Lilith: a novel (5 page)

That much made sense. A killer who was that thorough in cleaning up the electronic trails wouldn't be likely to forget to wipe down doorknobs and other surfaces.

“So what’s next?” Dave asked, looking pointedly at Alan. Although they all reported to Lieutenant Seeger, Alan was the detective first grade of the group, and he had a degree of authority, both formal and informal.

“The first thing I want to do is drive up to Columbus and meet this Lorelei Monroe.”

“Do you really think that she could be Lilith?” Maribel asked.

“No, of course not. But I think there is a good chance that she has some kind of a connection to the real killer or killers—probably unwitting on her part. The other fake photographs that Lilith used were all Ukrainians, obviously grabbed at random from the Internet. But Lorelei is local—and from the same city where one of the killings occurred. That can’t be a coincidence.”

“If you’re right,” Dave said, “the next question is: Why would the killer be so obvious? Lilith has been so careful with everything else. A mistake like that could tip her hand. Or
his
hand—or
their
hand.”

“I can’t venture a guess until we talk to Lorelei. I’d be willing to bet that the killer knows her. If she also knows the killer, then maybe we can catch a break.”

Alan and Maribel left for Columbus at 8:00 a.m. the next morning. Columbus, home of Ohio State University and the state capitol, was a two-hour drive from Cincinnati. They took I-71, the interstate that bisects the state diagonally along a southwest to northeast line.

They were able to check Lorelei’s work schedule on the Shell Gym & Fitness website. She would be there during the day shift today.

Alan decided that they would not call ahead, so that her responses would be unrehearsed.

Lorelei was not Lilith, nor part of the group that might be Lilith—Alan was almost sure of that. But if Lorelei knew the real Lilith, then it was likely that the two of them had an adversarial relationship. The use of Lorelei’s photos on a fake dating profile used in a serial homicide could not be taken as a compliment. If Lilith and Lorelei were in fact acquainted, then Lorelei might be afraid of Lilith. And frightened witnesses sometimes clammed up, convinced that the police could not protect them if they revealed their secrets, no matter what protection the police promised. 

Shell’s Gym & Fitness was located in a strip mall on the western, more affluent outskirts of Columbus. Lodged between a Best Buy and a Chinese restaurant, the front of Shell’s was all windows. Alan and Maribel could see the club’s members working out on the exercise machines as they approached. On one of the big window panels the name of the gym was painted in blue stenciled lettering. Above that was a simple blue and white painting of a clamshell. The logo was not unlike the logo of Royal Dutch Shell, the oil company—except that the color combination was different.

When they walked in, they were immediately spotted by a young African-American man who stood behind the front desk. He was wearing a blue golf shirt with the clamshell logo and the gym’s name sewn onto the left breast.

Alan and Maribel were dressed in business attire, and they weren’t carrying gym bags. The young man instantly discerned that they weren’t members.

“Can I help you?” he said evenly.

“We’d like to speak with Lorelei Monroe, please.”

Alan had been prepared to flash his badge, but that didn't prove necessary. The young man must have detected officialdom. He scurried away to find Lorelei.

“Wait here please. I’ll get her.”

In the rear of the main room, an aerobics class was being conducted to the beat of a Madonna song. The song had been immensely popular during the late 1980s. A large version of the clamshell logo adorned the back wall.
Branding
, Alan thought absently.

The desk attendant returned promptly with a woman wearing a pink and silver spandex workout suit. She had long brunette hair. The woman was instantly recognizable from the printout of the Facebook profile.

“I’m Lorelei Monroe,” the woman said, without waiting for the front desk attendant to introduce her. “Alec here says you wanted to see me.”

Alec nodded first to Alan and Maribel, then to Lorelei.

“Thanks, Alec,” Lorelei said. “I’ll take it from here.”

“How can I help you?” Lorelei said. Alan assessed her initial reaction as curiosity and mild apprehension, but definitely not fear. This meant either that a visit from the police was the last thing she expected, or she had been expecting them and had prepared herself well in advance.

“I’m Detective Grooms from the Ohio Department of Criminal Investigation,” Alan said. “And this is my partner, Detective Flynn. We have badges, but you’d probably prefer that we be as inconspicuous as possible. You’re not in any trouble, Ms. Monroe, but we need to talk with you about a very serious matter. Is there someplace here where we can talk privately?”

Lorelei seemed momentarily flustered now, but she steadied herself.

“Uh—sure. I have a private office near the aerobics area. It’ll be a little cramped with three of us, but we can speak in private.”

“That will be fine,” Alan said.

Lorelei led them down an aisle along the side of the main workout room, away from the exercise machines. In between the machines and the aerobics area, there was a section of the gym that had been set aside for free weights. Several men, most of them muscular and under thirty, watched Lorelei as she led her visitors.

The Madonna song changed to something screechy that Alan did not recognize as Lorelei ushered them into her office. It was indeed cramped: There was barely room for a desk and two visitors’ chairs. The bookshelf behind the desk overflowed with books about exercise and physiology. A promotional poster for a particular brand of protein powder decorated one wall.

“Please have a seat,” Lorelei said. She closed the imitation wood door of the office. The front wall of the office was glass, but it was reasonably soundproof with the door closed. 

Lorelei sat behind the desk, and Alan and Maribel sat in the two visitor’s chairs.

“What’s this all about?”

Alan laid a manila folder on Lorelei’s desk and opened it. He had been discreetly carrying it with him all along. For the time being, he left the folder closed.

“You have a public Facebook profile, isn’t that correct?”

Lorelei returned a puzzled look. “Well, sure, doesn't everyone?”

“No not everyone, exactly,” Alan said. “A few of us old dogs are holdouts.”

Alan’s daughters were both on Facebook, but Alan had resisted the trend. First of all, the ODCI strongly discouraged it: If a detective’s face was out on the Internet, he or she could potentially become useless for undercover work.

But more than that, Alan simply had no driving urge to reconnect with high school classmates from thirty years ago, or even army buddies from twenty-five years ago.

Yes, it would have been nice to say hello to a few old friends and see what became of their lives. But for the most part, Alan knew, it would be difficult to restart a decades-old relationship that had been limited to begin with, and dependent on a very specific set of circumstances. Alan suspected that many Facebook users used the site to create a personal virtual reality of sorts, where their pasts remained frozen in amber. But that was an illusion. The real-world reality was that people changed, people moved on.

“There’s nothing illegal about being on Facebook, is there?” Lorelei asked.

“No,” Alan said. “Of course not. Would you say that your Facebook page receives a lot of traffic?”

Lorelei paused before answering. “Well, I use my Facebook profile for personal connections,” Lorelei explained. “And I’m pretty active on there. But why are you asking me this?”

“Please, Ms. Monroe,” Maribel cut in. “You’re not in trouble here. We just need to get an idea of how you use Facebook.”

Lorelei gave Maribel and Alan a smile that wasn't really a smile.

“Has my Facebook profile been used in the commission of a crime or something?”

“We’ll get to that in a minute. Please, Ms. Monroe: Go on.”

“Well, okay. I use Facebook for personal contacts, but I also use it for work. I make my money here at the club in two ways: I receive an hourly wage, but I’m one of the personal trainers here, too. My Facebook page helps me attract clients.”

“How does that work?” Alan asked. “The personal training, I mean.”

“If a member of the club wants to hire me as a personal trainer, they make an appointment. I charge thirty dollars an hour. And the club gets a twenty percent cut.”

Alan nodded. On the surface, at least, Lorelei’s explanation made perfect sense. But was there anything below that surface?

Alan now opened the manila folder that he had placed on Lorelei’s desk. The fitness instructor had, somewhat understandably, been stealing glances at it.

Alan lifted a printout from the stack of papers inside the folder and handed it to Lorelei.

“Do you recognize this, Ms. Monroe?”

Lorelei took a few seconds to study the printout.

“These are my photos, of course,” she said. “But hey, wait a minute, this is a profile from a dating website.”

She laid the paper down on the desk and looked at Alan and Maribel.

“What is this about? I feel like you two are beating around the bush, trying to entrap me here. Then you show me this dating profile with my photos in it, and—I haven’t ever even done any online dating. I mean, not
ever
. I’m
engaged
, in fact.”

She gestured to a photo in a standing frame atop her desk: Lorelei and a bookish-looking but handsome man, obviously on vacation in a tropical location. The man was standing behind Lorelei and he had his arms wrapped around her. Their fingers were intertwined.

“You might not be doing any online dating,” Alan said, “but someone is setting up online dating profiles using your pictures.”

Lorelei laughed. “You mean like—false advertising? A bait-and-switch type of thing?”

“I’m afraid it's a bit more serious than that,” Maribel replied.

Alan and Maribel then told Lorelei exactly how her photos had been used. When they were done with their explanation, the color had drained from Lorelei’s face.

“Oh my God. You mean to tell me—a serial killer.” Then another thought occurred to her. “You don’t mean—you don’t think that I’ve been going around killing people, do you? Because, listen: I don't know anything about this! I’ll take a polygraph test or whatever you need!”

“No,” Alan said, holding up both hands in a take-it-easy gesture. “We actually don’t think that you had anything to do with this.”

“Well, that’s a relief to hear.”

“But we do think that the person—or people—behind these killings might know
you
. And that’s the main reason why we’re here. Yours weren’t the only photos used in the fake dating site profiles in this case. But the other photos have all been traced to stock photos—European models—grabbed off the Internet at random. While its possible that the killer might have grabbed your photos at random, too, it’s just a bit too much of a coincidence. You live here in Columbus, and the very first killing was in Columbus.”

“So what we need,” Maribel said, “is for you to tell us if you have any idea who might have taken your photos.”

“How could I possibly know?”

“Perhaps you don’t,” Alan allowed. “But can you think of anyone you know who might have done this? Has anyone expressed any overt or covert hostility toward you of late? Remember: Even though photos of women were used as bait, we don’t know yet if this serial killer is a man, a woman, or multiple people.”

“I have no idea,” Lorelei said. “I—I don’t know anyone who would do something like this. This—this is sick. Totally
sick
. I’m so sorry for what happened. And I know this sounds selfish, given that people have been killed, but I feel
violated
.”

“You
have
been violated, Ms. Monroe,” Alan agreed.

Such was the mixed blessing of the Internet. Alan had noticed over the years that there was something cultlike and self-important about online culture. Anyone who described the Internet as anything but a boon to progress was dismissed as a fogey or a Luddite.

In the roughly twenty years of its modern, commercial incarnation, the Internet had created whole new ways of life, and billions of dollars in economic opportunities. That much was true. But Alan had also read that the Internet had bankrupted much of the music industry through online piracy. The Internet had provided places where child pornographers, Islamic extremists, and cranks of every kind could find a podium and like-minded associates.

And the pervasive reach of social media, coupled with the ease of anonymously copying digital photographs, had associated Lorelei with the deadly activities of Lilith. Lilith had accomplished this much with a handful of mouse clicks and keystrokes.

Alan removed a business card from his pocket. He placed the card face-up on Lorelei’s desk. Maribel did the same. Then Alan took the printout that Lorelei had been reading, and tucked it back into the manila folder.

“If you think of anyone, Ms. Monroe, please give Detective Flynn or myself a call. Will you do that?”

“Absolutely,” Lorelei replied. She was noticeably less poised now than she had been at the start of the interview. “My photos—can this person still use them? Do I need to suspend my Facebook account? I suppose I could do that.”

“I don't think that’s really necessary or even helpful at this point. The killer already has your photos stored on a hard drive somewhere.”

“Are you going to catch him?”

“That’s the idea.”

Alan took another look at the photo of Lorelei and the man on the tropical beach:

“What sort of work does he do, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Ryan is a dentist,” Lorelei said. “He’s been out of dental school for three years. Ryan is working with a group of dentists right now, but he’d like to start his own practice in a few years.”

Her hands were laid out across the top of her desk. Lorelei involuntarily glanced at the engagement ring on her left hand. “We’re getting married in September.”

“Congratulations, Ms. Monroe.” Alan stood to leave, the manila folder tucked under one arm. Maribel followed his cue and stood, too.