Strange Flesh (15 page)

I sense he’s not going to budge. Because we may need him later, I decide not to push it. “I guess I don’t. I understand your position. Can you tell me, though, did she make any kind of statement? Say anything to the camera?”

“Yeah. She said, ‘You must have thought / I’d play the daughter of Lot / but I will not.’”

“The daughter of Lot?”

Maybe that explains the Genesis reference in the video Billy sent to his brother. How does Billy know Gina’s last words? Has he seen the video?

“That’s what she said.”

“What did you make of that?”

“A lot of people cite the Bible in their final words.”

“Yeah, right . . . But that’s not quoted in this report here. Did you tell anyone else about it?”

“No.” A waver in his intonation makes me think there’s more to it.

“But maybe someone else did?” I ask.

Nash frowns. “We had an incident a couple days after we found
her. One of the crime scene techs was trying to access the video in our evidence repository. Something he wasn’t authorized to do since the case had been closed. I asked him about it, and he said he was ‘doing follow-up.’”

“And you think he was going to leak it to someone interested in the case?”

“Seemed that way. But people do things for all kinds of crazy reasons.”

Maybe this tech’s reason came from Billy seeking answers about his friend’s death.

“So this tech didn’t have access to the video. What information might he have turned over?”

“He’d have his own crime scene photos, and he was the guy who found the video, so he’d be able to tell someone what was on it.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“I’d rather you didn’t. Guy’s mad enough at me already. They put him on leave pending an inquiry.”

“Really? That seems pretty severe.”

“Yeah. Well, when pressed on his ‘follow-up,’ rather than come up with some exculpatory bullshit, he calls a fancy lawyer. Which is an extreme reaction to a minor disciplinary matter.”

“Strange.”

Though not so strange if money had already changed hands.

“Yeah. Strange that you’d be asking that. You know something about this that I don’t?”

“I seriously doubt it.”

“You want to tell me exactly why you’re interested in this girl?”

“She was a friend of my subject. They were part of the same art group as Trevor Rothstein too.”

“Well I’d keep an eye on him then.”

“I’m trying to.”

I
zip over to GAME on my way back from the police station, trying again to catch up with Olya.

I can hear her as soon as the elevator door opens. There’s a high-volume stream of Russian cursing coming from outside the room belonging to her group. Which I’ve mentally named the “iTeam.”

As I turn the corner, I see Olya snatch a disposable video camera from one of a pair of GAMErs and smash it on the floor.

The guy steps back from her and says, “Take it easy, bitch. It’s just a game.”

“Gina is dead,” she says, her voice climbing registers of distress, “and you want to make a game of this? What kind of sick fucking perverts are you?”

The other guy puts his hands up. “Look, we’re sorry, Olya. We thought that you were part of it.”

Olya takes a deep breath and says with a thick voice, “Dixon, you have seen what I think about this
dolboeb
Billy and his games. Maybe you tell your little friends what happen to them if I hear any more of this.”

She pushes past them and stomps the opposite way down the hall without seeing me. I decide it’s not the right time to interrogate her. Dixon and his buddy follow her at a respectful distance.

That scene certainly confirms that Billy’s recruiting GAMErs to harass Olya. At first I’d thought Blake would be his primary target, but maybe he harbors a whole list of enemies he plans to sic his players on. Given
what the twins told me about
NeoRazi
, I’m not surprised. Game designers will often co-opt early participants into an elite cadre they use to help advance the narrative.

Olya however clearly has no intention of cooperating, though Billy seems bent on forcing her to play along. Maybe he sees her as the white queen he’s beset with pawns from GAME.

I spot Garriott standing just inside their workroom.

“Trouble in paradise?” I ask.

He peeks out to make sure she’s departed. “What, that? That’s nothing. You should see what happens when she gets stroppy. I think your man Billy disappeared to prevent her from killing him.”

“They fought a lot?”

“Hammer and tongs, mate. You didn’t hear about the funeral?”

“You mean Gina Delaney’s?” McClaren had mentioned that Billy’s first arrest happened at her funeral.

Garriott tilts his head with an anxious grin, like he’s considering something that he’s supposed to abhor but secretly loves. “You
must
see this.”

He brings his laptop over to my office and pulls up a video.

Someone’s cell captures a group somberly toasting the departed. The person leading the toast addresses the camera. Maybe they’re streaming the recording to friends who couldn’t make it to Boston.

In the far left of the shot, there’s a violent motion. Garriott stops it, expands that part of the clip, and starts a frame-by-frame. He’s got it focused on the back of a tall blonde in a black dress, clearly Olya. Then Billy enters the frame and leans over to say something to her. Olya doesn’t look at him, but almost lazily, she pulls her right hand across her body and then rams her elbow hard into Billy’s face. He goes down, lights out, and the camera now pans over to the commotion.

Olya steps forward to continue her assault, but someone grabs her and wrestles her away. The camera stays on Billy, but you can see her in the background breaking free and striding coolly out of the frame. We do not see Billy get up.

The feed ends.

I blink at Garriott. “I guess y’all won’t be putting that in your team recruiting videos.”

Garriott grins. “Isn’t that just
fucked
though?”

“What happened to him?”

“Oh, nothing life-threatening. Badly split lip, a bit of a bump on his head. I don’t think his nose was broken. But all in all, a rather poor showing. Especially given all his aggro theatrics from earlier.”

“What was he doing?”

“So the service was closed casket, and when Billy walks by, he tries to lift the bloody lid. He wants to place something in the coffin with her. Her dad sees this and is having none of it, and he confiscates whatever it was. Makes it known that poor Billy isn’t welcome. Fine. But then the barmy bastard comes back for the actual burial, and he’s taking photos. And again, her dad, who is a bit off it himself, goes over, grabs his camera, and tosses the kid out on his ear. Sasha, one of their PiMP friends, goes off to try to console him, and that’s the last we expect to hear of him.”

“But he came back again.”

“There wasn’t a reception, so her friends gathered at that bar for a post-funeral piss-up. Imagine our consternation when he shows up there. The family wasn’t around, and we knew he was close to Genes, so we don’t say anything, just avoid him like the plague, right? And everything’s aces for a bit while he’s downing Bombay and sort of talking to himself. Then he fancies having a chat with our savage Siberian, and . . . well, you saw how that interaction turned out.”

“Scary.”

“After all that shite, I suppose he deserved it.”

“What did he say to her?”

“I didn’t hear it, but our mate Dix was standing right there. Told me he said, ‘Are you happy now?’”

L
ater that night, as I return from GAME, I see three orange-vested municipal workers standing around a steaming manhole. They peer into it as if one of their number just disappeared down there and they’re about to draw straws to see who has to go after him and wrestle the albino alligators. The scene reminds me that I’ve yet to discover an entry point to Billy’s latest rabbit hole from the clues he’s offered. So by the time I flop down on my bed, my mind is spinning up on the problem, and I know I won’t be able to sleep.

I send Jacques back to Sade’s castle to stare at its crumbled crenellations. This can’t possibly be a dead end. The placard inside speaks of an “eternal château,” so must I now canvass all the period theme communities in NOD for another stupid castle? In the Nerds Only Dungeon every other build is a fortress, and the place’s swarming immensity would swallow any direct search. So where in the world should I start looking?

Well, how did I find my way here?

I followed a reference from the poem that came with the croc pendants. Maybe it has yet to yield all its instructions.

The verse invokes NOD with the phrase “Narration Of Death.” Focusing on those words again, I decide that an “eternal” castle wouldn’t be one subject to the entropy of the real world. But such a building could be preserved forever through art, like the castle in a painting. Or a book.

All of Sade’s work deals liberally with death and the suffering that precedes it, but “Narration Of Death” would apply to one title above all the
others. One that also happens to feature a castle infamous in the history of literature.

I scan through the first several pages of the book, and then start typing coordinates into Jacques’s teleport box.

My av winds up staring into a thousand-foot ravine. I take a second to pull up the sim’s property page and confirm that it’s owned by an av named Louis_Markey. The ruined castle at Lacoste was just a set of virtual objects on one of NOD’s public servers—the equivalent of an inert brochure. But now I’ve discovered a complete, privately hosted NOD build, which is more like someone’s personal website.

Panning my view, I see a mountain landscape with jagged peaks looming all around me. Just to the side is a stout wooden bridge that leads across the chasm toward an ominous gothic castle. The kind of place a monster would take his kidnapped princess in one of the darker fairy tales. One that revolves around revenge rather than escape.

Chiseled below the ramparts of the gatehouse I see the name of the fortress: the Château de Silling.

This castle is the setting of Sade’s epic of filth
Les cent vingt journées de Sodome, ou l’Ecole du libertinage,
known in English as
The 120 Days of Sodom
. I’d first flipped through it in college, where it was somebody’s bright idea that the Bat call our big winter party “120 Minutes of Sodom.”

Unfortunately the book is more of a catalog of heinous atrocities than a novel. The entries run along the lines of:

31. He fucks a goat from behind while being flogged; the goat conceives and gives birth to a monster. Monster though it be, he embuggers it.