40
Karen, Revealed
Mr. Contreras and I were climbing into my Mustang when a strange truck pulled into the parking lot. I reached reflexively for my gun, but Petra bounded from the passenger seat, as lively as a new puppy. Mitch broke from me to rush to her side, while Staff Sergeant Jepson climbed down from the driver’s seat, followed by Tim Radke, who’d been squeezed into the back.
“Afternoon, ma’am, sir,” Jepson called to Mr. Contreras and me. “You on your way out? We spent the day on your gal’s computer, and Tim thinks he’s got a lot of it sorted out.”
I explained that I needed to get the dogs home for the dog walker but invited them to follow us north. Mr. Contreras enthusiastically seconded the motion, mentioning my chicken. “Big enough for five, right, doll, when we make some fettuccine.”
At home, Jepson helped me check around the building to make sure Rodney or his minions weren’t lurking.
“So, Vic, Tim totally hacked into this computer. He’s amazing. You should hire him!” Petra yelled as I made my painful way up the three flights of stairs.
“It wasn’t cheap,” Tim warned me. “I had to download some pretty expensive software to come up with her password—none of Chad’s dad’s ideas worked.”
“I told him to go for it,” Petra sang out cheerily.
“Out of curiosity, little chickadee, how much is expensive?”
“Uh, thirty-two hundred dollars,” Tim mumbled.
“Thirty-two hundred, hmm? So—at fifteen dollars an hour—well, rounding up to give you the benefit of the doubt—that would be two hundred free hours of work you can give me, Petra.”
“But, Vic,” her big eyes opening so wide her lashes brushed her brows, “I knew this was important. And I didn’t want to wake you up after you got injured.”
“No, Peetie, that was thoughtful. That’s why I’m rounding your salary up as a thank-you. You see, you’re working for me. I’m paying the bills. And I probably know a vendor who could get me a better deal on software than you can.”
Petra glowered at me. “You’re not serious. I can’t afford—”
“Then you need to learn to think twice, or even three times, before committing me to debt, Petra.”
I looked at her seriously for a beat. “I will let you off the hook this time. But if you do such a thing again, I will hold you responsible for paying for it. Clear?”
“I told you I wasn’t a robot—”
“Clear?”
“Oh, all right!” She stomped back down the stairs.
Tim Radke, who’d been standing by uncomfortably while we argued, said he thought he should pay for the software, since he was the one who talked Petra into buying it.
“No, we’re cool on this. Petra just needs help curbing her magnanimous impulses.” I headed on up the stairs and left Radke to follow Petra back to Mr. Contreras’s place.
Jake Thibaut was on his way out as I reached the third floor. I hadn’t seen him for a couple of days, and he was surprised by my painful progress upward.
“Your hand bothering you?” For a bass player, an injured hand was worrying enough to cause a limp.
“Not so much. I’m just tired. See you before you fly out?”
“Not if it means looking at something gruesome stuck into your body.”
To my surprise, I found myself fighting back tears. “I’ll wrap myself in gauze, head to foot, so that only my eyes and mouth show.”
“Hey, hey, just teasing, V.I., just teasing.” He brushed my wet eyes with a callused fingertip. “I’m a bass player, nothing grosses me out. Except blood. Can’t explain that one. We have one last rehearsal tonight, and I’m just on my way to buy food for the group. Are you free tomorrow, four-ish? They’re not picking me up until six.”
He pulled me to him and kissed me, and I tried to translate the pain in my abdomen into passion on my lips. As he held me, I heard the dog walker arrive, the dogs’ yelps of pleasure, and then my neighbor start up the stairs with Tim, Staff Sergeant Jepson, and Petra.
Jake murmured that he’d leave me to cope with my circus on my own and went on his way.
Inside my apartment, Tim opened up Karen’s computer. He showed me what happened when he logged on to her site. We got the message that the site was down. Then he typed commands onto the screen itself. Lines of equations began to scroll downward.
“Here’s the command to block content from the site,” he froze the screen and pointed to a line of text. I could see the words “respect,” “for,” “the,” and “dead” separated by strings of code.
“Now, watch this.” He typed another set of commands. Green text scrolled down the screen once more. He typed another command line, and suddenly the Body Artist’s website was on the computer in front of us.
I forgot my sore belly. “How’d you do that?”
“It’s a clone.” Tim tried not to grin, tried to be casual—Aramis Ramírez quickly doffing his hat after back-to-back homers. “That way, whoever is blocking the original site doesn’t know we can access it.”
“But who is blocking it?”
He shrugged. “Can’t tell you that. The server is in Olathe, Kansas. When I talked to one of their techies this afternoon, the best he could tell me is that the commands weren’t coming from this machine. They’re coming from Baghdad. But whether they start there or just are being bounced through there, whoever is doing it is pretty sophisticated.”
“Your old buddies?” Jepson asked.
“USAC-NOEW?” Radke grimaced. “They could, but why would they? I didn’t see anything pertaining to military ops in here.”
“USAC-NOEW?” I said. “Sounds like a cat in pain.”
Tim laughed.
“U.S. Army Computer Network Operations and Electronic Warfare,” he translated. “You know the Army. It’s all alphabet soup.”
“Of course, they’re not the only big outfit in Baghdad,” I said. “There’s also Tintrey.”
“Them and a hundred other jackals.” Marty Jepson was suddenly angry. “I’m so sick of those damned contractors, those private armies! I lost two good buddies who had to go out shotgun to protect one of their farking CEOs.”
“Yeah, man, they’re total scum,” Radke agreed. “But why would they care about this stripper’s website?”
“She’s not a stripper.” Petra started to protest, then looked doubtful. “Maybe I shouldn’t be sticking up for her if she really is, like, a drug dealer or something.”
I scrolled carefully through the images looking for Nadia’s paintings. “We know what the codes that Rodney was using mean, but what was Nadia trying to tell us about Alexandra?”
Petra and the other two men crowded around my shoulders as Tim enlarged various parts of Nadia’s drawings. The last one she’d painted had shown her sister with flames sprouting out of her head.
“She was killed by an IED,” I said. “I suppose the fire symbolizes that.”
“Could well be, ma’am,” Jepson said, his voice very dry. “Where was this incident?”
“On the way to the Baghdad airport, her boss told me. Tim, are there any other files in here that we can look at?”
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know. Anything.” I flung my hands open in frustration. “Where the Artist might have gone to earth. What she knew about Olympia and Rodney’s business. What she thought of Alexandra Guaman—the two had a brief affair the summer before Alexandra deployed.”
Tim did some more keyboard work and brought up a list of all Karen’s folders. She had virtually no documents except drafts of scripts for the commentary she made during her shows and outlines for possible future shows. Any financial records, or letters, or even e-mails, didn’t reside on this machine. We should all be so careful about our privacy, I suppose, but it felt eerily like walking through an empty house—like walking through Karen Buckley’s, or Frannie Pindero’s, empty apartment. She might carry a vast burden of emotional baggage, but physically she traveled light across the landscape.
“Her videos, then?” I said. “What’s in those folders that you didn’t see on her DVDs?”
That folder bulged, of course. Movies are very byte hungry, and something only five minutes long might use a megabyte of memory.
Tim got up so that I could sit at the controls. At first, he and the others watched as I browsed through Karen’s junk footage, early shots of herself painting her own body, done with mirrors, in what I assumed was the darkened front room Petra and I had found yesterday afternoon.
After a bit, though, the two vets wandered off to join Mr. Contreras and Petra in my kitchen. The dog walker rang my bell. I sent Petra downstairs, with Staff Sergeant Jepson as protection. I kept watching videos as they came back up with the animals.
I saw footage of Leander Marvelle and Kevin Piuma dancing without their burkas. They moved beautifully—a marvel, a feather; they’d named themselves well—in a bare space that I guessed was the Columbia College rehearsal room.
Karen had taped herself with Vesta. They were in bed together. Vesta murmured something, low-voiced, out of mike range, and then sprang to her feet and ordered Karen to leave.
“Take your camera with you, Karen. And your clothes, your toothbrush—all those things. I don’t want you back here.”
And Karen hadn’t argued. She sat up in bed, her face as impassive a mask as when it was covered with paint. I saw her naked torso, her hand stretched out. She wasn’t beseeching Vesta but holding a small remote control and turning off the camera.
I looked for footage during the weeks Nadia had been visiting Club Gouge. I found a scene in Rivka’s bedroom with Rivka demanding to know what Nadia meant to Karen.
A chance to explore the world of art. She’s a tormented soul, little Rivulet. Don’t torment your own soul over her. And certainly not over me.
I moved on to other files. And came upon a crucifix with a doll’s head, black plastic hair tied around Jesus’ hands. That was the cross Nadia had kept over her bed.
Karen said, You’ve never done this before, have you? Her voice held cool amusement, no tenderness.
Wherever she’d placed her camera, it wasn’t quite close enough for good focus. I could tell Nadia was naked, but not what her face was registering. Her response to Karen was so soft that the mike didn’t pick it up.
Why did you hustle me so hard after the show, then? Karen said. Just out of curiosity.
A long tick of silence, except for the rustling of the bedclothes, and then Nadia said, You knew my sister. Alexandra.
I meet a lot of people, Nadia.
In Michigan, at a music festival. Maybe she told you to call her Allie; that’s her pet name at home.
Oh, yes. Beautiful girl, totally ashamed of herself. Are you the go-between? Is she ready to come out? Or did she tell you to use me for your own sexual experiments? If so, try this.
It wasn’t clear what Karen did next, but it hurt. Nadia gave a sharp yelp and sat up, wrapping a sheet around her shoulders.
Alexandra is dead. She was killed in Iraq.
Do you want me to stand at attention and play the “Star-Spangled Banner”? Karen’s cool tone didn’t change.
Do you have any feelings at all, for anyone besides yourself?
I figure chicks like you, emoting all over the place, have so many exhausting feelings that there isn’t room for mine. Karen was being sarcastic, but I thought there was an undercurrent in her tone—anger? bitterness?
If you had a sister like Allie and she was murdered, you might not be so cold.
Karen sat up in bed so fast that the camera recorded only a blur. I heard the slap, hand on face. F*ck you, bitch. I had someone like Allie who was murdered. So stop bleating at me like a sentimental sheep.
I hit PAUSE, startled. Did she mean Anton’s daughter, Zina? Was that a person Karen/Frannie had felt close to? If that was the case, then maybe Zina’s overdose had been someone else’s deliberate work. Or maybe Karen/Frannie just thought an OD was an act of murder. Impossible to know.
I clicked PLAY, and the recording began again. Nadia was apologizing. But my sister was tormented, she was hounded, she wrote it in her journal. All because someone where she worked in Baghdad found out that she liked, she preferred—that women—
That she was a dyke. Why can’t you just say it?
Don’t use that word about Allie! Who told them? Was it you? Because you were so angry with her for not returning your calls?
Karen sat up and began pulling on clothes—sweater, jeans, boots.
Nadia, you want someone to be at fault because the sister you adored so much is dead. But if she was a lesbian, people in Baghdad would have known. Believe me, I did not say one word to one person about my week with her. She was of no interest to me once she made it clear that I was of no interest to her.
For once, Karen spoke in a real voice, someone who was feeling the words she was saying. Or at least someone who acted as though she felt them.
The clip ended there, abruptly, as had the segment with Vesta. There was no way of knowing whether Nadia, like Vesta, had realized Karen/ Frannie was recording her.