“He’s always on those sites where you can explore city streets. Would that be a problem if he lived here?”
She shook her head. “No. In fact, many of the residents have them. It keeps them in touch and connected and entertained.” She rolled her eyes. “Not always the kind of entertainment I would prefer.”
“Thomas has been known to fire off e-mails that have caused us a bit of grief later.” I filled her in.
“Well,” she said, “it happens. If someone were to do that here, we’d have to remove Internet privileges for a period of time. If it persisted, we’d have to cut them off. But most everyone here, they’re eager to please.”
She showed me around. The house was orderly and well maintained. In the kitchen, I found one resident loading a dishwasher while another sat at a table eating a jelly sandwich. There were two rooms sitting empty on the second floor, one that looked out to the street and the other overlooking the backyard.
“Views don’t matter a lot to Thomas,” I said. “You’d probably be best saving the better one for someone else.”
Each of the rooms was roughly twelve by twelve feet. There was a bed, a couple of chairs, and a desk. There were two bathrooms on each floor.
“You’ll want to bring him over,” she said, “to check things out.”
“Yeah,” I nodded, feeling anxious.
Another woman approached. She was wearing a cardigan that looked a couple of sizes too big, a peasant skirt, and a pair of those neon purple plastic sandals, Crocs. Her hair was long and frizzy, and she looked pretty riled.
She stood in front of the two of us and said to me, “Are you Ray Kilbride?”
“Yes,” I said, hesitantly.
She extended a hand. “I’m Darla Kurtz.”
Slowly, I accepted her hand and gave it a shake, all the while looking at my tour guide. She smiled sheepishly at me.
The new Darla Kurtz said to me, “I’m sorry. I got held up at a city hall meeting.” Then, to my guide, she said, “Barbara, you’ve been very naughty, again.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Kurtz.”
“I’ll talk to you later.”
“Okay.” Barbara turned to me and said, “I hope Thomas gets to come and stay here. He sounds really interesting.”
I got out of there about an hour later. The real Darla Kurtz was every bit as welcoming as the phony one, but she had more specific questions. She also wanted me to bring Thomas in for a visit.
I was getting into the car when my cell rang.
“Get this,” Julie said.
“What?”
“So I’ve been getting bounced all over the place at Whirl360. The place is in absolute chaos.”
I slammed the door and reached for the seat belt with my free hand. “So they have been hacked?”
“No, shit, not that. One of their top people got killed.”
“What? When?”
“Yesterday. Him and his wife.”
“Who are we talking about?”
“Hang on, I made some notes. Okay, the guy’s name was Kyle Billings, and his wife’s name was Rochelle. They live in Oak Park, in Chicago. That’s where the company’s head office is. The wife’s sister was trying to get in touch with her last night, couldn’t get her or her husband on the phone, no answer at the house but both cars were there. So they called the police, and they were both in the basement. Dead.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Julie said. “Guess what Billings did at Whirl360?”
“Tell me.”
“He’s the guy who wrote the program that automatically blurs faces and license plates and all that kind of thing.”
I was about to put the key into the ignition and stopped. “Jesus.”
“And this other stuff, I just got this off the Chicago Tribune Web site. They’re attributing this to unnamed sources in the police department. How they died.”
“Go on.”
“Okay, so Billings was stabbed. Something very long and pointed, like an ice pick, maybe. But the wife—are you sitting down?”
“Julie, for Christ’s sake, just tell me.”
“She was suffocated, Ray. Someone put a bag over her head.”
FORTY-FIVE
LEWIS Blocker went online and read everything he could find about Kathleen Ford and her new Web site. She had a lot of money to put behind it, and was said to be attracting big names to write for it. She’d lured a prominent columnist from the New York Times. Some well-known talking heads from Fox and MSNBC had agreed to be regular contributors. There’d be plenty of celebrity gossip. In these respects, it was much like the site it was taking on. But Kathleen Ford was going to offer a few new things, too. She’d attracted two or three novelists—Stephen King and John Grisham were among those rumored to have been approached—who would write serially for it. Every week, a new installment, just like in the old Victorian newspapers. There was even some mention of an animated political cartoon, but there was no hint as to who might produce it.
Lewis took special note of that.