Ex-Kop (21 page)

“What would it hurt? He had his killer already. He knew I was going to be a reporter someday. He said that he'd ask me to return the favor one day.”

I looked over my shoulder at Maggie. “Are you believing this?”

She didn't respond, but I could see the uncertainty in her face. If Adela really had killed her parents it, then why would Ian be so sensitive about me talking to her? He broke my fingers, dammit. But there were other possibilities. Maybe he was just worried that I'd find out about his little arrangement with
Raj. But that was hardly a big deal. All he did was save the kid some embarrassment by burying the vid. It was the kind of thing cops did every day. But this time, there
was
a promotion on the line. A black mark in his file, no matter how small, could make the brass favor Maggie over Ian. Or maybe he was just afraid of me digging into his other cases, like the barge murders. Was it possible that Adela did do it? She
did
confess. And she didn't just say the words and sign the papers. She was
believable.

I had to be sure Raj was telling the truth. I balanced on one foot as I slid my left hand down to my ankle strap and pulled out my blade. “You think the camera loves you, do you?” I powered the blade up. The red blade sizzled into life.

Maggie was tugging on my shoulder. “That's enough, Juno.”

I raised the blade's tip to his face. “What will the camera think if I split that little nose of yours in half?”

Maggie was yelling at me, telling me to stop. The kid was squirming under my grip, but I had him firm. I waved the blade across his face, close enough that he could feel the steam of flash-fried drizzle.

“I don't believe you,” I hissed.

“It's true,” he screamed.

I aimed the tip of the blade at his eye. “Tell me the truth or you'll be doing the news with a glass eye.”

He was crying now. “I did tell the truth. Please don't … Please!”

Tears evaporated off his cheek as I moved the tip closer. “Tell me the truth.”

“I did tell the truth,” he sobbed.

Maggie was still tugging my shoulder. “That's enough. Stop it,” she said in my ear.

I dropped the kid, letting him tumble to his knees. I turned off the blade and slid it back into my pocket. Maggie and I walked away, leaving the kid blubbering. We didn't get more
than a block before Maggie stopped me. “What the hell was that about?” she asked.

“I had to be sure he was telling the truth.”

“This is
my
investigation, Juno. We're doing this my way, and my way doesn't include burning a kid's eye out.”

“Relax, I wouldn't have done it,” I lied.

“We're not going to torture suspects! You hear me?”

I shook my head and started walking again.

She grabbed my wrist and yanked me to a stop. “Don't you walk away from me when I'm talking to you!”

I turned away. I didn't need a lecture.

She kept at me. “I'm sick of this bullshit, Juno. One minute you're sitting there behaving yourself and the next you're like some damn psycho. Don't you have any self control?”

The knot in my stomach clenched. Pent-up rage welled up from my gut. “Dammit, Maggie!” I yelled back almost incoherently. “Ian pinched my wife's air hose shut 'til she turned fucking blue! If I have to carve that pervert's eyes out to get to the truth, I'll do it, and I don't care what you say!”

Maggie didn't respond. The two of us just stood there fuming at each other, avoiding each other's eyes. We finally started walking again, covering the blocks in silence, the drizzling rain cooling my hot head. My stomach was knotted to the point of cramping. I forced myself to walk upright, stretching my stomach muscles until they stopped seizing. I wondered how long I could live like this. Something had to give, and soon.

“Did you believe him?” I asked when I finally felt calm enough to talk without raising my voice.

“Yes.”

“You think Adela killed her parents?”

“No. But I think Raj believes she did. Ian probably convinced him. How about you? What do you think?”

“The same.”

We stopped at a café, and I used the owner's phone to call Vlad. Still no sign of Ian. Then I called up to the Orbital and downloaded our now decrypted vid files. Maggie paid the café's owner to let us go upstairs and use their home vid system.

I settled on the sofa, a foam futon with a cheap faux-brass frame that was splotched with patches of faded metal. Maggie sat next to me after having tried the armchair, which was so mildewed it had made her sneeze. Once Maggie finished backing up the files to her home system, she started the first vid.

The room shifted. Gone were the crucifixes and the glittery Virgin Mary display. Gone were the family photos and the ratty furniture. Suddenly we were sitting in an overwhelmingly pink bedroom. It was so pink, it felt like one of Niki's corner-store romance novels had exploded in here. There were red scarves draped over the lamps and sweetheart pillows stacked high on pink satin sheets. Two white vases filled with red roses stood at the foot of the bed. The vases were so large that they were gaudy by definition. Noticing the small round windows, I realized it wasn't a bedroom at all, but a cabin on a boat, a nice boat.

Liz came in, stark naked. I remembered the label Yuri had put on the vid disc I'd copied, “Liz—Complete Works.” She stepped in front of the camera and smiled shyly. The vid froze on her smiling face, and the words
Liz Lagarto
popped in over her head.

Maggie shook her head. “Christ. I don't think I can take any more porn.”

I felt empty with the realization that Liz was a porn star, with a tacky name to boot. I didn't know what my feelings for her were, but I was already feeling jealous of the men I'd soon be seeing. She was masturbating now, vibrating her way around the bed.

“Mind if I speed this up?” Maggie asked.

“Please,” I responded, hoping she couldn't see the bulge in my pants.

Maggie set the vid to
4
X, and we watched Ian's girlfriend get off at quadruple speed.
Un-fucking-believable.
I hit my flask hard, wanting to soothe the knot in my stomach that was now screaming at me, telling me how bad I'd screwed everything up. I was back to living in Tenttown. I was being hunted by Ian and his gang of dirty cops. I was watching porn with a woman I thought of as a daughter. I was spending money I didn't have in an effort to keep my suicidal wife alive. And now I had the hots for Ian's girlfriend, a porn star for chrissakes. I felt miserable as I watched Liz Lagarto in what was now a quad-speed four-way, my pants getting more and more uncomfortable with every passing second.

I passed the flask to Maggie, who took a deep swig then said, “This is the most action I've gotten in months.”

I chuckled, and she chuckled back. The nervous chuckles quickly escalated into outright laughter for no apparent reason other than we needed it to. Then when the coffee shop owner walked in on a high-speed cum shot and ran out covering her eyes, our laughter turned into bent-over, tear-rolling hysteria.

We were well into the third movie when I asked Maggie to slow the speed down to normal. Liz Lagarto was in a bamboo hut that looked like the huts you'd find in the fringe towns except you could tell it was just a cheap set piece. She was playing the role of some Tarzan-like jungle girl who needed taming.

“Now, freeze it,” I said. I got up and walked past Liz, who was wearing a tiger-skin outfit that was so skimpy it could have been made from a cub. “I know this guy,” I said as I stepped up to the stuffed tiger that was being used as a background prop. I was
sure it was the same one, standing upright with one claw raised. “Horst has this tiger standing outside his office on the Square.”

“You know what these movies are?” Maggie asked rhetorically. “Have you noticed how Lagartan they are? Liz Lagarto in the jungle. Liz Lagarto on a riverboat. Liz Lagarto in a brandy cellar. How much you wanna bet they're promotionals for his tour company? I bet he distributes them for a tidy profit, but his main purpose is to feed his sex tour business.”

I realized she was right, and I said so. I went back to my seat thinking Horst had found quite the market penetration strategy.

Maggie started the vid running again. “You've got to be shitting me,” she said upon recognizing the loincloth-wearing jungle boy who entered the hut—Raj Gupta.

I was speechless. Jaw-drop dumbfounded. That little shit, he didn't tell us he'd starred in a porno. He said he hardly knew Ian, but here he was getting his loincloth lifted by Ian's girlfriend. And what was it with this kid and loincloths? We interviewed him twice,
twice,
and we still hadn't gotten the full story. Right then, as I watched him get a lubing à la Liz Lagarto, I was seriously wishing I'd taken the opportunity to do some facial carving when I had the chance. “Are there any women on this planet that he isn't banging?”

Maggie said, “I might be the only.”

My flask was empty by the time we started number five. I just wanted to get it over with. I was OD'ed on porn. What had started off erotic had quickly turned laughable, and now it had become just plain tedious. It was true that we'd learned a little more about Raj and Horst. And it was also true that we'd learned a hell of a lot more than we ever wanted about Liz, but our main goal in ransacking Yuri Kiper's office was to get us closer to the barge murders, and on that score we'd come up empty.

Maggie had the system cranked up to
8
X now. The plot was easy to follow, even at eight speed, and without hearing any dialog. Liz Lagarto, married to a less than adventuresome husband, seeks out an affair with a charismatic neighbor played by a dark-skinned, middle-aged local who had starred in two of her other movies. He introduces her to the rough trade, starting with a little pinching during sex and quickly moving up to spanking and nipple clamps. Each time they have sex, she encourages him to push a little further.

Maggie slowed it down to regular speed as the degradation began to hit disturbing levels. They'd moved far beyond kinky and were now into the realm of the truly perverted. He was keeping her locked in his basement now, chained to a post with a dog collar on. When she cried, he'd tell her she was a sinner. “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”

This was the first thing we'd watched that smacked of the S&M culture that all our suspects seemed to be a part of. I paid rapt attention despite the mounting revulsion.

Liz groveled as he came in and told her that today was her day of reckoning. He had a bed in the basement, and he cuffed her to it. He started in with electric shocks to her privates. How could she submit to this? Liz was panicked, straining so hard at her cuffs that her wrists bled. I squirmed in my seat when he razored her thighs and then her breasts.
Make it end.
Bile rose up in my throat as he snuffed out an entire pack of cigarettes on her back, making a connect-the-dots cross.
This can't be real.

I looked over at Maggie, who was looking as pale as I felt. “This can't be real, Maggie.”

“God, I hope you're right.”

I didn't know what was worse, the fact that a human being would make a movie like this or the fact that there were people who got off on it.

He turned her over so she was face up. “Cheating on your husband is a sin,” he said. “Now you die.”

Liz struggled against her restraints. She yanked so hard that she dislocated her shoulder and cried out in pain.
It's all a fake. It has to be.
But there were no cut shots like you saw in regular movies, the kind of thing where you see the attacker stab down, then you see the victim bleeding, but you never see the knife go in. He grabbed her by the hair and held a knife to her throat. I kept telling myself it couldn't be real, but when I looked at her eyes, I saw pure terror. She was hyperventilating. It looked so
real.
I wanted to believe she was acting, but I'd seen her movies, and she wasn't that good an actress.

But it had to be fake. She was wearing an open-backed dress the first time I saw her. I would've seen the cig-burn cross on her back. He dragged the blade across her throat. Blood went spurting. She jerked against her restraints, once, twice, spraying blood all over her attacker. One more spasm and she went still, her eyes staring off in death.
It's not real. It can't be. Liz is alive.
But it was all so believable, all one long shot, no cuts.

I stared at her corpse as I told myself she was fine—she was
alive
. But she wasn't at Roby's last night. … No, I told myself, I copied this vid almost two days ago. I'd seen her since then.

The vid was still running. Her murderous boyfriend circled the bed, studying his handiwork, his face speckled with blood. She looked like a real corpse. Her chest didn't move, and she didn't blink. Her skin turned ashen. How did they do this? Flies were buzzing around the scene. Scavenging geckos were coming out of the walls, their noses tuned to the scent of decay.

The murderer kneeled on the bed.
No, don't tell me!
He unzipped his pants.

I covered my eyes. “Turn it off already!”

The scene blinked out, and the room returned to normal.

We were left staring at the café owner's Virgin Mary shrine.
I focused on it, trying to purge the images from my mind. I studied the brightly painted Mary standing in front of a mosaic background of sparkly glued beads. I never was the religious type, yet I felt the urge to ask for forgiveness, just for having watched.

My phone rang. My new anonymous phone.