The Watcher in the Wall (11 page)

So stop it, then,
she wrote.
What do I need to do?

Get a webcam,
Frey replied.
Preferably something high-def. Mount it somewhere where I can see what you’re doing.

“The voyeur stuff again,” Windermere told Stevens. “Just like with Adrian Miller and the others.”

You like to watch, huh?
she wrote.
What’s that all about?

Want to make sure you’re doing it right,
Frey replied.
What’s the point of doing this together if you screw up and fail?

“Gee, I dunno,” Windermere said aloud. “I guess you’d die alone?”

As soon as I’ve seen that you’ve done it,
Frey continued,
I’ll follow you. We’ll see each other on the other side.

Why do I have to go first?
Windermere typed.

The response was instantaneous.
You came to me, remember? No debate.

•   •   •

“We have to figure out a way to pin this girl down,” Stevens said, pacing the office. “If all the high-tech tracing stuff isn’t working, we’re going to have to go old-school.”

Windermere was busy staring at her computer screen. “Old-school?”

“You know, real policing?” Stevens said. “Interrogation. Probing conversations with the subject. Looking for weaknesses and exploiting them.”

“Is that how they used to do it?” Windermere said.

“How they still do it, where I come from,” Stevens told her. “You gotta be careful, though. You’re a sixteen-year-old boy, remember? Try not to sound like an FBI agent.”

Windermere gave him a look. “Do I sound like any other FBI agent you ever met in your life?”

•   •   •

She brought up the chat box and typed again.
So why are you doing this, anyway?

Ashley Frey (as Azrael99) replied,
What? Killing myself?

XXBlackDaysXX:
Or whatever
.

“Let’s see if she’ll rise to the bait,” Windermere told Stevens. “Sometimes all these assholes really want is to brag about all the sick shit they’re doing.”

Azrael:
No reason to live anymore. Life sucks. The usual. Don’t reduce me to a pile of clichés.

BD:
You’re reducing yourself. Why the forums? What brought you here?

A:
Who cares? Why are you asking?

“Careful,” Stevens said. “You don’t want to rattle the cage too much.”

“Who’s rattling cages?” Windermere replied. “This freak’s trying to get people to kill themselves. She should damn well have a convincing argument.”

BD:
I’m curious. We’re about to do something pretty intimate together. Here: I’ll go first. I’m doing this because I’m sick of being picked on at school. I have no friends and everyone makes fun of me for being clumsy and ugly and poor. I figure whatever’s in the afterlife has to be better than here, right? I’m better off dead.

Windermere pressed send. Knew Stevens was reading over her shoulder. Wondered if he could sense Rene Duclair in what she’d written, the cesspool of guilt from which she’d dredged that stuff.

Azrael99 wrote back.
You are better off dead.

BD:
I guess I’m going to find out.

Ashley Frey didn’t respond, not for a few minutes. Five, maybe ten. Windermere stared at the computer screen, hit the refresh button. Stevens paced the tiny office, muttering about how she’d scared the subject away. Windermere ignored him. Kept hitting refresh, wondering if she should write something else.

The computer chimed.

Azrael99:
I’m here because of my stepfather. He’s a piece of shit and I hate him.

Windermere snapped her fingers. “Stepfathers again,” she said. “If Mathers is right, there’s some truth here.”

XXBlackDaysXX:
Why do you hate him so much?

Another long pause.

Azrael99:
He’s just a dick. Alcoholic. He gets drunk and whales on me, tells me I’m worthless. He used to do shit to his daughter, too, my stepsister. Sick shit.

“My God,” Stevens said.

WTF,
Windermere typed.
Scumbag. Can’t you just call the police?

Too late for that,
Frey responded.
She’s already gone. She got sick of him messing around with her and she already took the leap. I’m just following in her footsteps, I guess.

Windermere turned to tell Stevens to write this stuff down, found he was already scribbling in his notebook.

XXBlackDaysXX:
What was her name?

Azrael99:
My sister?

BD:
Ya.

Another pause. A couple minutes. Then:

Azrael99:
I don’t want to talk about this anymore.

Azrael99:
GTG.

Azrael99:
C ya.

<
43
>

They put Mathers
on the grunt work.

“We want suicide victims,” Windermere told him. “Dating back, what, four years? That’s when Frey first showed up on the forum.”

Stevens tapped his pen against his notebook. “Sure,” he said. “Except we have no idea how long it took Frey to come up with this idea.”

“Ten years, then,” Windermere told Mathers. “Bring us everything. Bonus points if there’s an Earl involved somewhere.”

•   •   •

Mathers came back a couple hours later, clutching a rain forest’s worth of printouts.

“Got about twenty thousand dead girls dating back the last ten years,” he said. “I tried controlling for family members named Earl, but all these cases are reported differently. Sometimes they list the family, sometimes they don’t, so I figured better safe than sorry, give you the whole stack.”

Windermere took the stack of pages, flipped through them. “We don’t have time to go through every one of these cases,” she said. “Not by the end of the day, anyway.”

“What about a stepsister?” Stevens said. “Can we pare this down to cases where Ashley Frey had a stepsister?”

“Or a stepbrother,” Windermere said. “Given that Ashley Frey could be the Prime Minister of Canada, for all we know.”

Mathers scratched his head. “Most of these cases don’t specify,” he said. “Like I said, suicide reporting tends to be pretty bare-bones.”

Windermere dropped the printouts on the desk beside her. The stack landed with a resounding thud. “We need more information,” she said. “We’re not moving fast enough, guys. We have to do better.”

She sat back down at her computer and reviewed what they knew. Thought about Ashley Frey on the other end of that chat room connection, reeling in her victims and watching their deaths on her computer screen, playing the unhappy teenager. An idea began to form in her head.

“It’s risky,” Stevens said when she explained her thinking. “It’s an all-in bluff, and we don’t have the cards to back it up.”

“Risky pays the bills, partner,” she replied. “We’re bluffing anyway,
and sooner or later Ashley Frey is going to call us. We can flail around until the last possible moment and do things on her terms, or we can bring the fight ourselves.”

Stevens nodded. “It’s ballsy, that’s for sure,” he said. “If anyone can pull it off, Carla, it’s you. Just be careful.”

“Always, Stevens,” she said. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

<<<

Gruber was coming out
of the bathroom when his computer chimed. He dried his hands on his pants, sat down, and hit the space bar, blinked in the dim light as the screen flashed to life.

A message from XXBlackDaysXX:
You still there?

Counting the minutes,
Gruber replied.
You getting cold feet?

Nah,
came the response.
I’ve just been thinking about you. About your stepfather.

Gruber’s eyes shifted involuntarily to the lineup of taped pictures behind his computer. Sarah’s yearbook picture. DarlingMadison and Adrian Miller and Dylan Price, too. And Earl, watching him, always.
Oh yeah?
he typed.

There was a pause.

Do you have a webcam?
XXBlackDaysXX wrote.
Would be cool to see your face before we do this.

That wasn’t the agreement,
Gruber replied.
I never promised a webcam.

I just want to see your face, is all,
XXBlackDaysXX wrote.
Would be nice to hear your voice. This typing is so impersonal.

Sorry,
Gruber wrote.
Impossible. You want to add me on Facebook, knock yourself out, but why bother?

Skype? FaceTime? You’re asking me to kill myself on webcam for you
.
I don’t think it’s crazy to want to see your face first.

You came to me,
Gruber typed.
I didn’t ask for any of this. I don’t have to prove anything to you.

There was another pause, a long pause.
I don’t think you are who you say you are,
XXBlackDaysXX finally replied.
I don’t think you want to kill yourself at all. I think you’re one of those suicide freaks who gets off on watching other people die.

Gruber stared at the screen, felt something oily and viscous start to slither around his intestines. Before he could type a response, his computer chimed again.

I bet that’s why you want me to go first,
the prospect wrote.
You’ll wait until I’m dead and then you’ll use the webcam footage to get yourself off. I bet you’ve done this before, haven’t you?

The snake in Gruber’s bowels lurched a little. Rumbled, threatening. He realized his heart was pounding.

Earl glared down from his mug shot photo. Gruber could hear his words without trying.

Shit stain.

Pip-squeak.

Runt.

Pussy
.

I bet your stepdad’s not real,
XXBlackDaysXX wrote.
I bet you made up that whole story about your stepdad so I would feel sorry for you and believe you were legit.

He’s real
, Gruber replied.
Earl is too real. I never lied.

I bet there is no Earl. I bet you lied about him like you lie about everything else.

The room narrowed into a tunnel, the computer screen tiny at the end of it. Gruber heard his pulse in his ears, his heavy breathing. Felt his temperature rising. Just who did this asshole think he was?

There’s no Earl,
XXBlackDaysXX wrote.
You don’t have a stepdad and you probably don’t have a dead sister, either. It’s all just a big lie so you can get people to do what you want.

Stop trying to act like you know me,
Gruber wrote.
You’d never understand. I’m so far above your level it’s not funny.

Uh-huh. Just admit there’s no Earl. Admit you don’t have a stepsister.

Gruber inhaled sharply. Pounded the keyboard.
OF COURSE I DON’T HAVE A STEPSISTER. SHE’S FUCKING DEAD. SHE KILLED HERSELF BECAUSE OF ME.

How’d she do it?

Gruber didn’t reply.

Did she hang herself, Ashley? Did you watch? Did you like what you saw?

Gruber was aware he was gasping for breath, his eyes watering, the lenses of his glasses fingerprint smudged. He was aware he was hyperventilating, felt like he was rocketing downward into some dark abyss.

You liked watching your stepsister die. Admit it.

YEAH, I FUCKING LIKED IT. SARAH WAS A STUPID LITTLE TRAMP. SHE DESERVED TO FUCKING DIE AND I’M THE ONE WHO MADE HER DO IT.

I’M AN ANGEL OF DEATH, YOU STUPID LITTLE SHIT STAIN. YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT I’M CAPABLE OF.

A long pause. Gruber stared at the screen, breathing hard, furious.

Then:
I do now.

<
44
>

Stevens sat back
from the computer. Wiped his brow and exhaled. “Well, hell,” he said. “I’d say we broke her, Carla.”

Windermere paced the small office, trying to burn off the adrenaline. The online conversation with Ashley Frey had revved her up about as much as any in-person interrogation she could remember—maybe more so, given the stakes at play.

She’d wondered what the predator would do when she and Stevens called her bluff. Wondered if Frey would fight back or disappear, hoped it would knock her off-kilter enough that she’d give them something concrete to work on, some kind of new lead.

Figured it was the only shot they really had.

“You think she’s gone?” Stevens asked Windermere. It had been fifteen minutes since that last message, and even though Windermere had thrown out a few more salvos, Frey hadn’t replied.

“She’s gone,” Windermere said. “She’s either hurling her computer through her bedroom window, or she’s realizing she said too much. And meanwhile . . .” She scrolled up the page. “We have a few more scraps of information to plug into the machine.”

Stevens read over her shoulder. “‘Sarah,’” he said. “I guess that’s his stepsister.”

“Gotta be,” Windermere said. She copied the chat log, hit the print button. Shivered a little—the last residual adrenaline, and something else, too, something spookier.

“So let’s see if we can’t work with this,” she said, reaching for the printout. “Between Earl and Sarah, we must have a lead somewhere.”

<
45
>

Gruber woke up
to darkness outside, his head pounding, saliva dried and crusted on his lips. A train whistled down the block, the rumbling of a switch engine. He sat up, rubbing his face, found his glasses where he’d knocked them to the floor, and surveyed his living room.

There wasn’t much to see. The curtains were drawn, blocking most of the yellow glow from the sodium streetlight outside. What light did penetrate came in sharp lines, illuminating the table piled high with dishes, empty take-out containers, photographs torn from newspapers. It shone on the computer desk, too, the now dormant computer and the secondhand desk chair, and it shone on the pictures he’d taped to the wall.

It shone on Earl. His dark eyes, his sallow skin. His anger.

Shit stain. Pip-squeak.

Runt.

Gruber pulled himself to his feet. Pressed a button on the computer’s keyboard, and the screen came to life. The Death Wish forum was still running in his Internet browser, the chat box with XXBlackDaysXX. The sight of the message history was enough to make Gruber’s intestines churn all over again.