The King Tides

Chapter 42 The Reality Thief

If you believed what you read in the newspapers, the decline in the national murder rate was due to a less violent population. Fewer people were dying of gunshot and knife wounds each year, which could only mean that the populace was becoming less violent.

Only half of this statement was true. The citizenry was as violent as ever, the number of people being shot and stabbed at an all-time high. What had changed was the medical profession’s ability in dealing with the victims. First responders kept the victims breathing, and emergency rooms saved their lives.

That was why Daniels survived. Ten years ago, this would not have been the case, and she would have died from loss of blood and the shock. But the emergency medical attendants were pros, and they had kept her alive until they reached the hospital.

Daniels’s status as an FBI agent earned her a private room in the ICU of Broward Health Medical Center. She was weak and needed time to regain her strength before starting rehabilitation. To anyone who came to visit, Daniels vowed that she would be back running within six months. No one had doubted her.

Lancaster came to visit a few days later. Melanie, Nolan, and Nicki Pearl were gathered around her bed sharing a story. Melanie hugged him.

“And to think I didn’t want to hire you,” Melanie said.

“It all worked out in the end,” he said. “How’s our patient doing?”

“My sister’s a tough little shit. She’s going to be fine.”

“I heard that,” Daniels said. “What did you bring me?”

Lancaster handed her the gift bag. Daniels undid the bow holding it together and removed a picture frame in distressed gold. Instead of a photograph, there was a quote from the Irish poet Samuel Beckett written in bold calligraphy.

“What does it say?” Nicki asked.

“It says, ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better,’” Daniels read aloud. “Is that what we did, Jon, fail better?”

“We didn’t quit,” he said.

She placed the frame on the night table. “No, we didn’t. How’s our victim?”

Ryean Bartell was also a patient in Broward Health Medical Center. Mates and Holloway had given her so many sedatives that she was lucky to be alive. Ryean hadn’t understood the mortal danger she was in until Daniels had blown down the front door and come charging in. The newspapers had nicknamed her “The One That Got Away.”

“The kid’s a survivor,” he said. “She’s going to be okay.”

Daniels started to reply but instead shut her eyes. Melanie reached over the bed and hugged her sister. The bad moment passed, and Daniels reopened her eyes.

“I need to tell all of you something,” she said. “I’m sorry for all the grief I caused Nicki and the rest of you by creating those videos. I have a way to make Nicki’s stalkers go away so your lives can return to normal. It will take a few weeks to work, and then everything will be good again.”

“You’re going to make these bad men leave me alone?” Nicki said.

“I sure am, honey,” Daniels said.

Nicki kissed her aunt on the cheek. Then it was Melanie’s turn, then Nolan’s.

They were a family again. There was a silver lining in every tragedy. This was theirs.

“Would you guys mind leaving the room for a few minutes?” Daniels asked. “I need to speak with Jon in private.”

The Pearls filed out. Before leaving, Nicki gave Lancaster a hug. She wore a pink T-shirt that said CAUTION! THIS PERSON MAY TALK ABOUT HORSES AT ANY MOMENT!

“Thank you for helping us,” she said.

“You’re welcome, Nicki,” he said.

“My dad says that now he has to buy you a new refrigerator. Do you have one picked out?”

“I do. Every time I open it up, I’m going to think of you.”

“That’s cool.”

Nicki left, and Lancaster pulled up a chair and rested his elbows on the metal guardrail on Daniels’s hospital bed. He’d held up his end of the bargain, and now it was time for Daniels to fulfill hers and make good on the two things he’d asked of her.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Daniels said. “My boss came by this morning, and brought along the director of the bureau’s North Miami office. I told them about the two detectives dealing in stolen coke. The North Miami office is aware of the situation. Turns out, there are other detectives involved. They’re going down soon.”

“How soon?”

“Next week. The director told me that the coke is passed to the detectives at a Mexican restaurant. The FBI plans to secretly videotape the detectives receiving the stolen coke, and bust everyone at once.”

The news made him feel better, but only a little.

“What about Zack Kenny?” he said. “He threatened to kill the woman who helped us blow this thing open. I promised her that I’d deal with Zack.”

“I’m afraid that’s the bad news. Kenny’s situation will take longer to resolve. My boss did some digging. Zack had a restraining order put on him by an ex-girlfriend, but is otherwise clean. We need hard evidence to bring him down, and that takes time.”

“Zack has a library of kiddie porn on an iPad in his apartment. That should be enough to put him away for a while, don’t you think?”

“It should, except the tip came from his ex-girlfriend, who obviously hates him. A judge will want to know why the ex-girlfriend took so long to tell the police, considering they broke up a while ago.”

“You’re saying the judge might turn down a request for subpoena.”

“Unfortunately. We need another angle.”

He rested his chin on the cold metal bar. He had promised Karissa that he’d fix this. Karissa had opened the door that had led him to Daniels. Her bravery had made the difference, and he was not going to allow that selfless act to go unrewarded.

“I need to think about this,” he said. “I’m going to the cafeteria to get a drink. You want something?”

“I’m craving sweets. Get me a chocolate doughnut,” she said.

“Coming right up.”

At the doorway he stopped and turned around. Zack Kenny had kept a teenage runaway in his condo, and he wondered if it might be enough to convince a judge to issue a warrant. He started to pose the question, but Daniels had drifted off to sleep.

In the hallway he tried to remember his way to the elevators. A Middle Eastern man wearing designer clothes acknowledged him with a smile. It took a moment to place him. It was Cassandra’s partner from the videos. He’d shaved his goatee, but his dark eyes gave him away.

“I’m Jon Lancaster,” he said.

“My name is Fadi. Beth has told me all about you,” the man said.

“Are you the Reality Thief?”

“I’d rather think of myself as Beth’s boyfriend.”

“You and I need to talk.”

“I really need to see Beth. I just flew in on the red-eye.”

“She’s taking a nap. You want something to eat? My treat.”

“Beth said you were very persuasive. Lead the way.”

They paid a visit to the hospital cafeteria in the basement. Fadi hadn’t eaten on the plane, and Lancaster’s offer to pay for lunch was enthusiastically received. He was a good-looking guy and spoke English better than most Americans.

“How did you make the Cassandra videos look so real?” Lancaster asked.

Fadi blew on a spoonful of chicken soup. “The ability to age-regress photographs isn’t new. I figured out how to transfer the technology to video so each frame was age-regressed and resembled the previous frame. The process is not perfect, by any means.”

“Is that why the videos were shot in muted light?”

“They were actually shot through a soft lens that hid the imperfections.”

“It sure fooled me. Do you work in Hollywood making movies?”

Fadi laughed under his breath. “Hardly. I live in Silicon Valley. My parents moved here from Lebanon to work as engineers for Apple. I grew up creating avatars on my computer. When I graduated from Stanford, I started my own animation video company in my apartment. I called it BTTF, which stands for Back to the Future, which is one of my favorite movies. We produce videos that use age-regression technology that turns adult actors into children and shows them revisiting their childhood. It was a huge hit on YouTube, which Beth tells me you know something about.”

“I’ve heard of BTTF. It was bought out by Google, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was, although I still run things. Two years ago, we were approached by the FBI. They wanted us to create videos using an adult actress who we’d age-regress to look like a teenager. The goal was to lure sexual predators out of hiding, and arrest them.

“At first I refused. I did not want BTTF associated with pornography. Then Beth paid me a visit. She told me about what happened at Dartmouth and how the killers were taunting her with the photographs of their latest victims. She practically begged me to help her.

“Beth and I share a passion for running. The next day, we ran five miles together. At the end of the run, I realized I was attracted to her, so I agreed to create the videos using Beth, who would be age-regressed in my studios.

“Men who download kiddie porn are not stupid. They download the video to a computer, then transfer the video to another device, and scrub the hard drive of the original computer. When the police search the original computer’s hard drive, they won’t find evidence of the download, and cannot make an arrest.

“Beth asked me if there was a way to put a permanent cookie on a site that downloaded a kiddie-porn video. It took a while, but my engineers came up with a solution. Do you know what a cookie is?”

“Cookies are code that sites attach to the IP address on a computer,” Lancaster said. “It allows the site to retarget the viewer with ads.”

“If you scrub a computer’s hard drive, it erases the cookies. My company created a code that we call zombie cookies. A zombie cookie becomes embedded in the hard drive and cannot be erased. Beth was convinced that zombie cookies could be used in court to show that a deviant had downloaded a porn video.

“Unfortunately, the courts didn’t allow it. The technology was new, and no one understood it. The fact that a zombie cookie was embedded on a pervert’s computer didn’t give the FBI the right to make an arrest. It was a huge setback.

“By then, Beth and I were dating. Every month, we would get together for a long weekend. During one of these visits, Beth told me that the age-regressed videos were a failure. She asked me if we could make a video of the two of us having sex, and then have my team age-regress her in the video. She thought this would create greater interest and draw out the killers who were taunting her.”

“Because of the sex,” he said.

“Exactly. Beth called it the honey pot. The bear sticks its paw into the honey pot, and cannot pull it out. And that’s how the Cassandra videos were created.”

Fadi tore apart his roll and cleaned the bottom of his bowl. If Lancaster remembered correctly, Google had paid $1 billion to acquire BTTF. Fadi was one of those rare individuals who’d gotten rich but remained humble.

“You didn’t like it, did you?” Lancaster said.

“No, I didn’t. Making the Cassandra videos made me feel dirty. Then, a few days ago, Beth called me and said she thought she’d found the Dartmouth killers, and that the videos had helped draw them out. It made the whole thing seem worthwhile.”

“Beth’s niece has been stalked by men who think she’s the girl in the Cassandra videos,” he said. “Beth said there was a way to fix this. How?”

“Beth knew the Cassandra videos might be harmful,” Fadi said. “She asked me to create a final video that would repulse the perverts. She planned to release it when the sting was over. It was designed to make the perverts stop fantasizing about Cassandra.”

“Can I see it?”

“I really should ask Beth first.”

“I’m sure she’d say yes, don’t you think?”

“You’re probably right.”

Fadi took out a cell phone as thin as a playing card. He opened an app and hit a command, then turned the screen. The last installment of the Cassandra videos began to play. It had been shot in a hotel room with muted lighting. An age-regressed Beth lay naked in bed, talking to the camera. A naked Fadi entered the picture. He joined her and they began to kiss. Then Beth reached beneath a pillow and pulled out a pipe, which she began to beat him with. Each blow was accompanied by a loud cracking sound. Fadi jumped out of bed, fearful for his life. Beth followed him around the room and continued to inflict punishment. Bleeding from the mouth and nose, Fadi sank to the floor. The video ended with him begging for mercy.

“That’s brutal,” Lancaster said.

“It’s intended to be brutal,” Fadi said. “The other videos portray Cassandra as a victim. Here, she is clearly the aggressor. Beth showed it to the profilers at the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences unit. The profilers said that once the perverts watch it, they will never see Cassandra the same way again, and will stop fantasizing about her.”

“When are you going live with this?”

“As soon as Beth tells me to.”

“I hope your solution works. Nicki and her parents have been through hell because of those videos.”

“I know. Beth told me what happened.”

Fadi looked sad. He’d done something against his better judgment, and now appeared unhappy with his decision. Lancaster went to the cafeteria’s bakery section and bought a chocolate doughnut. He walked Fadi to the elevator and handed him the bag.

“Please give this to her.”

The elevator came, but Fadi did not board. His conscience was eating at him, the way it did to moral people. It was hard to do good, as he now painfully understood.

“I want to fix the harm I’ve caused,” he said. “How do I do that?”

That was a good question. It was true that time healed all wounds. But there would always be psychological scars. Whenever Nicki saw a strange man staring at her, she would be fearful. All the money in the world couldn’t fix that.

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” he said.