Game of Death (17 page)

‘Yeah. Who’s this?’

At least we know she’s still alive,’ Killkenny says to me. He presses the intercom button again. ‘This is Detective Paul Killkenny, Boston Police Department. Do you have a
moment to talk?’

There’s a long pause before the voice comes back. ‘Talk about what?’

‘I’d rather talk in person, if possible,’ Killkenny responds.

The pause again. ‘Fine. Just give me a couple minutes, okay?’ For the first time I can hear the thick Boston accent.

We stand on the stoop, looking out at the neighborhood. Those who pass us look up with scowls. ‘We’re not popular here. They know I’m a cop,’ Killkenny comments.

‘What do you think gives it away?’ I ask deadpan, looking at him. Everything about him – the aggressive stance, the sense of entitlement – screams ‘cop’; he
could be nothing else.

‘You’re my silent partner up there, right?’ he says.

‘Whatever you say, boss.’

‘I’m serious about that. You’re only here so I can avoid the hassle of a subpoena and dealing with your company’s lawyers to get the information I need. If Welker knew I
allowed you to tag along on this, he’d have my ass in a sling. If you or your girlfriend step out of line, we’re done with this, and I’ll consider bringing charges.’

‘She’s not my girlfriend.’

That draws a smirk from Killkenny, and I realize he was baiting me. ‘Whatever,’ he says. ‘I just want to know that you’re gonna keep your mouth shut.’

‘Yeah, I’ll let you do the talking,’ I agree.

The front door opens, and a guy who looks like he’s in his early twenties comes out. He’s attractive, with dark hair and a brooding, unshaven look that women tend to like. His hair
is disheveled, and he’s tucking his shirt, which is inside-out, into his pants. He’s carrying his socks and his wallet and his head is bowed, looking down at the ground. ‘Excuse
me,’ he says as he sidesteps us on the stoop.

Killkenny and I turn and watch him walk away, down the street, as the intercom cracks and Jennifer Quincy’s voice says, ‘Okay, you can come up if you want.’

Killkenny smiles at the man walking down the street and chuckles. ‘This should be interesting.’

‘What’s this all about?’

Jennifer Quincy is standing in the living room/dining room/kitchen of her 900-square-foot apartment, her arms crossed in front of a loose-fitting T-shirt with the logo of a band that I
don’t recognize emblazoned on the front. She is wearing striped leggings, and she’s tried to pull her blonde hair back into some reasonable shape, but it’s too unruly to be tamed
without a great deal more effort. The apartment is small for two people, but relatively neat. The furniture is low-end IKEA, and there are candles lined up on the mantel above a non-working
fireplace. Killkenny walks over to the mantel and examines the candles. They have burned down, and the wax has spilled out unevenly onto the mantel’s white paint. It looks like they were
probably burning the night before, likely to help set the mood with the guy who shouldered past us on the stoop. I look at Jennifer, standing there like a post-coital wreck, and it’s hard not
to notice how striking she is, with her tanned skin and light hair. Even her angry stance makes her seem all the more sexual. I feel a distinct pang of jealousy toward the man we saw leaving.

‘The door outside says Quincy/Kimball,’ Killkenny says. ‘You have a roommate?’

‘She’s away on business.’

‘What kind of business?’

‘Commercial real estate. She’s an intern. Is this about her?’

‘I just wanted to know whether there was anyone else here.’ Killkenny is walking around the room, looking things over. He picks up a picture of Quincy and a group of friends smiling
broadly at the camera, all holding drinks raised in cheer. It looks like it was probably taken on some spring break within the past few years.

‘There’s no one else here,’ she says.

‘Not anymore.’ Killkenny looks over his shoulder at her and gives her a smile that borders on lecherous.

‘Am I in trouble?’

Killkenny puts the picture down. ‘No, you’re not. We’re in the middle of an investigation, and we’re here to ask you a few questions about a modeling job you did around
four and a half years ago.’

She’s looking blankly at him. ‘A modeling job I did four and a half years ago?’

‘Yeah. You were a model, right?’

She shrugs, and I see the shadow of disappointed expectations cross her face. ‘I did some modeling,’ she says. ‘I don’t know that it was ever steady enough to say I was
a model
. It’s a tough business.’

‘I’m sure,’ Killkenny says. ‘Lots of pretty girls out there.’ She says nothing, but recrosses her arms, waiting. ‘We wanted to talk to you about a job you did
for a company called NextLife. Do you remember that one?’

Her arms fall to her sides as she exhales and her face goes sour. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I remember that one.’ She sits on the faux-modern orange couch against the wall.
‘That was the one that got me out of the business.’

‘How so?’

‘What are you investigating?’

‘Murder.’

That gets her attention. ‘A murder? Of someone I know?’

Killkenny shakes his head. ‘It’s not likely. But it may have to do with NextLife. It would help if you could tell us about what you did for them.’

‘Sure,’ she says absently.

‘You said it was the job that got you out of the business. How did it do that?’

Her eyes are directed toward the floor, but her focus is in the distance, on the past. ‘I’d been trying to break in for a couple years. I got some modeling jobs in my senior year, up
in Leominster. Some local-paper stuff for some of the manufacturing companies. That convinced me to come to Boston to see if I could make it a steady thing.’ She takes a deep breath and lets
it out. ‘I was naive.’

‘How old were you?’

‘I had just turned eighteen when I got to Boston.’

‘And when you did the job for NextLife?’

‘It was right before my twentieth birthday.’

‘What happened?’

She leans back in the couch, crosses her legs and her shoulders seem to draw in upon her body. ‘The first year I was here I got picked up by the Helena Agency. It’s one of the
smaller ones, but it had an okay reputation, and who was I to judge, right? Anyway, they got me a job here, a job there – usually catalogue stuff, a few fliers. Nothing that paid any real
money. I had to get a job waiting tables to buy food and pay rent. They kept telling me that I could make much more money if I’d be willing to show a little more skin, but I’d always
said that I wouldn’t do nudity. I did some underwear stuff for a flier once, but it was pretty tame, and I’d always said that was as far as I’d go.’

Killkenny sits in an upholstered chair across the coffee table from her. He frowns and reaches underneath him, in the folds of the cushion, and pulls out a black lace bra. He holds it up on one
finger. ‘You had your standards, no doubt.’

She shoots forward, grabs the bra back from him and crumples it into a ball angrily, starts to put it in her pocket, but quickly realizes she has no pockets. She seems defeated and unfolds the
bra on her lap, looking at it contemplatively. ‘I had standards once,’ she says quietly. ‘After a year and a half the people at the agency sat me down and told me they were going
to drop me. They thought I had the look, but I wasn’t getting the jobs, and they had other girls they wanted to bring in.’ She looks at Killkenny, her eyes pleading for understanding.
‘You gotta realize, when I left Leominster I said I wouldn’t go back until I was a real success. I didn’t have any skills, I didn’t have any money. So I begged them. I told
them I’d do anything to get work.’

‘So you started taking your clothes off.’

She nods. ‘Just a little. No full nudity, but I had a few jobs posing for fliers that the hawkers for the strip-joints out on Route One give out. You know, the teasers? Those six-by-four
postcards that offer free admission? They give them out in the city to try to get the business out there. Nothing too bad. Show a little bit of nipple, that sort of thing. And the money was better.
The jobs I was doing before were paying a couple hundred dollars for the day, tops. These jobs were paying five, even six hundred dollars. So that was good.’

‘How’d you get the job for NextLife?’

‘Through the agency. They called and said they had this job that would pay a thousand dollars. They said it was full nudity, but the trick was, it was never going to be used as advertising
or anything like that. They said it was just to help some programmers map the female body. So I figured it was low-risk, and no one would ever know. And the agency really wanted me to do it, and it
was the best money I’d ever been offered, so I figured: what the hell – you know?’

‘What happened?’

‘It was like I was captured by fucking aliens, that’s what happened,’ she says angrily. ‘Those people were freaks.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, to start with, at most photo shoots there’s a set of some sort, and they have robes, and there are people there who are nice to you and try to make you feel comfortable. There
was none of that in this case. There were about ten of us who were being shot all in a row, so we just had to sit there in this sort of laboratory of a place. There was one photographer, who was
okay; he seemed to know what he was doing. But then there were these three or four geeks there who were directing the show. When it was my turn, they had me strip down – no prep, no
explanation of what we were doing. And then they had me stand in front of this blue backdrop buck-naked, and the photographer took about a hundred pictures. A few of them were full-body shots, but
then they had him focus right up close on every part of me.’ She pauses and looks at us both. ‘You get that?
Every
part of me.’

‘Yeah, we get it,’ Killkenny says.

‘I mean, it wasn’t even like something from
Playboy
, where they try to be sexy. This felt like . . . I don’t even know what.’

‘That was it?’

‘I wish. After that, they put these little dots all over me, and they told me to move from pose to pose while they took movies with this special camera. And, let me tell you, some of these
poses . . . well, they didn’t leave much to the imagination. The entire time these people there were looking at me like I was some sort of fucking lab rat. When I walked out of there I said:
fuck this
. Nothing was worth going back to do something like that again.’

‘Do you remember anything about the people who were at the shoot?’

‘Sure. It was such a freaky experience. The guy who was directing things was an older guy. An Indian – dot, not feather. I didn’t like him; he had no warmth. If anything, he
almost seemed angry. It was like he thought I was unclean, when he was the one having them take the goddamned pictures of me.’

‘Was his name Gunta?’

She gives a derisive laugh. ‘I never got their names.’

‘Who else was there?’ Killkenny asks.

‘There was another guy there who was younger than the Indian, but who seemed like he might have been the Indian guy’s boss. Nice clothes. He seemed more normal.’

‘More normal – how?’

‘Well, he was at least talking to a couple of the girls, trying to make them feel comfortable. Maybe even hitting on them.’

‘You find that normal?’

‘Yeah, Detective, I do. If there’s a roomful of models who are all taking their clothes off, I think a normal guy might think to strike up a conversation. What do you think
you’d do?’ Her tone is sharp and biting, and it makes me like her more. Killkenny deserved to take a little back for all that he’d been giving her.

He nods. ‘Fair enough. Did you talk to this guy enough to get a name?’

She shakes her head. ‘He might have said a quick hello to me, but he was focused on a couple of the other girls. One in particular, with a totally different look from me.’ She looks
at Killkenny. ‘Not everyone’s into blondes, y’know? I’m okay with that.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘There were two guys sitting behind laptops, tapping away as the pictures were being taken. I have no idea what their job was.’

‘Can you describe them?’

‘Not really. By the time I had any exposure to them – no pun intended – I was so freaked out that I was just trying to get through it. I have a vague recollection that one of
them was decent-looking, and he seemed to have some sympathy for what I was going through, but that’s about it.’ The room is quiet for a moment. ‘What are these questions all
about? What do they have to do with a murder?’

‘Three murders, actually,’ Killkenny says.

Her eyes go wide. ‘Three murders? What do they have to do with the modeling job?’

Killkenny leans forward in his chair. ‘Do you know how they ended up using the images they took of you that day?’

She shakes her head. ‘I wanted nothing to do with it after that. I’ve never seen anything that’s used them.’

‘Have you ever gone on NextLife?’

‘No. I know about them, now. Who doesn’t? But I’ve got no interest, after my experience with the company. Why? How did they use the pictures?’

Killkenny looks at me, and I can’t tell whether he wants me to speak now. It would be just like him to let me handle the worst part of the discussion. He doesn’t, though; he turns
back to her. ‘The company has a portion of the website where you can create your own world and you can populate it with people. When you design those people, you go to a library of different
looks that they have. You’re one of the prototypes for those looks.’

‘Oh.’ For a moment, she seems to accept this without concern. ‘So I’m like a backdrop?’

Killkenny frowns. ‘That’s one possible way the images can be used.’

She stares at him, her expression darkening as she starts to connect the dots. ‘Of course if that was it – that I was just going to be used as a backdrop – why would they have
needed to take pictures of me naked?’

Killkenny says nothing.

‘Great,’ she says. ‘Motherfuckers! They said the pictures were just to train the computers.’

‘That’s true,’ Killkenny says, an obnoxious smirk on his face. ‘They trained the computers to create an image that looks like you.’