“You’re early,” she says, like I did this on purpose to screw with her. She points at her screen. “Two of the prisoners aren’t available. Says here Baldwin is with his lawyer and Andrews is in with the doctor.”
Well, shit. Should have realized there might be some scheduling problems. I shrug, like this is most obvious thing in the world. “Yeah. So? I’m here to see Goetz.”
She narrows her eyes. “You’re here to talk to Goetz.” Her tone is flat, but I can see suspicion lighting up her brain.
I see it inside her mind just before I say anything else.
Goetz is the guy I punched in the throat. He can’t talk. He nearly choked to death on the damage I did to his windpipe before a paramedic did an emergency tracheotomy in the ambulance. He’s still breathing through a tube.
So I give her an irritated look and say, “Well, not talk to him. But yes, I’m here to interview him.”
She scowls. “How do you do that, anyway?
I do my best impression of an FBI agent, which is to say, I put a full serving of arrogance into my voice: “He can still write, you know.”
I might have pushed it. For a moment, she considers asking to see my papers again.
But she feels the pressure of the people behind me, the impatient sighs, the glares, and the shifting. Whatever her bosses tell her in her evaluations, she knows her job is to keep that line moving.
So she waves me on. For a moment, she thought her day had almost gotten interesting. But she sinks back into boredom as soon as I step away.
I walk through the metal detectors and then I’m escorted into the medical wing by another deputy.
Let’s find out what Mr. Goetz knows.
Goetz is laid up in a bed in the medical wing of the jail. It looks almost like a regular hospital, except for the locked doors and the metal furniture bolted to the floors. My escort lets me in to see him, tells me to knock when I’m done, and leaves. His face was carefully blank the whole time, but he was practically spitting with contempt inside.
I’m tempted to do the same thing. I look at Goetz in the bed. There’s a tube running out of his throat, and the hissing and pumping of machines. His hipster haircut is greasy and lank, and he’s hollow-cheeked and dark-eyed. He seems helpless and shriveled. And yet I find I want to step on him, hear his bones crack like a cockroach under my heel.
I shove it away. It won’t help. I need the information. So I plaster a fake smile on my face and step closer to the bed.
“Mr. Goetz,” I say. “I’m with the FBI. I was hoping you’d be willing to talk with me.”
He gives me a sullen glance before looking away again. His thoughts are a repeating loop.
He doesn’t recognize me. That’s not too surprising. Stress and adrenaline usually interfere with forming memories. There’s too much input into the brain at once, and everything gets lost in the chaos.
And the glasses help. Say what you will about Clark Kent, but he was always right about this: one single distracting detail can make an entire disguise.
I can feel the cushion of painkillers between him and the world. The staff has taken good care of him. He has a small dry-erase board on the bedside table and he grabs it.
wheres my lawyer
He’s more curious than suspicious at this point. The drugs are taking the edge right off, making him stupid.
“I’m here to offer you a deal, Mr. Goetz. But if you’d rather I talk to your lawyer, we can always wait until you’ve been arraigned. Of course, that could take a while. Weeks, maybe.”
He shrugs and waves me over.
what u want, he scrawls.
“I thought we could talk about the incident.”
why
I think about every episode of Law & Order I’ve ever seen, and throw whatever legal jargon I can at him. “Maybe there’s some detail you’ve forgotten to mention. Perhaps there’s someone else you can name. Something I can use to convince my bosses to offer you a plea bargain.”
He makes a rasping noise that I realize is his version of laughter now.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Mr. Goetz,” I lie. “You are in a lot of trouble. But there’s a chance, if you know anything at all that might provide some kind of explanation or reason for your actions . . .”
He rasps again and raises his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug.
That doesn’t help me. I need to steer him back to the shooting.
“Is there anything you can say? Anyone else who was involved?”
That only confuses him.
“Maybe it wasn’t entirely your plan? Maybe you were scared. You were afraid of getting hurt. Maybe you were only going along with your friends?”
He looks away and I feel a flare of wounded pride. He considers blaming Baldwin and Andrews.
Jesus Christ, he actually wants credit for this.
“Why did you do this? Why did you shoot Kira Sadeghi?”
He turns and makes a face when I mention her name. But it’s exactly the right question, as it turns out. It triggers a whole chain of memories as I get a good, long look inside his head.
And it’s like a horror movie in there.
He is still filled with rage at Kira. A woman he knew only from his TV screen and her Twitter account. Even now there are scenes from Tehrangeles playing in his head like a montage from the show. Kira dancing in a club. Kira kissing her best friend’s boyfriend. Kira posing seductively against a wall. Kira laughing at some random guy trying to chat her up. In Goetz’s memory, these images all glow like they’re radioactive.
And somewhere along the line, he began to take this personally. He went from a casual viewer of the show—he never would have called himself a fan—to watching episodes over and over, building a mental catalog of Kira’s crimes.
All of this for someone he never met.
I steel myself and try to untangle the mess of bad wiring inside this guy’s skull, to find the place where he started to go off the deep end.
It’s hard to describe, but there is a definite starting point to his obsession. Before all this started, Goetz was a customer-service rep for a cable-TV company. He spent his days in a warehouse-like building in El Segundo answering irate calls from people who wanted to know why they couldn’t get their pay-per-view to work. He didn’t even have his own desk. He’d just slot into whatever cubicle was open, stacked in row after row along the great, empty floor. At night, he’d go home to a tiny apartment he shared with two other guys and flip on his computer. About the only perk he got from work was a discount on his broadband.
He spent a lot of time on the message boards, railing against everything in his world that sucked. Someone posted a clip from Tehrangeles—something like “You won’t believe what this girl does next!” And there was Kira. Frozen at the moment she was about to spill out of her bikini top in a hot tub, her face caught in an expression of pure delight.
He clicked. Saw the clip. Saw her laughing. Looking too happy. Too rich. Too much.
He couldn’t laugh at her, like he could most of the people on those stupid shows. And he certainly wasn’t laughing with her. She lived on a different planet than he did. All he felt, right then, looking at her, was small.
He kept clicking.
From there, it started growing like a tumor. I know Kira is supposed to be the bad girl of the show, but i
n Goetz’s head, he recalls being bombarded with images and stories about her shitty behavior.
Worse, they all seem keyed to hit exactly the wrong notes with him. He was alone, struggling at his crappy job, spending 70 percent of his income on rent, barely able to afford pizza and beer when he did go out. He would see Kira in a $3,000 dress, making out with a guy in a club he could never get into, then dropping that guy for another one. It began to feel, to him, like she was rubbing his nose in his own sad excuse for a life.
He examined video from each episode like it was the Zapruder film, looking for evidence that would prove she was an evil bitch. His roommates got bored with it. They stopped talking to him. Didn’t matter. He found plenty of other people who would agree with him. He began spending even more time online, complaining about her on the message boards, in comment sections, anywhere he could find a place.
Then he found Downvote.
He was already using Tor to access the Dark Net. Most of the time he downloaded porn that he couldn’t get on the aboveground torrent sites. But a link on one of his message boards led him to Downvote.
There he found a whole community of people very much like him: extremely pissed off, and constantly howling for blood.
Kira had her own subsection on Downvote. People would argue about her, post video clips and articles, and elaborate fantasies about what they’d do to her if they got the chance. They lobbied to get her on “the big board”—Downvote’s front page. Once she was there, Goetz was sure someone would do something about her. Put her in her place. Teach her a lesson.
He found other Downvoters who agreed with him. Pretty soon he was spending all his time in arguments, trying to get her into the top ten.
Then she finally made it. He felt vindicated. Now everyone agreed with him, everyone would see that she was as loathsome as he’d always thought.
Only it wasn’t enough. Nothing happened. Her name just sat there—sometimes it went up, sometimes it went down. She stayed on the board—he downvoted her every day, doing his part—but it wasn’t like anyone was about to cancel her show.
It didn’t cost her anything. That’s what really galled him. She didn’t even know they existed, all these people who hated her.
She had to know.
So one evening he typed the words “Someone should do something about that bitch” into his computer.
Easily a dozen other people responded with more or less the same message: “Like what?”
“We should ruin her wedding,” he typed back. The news was out by then. Goetz couldn’t miss it. His newsfeeds were crammed with mentions of Kira, pictures of Kira, Kira’s greatest hits from the show.
“Yeah, we should crash it,” one of the other Downvoters wrote back.
“We totally should.”
“We should fucking ruin it,” another wrote.
“We should fucking ruin her,” one other guy typed.
And that’s when Goetz had the idea. He could show her. He could show them all.
Of the dozen or so who chatted with him online that night, most dropped away immediately when he mentioned getting guns. Just logged out and never came back. Goetz didn’t care. He thought they were cowards.
Five hung around. They all talked a good game. One guy was in Canada, though, so he was out. Two of the others just rubbed him the wrong way. He didn’t think he could count on them if it came down to a real firefight.
But Baldwin and Andrews—one lived in Henderson, Nevada, and the other was in Riverside—they were on board. They loved the idea. They all met up and made a plan. They filled out their forms and bought their guns. They ordered their fake waiter costumes online. They mapped out the site of the wedding and drove there together and parked Baldwin’s shitty little Mazda hatchback at a parking meter near the beach.
They walked up to the hotel from the public walkway and wandered right past the fat security guard.
They hid by the deck until they heard the “Wedding March.”
Then they jumped out and started shooting, and people fell down.
Goetz expected he’d be sick. Or nervous. Maybe even a little guilty.
Instead, all he felt when he saw Kira fall was a sense of wonder. He’d done something. He’d proven she could be touched, that they really did exist in the same world. No matter what else happened, for that split second, he mattered.
He’d shown her.
I find myself staring at his breathing tube. It would take almost no effort at all to crimp it. Then it would be only a matter of seconds—not even minutes—to watch him suffocate.
Then I remember: everything in here is recorded. There are cameras in every hallway, every cell, every medical bay. There is a long digital trail of my presence here. In the past, I’ve walked five feet in front of guards with automatic rifles in broad daylight, and afterward, they would swear they’d been looking at nothing but empty air. I can fool human beings into seeing stuff that isn’t there.
Cameras and computers, not so much. I’m good, but I’m not good enough to talk my way out of a murder committed on video.
So I shake my head and forcibly break contact. Look away and take a deep breath. I realize my hands have clenched into fists.
Goetz is not completely stupid. He is watching me more carefully now. He saw the sudden rage and how I forced myself to remain calm. He knows something is off here. His mind has shifted from self-pity to self-preservation. Better late than never.
He writes on the board again.
get out want my lawyer
“This is the only chance you’ve got for a deal,” I tell him, pulling out the fake smile. My face feels like rubber. It doesn’t put him at ease.
He takes the board back, scribbles some more.
what’s ur name
He underlines it several times. Glaring at me the whole time.
Decision time. He can’t yell for help, but he does have a button that will summon the nurse on duty in the pod, and the deputies along with her. My blank papers will not withstand that kind of heightened scrutiny. I could still get out of here, but not without hurting someone, and I don’t want to do that.
It’s time to go. I stand up.
“It seems like you need your rest,” I say. “We’ll continue this another time.”
I knock on the door and wait for the deputy. Goetz is on full alert now, however. He taps the board again, points at me, gestures furiously.
The deputy is taking his sweet time getting me out, and Goetz is only getting more agitated. He’d be up and out of bed if it wouldn’t dislodge his tube. He’s mouthing obscenities. In his head, I hear them at full volume.
It’s just a little more than I’m prepared to take.
I step back toward the bed and push him down into the mattress. I put my face close to his. He sees me behind the glasses for the first time. I feel the sudden shock of recognition. He suddenly remembers where he’s seen me before.
“That’s right,” I say quietly. “It’s me.”
He reaches for the call button. I grab his wrist and pin it down. He struggles, but not much.
“You want to live, Mr. Goetz? Tell me who’s behind this. Tell me about Downvote.”
Panic in his brain. Like a rat gnawing at its tail pinned in a trap. He can’t talk, and he can’t reach the tablet to write because I’m holding him down.
But I can get what I need direct from the source.
The problem is, it doesn’t make much sense. He doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about.
“Hey,” the deputy says
, from behind me. “What are you doing?”
I stand up. Smile again. Hopefully more convincingly this time.
“He seems a little agitated,” I say. “Maybe he needs to rest. I’ll come back later.”
The deputy takes a look at Goetz, who radiates relief, but otherwise keeps his face blank. The deputy stands on the edge of a decision for a long moment, teetering back and forth between suspicion and indifference.
In the end, indifference wins. Bad shit happens in these jails all the time. There’s the usual menu of gang violence, rape, and beatings. And over in the men’s central jail, some of the deputies were so notorious for beating prisoners that they were more like a gang themselves. The former sheriff resigned under indictment for lying about it, and one of his top undersheriffs was just convicted of federal corruption charges for covering it up. Now everyone has to be even more careful. There have been so many investigations, one after another, that anyone could be a federal informant. Prisoner, deputy, staffer—doesn’t matter. Anybody could be a snitch.
The deputy knows: you want to keep your job, you keep your head down, you keep your mouth shut.
So he pretends he hasn’t seen a thing.
“You coming?” he asks.
I nod, and go to the door.
But before I leave, I look back at Goetz. “Don’t worry,” I tell him. “I’ll see you again.”
I admit, I take a lot of joy in the wave of fear that rolls off him as I walk out.
My arrogant little victory dance is short-lived. The deputy takes me back to the lobby by a different route, and we pass one of the exam rooms where a prisoner from the seventh floor is being treated.
I forgot. This is not only one of the largest jails in the country, it’s also the largest mental health facility in the world. That’s because it’s the holding pen for every head case who gets arrested in Los Angeles County. At any given moment, there are about two thousand people with some kind of mental illness in Twin Towers. Everyone placed on a seventy-two-hour hold by their concerned relatives, every suicidal vet, every addict who’s melted his brain, every crazy homeless person picked up for jerking off in public.
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