“I’m asking for a favor. You can just say no.”
Scott does not sigh, and he does not mumble. He’s simply quiet. Then, a few seconds later: “Come to the office around 8:00. You can use the terminal in my office.”
* * *
The Watcher thinks of himself as a good client. He makes sure he gets his money’s worth, but he leaves a generous tip. He likes the clarity of money, the way it makes the flow of power obvious. The girl he just left was certainly appreciative.
He drives faster. He feels he’s been too self-indulgent the last few weeks, working too slowly. He needs to make sure the last round of targets have paid. If not, he needs to carry through. Action. Reaction. It’s all very simple once you understand the rules.
He rubs the bandage around his ring finger, which allows him to maintain the pale patch of skin that girls like to see. The lingering, sickly sweet perfume from the last girl—Melody, Mandy, he’s already forgetting her name—reminds him of Tara, who he will never forget.
Tara may have been the only girl he’s really loved. She was blonde, petite, and very expensive. But she had liked him for some reason. Perhaps because they were both broken, and the jagged pieces happened to fit.
She had stopped charging him and told him her real name. He was a kind of boyfriend. Because he was curious, she explained her business to him. How certain words and turns of phrase and tones on the phone were warning signs. What she looked for in a desired regular. What signs on a man probably meant he was safe. He enjoyed learning about this. It seemed to require careful watching by the girl, and he respected those who looked and studied and made the information useful.
He had looked into her eyes as he fucked her, and then said, “Is something wrong with your right eye?”
She had stopped moving. “What?”
“I wasn’t sure at first. But yes, it’s like you have something behind your eye.”
She wriggled under him. He was annoyed and thought about holding her down. But he decided not to. She seemed about to tell him something important. He rolled off of her.
“You’re very observant.”
“I try. What is it?”
She told him about the implant.
“You’ve been recording your clients having sex with you?”
“Yes.”
“I want to see the ones you have of us.”
She laughed. “I’ll have to go under the knife for that. Not going to happen until I retire. Having your skull opened up once was enough.”
She explained how the recordings made her feel safe, gave her a sense of power, like having bank accounts whose balances only she knew and kept growing. If she were ever threatened, she would be able to call on the powerful men she knew for aid. And after retirement, if things didn’t work out and she got desperate, perhaps she could use them to get her regulars to help her out a little.
He had liked the way she thought. So devious. So like him.
He had been sorry when he killed her. Removing her head was more difficult and messy than he had imagined. Figuring out what to do with the little silver half-sphere had taken months. He would learn to do better over time.
But Tara had been blind to the implications of what she had done. What she had wasn’t just insurance, wasn’t just a rainy-day fund. She had revealed to him that she had what it took to make his dream come true, and he had to take it from her.
He pulls into the parking lot of the hotel and finds himself seized by an unfamiliar sensation: sorrow. He misses Tara, like missing a mirror you’ve broken.
* * *
Ruth is working with the assumption that the man she’s looking for targets independent prostitutes. There’s an efficiency and a method to the way Mona was killed that suggested practice.
She begins by searching the NCIC database for prostitutes who had been killed by a suspect matching the EchoSense description. As she expects, she comes up with nothing that seems remotely similar. The man hadn’t left obvious trails.
The focus on Mona’s eyes may be a clue. Maybe the killer has a fetish for Asian women. Ruth changes her search to concentrate on body mutilations of Asian prostitutes similar to what Mona had suffered. Again, nothing.
Ruth sits back and thinks over the situation. It’s common for serial killers to concentrate on victims of a specific ethnicity. But that may be a red herring here.
She expands her search to include all independent prostitutes who had been killed in the last year or so, and now there are too many hits. Dozens and dozens of killings of prostitutes of every description pop up. Most were sexually assaulted. Some were tortured. Many had their bodies mutilated. Almost all were robbed. Gangs were suspected in several cases. She sifts through them, looking for similarities. Nothing jumps out at her.
She needs more information.
She logs onto the escort sites in the various cities and looks up the ads of the murdered women. Not all of them remain online, as some sites deactivate ads when enough patrons complain about unavailability. She prints out what she can, laying them out side by side to compare.
Then she sees it. It’s in the ads.
A subset of the ads triggers a sense of familiarity in Ruth’s mind. They were all carefully written, free of spelling and grammar mistakes. They were frank but not explicit, seductive without verging on parody. The johns who posted reviews described them as “classy.”
It’s a signal, Ruth realizes. The ads are written to give off the air of being careful, selective, discreet. There is in them, for lack of a better word, a sense of taste.
All of the women in these ads were extraordinarily beautiful, with smooth skin and thick, long flowing hair. All of them were between twenty-two and thirty, not so young as to be careless or supporting themselves through school, and not old enough to lose the ability to pass for younger. All of them were independent, with no pimp or evidence of being on drugs.
Luo’s words come back to her: The men who go to massage parlors for $60 an hour and a happy ending are not the kind who’d pay for a girl like this.
There’s a certain kind of client who would be attracted to the signs given out by these girls, Ruth thinks: men who care very much about the risk of discovery and who believe that they deserve something special, suitable for their distinguished tastes.
She prints out the NCIC entries for the women.
All the women she’s identified were killed in their homes. No sign of struggle—possibly because they were meeting a client. One was strangled, the others shot through the heart in the back, like Mona. In all the cases except one—the woman who was strangled—the police had found record of a suspicious call on the day of the murder from a prepaid phone that was later found somewhere in the city. The killer had taken all the women’s money.
Ruth knows she’s on the right track. Now she needs to examine the case reports in more detail to see if she can find more patterns to identify the killer.
The door to the office opens. It’s Scott.
“Still here?” The scowl on his face shows that he does not have his Regulator on. “It’s after midnight.”
She notes, not for the first time, how the men in the department have often resisted the Regulator unless absolutely necessary, claiming that it dulled their instincts and hunches. But they had also asked her whether she had hers on whenever she dared to disagree with them. They would laugh when they asked.
“I think I’m onto something,” she says, calmly.
“You working with the goddamned Feds now?”
“What are you talking about?”
“You haven’t seen the news?”
“I’ve been here all evening.”
He takes out his tablet, opens a bookmark, and hands it to her. It’s an article in the international section of the Globe, which she rarely reads. “Scandal Unseats Chinese Transport Minister,” says the headline.
She scans the article quickly. A video has surfaced on the Chinese microblogs showing an important official in the Transport Min
istry having sex with a prostitute. Moreover, it seems that he had been paying her out of public funds. He’s already been removed from his post due to the public outcry.
Accompanying the article is a grainy photo, a still capture from the video. Before the Regulator kicks in, Ruth feels her heart skip a beat. The image shows a man on top of a woman. Her head is turned to the side, directly facing the camera.
“That’s your girl, isn’t it?”
Ruth nods. She recognizes the bed and the nightstand with the clock and wicker basket from the crime scene photos.
“The Chinese are hopping mad. They think we had the man under surveillance when he was in Boston and released this video deliberately to mess with them. They’re protesting through the backchannels, threatening retaliation. The Feds want us to look into it and see what we can find out about how the video was made. They don’t know that she’s already dead, but I recognized her as soon as I saw her. If you ask me, it’s probably something the Chinese cooked up themselves to try to get rid of the guy in an internal purge. Maybe they even paid the girl to do it and then they killed her. That or our own spies decided to get rid of her after using her as bait, in which case I expect this investigation to be shut down pretty quickly. Either way, I’m not looking forward to this mess. And I advise you to back off as well.”
Ruth feels a moment of resentment before the Regulator whisks it away. If Mona’s death was part of a political plot, then Scott is right, she really is way out of her depth. The police had been wrong to conclude that it was a gang killing. But she’s wrong, too. Mona was an unfortunate pawn in some political game, and the trend she thought she had noticed was illusory, just a set of coincidences.
The rational thing to do is to let the police take over. She’ll have to tell Sarah Ding that there’s nothing she can do for her now.
“We’ll have to sweep the apartment again for recording devices. And you better let me know the name of your informant. We’ll need to question him thoroughly to see which gangs are involved. This could be a national security matter.”
“You know I can’t do that. I have no evidence he has anything to do with this.”
“Ruth, we’re picking this up now. If you want to find the girl’s killer, help me.”
“Feel free to round up all the usual suspects in Chinatown. It’s what you want to do, anyway.”
He stares at her, his face weary and angry, a look she’s very familiar with. Then his face relaxes. He has decided to engage his Regulator, and he no longer wants to argue or talk about what couldn’t be said between them.
Her Regulator kicks in automatically.
“Thank you for letting me use your office,” she says placidly. “You have a good night.”
* * *
The scandal had gone off exactly as the Watcher planned. He’s pleased but not yet ready to celebrate. That was only the first step, a demonstration of his power. Next, he has to actually make sure it pays.
He goes through the recordings and pictures he’s extracted from the dead girl and picks out a few more promising targets based on his research. Two are prominent Chinese businessmen connected with top Party bosses; one is the brother of an Indian diplomatic attaché; two more are sons of the House of Saud studying in Boston. It’s remarkable how similar the dynamics between the powerful and the people they ruled over were around the world. He also finds a prominent CEO and a Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, but these he sets aside. It’s not that he’s particularly patriotic, but he instinctively senses that if one of his victims decides to turn him in instead of paying up, he’ll be in much less trouble if the victim isn’t an American. Besides, American public figures also have a harder time moving money around anonymously, as evidenced by his experience with those two Senators in DC, which almost unraveled his whole scheme. Finally, it never hurts to have a judge or someone famous that can be leaned on in case the Watcher is caught.
Patience, and an eye for details.
He sends off his emails. Each references the article about the Chinese Transport Minister (“see, this could be you!”) and then includes two files. One is the full video of the minister and the girl (to show that he was the originator) and the second is a carefully curated video of the recipient coupling with her. Each email contains a demand for payment and directions to make deposits to a numbered Swiss bank account or to transfer anonymous electronic cryptocurrency.
He browses the escort sites again. He’s narrowed down the girls he suspects to just a few. Now he just has to look at them more closely to pick out the right one. He grows excited at the prospect.
He glances up at the people walking past him in the streets. All these foolish men and women moving around as if dreaming. They do not understand that the world is full of secrets, accessible only to those patient enough, observant enough to locate them and dig them out of their warm, bloody hiding places, like retrieving pearls from the soft flesh inside an oyster. And then, armed with those secrets, you could make men half a world away tremble and dance.
He closes his laptop and gets up to leave. He thinks about packing up the mess in his motel room, setting out the surgical kit, the baseball cap, the gun and a few other surprises he’s learned to take with him when he’s hunting.
Time to dig for more treasure.
* * *
Ruth wakes up. The old nightmares have been joined by new ones. She stays curled up in bed fighting waves of despair. She wants to lie here forever.
Days of work and she has nothing to show for it.
She’ll have to call Sarah Ding later, after she turns on the Regulator. She can tell her that Mona was probably not killed by a gang, but somehow had been caught up in events bigger than she could handle. How would that make Sarah feel better?
The image from yesterday’s news will not leave her mind, no matter how hard she tries to push it away.
Ruth struggles up and pulls up the article. She can’t explain it, but the image just looks wrong. Not having the Regulator on makes it hard to think.
She finds the crime scene photo of Mona’s bedroom and compares it with the image from the article. She looks back and forth.
Isn’t the basket of condoms on the wrong side of the bed?
The shot is taken from the left side of the bed. So the closet doors, with the mirrors on them, should be on the far side of the shot, behind the couple. But there’s only a blank wall behind them in the shot. Ruth’s heart is beating so fast that she feels faint.
The alarm beeps. Ruth glances up at the red numbers and turns the Regulator on.
The clock.
She looks back at the image. The alarm clock in the shot is tiny and fuzzy, but she can just make the numbers out. They’re backwards.
Ruth walks steadily over to her laptop and begins to search online for the video. She finds it without much trouble and presses play.
Despite the video stabilization and the careful cropping, she can see that Mona’s eyes are always looking directly into the camera.
There’s only one explanation: the camera was aimed at the mirrors, and it was located in Mona’s eye.
The eyes.
She goes through the NCIC entries of the other women she printed out yesterday, and now the pattern that had proven elusive seems obvious.
There was a blonde in Los Angeles whose head had been removed after death and never found; there was a brunette, also in LA, whose skull had been cracked open and her brains mashed; there was a Mexican woman and a black woman in DC whose faces had been subjected to post-mortem trauma in more restrained ways, with the cheekbones crushed and broken. Then finally, there was Mona, whose eyes had been carefully removed.
The killer has been improving his technique.
The Regulator holds her excitement in check. She needs more data.
She looks through all of Mona’s photographs again. Nothing out of place shows up in the earlier pictures, but in the picture from her birthday with her parents, a flash was used, and there�
�s an odd glint in her left eye.
Most cameras can automatically compensate for red-eye, which is caused by the light from the flash reflecting off the blood-rich choroid in the back of the eye. But the glint in Mona’s picture is not red; it’s bluish.
Calmly, Ruth flips through the photographs of the other girls who have been killed. And in each, she finds the tell-tale glint. This must be how the killer identified his targets.
She picks up the phone and dials the number for her friend. She and Gail had gone to college together, and she’s now working as a researcher for an advanced medical devices company.
“Hello?”
She hears the chatter of other people in the background. “Gail, it’s Ruth. Can you talk?”
“Just a minute.” She hears the background conversation grow muffled and then abruptly shut off. “You never call unless you’re asking about another enhancement. We’re not getting any younger, you know? You have to stop at some point.”
Gail had been the one to suggest the various enhancements Ruth has obtained over the years. She had even found Doctor B for her because she didn’t want Ruth to end up crippled. But she had done it reluctantly, conflicted about the idea of turning Ruth into a cyborg.
“This feels wrong,” she would say. “You don’t need these things done to you. They’re not medically necessary.”
“This can save my life the next time someone is trying to choke me,” Ruth would say.
“It’s not the same thing,” she would say. And the conversations would always end with Gail giving in, but with stern warnings about no further enhancements.
Sometimes you help a friend even when you disapprove of their decisions. It’s complicated.
Ruth answers Gail on the phone, “No. I’m just fine. But I want to know if you know about a new kind of enhancement. I’m sending you some pictures now. Hold on.” She sends over the images of the girls where she can see the strange glint in their eyes. “Take a look. Can you see that flash in their eyes? Do you know anything like this?” She doesn’t tell Gail her suspicion so that Gail’s answer would not be affected.
Gail is silent for a while. “I see what you mean. These are not great pictures. But let me talk to some people and call you back.”
The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Second Annual Collection Page 19
