Ransom X

by I.B. Holder

  Chapter 33 Learning curve

  The bells of a church chimed in the distance, reminding Legacy that time passed with or without his consent. How long had he been sitting in silence? By Wagner’s gaze at him, it must have been at least ten minutes, but less than an hour, because she was waiting expectantly without seeming pissed off. Legacy could not explain a newfound desire to keep her engaged. He had in fact taken the ten minutes to collect his thoughts, so that they would best inform her of the strides that they had made by viewing Sofia spouting lies in front of a bustling hometown crowd.

  “She’s opened the door to a world of conjecture that I probably would have never found.” He paused, “Never being the type to market pornography.”

  Wagner saw her opening, “But she has no connection to the actual abductors –”

  “Her connection is in the marketing. She’s following a pathway that the Vinyl Men opened up when they started their franchise of sex and abduction.” He said, with a little impatience hanging in his voice.

  “The standard investigative paradigm of pursuing the truth is not going to work when the person you are following is so much smarter than the truth.”

  “Smarter than the truth?” Wagner asked with a laugh.

  “He leaves only the fragments of truth behind him, so much so that lead away from him.” Legacy responded. “But by studying behavior we can project backward to the conception of this kind of project, without involving Blue.” His eyes lit up, “What questions does one ask before this kind of abduction?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start.” Wagner exclaimed.

  “Start with what we just saw, why did Sofia give that fake speech in front of her home town? Answer: because these are the people she went to school with, ran around with, annoyed, impressed, and ultimately, dismissed. Why did she come back? These are the people who are most likely to develop a fascination and want to see her sexually subordinate.” He waited for the thread to be picked up by Wagner.

  A hundred questions later, they’d fleshed out a scenario that seemed so wrong that it could well have been the path that the Vinyl Men took in starting their brotherhood. Take a girl, any girl, perhaps a girl who’d been with them for the ride, take her and spread her across a table like a buffet. That’s where it started, hunger, and it was probably developed by their frustrated leader as some kind of Dionysian celebration after they’d finished a job. How did this celebration then become their job? A market developed, in a way that Legacy couldn’t see until Sofia. It developed from the grassroots. It was a road that tapped into new technologies and gave old ties that last chance to see something familiar in sick entertainment. Sofia might not be the first, but she was taking the same path as the first girl took and that was as good as a map to the starting place.

  “They tapped into a group of people who knew the identity of the girl being used in the videos?” Wagner asked.

  Legacy nodded, “Probably through one of those websites that links classmates together, my daughter has a link to one on her homepage. I’m going to ask her to take it off.”

  Wagner then surprised Legacy; “It was probably the girl that thought of it, wanting to show all those people exactly how right they were about her. Show off –”

  “Infamy is better than being forgotten.” Legacy responded. “The email would read, “prom queen” or “cheerleader from Lincoln class of 99 taken by thugs. See the kinky footage for thirty dollars “.

  “Who wouldn’t want to buy that?” Wagner spit out through a thin, constricted scowl.

  Legacy was sure that the girl on the podium was a derivative version of the abductions that they were seeing now. Their pioneering effort produced a new category in pornography. The Vinyl Men had cultivated a new audience, and it was evolving from high school sweetheart to a local TV to the new world of Internet porn. Each girl represented a larger slice of an audience that they could market directly to by way of the Internet, until Laura took their scheme national.

  “So we start looking for a connection to direct marketing of pornography using a local girl as the bait- “ Wagner was well into note taking and list making.

  “Or if you are right, the hook.” Legacy snatched the note pad from her desk.

  “Does this help?” He asked, referring to the notepad “I always thought of note taking as a way to waste time.”

  Wagner let the smallest cloud of offense drift across her angelic brow, Legacy burst out into a beaming smile as if to say, “I got you.”

  Wagner kicked him in the shins on the way to the door.

  At the door she turned, “I’m going to get Brent to track this down.”

  “About the face painting –”

  “Can it wait?”

  Legacy had already turned away then something in him decided it couldn’t. This was a move that his brain would later question, “Sofia had glitter on her cheeks, soft lines on her eyes and sloping color which drew attention to her very pretty face. You do the same thing around your lips and on your cheeks – my question is this: it’s all for attention right? I mean there’s no other purpose?”

  Wagner blushed; she hadn’t suspected that the details of her face had ever crossed his mind. “I guess it must have something to do with attention.”

  “I don’t think Laura wants any more attention and yet she paints her body up each time.”

  “True.”

  “So what are the lines meant to draw attention to?”

  Wagner glanced up, “We’ve had cryptographers and symbolists go over every inch of every design without even the hint of anything meaningful.”

  He saw no quick answer. “You can go.”

  Wagner fought back her curiosity as she went to find Brent. The answer to why Laura covered herself in those marks was the next step inside the mind of Laura.

  Legacy thought about the day ahead of Wagner scrambling after the merchants, searching for someone who’d been approached to buy videos of their high school sweethearts being twisted like a pretzel. Even when, at the end of the day, she had a name to go on, Roman Tanner, and a thread that might just reach all the way back into the past from his favorite spirit squad leader to the present abduction, even then she wouldn’t have gotten as far as Legacy did that day. It turned out that Laura had sent a painted message, but it would take Legacy another 48 hours to figure out how.

  A series of strange phone calls ended Legacy’s day at the office. The strange part was that Legacy, according to his long tradition of telephone ambivalence, didn’t answer a single one of the calls, yet he found himself speaking to each caller.

  It began with the unfortunate coincidence of the delivery of his coffee by, ­well, the woman who delivered his coffee. The cup hit the table in exact synchrony to the phone ringing, and the coffee woman, (let’s call her Stephanie because she is of no consequence, and most people of no consequence have long names like Stephanie) mistook the reach of Legacy toward his cup for an interest in the ringing phone. Being the helpful person that Stephanie was, she delivered coffee everyday after all, she picked up the phone and handed it to him.

  Legacy received the phone like a coaster being set underneath a long stemmed wine glass being held in his hand. It had no purpose being there. It took him a moment to even move it to his ear, a moment during which he covered his displeasure with Stephanie by conspicuously turning away from what he guessed would be her helpful smile, if he looked up at all, which he never did.

  Now, strange calls require strange callers, and Tyke’s voice fit perfectly into the mix. “I need your help.” There was a sound in his voice that was deeply unsettling like he’d lost control.

  Legacy countered the urgent emotional tone with “Do you have that breakdown for me yet?”

  “I’m in the middle of a breakdown, man.” Tyke responded.

  “Send it. We’ll talk later.” Legacy said, his phone manner a bit distracted. He always had problems focusing when he was on the phone, perhaps because the
re was just that thin auditory track couldn’t possibly keep him interested for more than a few seconds. Or, the greater possibility was that because he hadn’t intended to answer the phone, he’d considered the conversation done before it had unfortunately began.

  “This is a social call.”

  A social call? Legacy didn’t even know what to say, he hadn’t had one of those in years. Was it possible that Tyke thought that they were friends? He hadn’t had one of those in years either.

  “I need something, that I know you got.” Tyke launched into a whiney complaint.

  “I’m not going to tell you how I cheated.” Legacy responded.

  “I have someone special coming over, and I need that thing you got – that thing that pulls them in.” he said.

  “Them?” Legacy asked.

  “The ladies.” Tyke wrapped his voice in secrecy, a stage whisper, on the off chance that his special visitor was near. Legacy stared at the receiver for a full five seconds. In his mind he pulled substance around the sound waves and made them a physical entity, a piece of insecure art. The one thing he was sure of was that Tyke would say more ridiculous things.

  “They’re always buzzing around you like a bee to honey.”

  It was a bad comparison for a number of reasons, as bees have a facilitator relationship with honey, nothing amorous. “Where did you get this idea?”

  “You’re tall and let’s face it man, your eyes are dreamy. That’s what I heard from almost all the available female gene pool when we worked together.”

  “You’re deluded.”

  “What about that hot secretary that used to walk down three flights of stairs to deliver your coffee every day even though she didn’t work in your department. No wonder she got such great legs.”

  “Stephanie?” Oops that was the name he’d made up.

  “Man, you never got her name? She flat out shines and you never get her name. That’s what I need, just a little fix of that so I can take my relationship with Kelly to the next level.” Tyke poured out his heart in a crisply punctuated ramble. He had obviously spent too much time with computers committing text to speech and his cadence matched the structural need of a processor to understand it. He was near to begging, “I’m hooking you up.”

  It was a trade, Tyke had obviously completed the favor that Legacy had asked and he wanted one in turn. Legacy felt completely unequal to the task of giving any kind of romantic advice, but he realized that Tyke’s friendly manner made him feel oddly accommodating.

  “What makes you think I can get you Kelly?”

  “Even if you don’t notice the way women react to that “intense and wounded” thing you’ve got going on, you get inside people’s heads? That’s what you’re best at right?”

  Legacy couldn't disagree, he found himself being drawn in to the challenge. A phone conversation was becoming interesting – maybe he’d have to reconsider the next time the phone rang.

  Tyke continued, “I never consult people that are worse than me at anything – I’m guessing you definitely had a “first D” on par with Kelly.”

  “Had a first D?” Legacy asked, not knowing that the explanation would run long.

  Now, saying that Tyke had a unique view of social interaction was a continent-sized understatement. Living among his computers, toys and gadgets in which a fortune of time and money had been invested, but Legacy had to admire the fusion of emotion and thought that went into a system that Tyke had coined the “first date continuum.” It was a detailed analysis of the way men and women couple off, and was likely several volumes long. Legacy got the brief version because of Kelly’s imminent arrival.

  It went something like this: The coupling of men and women is completely and totally governed by the first person they ever dated. Because this happens at a time of relationship innocence, there are no external forces that dictate the pairing. That first girl is an accurate indication of the level of likeability or inner desirability of a man. This quotient, which Tyke sited almost like an element, “first D”, this first D is not a variable; it never changes during a person’s life. It gets recognized as a part of his nature, and although later in life money, social standing and other exterior affects can lure desirable women to be with less desirable men, those relationships were built on factors that at any moment could be taken away. The most stable relationships, like the equal pairings of electrons and protons within an atom, are when the man and woman are equally desirable.

  That first girlfriend sets the tone that nature has in mind for the rest of a person’s natural life. Tyke knew that the women that he most admired in junior high went out with the most admirable boys. It wasn’t the right boy, or the strongest boy that got Mary Borra Charpenter to go to second base with him. Neither was it incidentally a member of the baseball team. It was Tyke’s best buddy, fellow computer nerd. He was a good guy and he deserved her.

  Legacy sat through the explanation intrigued by the notion that his daughter’s first boyfriend would tell him everything about her present and future charisma. “I’m not sure I totally agree –”

  “Who was your first, the first girl you dated?” Tyke shot back like he was protecting a beloved pet or at least a theory in which he was heavily invested.

  “My wife.” Legacy replied slowly. Time stood still for more than a breath.

  “Then I’m right, man. She was the most beautiful thing I ever saw in person. That’s the truth.”

  Legacy was somehow grateful for the words that came so easily to Tyke. They were the truth about her from another person, something he never really allowed himself to experience.

  “So is Kelly on par with the first girl you dated?” A long pause followed.

  “Believing in the theory puts a lot of pressure on your first date.”

  “You’ve never dated anyone? At your age and income level?” Legacy knew that by phrasing it like that, Tyke would pop.

  “I’m always busy helping out my friends.” A sound in the background cut panic into his voice and on the sharp edge Tyke yelped out “She’s here. What do I do?”

  “Open the door.”