Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (53 page)

As if to discount the captain’s caution, Hardwick called across the room to Gurney, who was seated at the opposite end of the half-moon table. “Congratulations, Sherlock! You ought to consider a career in law enforcement. We need brains like yours.”

A voice from the monitor on the wall redirected everyone’s attention.

“I
t’s now 2:03
P.M.
, September twentieth. This is Detective Lieutenant Darryl Becker of the Palm Beach Police Department. With me in Interrogation Room Number One are Jordan Ballston and his attorney Stanford Mull. This interrogation is being recorded.” Becker looked from the camera to Ballston. “Are you Jordan Ballston of South Ocean Boulevard, Palm Beach?”

Ballston answered without raising his eyes from the table. “Yes, I am.”

“Have you agreed after consultation with your attorney to make a complete and truthful statement regarding the murder of Melanie Strum?”

Stanford Mull put his hand on Ballston’s forearm. “Jordan, I must—”

“Yes, I have,” said Ballston.

Becker went on. “Do you agree to answer fully and truthfully all questions put to you in regard to this matter?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Please describe in detail how you came into contact with Melanie Strum and everything that occurred thereafter, including how and why you killed her.”

Mull looked agonized. “For Godsake, Jordan—”

Ballston looked up for the first time. “Enough, Stan, enough! I’ve made my decision. You’re not here to get in my way. I just want you to be fully aware of everything I say.”

Mull shook his head.

Ballston seemed relieved by his attorney’s silence. He looked up at the camera. “How large an audience do I have?”

Becker looked disgusted. “Does it matter?”

“The damnedest things end up on YouTube.”

“This won’t.”

“Too bad.” Ballston smiled horribly. “Where should I begin?”

“At the beginning.”

“You mean when I saw my uncle fucking my mother when I was six years old?”

Becker hesitated. “Why don’t you start by telling us how you met Melanie Strum?”

Ballston leaned back in his chair, addressing his answer in an almost dreamy tone to a point somewhere high on the wall behind Becker. “I acquired Melanie through the special Karnala process. The process involves a branching journey through a sequence of portals. Now, each of these portals—”

“Hold on. You need to describe this in plain English. What the hell is a portal?”

Gurney wanted to tell Becker to relax, let the man speak, ask the questions later. But telling Becker what to do at this point could derail him completely.

“I’m talking about website links and passages. Internet sites offering choices of other sites, chat rooms leading to other chat rooms, always in the direction of exploring narrower and more intense interests, and finally leading to a direct one-on-one e-mail or text-message correspondence between customer and provider.” In light of the underlying subject matter, Ballston’s professorial tone struck Gurney as surreal.

“You mean you tell them what kind of girl you want and they deliver her?”

“No, no, nothing as abrupt or crude as that. As I said, the Karnala process is
special
. The price is high, but the methodology is elegant. Once the direct correspondence has proven satisfactory on both sides—”

“Satisfactory? In what way?”

“In the way of credibility. The people at Karnala become
convinced of the seriousness of the customer’s intentions, and the customer becomes convinced of Karnala’s legitimacy.”

“Legitimacy?”

“What? Oh, I see your problem. I mean
legitimacy
in the sense of being who you claim to be and not, for example, the agent of some pathetic sting operation.”

Gurney was fascinated by the dynamics of the interrogation. Ballston, who was implicating himself in a capital crime for which he was bargaining to receive a less-than-capital sentence, seemed to be drawing a sense of control from his own calm narrative. Becker, nominally in charge, was the rattled one.

“Okay,” said Becker, “assuming that everyone ends up satisfied with everyone else’s legitimacy, what then?”

“Then,” said Ballston, pausing dramatically and looking Becker in the eye for the first time, “the elegant touch: the Karnala ads in the Sunday
Times.
”

“Say that again?”

“Karnala Fashion. Featuring the highest clothing prices on the planet: one-of-a-kind outfits, custom-designed for you, at a hundred thousand dollars and up. Lovely ads. Lovely girls. Girls wearing nothing but a couple of diaphanous scarves. Very stimulating.”

“What’s the relevance of these ads?”

“Think about it.”

Ballston’s creepy gentility was getting to Becker. “Shit, Ballston, I don’t have time for games.”

Ballston sighed. “I’d have thought it was obvious, Lieutenant. The ads aren’t for the clothes. They’re for the girls.”

“You’re telling me the girls in the ads are for sale?”

“Correct.”

Becker blinked, looked incredulous. “For a hundred thousand dollars?”

“And up.”

“So then what? You send off a check for a hundred grand, and they FedEx you the world’s highest-priced hooker?”

“Hardly, Lieutenant. You don’t order a Rolls-Royce from a magazine ad.”

“So you … what? Visit the Karnala showroom?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. The showroom is actually a screening room. Each of the currently available girls, including the girl featured in the advertisement, introduces herself in her own intimate video.”

“You talking about individual porno movies?”

“Something much better than that. Karnala operates at the most sophisticated end of the business. These girls and their video presentations are remarkably intelligent, wonderfully subtle, and carefully preselected to meet the customer’s emotional needs.” The tip of Ballston’s tongue ran idly across his upper lip. Becker looked like he might explode out of his chair. “I think what you’re failing to grasp, Lieutenant, is that these are girls with
very
interesting sexual histories, girls with
intense
sexual appetites of their own. These are not hookers, Lieutenant, these are very special girls.”

“That’s what makes them worth a hundred grand?”

Ballston sighed indulgently. “And up.”

Becker nodded blankly. The man appeared to Gurney to be lost. “A hundred grand … for nymphomania … sophistication …?”

Ballston smiled softly. “For being exactly what one wants. For being the glove that fits the hand.”

“Tell me more.”

“There are some very good wines available for fifty dollars a bottle, wines that achieve ninety percent of perfection. A far smaller number, available for five hundred dollars a bottle, achieve ninety-nine percent of perfection. But for that final one percent of absolute perfection—for that you’ll pay five thousand dollars a bottle. Some people can’t tell the difference. Some can.”

“Damn! Here’s ordinary little me, thinking that a pricey hooker is just a pricey hooker.”

“For you, Lieutenant, I’m sure that’s the ultimate truth.”

Becker went rigid in his chair, his face expressionless. Gurney had seen that look too many times in his career. What followed it was usually unfortunate, occasionally career-ending. He hoped the camera and the presence of Stanford Mull, Esquire, would be effective deterrents.

Apparently they were. Becker slowly relaxed, looking around the room for a long minute, looking everywhere except at Ballston.

Gurney wondered what Ballston’s game was. Was he calculatedly trying to ignite a violent reaction in exchange for a legal advantage? Or was his laid-back condescension an effort to demonstrate his superiority as his life collapsed?

When Becker spoke, his voice was unnaturally casual. “So tell me about that screening room,
Jordan.
” He articulated the name in a way that sounded oddly insulting.

If Ballston heard it that way, he ignored it. “Small, comfortable, lovely carpet.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. When I was picked up at Newark Airport, I was given a blindfold—one of those sleeping masks you see in old black-and-white movies. I was told by the driver to put it on and not take it off until I was informed that I was in the screening room.”

“And you didn’t cheat?”

“Karnala is not an organization that encourages cheating.”

Becker nodded, smiled. “Do you think they might consider what you’re telling us today a form of cheating?”

“I’m afraid they might,” said Ballston.

“So you look at these … videos and … you see something you like. What then?”

“You verbally accept the terms of the purchase, you replace your blindfold, and you are driven back to the airport. You arrange for a wire transfer of the purchase price to a bank-account number in the Cayman Islands, and a few days later the girl of your dreams rings your doorbell.”

“And then?”

“And then … whatever one wishes to happen … happens.”

“And the girl of your dreams ends up dead.”

Ballston smiled. “Of course.”

“Of course?”

“That’s what the transaction is all about. Didn’t you know that?”

“All about … killing them?”

“The girls Karnala provides are very bad girls. They’ve done
terrible things. In their videos they describe in detail what they’ve done. Unbelievably terrible things.”

Becker moved back slightly in his chair. He was clearly in over his head. Even Stanford Mull’s poker face had assumed a certain rigidity. Their reactions seemed to energize Ballston. Life seemed to be flowing back into him. His eyes brightened.

“Terrible things that require terrible punishments.”

There was a kind of universal pause, maybe two or three seconds, in which it seemed that no one in the Palm Beach interrogation room or the BCI teleconferencing room was breathing.

Darryl Becker broke the spell with a practical question in a routine tone of voice. “Let’s be perfectly clear on this. You killed Melanie Strum?”

“That’s correct.”

“And Karnala had sent other girls to you?”

“Correct.”

“How many others?”

“Two prior to Melanie.”

“How much did you know about them?”

“About the boring details of their day-to-day existences, nothing. About their passions and their transgressions, everything.”

“Did you know where they came from?”

“No.”

“How Karnala recruited them?”

“No.”

“Did you ever try to find out?”

“That was specifically discouraged.”

Becker leaned back from the table and studied Ballston’s face.

As Gurney watched Becker on the screen, it looked to him as if the man was stalling, overwhelmed by his introduction to a level of sickness he hadn’t anticipated, trying to figure out where to go next with the interrogation.

Gurney turned to Rodriguez. The captain looked every bit as nonplussed as Darryl Becker by Ballston’s revelations and nonchalance.

“Sir?” At first Rodriguez seemed not to hear him. “Sir, I’d like to send a request down to Palm Beach.”

“What kind of request?”

“I want Becker to ask Ballston why he cut off Melanie’s head.”

The captain’s faced twitched in revulsion. “Obviously because he’s a sick, sadistic, murdering creep.”

“I think it could be useful to ask the question.”

Rodriguez looked pained. “What else could it be, other than part of his disgusting ritual?”

“Like cutting off Jillian’s head was part of Hector’s ritual?”

“What’s your point?”

Gurney’s tone hardened. “It’s a simple question,
and it has to be asked
. We’re running out of time.” He knew that Rodriguez’s horrendous difficulties with his crack-addict daughter were compromising the man’s ability to deal directly with a case so close to home, but that was not Gurney’s largest concern.

Rodriguez’s face reddened, an effect heightened by the contrast with his starched white collar and dyed black hair. After a moment he turned toward Wigg with an air of surrender. “Man has a question. ‘Why did Ballston cut off her head?’ Send it.”

Wigg’s fingers tapped rapidly on her keyboard.

On the teleconferencing monitor, Becker was pressing Ballston about where Karnala got the girls, and Ballston was reiterating his total lack of knowledge in that area.

Becker looked like he was considering yet another way to pursue this when his attention was drawn to his laptop, apparently to the question Wigg had just transmitted. He looked up at the camera and nodded before switching subjects.

“So, Jordan, tell me … why did you do it?”

“Do what?”

“Kill Melanie Strum in that particular way.”

“I’m afraid that’s a private matter.”

“Private, hell. The deal was we ask questions, you answer them.”

“Well …” Ballston’s bravado was fading. “I would say it was partly a matter of personal preference, and …” He looked for the first time in the interrogation mildly anxious. “I have to ask you something, Lieutenant. Are you referring to … the whole process … or simply the removal of the head?”

Becker hesitated. The banal tone of the conversation seemed to be twisting his grip on reality. “For now … let’s say we’re mainly concerned about the removal.”

“I see. Well, the removal was, shall we say, a courtesy.”

“It was a
what
?”

“A courtesy. A gentlemen’s agreement.”

“An agreement … to do what?”

Ballston shook his head in despair, like the sophisticated tutor of a dull student. “I think I’ve explained the basic arrangement, and Karnala’s expertise in catering to the psychological dimension, their ability to provide a unique product. You did understand all that, Lieutenant?”

“Yeah, I understood it fine.”

“They’re the ultimate source of the ultimate product.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“As a condition for an ongoing business relationship, they did have that one small stipulation.”