

  “The scanner turns the image into bytes—the ones and zeros that are the basis of all digital information. Once it’s been digitized, you load the file into your computer, drag it into your software, and then you can do anything you want with it.”

  “What kind of software are we talking about?”

  “Richter used Adobe’s Photoshop, that’s the most popular. Plus he had the Aldus Photostyler, Alias Eclipse, Kai’s Power Tools, PhotoMorph, and Studio Pro. With those babies you can treat a photograph just like a piece of text—cut, paste, edit, combine, enlarge, reduce, colorize, color adjust, chrom plate, mezzotint, whatever. If you’ve got enough memory you can make Hillary Clinton look like Minnie Mouse.”

  “And you can mix one image with another image.”

  “Definitely. With any other image. That was Richter’s specialty—take a woman who thinks she’s posing for art studies, then put her in the computer and give her some slutty accessories. In Mandy’s case, the accessory was her brother,” he added with a lethal undertone.

  “What kind of hardware are we talking about?”

  “Richter had lots of it, but he did most of his work on a Mac Quadra 950 with 200 megs of RAM and a Thunder Photobooster accelerator card.”

  “That’s a lot of memory, right?”

  “Yeah, but you need all you can get. He had a 1.2 gigabyte hard drive and a quad-speed CD-ROM drive, too. If you do anything of any degree of refinement, you’re going to end up with a file of 20 megs, and photo files of 200 megs aren’t unheard of.”

  “Okay,” I said. “We’ve got input, and software, and hardware. What’s next?”

  “Output. Once you’ve got the image composed inside your computer, you can keep it there as video art or you can send it through something like the Kodak Premiere Workstation and turn it into a slide or a photographic negative—back to square one, in other words, only with a completely different image from the one you started out with. Usually a photo lab or service bureau does this part because the machines are so expensive—a hundred grand or more for something like a Superset Imaging Workstation. Richter used a Fire 1000 film recorder, which isn’t as powerful as a Kodak but it will do the job for the type of stuff he put in Erospace. And sent to Mandy’s father.”

  I leaned back in the car seat and looked at the dome light. It reminded me of what we used to think a spaceship looked like. “This is pretty scary, when you think of it.”

  Jeff nodded. “With the Pentium and Power PC chips online, and fuzzy logic compression calculations and high-end workstations, pretty soon you’ll be able to turn a still photograph into a feature film and put Garbo and Gable back on the silver screen with brand-new scripts and no one can tell they’ve been dead for years. They’re close to doing that already, if you’ve read about the work the Industrial Light and Magic and Digital Domain people did on movies lik
e Mask and Forrest Gump and Pagemaster. We’re at a point where a guy like Richter will be able to take a picture of Julia Roberts out of People magazine, put it through his imaging system, and come out the other end with an X-rated movie of her taking on the Supersonics starting five and show it on the PC in the bedroom. And then he can send it off to a few of his horny buddies to download off the Internet. Poor Julia won’t know a thing about it unless he hires a hall and starts to sell tickets. And even then all she can do is sue him.”

  “And this is what happened to Mandy and Nina.”

  “Sure. With Nina, all he added was props—flag, knife, graffiti. With Mandy, he took the photo session shots of her and the school pictures of Todd, mixed them with some copulating nudes he probably got from some poor souls he hired off the street, then convinced old man Lorenzen that his little prides and joys were fucking each other’s brains out. It’s as sick as it gets, the bastard. I wish I’d killed him myself.”

  “So you didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “Who did?”

  “I thought that was where you came in.”

  Jeff fumed to silence. I tried to think of what the enterprise he’d just described might have meant in the larger sense. “What would you say Richter’s system cost altogether?” I asked after a minute.

  “A hundred grand, easy. Maybe twice that.”

  “Lots of money.”

  “So?”

  “Where do you think he got it?”

  “Blackmail.”

  “It’s a chicken or egg problem, isn’t it? He needed the images to do blackmail, but he needed the blackmail to fund the images.”

  “So maybe he had some backing.”

  “My thought exactly. Any idea who?”

  Jeff hesitated, then shook his head. “You?”

  “Nope,” I said and left it there, even though both of us were lying.

  I looked at the featureless building. “Why don’t we go see what the cops are up to?” I got out of the car and waited for Jeff to join me. We walked across the street and loitered near the blue-and-white police vehicles until a familiar figure showed its face: Lieutenant Molson, followed by his sidekick Nudge, the Mutt and Jeff of Seattle homicide.

  When he caught my eye, Molson strolled our way, as lanky and nonchalant as ever, his sport coat an inch too short in the arms, his slacks luffing like sailcloth around his skinny legs. Nudge was a bundle of hostility, dressed in warm-ups and cross-trainers, but he was more interested in a female technician in a white coat and short skirt than he was in me or Jeff Evans.