“Absalom, you mean,” I say, and he nods. “It was Absalom you were after? That’s who Sauer was looking into?”
“Yes.” He takes a long breath. “My son suffered from, as they term it these days, affluenza. I would simply call him spoiled. It led to drug and alcohol addiction, which resulted in a variety of problems. All tiresomely predictable. A cliché.” He waves that away. “Absalom targeted him, and they were unspeakably cruel in how they tormented him online. No reason at all. Simply because he was an easy target. Amusement, I suppose.”
“How did they attack him?” I ask, but I think I already know. He takes another drink, then puts his glass down on the table to join ours. It means he’s surrendering his last defense, I think.
“It started as postings. What do they call them on the Internet? Memes. One day he woke up and discovered he was the butt of a thousand jokes, and I can only imagine it devastated him; he never told me about it. He tried to handle it himself, and that only put fuel on the fire. They came after him like a pack of wild dogs. Put his personal details online. Posted stolen therapy records. They went further every day. My son had a three-year-old daughter. They first claimed he molested her, then forged paperwork that purported to prove it. Pictures. They posted these—horrible videos of—” Rivard’s voice fails him, and for the first time, I feel sorry for him. I know this story. I’ve lived it.
He clears his throat. “The worst was, people believed it. There were websites formed around hounding him. Police investigated the claims of molestation. There was no truth to it, the case was dismissed, but that didn’t stop the crusade. There were avalanches of vile letters. Faxes. Phone calls. He couldn’t—he couldn’t get away from it. After a while, I suppose he didn’t even see the point of trying.” Rivard’s watery eyes suddenly shift to lock on mine. “You understand. I know you do, given what was done to you.”
I slowly nod. From the day that Melvin’s horror chamber was broken open, my kids and I have been targets. You never understand how vulnerable you are in this age of social media until something breaks against you, and then . . . then it’s too late. You can shut down Facebook, Twitter, Instagram; you can change your phone number and your e-mail. Move to new places. But for dedicated tormentors, that isn’t a barrier. It’s a challenge. They enjoy hitting. They don’t particularly care if the blows ever land, and it becomes a contest of who can post the most shocking, degrading material. The torrent comes from nowhere, and everywhere, and the hatred . . . it’s like poison, seeping from the screen into your brain.
It doesn’t take much of Absalom’s brand of abuse to erode your sense of balance, your confidence, your trust in those around you. When your enemies are faceless, they are everywhere. Paranoia becomes reality. At any given moment, even now, I can log on and find a firehose of hatred directed at me, and at my kids. I can watch it happen in real time. It’s a self-perpetuating engine of outrage.
So I can sympathize with the hopelessness Ballantine Rivard’s son felt. I had days where ending things felt like the only way out of the trap. I’d survived, just barely. He hadn’t. It isn’t fair, or right, but it’s dreadfully human, the way we tear each other apart.
“I’m sorry for what he went through,” I tell Rivard. I let a beat go by before I come back to the topic. “How did he kill himself?”
Rivard’s eyes go distant and blind. “He jumped from this tower. He had an apartment here. The glass was thick; he had to make a dedicated effort to break it. I believe he used a marble bust. Then he jumped. Twenty-eight stories.”
I give that a respectful moment of silence before I continue, “And, after he died . . . you hired this investigator to track down the people who went after him?”
“No. I hired Mr. Sauer to investigate who was driving him to the brink of madness well before that. But Mr. Sauer disappeared just prior to my son’s death.” His hands tap restlessly on the armrests of his chair. Grip them tightly, until I can almost hear his knuckles crack.
Now we are getting to it. “Did he give you regular reports? Information?”
“Some,” he says. “Not as much as I’d hoped. He was due back to me with more details on the day he vanished. And now it’s time for you to explain to me how exactly you located my missing man.”
We do. We leave Lustig out of it, but we tell him about the video we recovered—though not where we found it. Mike Lustig has the thumb drive, but Sam has taken the precaution of uploading it to the cloud, and he offers to play it for Rivard. Rivard provides a laptop, and Sam gives him the link. I don’t watch. I try not to listen, but I hear when Sauer gives up the name Rivard.
Rivard stops the video. We are all silent for a moment, and then Sam says, “Do you recognize anyone? Any voices?”
“No,” Rivard says. He sounds subdued and thoughtful. “And you found his body there?”
“Yes.”
“Did you find anything else? Any clues?”
“Just his wallet. The police will have it all now.” I consider mentioning the FBI, but I decide not to.
“Would you be willing to give us what you have on Absalom?” Sam asks. My impulse would have been to demand it, but Sam’s right. Rivard’s sense of entitlement responds better to what he considers politeness. Whatever works. My ego isn’t at stake. “Mr. Rivard, I know you can hire a hundred investigators to go at this, but we’re here. We’re invested. And we’re going forward with or without you, so you might as well join with us, don’t you think?”
“You’re proposing an alliance.” He glances at me, then back to Sam. “You realize that I’m a very public figure. I would have to ask you to withhold any mention of my involvement. I can, however, offer you resources to help you along. You’ll keep me informed of what you discover?”
“Yes,” Sam says. “At every step.” He sounds completely trustworthy. But then, he lied to me successfully, too, for quite a while. He’s good at deception when he needs to be.
Rivard seems to accept that at face value. “All right. He gave me a few names. Most of who Absalom seems to recruit are just kids, fifteen and sixteen years old. Sociopaths, yes, but too young to be held criminally responsible, and followers, definitely not leaders. Of the adults Mr. Sauer was able to track down, two were already dead when he located their identities.” Rivard takes in a raw breath. “He’d called that information in the morning he vanished, but I was hoping for more. He said he’d be back in touch. He wasn’t.”
I try to keep my voice quieter. Softer. More feminine, which is what Rivard seems to favor. “Will you give us the last name that Mr. Sauer reported to you?” I ask it carefully. Quietly. I don’t look at him directly, for fear of raising his hackles again.
Rivard considers. He does it a long time. There’s a knock—a discreet one—at the door, and it opens a small amount for the man in the blue suit to lean in. “Sir,” he says. “It’s almost time for treatments.”