Trust Your Eyes

FORTY-ONE

Julie said, “Okay, so let’s go through this again.”

I had my clothes on now, sitting on Thomas’s bed, and he was back in his chair in front of his three monitors. Julie and I sat like pupils in front of a teacher who was reviewing what was going to be on the final.

Julie said, “Thomas here sees this picture on the Net, manages to get you to go to this address in Manhattan to check it out, which you do, but not really, since your heart’s not really in it, but you do talk to some lady who lives next door.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And Thomas, who’s totally unimpressed with your investigatory skills, calls the landlord and finds out two women used to live in this place, but they’ve both moved out, and the place has been sitting empty since then, but the rent’s being paid by some guy named Blocker. How’m I doing so far?”

Thomas nodded. “Excellent.” He looked at me. “She’s doing very well.”

“Go on,” I said.

“And within a couple of days of your little mission, the image on Whirl360 is altered,” Julie said. “ That kind of blows my mind.”

“Yeah, mine, too,” I said. “But it doesn’t make any sense. I didn’t say anything to the woman down the hall about seeing the image online. Thomas, did you say anything to the landlord about what you saw in the window, on your computer?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“So then, what’s the connection?” I asked.

Julie was thinking. “You didn’t tell why you were at that address? Did you tell that guy you had lunch with? Your agent?”

“No. I didn’t mention a word of it to him.”

“Nobody followed you?”

I gave Julie an eye roll. “Really.”

She grimaced. “Okay, maybe that’s a bit out there. But think back to when you got to the place on Orchard Street.”

I sighed. “After I finished the meeting I grabbed a cab and got out at Orchard, a few blocks north of where I needed to be. I headed down, slowly, with the printout in my hand, comparing the window patterns and the brick and everything until I was sure I had the right building. It had the same air-conditioning unit in the window and everything.”

“How’d you get in?”

“Some guy was coming out and I slipped in. I went upstairs, knocked on the door, no one answered. Nothing else to tell.”

Julie was thinking. “What were you going to say, if someone had opened the door?”

“I was going through several ideas in my head and finally decided to play it straight. That we’d seen this image on Whirl360 and were curious to find out what it was.”

Thomas shook his head disappointingly.

“So you had the printout in your hand the whole time,” Julie said.

“Yeah, I guess I did.”

“So the person heading out of the building saw it, the neighbor lady saw it, and anyone else you walked past saw it.”

“No…I don’t think…Shit. I took it out at one point, and I know I put it back in my pocket eventually, but I’m not sure when.”

“So that lady might have seen it,” Julie said. “Or someone else you didn’t even notice.”

“Maybe there was a camera in the lobby,” Thomas said. “Didn’t you think of that?”

I looked angrily at him. “No, I did not think of that. Why the hell would I think of that?” But I supposed it was possible. Calming down, I said, “Okay, let’s say somebody, somehow, saw that sheet of paper I was carrying. How do we make the leap from that to the image disappearing online now?”

Julie said, “For the sake of argument, why don’t we say that what Thomas saw in the window was… something. Something that someone-”

“Like who?” I asked.

“Work with me here. Okay? Let’s say whatever’s shown in the window is something someone wouldn’t be pleased to find out was online. And once they found out it was, they had to have it removed. Think about it. Think of all the candid shots these Whirl360 cars have taken. Husbands cheating on wives, wives cheating on husbands.”

“But they blur the faces,” I said.

“Okay, but let’s say, for example, just for fun, you’re some guy in Hartford and you want to see if your house is on Whirl360, and you find it, there’s a car in the driveway you recognize as your golfing buddy’s Lincoln, except he’s never been to your house. But your wife’s home during the day, when the picture was taken. Or let’s say you’re that guy with the Lincoln, and you find out that picture’s up there before your friend does. What do you do?”

“I get what you’re saying.”

Thomas chimed in, “It’s like that car I saw that hit the other car in Boston.” To Julie, he said, “Ray wouldn’t do anything about that.”

“There’s all kinds of shit online that if you knew about it, you’d freak out,” Julie said. “And maybe when you were waving around that piece of paper, you tipped somebody off about the head in the window.”

“Maybe,” I conceded. “So let’s say you’re right, and that my visit and the doctoring of the image are linked. How the hell would you go online and change it?”

“You’d hack in,” Thomas said.

Julie nodded. “Sounds logical. How else would you do it, right?”

“I guess,” I said.

“It’d be worth calling Whirl360, asking them if anyone has tried lately to break into their system,” Julie said. “Get through their firewall or whatever they call it.”

“Where would you begin?” I asked. “Who would you call?”

Julie smiled. “You may know how to draw pictures but you’re clearly clueless when it comes to getting answers. I’ll take that on.”

Julie obviously had the smarts to find stuff out. What I was less sure was whether we should be trying. Was this something we needed to get involved in? Could nosing around backfire, get Thomas in trouble? We’d already had the FBI here. Did we want Whirl360’s security people at our door, too?

But I kept those concerns to myself, at least for the moment, because I had more immediate questions. “Thomas, tell me again what the landlord said when you called him. About the women who used to live there?”

“He said the apartment got empty late last summer. I don’t think they were sisters or related. They had different names.”

“What were they again?”

“Courtney and Olsen.”

“Those were their first names?”

“I think so. I had a hard time understanding him because of the accent. I told you that.”

“Olsen doesn’t sound like a woman’s first name,” Julie said. “Did he give you their full names?”

Thomas turned to his desk. “I wrote it down,” he said. “Courtney Walmers and Olsen Fitch.”

“Wait a second,” I said. Something about the name rang a bell. “Olsen Fitch?” Hadn’t I come across a name like that recently? “Thomas, let me sit there.” I got him out of his computer chair, opened up a new browser, and conducted the same search I’d done on Dad’s laptop of any news stories that had mentioned New York’s Orchard Street.

“Hang on…hang on,” I said. “Here we are. I knew that name rang a bell. Thomas, is it possible the landlord was saying ‘Allison Fitch’ instead of ‘Olsen Fitch?’”

Thomas thought. “I guess.”

“Okay, so here’s a story about the police issuing a statement that they were trying to find an Allison Fitch. She lived on Orchard, and worked at some bar and didn’t show up for work. There’s just the one story here, no follow-up.”

“That’s probably the person in the window,” Thomas said, standing close to me, like he wanted his chair back as soon as I was willing to surrender it. “It’s a woman. She got smothered, and then they got rid of her body.”

For a guy who didn’t watch TV crime shows, Thomas was pretty fast with possible scenarios.

“Thomas,” I said, “why don’t you sit back down here while Julie and I talk about how to handle this.”

“Are you going to go finish having sex?” Thomas asked.

I felt my own face flush, but Julie was very cool. “Maybe later,” she said. “We’re going to talk about this first. We can have sex any old time.”

Thomas was already back at it, exploring some city that looked to be European. Sensing my curiosity, he said, “Prague.”

Julie and I retreated into the map-covered upstairs hallway.

“What do you think?” I asked.

She raised her hands hopelessly. “Damned if I know.”

“Same here.”

We went down to the kitchen. Julie went looking for coffee and found a jar of instant. “Tell me this isn’t all you have.”

It was. As she filled a kettle she said, “Call me crazy, but I think there’s something going on here.”

“Yeah,” I said reluctantly.

“Why the hell would someone erase that head from the window if there wasn’t something funny about it?”

“Agreed.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Do?”

“I know you said you weren’t really going to call the New York police like Thomas asked, but that was then. You gonna call them now?”

“None of the reasons that would have kept me from calling before have changed,” I said.

Julie looked surprised. “Excuse me? That altered picture sort of changes things.”

I reminded her about the FBI. “Thomas is already on their radar for sending e-mails to the CIA and Bill Clinton. Say we call the New York police, or even the Promise Falls cops. That’ll probably trigger some sort of alarm, and the FBI’ll be notified. And when the FBI brings everyone up to speed on my brother’s activities, that he’s been writing the CIA with all his street memorization updates, just how seriously do you think anyone’s going to take him? Especially when what he claims to have seen is no longer on Whirl360?”

Julie’s shoulders slumped. “Shit. But there’s more than just what Thomas saw, and you still have the earlier printout. And there’s that missing woman.”

“Who may or may not still be missing,” I said.

“Yeah, but that can be checked. Ray, I get your hesitation here, and being worried that the cops will think there’s nothing to it, but I gotta tell ya, this makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I know what I’m going to do. Tomorrow I’m going to call Whirl360 and talk to whoever’s in charge of muddying images on the site and ask if someone hacked into it. Or if they changed it themselves for some reason.”

“And you think I should call the cops,” I said.

“I think you should call the cops.”

I raised my hands in defeat. “Fine, I’ll call the cops. Which ones?”

“NYPD,” Julie said.

“I don’t even know what precinct that would be.” Using Dad’s laptop, we concluded it was the seventh. I entered a number on the Web site into my cell phone. “Here goes,” I said to Julie while I waited for the connection.

“Yeah, hello,” I said when someone picked up. “I need to talk to a…I guess I need to talk to a detective.”

“Is that an emergency call, sir?”

“No, it’s not. I mean, it’s important, but it’s not an emergency.”

“Hold on.”

A few seconds later, someone else picked up. A man with a gruff voice. “Simpkins.”

“Hi, my name is Ray Kilbride. I’m calling from Promise Falls.”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Kilbride?”

“Okay, this is going to sound kind of crazy, but I just need you to hear me out. My brother may have witnessed a homicide. Or something.”

“What’s your brother’s name?”

“Thomas Kilbride.”

“And the reason you’re calling and he isn’t?”

“I think he’s more comfortable if I do this.”

“And that’s because?”

“Look, that really doesn’t matter, and the thing is, he’s not really the only witness.”

“Who else is a witness? Are you a witness, Mr. Kilbride?”

“Sort of. The thing is, there could be a great many witnesses. There’s a record of the crime on the Internet. At least, there was.”

A pause at the other end of the line. “I see. Who got killed, Mr. Kilbride?”

“Okay, I don’t know for certain that anyone did, but it looks like someone being killed in a window. And it might be a woman named Allison Fitch.”

“Is this something you saw posted on YouTube, sir?” the detective asked, his voice already filled with skepticism.

“No, it was on Whirl360, where you can-”

“I know what it is. You telling me your brother thinks he saw a homicide on that site?”

“That’s right. Listen, at first I thought he was imagining it, but-”

“Why would you have thought he was imagining it, sir?”

“Because my brother has a history of psychiatric problems and-”

Click.

I looked at Julie.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said. “I’d have hung up, too. Could you have laid it out for him any worse?”

“I told you it was a bad idea.”

Julie threw her hands up. “Okay, you were right, I was wrong. You want to stay out of this, not get Thomas involved, I suppose that makes perfect sense. You’ve got no stake in this personally. And even if someone did see you with that printout, they’ve got no idea who you are.”

“That’s right. I didn’t give anyone my name.”

“Well, there you go,” Julie said. “You’ve got nothing to worry about.”