“Yay!” cheered Judith at my exhilarating discovery.
I placed My First Clue on the coffee table with excessive delicacy and smoothed her out as best as I could without smudging the pencil. “‘2 extra N95s, 2 PBJ sandwiches, water bottle, flashlight, sunscreen, pepper spray, 1 jug eyewash, goggles, tracker.’” My eyes snapped to Geraldine. “What’s this about a ‘tracker’?”
“Oh, that?” she asked with a most blasé delivery. “He has me pack it every time he goes anywhere. I don’t know why.”
“What does it do, exactly?”
“I don’t imagine that it does very much. It doesn’t have a screen or any buttons, just a USB port. There’s nothing on it to do anything. It’s a Klondike bar that tastes like plastic and breaks your teeth when you take a bite. I shouldn’t have to tell you not to eat it, but I’m giving you that advice in case you need it to be explained.”
“Miss Pasteur… I’m not stupid. I know better than—”
“Did I use the word ‘stupid’?”
“No, but you implied—”
“Do not put words in my mouth, Missy, do not project your insecurities onto others. It’s very rude, not to mention manipulative. Tantamount to gaslighting.” I bristled.
“You have got to be kidding me,” growled Shosh.
“She was trying to say,” interjected Judith, “that she appreciates your advice.”
Geraldine scoffed. “Once again, the investigator’s poor communication skills lead to a misunderstanding. You are welcome for the advice, Miss Buckman.”
Shosh rolled her eyes.
“Gee… Thanks,” I replied sarcastically. “Anyways, I suppose a device without any physical features isn’t going to look very useful, my very learnèd and observant friend—but if this thing is what I think it is, it would actually be very useful for our purposes.”
“What sort of ‘useful’ gadget could you possibly think it could be?”
“A GPS tracker, a device that records its coordinates at regular intervals and stores them for later retrieval. Some models even upload those coordinates to their manufacturers’ websites with a cellular data plan.”
“Oh. That does sound useful,” she replied with a hint of curiosity. “Are you saying this thing can actually tell us where he’s been?” For once… she seemed impressed by my investigative skills.
“Yes! That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Why,” asked Judith skeptically, “would he go to all the trouble of turning off his location on his phone, only to carry around a device that collects and uploads the same data to the cloud?”
“Oh. Um… Let me think… Hm…” Half a minute of thinking later I explained, “I think, and don’t quote me, that if the tracker is on a prepaid data plan, there won’t be any records from the cellular carrier tying his identity to the tracker, so the police should have no idea he even has this thing and therefore no way of subpoenaing the manufacturers for the coordinates it’s uploading… unless they find it on him and from there figure out who owns the web server—and depending on the device’s design, that could be very difficult to extract.”
“I see.”
“Would you happen to know the brand of the tracker, Geraldine?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t, it’s just a featureless black box. He would know. But he isn’t here… He’s gone… Maybe… possibly… (forever.)” She began to slip back into despair as she reminded herself that her husband was no longer with her.
“This list could make a huge difference, ma’am, a very big difference. Thank you for helping me dig it up. For helping us rescue him.” Thus I attempted to bring her back into the world of smiles and hugs and possibly hope.
“Oh. You’re welcome.”
I drummed my fingers nervously on my thigh, anxious to learn what the tracker might have recorded—if only we could access the data.
“The website could be in his bookmarks,” suggested Judith.
“Yes! Geraldine, do you know his computer password?”
“My memory isn’t that good—I don’t even remember my own password because he made me make it so long. I had to write it down.”
This time, just before driving into the deep end of catastrophization, I lassoed my despair, flanked it, tied its legs, and calmly asked her, “Would you happen to have his password written down, too?”
“Of course. He couldn’t remember his, either.”
“Can you get it for me?”
“You want me to give you his password?”
“Yes, if you don’t mind.”
“With all due respect,” she seethed, “I am not giving a stranger—who showed up at my door unsolicited mere minutes ago, who has repeatedly insulted me and my beloved, who has caused me great distress and worry—my husband’s computer password.”
“Ma’am… we are your only hope.”
“Yes, but—”
“If you want to type in the password for us, that would work just as well as you handing it over.”
“You would still have access to all his data.”
“Access we need if we’re to have any chance of finding him. Every footprint he has left behind is critical to our investigation, which means we need unfettered access to all of his data.”
“I dunno…” ((She’s bending! She’s finally yielding to logic!))
“Ma’am… We have reached a fork in the road. If you want our help, you must let us access his account. If you do not help us, we will find ourselves coming to a dead-end, in which case we must take our business elsewhere. Do you understand what I’m saying, or do you require clarification?”
“There must be a better way. I refuse to accept that this is necessary.”
I sighed. ((I gotta do what I gotta do.)) “Missus Pasteur… your husband’s life is in danger. I want you to ask yourself, ‘Which is more important to me: his privacy, or his life?’”
She hesitated, glanced at Judith, paused, nodded reluctantly, departed, returned, and relinquished unto me a sticky note folded into quarters. (I did not question why it was folded into such a small square.)
“Thank you.” I memorized his irrationally long password as I logged him in, because I cannot stop numbers and letters from chiseling themselves into my gray matter. (License plates are the worst offenders.) “What browser does he use?”
“We use Garlic Browser.”
I rolled my eyes and, without thinking about what I was about to say, muttered, “Of course he uses the criminal browser.”
“‘Criminal’! You call his principles on the right to privacy ‘criminal’!”
((Ah, fuck…)) “I didn’t mean to say… I’m sorry, I misspoke. Please forgive me.”
“I forgive you.”
“Now that you’re a P.I. making friends in the seedy underworld, Andy, you’ll be using Garlic, too.”
“(Shit,)” I muttered. ((It’s not enough that I put my nose to the ground and sniff with all my lung capacity—I’m going to have to change the way I think entirely. I need to be even more paranoid than I was as a cop.)) I opened up Garlic Browser, and, with the others watching over my shoulders, browsed his bookmark list (disabled by default to protect the user’s security and left that way by truly security-conscious users) until—
—until I found it: Amphibipos GPS Portal. My mind raced so quickly I wondered briefly whether I’d accidentally doubled my Adderall that morning. I opened the link and was greeted with a login screen which the password manager (also disabled by default to protect the user’s security, and also never enabled by truly security-conscious users) automatically populated with his username and password. “Yes!” I shouted victoriously. Tapping ‘enter’ revealed to us a map centered on the end of the long wood-and-concrete walkway projecting into Santa Virginia Bay. I zoomed in. “Big Pier,” was all I could think to say. “Big Pier…”
“Looks like he’s waiting at the end of the Big Pier,” observed Judith.
“The error circle extends out over the water…”
Judith whispered, “You think he took a dip, Andy?” Her voice, close to my ear and extra quiet because Geraldine was right next to us, did that buzzing thing to my scalp.
“(Hah…)” Once I had recovered from the extra-breathtaking blast of sensation, I said, “Geraldine, we’re going to need to spend some time on this, it’s probably best if you don’t worry yourself about our work. Let us do our job so that you can do yours.”
“Okay.” She waited beside us.
“You’re kind of distracting us.”
“Oh I’m sorry, am I breathing too loudly? I have terrible asthma, my exercise regimen has been an absolute catastrophe, inhalers make me break out in hives. It’s genetic, or so I’ve been told. The reaction, not the asthma. The asthma is actually a result of—”
With the last of my patience I told her, “Geraldine, please go somewhere else so we can concentrate on our work.”
“Oh. Alright. If you feel so strongly about it that you believe it necessary to interrupt me. I’ll be waiting in the living room, trying not to cry.”
“(Don’t worry, we’ll find him,)” I flaccidly reminded her on her way out. I stared at the web app’s interface, wondering what to do—then saw a button that looked like a constellation or a connect-the-dots, an articulated zig-zag that screamed, ‘Click me!’ I hovered over it and a tooltip popped up with the word ‘History’, injecting a surge of anticipation into my nervous system. “Oh, wow. I think I found something useful.” I clicked the button… and was rewarded for my curiosity as the tracker’s every step was plotted out before us, dots connected by lines forming a trail from the Brookvale-Pasteur home to Old Town to the Bay. “Hot damn. Digital breadcrumbs.”
“Oh, hell yes. Good find, Friday.” Her commendation harmonized with the vibrations haunting my scalp.
I noticed a ‘play’ button and, tamping down my excitement, clicked it. I was very pleased with the resulting playback, at 10-times speed, of the journey the tracker took beginning a week ago. I scrubbed forward to Wednesday morning, and we watched the tracker leave the apartment, speed up slightly as it headed in the direction of Old Town with several stops along the way, slow down at Lemon Street, round the corner onto Adams Avenue, proceed down a quarter of the block before turning tail at double speed, about face again, and drag its feet a little ways before coming to a stop on Adams—in the heart of the Red-Light District.
“What’s he doing now?” asked Judith, puzzled.
“I’m still forming a picture in my head. Let’s give it a minute.”
At the end of that minute, she asked, “Is it glitched?”
“Maybe he abandoned or forgot his backpack?”
“Maybe.”
After 3 more minutes of motionlessness, the tracker suddenly picked up and accelerated, zooming over streets, stopping and going… “He took the bus, then had some back and forth and a rest, and then he went for a car ride,” I theorized.
“That’s a car, alright, no doubt about it—check out the speedometer in the corner of the screen.”
“45 down Ashland? That’s a 25 zone!”
“Taxi.”
“No, not even a taxi’s gonna go that fast, they’d be pulled over for reckless driving in a heartbeat and then it’s bye-bye license. We’re dealing with someone crazier than your average taxi driver. Someone who isn’t scared of being pulled over. Someone who isn’t scared of law enforcement.”
“They’d have to be a nutcase.”
“Assuming you don’t consider yourself a ‘nutcase’, are you admitting you’re scared of the fuzz?”
When she didn’t respond, I turned my head to see her face—plastered with a dour frown. “I’m not a pussy.”
“If I still had a badge… would you be intimidated by me?”
“No.”
I watched her face for any signs that she was lying, but saw none. So I doubled down. “How would you feel if I handcuffed you?”
Her expression softened into something inscrutable. “I was planning on asking you the same question someday.”
((What?)) “Why would you do that?”
“If you want to find out, just answer the question. How would you feel if I handcuffed you?”
“Well… I’d feel vulnerable, I think. Powerless. I’d be at your mercy.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What kind of mindset would those feelings put you in?”
“I don’t know what kind of mindset it would put me in, but the mindset I’d need to already be in to let you put them on me would involve a lot of trust.”
“What would you be trusting me to do?”
“I wouldn’t be able to do anything for myself, so, if I was restrained for more than a few hours, I’d be trusting you to take care of my needs.”
“Like how you had me ‘take care of your needs’ last night?”
I blushed. “Ohh, that’s where you were going with this.”
“You’d have to rely on me to do everything for you. All you’d be able to do is suggest what I should do next… and beg me to keep going.”
I nodded nervously.
“Is this conversation turning you on?” she whispered straight into my ear…
…causing me to shudder pleasantly. “Hah…!” ((If this goes on in any more detail, I’m gonna need a fresh pad to keep my panties dry.)) “Um. We’re working on a case where a man may have drowned, so…”
“Good point. I’ll stop distracting you.”
“Thank you.” The tracker continued zooming around. ((Shit, my pad’s soaked through and my panties are already wet.)) I sighed and admitted, “But, yes, that idea turned me on.”
“Good. We might give it a try sometime.” My face turned red as a pomegranate seed. The tracker suddenly slowed down to only 2 miles per hour when it hit the parking lot by the pier. “He’s on foot again.” Before long the tracker was at the ocean end of the pier, at which point the web app informed us the signal had been lost. “Well, Andy? Whatcha thinkin’?”
“I’m thinking, on the surface, it’s supposed to look like he drowned himself.”
“But if we dig deeper…”
“It’s someone trying to pull the wool over our eyes… and that wool has a lotta big holes in it.”
“What gave it away?”
“For one thing, what’s up with the crazy car ride? Alex Brookvale is anti-car, and even if he broke his vow of celibacy, no Ridr or licensed taxi driver would go that fast down a residential street—except at gunpoint.”
“Excellent logic. I hope you don’t mind me asking stupid questions, I just wanted to make sure you’re thinking things through and not just jumping to the most obvious conclusions. It is fishy.”
“They aren’t stupid questions. I appreciate you keeping me on my toes.” I rewound the tracker’s playback to the timestamp where it didn’t move for 40 real-time minutes. “That’s where they took it off of him. That’s when he really disappeared. On Adams.”
“Adams Avenue. My old turf.”
I stared at her. “(You mean… you were a prostitute?)”
She stared back. “‘Sex worker’. Do you have a problem with that?”
Shosh appeared out of nowhere, startling me. Her wide-spread eyes darted between me and Judith. “Esti… this is weird. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with you being around this woman anymore.”
“Um. It’s… I’ll admit it’s… a bit of a shock. And I wasn’t really prepared for it…”
Judith was very clearly dissatisfied with my response.
“But I stand by my new friend. My past is my past, her past is her past. She doesn’t judge me, I don’t judge her.”
This did not pacify her completely, but her stare softened enough that I could tell that my ass was no longer in direct contact with the hot seat. Shosh just shook her head.
As casually as I could, I asked, “Judith… why’d you quit?”
“Because… as much as I liked my job—I really did, it was fun and emotionally satisfying and empowering—making money off of sex kind of took over doing it for fun. Any time I tried to just do stuff with partners who weren’t offering me money in exchange, I found myself reflexively tallying up how much I should charge them. I had to stop myself from giving them their bill afterwards, and I couldn’t help but feel like I’d been stiffed when they didn’t pay me. And I focused so much on satisfying my partners’ desires that I would forget to satisfy my own, to seek pleasure for myself. I have a strong attraction to profit, so I can’t let money get involved with anything I enjoy, or the money takes precedence over the pleasure. I don’t regret that part of my professional career, but I’m glad I retired before my hunger for the hustle turned sex in its entirety into a means to acquire wealth, and nothing more.”
“Wow. Does that happen to all prost—sex workers?”
“I dunno. Nobody I’ve talked to has ever mentioned having this problem. It could be rare, or it could be common. But I suspect it’s a me thing—like I said, I’m motivated by money to a pathological extreme.”
“Well… I’m glad you enjoyed it for as long as it was your job, but I’m also glad you moved on before it became too much.”
She smiled. “Are you curious?”
“About…?” I asked… fully aware of the answer.
{I’m standing on Adams, waiting for somebody. Nobody in particular, but a particular kind of nobody. A limo pulls up. A man seated in the back offers me a crisp Hamilton in exchange for something quick. Though I have no taste for men, this one’s different from the average fellow I might meet on the street… he has lots of money. I curl my fingers demandingly—I’m worth more than that. He pulls out another tenner. I snatch the bills with a greedy hand and shove them between my tits. He’s the wrong gender to speak to my love, but he speaks the ‘love language’ needed to convince me to make an exception. He opens the door and makes room for me, and I take my seat next to him. With restrained eagerness I gingerly unbutton his pants and—}
“Andy?”
I snapped out of the daydream. “Huh? What?”
“You are curious, aren’t you? You wanna give it a try.”
I felt that damn wet heat between my thighs. “You mean… (walking the streets?)” Shosh evaporated with a discomforted, apprehensive stare.
“Oh, hell no. The streets suck—unless, like, maybe you really enjoy being your own boss as a fille insoumise.”
{I burn the midnight oil for as long as I feel like working, making half a dozen new friends each night; free to make my own decisions as an independent worker, deciding my own hours, choosing my own workplace, handpicking my own clients, setting my own prices—I head home early to kick back with my girlfriend once I’m satisfied with my nightly take…}
“Other than that, the streets are the worst. Definitely not my bag. Anyways, I’m talking about being an escort. You can go the independent route if you want to keep all your earnings and are willing to manage your own business—in which case I can help you get started—or you can go the agency route and focus on the rest of the job—in which case I’ll help you find an agency that won’t bleed you dry with fees.”
I blushed. “No. Thank you, but—no. I’m satisfied with being a humble private investigator.” The mental image of me {carefully unbuttoning then slowly, sensually unzipping this stranger’s fly, pulling his pants down an inch, bringing my head down to bury my face in his lap—taking a moment to acquaint myself with his novel scent—before reverently retrieving his cock from his boxers and dutifully sucking it while savoring the sounds of his enjoyment and the taste of his sweat—the whole time anticipating the moolah, the dough, the riches I’m gonna rake in from all these attention-starved fellas—} was doing all it could to grab me and pull me back in.
“Think of sucking dick as a backup career, in case being a dick doesn’t pan out. Or a side hustle for when your caseload has a dry spell.”
((No, thank you. It’s a really dangerous career. I shouldn’t—even if—))
{The stranger tips me an extra five for every time I made him cum, and one more for keeping anything from getting on his pants or matting his pubes. Another flawless, artful performance. Which comes as no surprise—everyone knows I’m the best damn cocksucker in the city. I count my latest paycheck—soft cotton paper lovingly tickling my fingertips—before I shove the wad into my cleavage. Another car pulls up to my curb. Time to blow another cock to blow another mind.
{I smirk as I realize something: earning a living was never this easy—nor was it ever so satisfying. Being a cop, being a P.I.… frustrating wastes of time. This was my true calling all along. I’ve finally found my happily-ever-after.}
I shook away the fantasy and the stupid dreamy smile on my face before I could change my mind and take her up on her offer to become an escort—or abandon the case in favor of the curb. “I’ll… take a rain check.”
She patted me on the shoulder. “It’s a huge career shift. Nerves are natural. Take your time.”
“(I just… need… to think about it, okay?)” I scrubbed back and forth through the GPS timeline, then noticed a tiny burst of speed as Alex reversed direction a third of the way down Adams, reaching an average of 12 miles per hour for about 2 seconds—over such a brief interval that the tracker barely had the chance to record it—before suddenly coming to a standstill. “Hm. That’s about sprinting speed. This is a strange place and time to be exercising. Given our kidnapping hypothesis, I’m presuming he was running from his would-be captors. Then he comes to a standstill as they grab him, and reverses direction as they drag him a little way back; his captors wait around for roughly 40 minutes doing who-knows-what… then they take his tracker and drive off to toss it in the bay.”
“Excellent deduction.”
“Thanks. The question that’s pestering me now is ‘Who was chasing him?’”
“We could make a list of all his enemies, but that would take all day—maybe longer.”
“Unfortunately, we may have to do exactly that. But not now. Let’s think about our other questions, in particular the big question: what happened to him after they separated him from his tracker?”
“Hmm.” Judith stroked her chin. “There are only a coupla ways for us to find out: one, eyewitnesses; and two, camera footage.”
I nodded. “And since it happened in the Red-Light District…”
“…no one in their right mind would have recorded anything, because they know damn well that they could end up incriminating themselves or their peers.”
“Of course. So that leaves us with eyewitnesses.”
“This all happened in the morning, so…” She sighed, and under her breath cursed, “(Shit.)”
I scrubbed through the tracker’s path to the last stop before his walk down Adams. “His bus stopped at Grover Cleveland Avenue and Lemon Street by 9:05, and he reached the corner of John Adams and Lemon by 9:10.”
“There wouldn’t have been anybody on the street in the morning. On summer weekdays, most street workers don’t start until 7 in the evening, and even on weekends the earliest birds don’t get their worms till noon—and never a second sooner.”
“In other words, we’re screwed.” I sighed.
“No footage, no eyewitnesses.”
“(Tsk.) You know what? Who knows. I’m not giving up. We’ll go there at night, and maybe we’ll get lucky and one of the working girls was there that morning. Which means asking every single one of them if they were there that morning. How many are there?”
“Do I look like a census-taker?”
“I figured it was worth asking you, seeing that you used to work there.”
“That’s reasonable, I guess, except I only walked the streets for a few weeks before escorting for the rest of my career. I only got to know a handful of streetwalkers while I was on Adams. And that was decades ago.”
“Oh. Well. However many there are, we gotta interview all of them.”
“You really wanna ask all of them a bunch of questions?”
“That’s what a responsible investigator would do.”
Her cheeks swelled as she puffed between puckered lips. “(Pffff…) Looks like we got our work cut out for us.”
“Yep. Alright, let’s escort this to a file so we can take it with us.” Sic.
She smirked. “Let’s what this to a file?”
“Escort.” She snickered. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“I don’t see what’s funny. ‘Let’s escort this—’” My cheeks turned red.
She slapped her knee and cackled.
I found the export button and emailed myself the file. “Alright, if we need to review it later, we can do it at my apartment. Let’s go and… do something else while we wait for the night shift on Adams.”
“If that’s your plan. Where you go, I will go.”
We notified Geraldine that we had tracked her husband to Adams and claimed that we had a plan that would tell us where to go next, which seemed to soften her mood to the point of tolerability—but as we departed, some questions popped into my head. “Geraldine, I have a few more loose ends to tie.”
“Could you hurry? It’s time for my nap.”
“Of course. Does your husband gamble?”
“No.” My question had irritated her slightly.
“Do either of you have any debts?”
“Student loans. No credit cards, no mortgage.”
“Are the student loans being paid on time?”
“Yes.”
“Any litigation, past or pending?”
“Plenty.”
“And who’s suing who?”
“We have a few cases against the police department, the police union, and several individual police officers. False imprisonment, death threats, police brutality, unlawful search and seizure, illegal wiretapping, First Amendment violations, attempts to coerce confessions. You know… the usual. As for him being the defendant, he’s on trial for assaulting an officer—but that one’s poppycock, he’s sworn himself to nonviolence.”
“Right,” I concluded nervously. “Thank you.”
“Keep your hopes up, Geri,” added Judith. “We have a strong lead. Take care of yourself.”
“Thank you,” replied Geraldine warmly, calmly. “I will.”
We headed back to my apartment and sat down on my couch, demoralized by the fact that Adams would have been a ghost town while the disappearance was going down. I felt lost.
This time, though, I had somebody to be lost with.