The girl carried a manila folder. Pages and slips of paper dangled and fluttered from the edges of the folder. She looked at him with solemn eyes, her gaze taking in his office. “Where’s your little girl?”
Her mother petted the child’s hair. “Sorry, she thinks everyone should have a daughter she can play with.”
A few degrees beyond the woman’s field of vision, atrocities were worming across Foster’s monitor. Playing in lurid color, the sound muted, here were crimes against children just the witnessing of which would send him to prison until he was an old, old man. With just one more step, she’d see things that would trouble her sleep for the rest of her life. Men wearing masks and waiting in line. Sex where the child was clearly dead.
Foster tapped a key, and the horrors were replaced by columns of serial numbers. He said, “Gena?”
The girl looked back, her eyes confused.
He continued, “You have a good ‘Take Your Daughter to Work Day,’ okay?”
Gena stepped closer. Her head tilting to a slight angle as she asked, “Why are you crying?”
He touched the side of his face and found a tear he wiped with his knuckles. “Allergies,” he told her.
Her mother mouthed the words, “It’s Tuesday.” Stretching them out. She put a hand on her child’s shoulder and steered her away.
Right. Taco Tuesday. Only in prisons and aboard submarines were people more excited about food than they were in office jobs. It was lunchtime, and the floor was going quiet. Foster toggled back to hell.
To find these sites had been spooky-easy. One anonymous phishing email had led him down the rabbit hole. Each cache yielded links to others.
So what if someone caught him? Who really cared if somebody from IT found anything he’d failed to scrub from his browser history? Foster risked nothing. He’d become a man who’d already suffered the worst. This searching gave him a reason to live.
Robb had told him, once, in the group, that the laboratories that did medical experiments and product testing on animals sought out dogs and cats that had once been household pets. Wild animals or strays living on the street knew how dangerous the world actually was. Such animals had a survival instinct, and they fought back. But animals raised with love would tolerate torture and regular abuse and never strike out in self-defense. On the contrary, animals raised in loving homes would suffer the laboratory abuse and always strive to please their tormenter. The more torture an animal could endure, the longer it was useful. And the longer it would live.
The same went for kids. Girls like his daughter, Lucinda, they could stay alive by not resisting. No child had been raised with more love than Lucinda, if she was still alive.
If nothing else, he might see how his daughter had died. Hovering over the images, reflected dimly on the screen was his dull, sick face. His eyelids sagging, half closed. His lips hanging half open.
Foster’s eyes tried to avoid the kids the way anyone decent looked away from a dead cat in the street. To not look was to respect its dignity, somehow. These kids, they’d been looked at to death. Drooled over to death. And whatever took place in these images amounted to a slow-motion murder.
No, the kids Foster tuned out. The kids he found online with men. The men, though, he studied their faces. The pixilated ones, he studied their hands, or he scoured their bodies for tattoos, for finger rings or scars. An occasional glimpse of Lucinda’s long hair might catch his attention—hair like that of the girl at the airport—but it was never her. So he focused on the men.
These kids, he’d never see them on the street. Foster knew as much. His only hope was to see one of the men. So he toggled to make screen captures, and he enlarged them as much as their resolution would allow. In that way he built his inventory of male faces, of tattoos and birthmarks. In such numbers it was just a matter of time. If he could catch just one man, he might be able to torture his way to the next.
Gates Foster saw himself as a bomb primed to explode. A machine gun in constant search of its next target. This, this office, no it wasn’t his dream job. His fantasy career would be to torture these men who tortured children.
Crazy risks Mitzi didn’t take.
A gun on the table across the restaurant from her. Two strange men, two goons trading a gun with one man crying and the other looking around for eyewitnesses. She let her gaze drift out the large windows to where a Porsche sat. Guarded, she lowered her voice. “I want you should give this a listen…” She offered Schlo the earbuds attached to her phone. When she dared to look again, the two men were gone.
The producer continued, wary. “The girl we hired, she’s okay at taking off her clothes, but she couldn’t scream her way out of a paper bag.”
Cued up on her phone was Mitzi’s new masterpiece. A game changer that would have sound replacing visuals as the most important part of any picture.
Schlo eyed the earbuds. “What’s this?” He reached to accept them. He pressed one, then the other, into his hairy ears.
Mitzi winked. She said, “Judge for yourself.” Touched the screen of her phone.
She didn’t say as much, but the only way a person had to process an experience so troubling was by sharing it. And not just pirated on a telephone screen. A troubled person wanted everyone else to see and hear it on the big screen. Multiple times. Ticket after ticket. Until the experience stopped leaving them so shaken.
Over the phone, her masterpiece worked its magic. Schlo’s face had gone pale as a powdered doughnut. A tear tipped out of each eye and slid down. His lower lip trembled, and he planted
