The next morning, Maclean and Verraday pulled up in front of a two-story building in Belltown. They walked up a narrow set of stairs and on the second floor, found a door with a small sign beside it reading “Erotes Hosting.”
“This is the place,” she said. “They administer four different sites for male, female, and transsexual escorts in the Seattle area, plus an alternative dating site.”
They entered. There was no receptionist. In the back, through a glass door, was a tomb-like machine room where the servers stood on a raised floor in the perpetual chill of air-conditioning. At the back of the office, a bespectacled young woman dressed in emo style sat at a desktop computer. She wore heavy eyeliner, a purple streak in her hair, and striped arm warmers pulled down to her knuckles to ward off the cold. She didn’t hear Verraday and Maclean over the roar of the fans at first. From their side of the counter, Verraday and Maclean could see that the young woman seemed to be putting together a webpage.
“Excuse me,” called Maclean.
In her peripheral vision, the emo girl spotted them. Without taking her gaze off the screen as she dropped some text into a blank box, she said in a welcoming tone of voice that surprised them both, “Hey, what can I do for you?”
Maclean held up her badge. “I’m Detective Maclean. Seattle PD. I’m investigating a homicide.”
“Holy shit!” exclaimed the girl, now turning in her swivel chair to look directly at her. “Are you serious?”
The girl had a guileless face under her plastic-rimmed glasses, so wide-eyed and sincerely surprised that under other circumstances Maclean would have had to suppress a laugh.
“Yes, I’m afraid so,” she said instead. “Can I speak to whoever is in charge here?”
“Yeah, sure,” replied the girl.
She leaned into the back office and called out, “Hey Marty, there’s a police detective here. It’s about a homicide.” Then she turned politely back toward Maclean and Verraday. “He’ll be right out. Can I get you guys some coffee or water?”
“No, but thank you,” said Maclean.
The young woman went back to work, and Verraday noticed her carefully using a computer paintbrush tool to obscure the face of the girl whose escort page she was putting together. It was pixelated the same way Destiny’s was.
“Do you do that to all of them?” Maclean asked. “Obscure the faces, I mean?”
“Yes, all of them,” said the young woman. “Unless they specifically request not to have their faces pixelated or blanked out. But almost everybody wants their identity concealed. The men as well as the women. A lot of them are doing this on the side, paying for college, so they don’t want their families or the general public to be able to recognize them.”
Verraday wondered how many of his students might be on this site to pay for their skyrocketing tuition. And how many of them might end up like Alana Carmichael, Rachel Friesen, or the girl they knew only as Destiny. He didn’t want to think about it.
A few moments later, a man in his late twenties emerged from the back office. He did not share the guileless features of the emo girl, nor her fashion sense. He was stocky and wore chinos with a coral-colored polo shirt. His eyes were close set, creating the impression of a suspicious, overstuffed ferret. The young woman half-heartedly went back to her work, her attention more focused on the drama unfolding before her.
“Are you Marty?” asked Maclean.
“Yeah. Can I help you?”
Maclean held up her badge again. “I hope so. Detective Maclean, Seattle PD. A girl listed on one of your websites has been murdered.”
“That’s very unfortunate,” said Marty. “We’ve never had that happen before.”
“I’m looking for the file of a girl called Destiny.”
“Do you have a warrant?”
“No, but I can get one by two o’clock this afternoon, by which time our leads will have gone colder, and I will be very, very pissed off. Pissed off enough to bring the vice squad in here to go over your operation and your computer files with a fine-toothed comb. How’s that sound?”
“Whoa, I think we’re getting off on the wrong foot here,” said Marty. “Let’s just take a step back, okay?”
“As long as you can help me out with this girl.”
“So this person’s really dead? You’re not doing some kind of sting operation or something, looking for something else under a false pretext? Because if you did, that would be entrapment, you know.”
“Trust me, my colleague and I have seen her body at the morgue. Not a pretty sight, thanks to some shit heel who probably found her on your web page.”
“Look, people post here voluntarily. We can’t control who they go out with. Do you have her last name?”
“No, that’s one of the things we’re trying to find out.”
“A lot of people who post ads here are named Destiny,” said the emo girl. “It’s a common alias. But I can bring up every file with that username in it. Then you’d just have to cross reference it with the pictures, and we can work backward from there.”
She started typing. Marty seemed to have decided that cooperation would be wiser than obstruction.
“Everybody who lists their services on our site has to give us a real first and last name and a matching credit card,” he said. “That way we know they’re real and not some jealous ex posting nudes of whoever dumped them, or some creep looking to hurt people or pull an Ashley Madison and extort from them, you know? It happens.”
“There are twenty-seven people in our system with that name. Shouldn’t take too long. Wanna come look?” the emo girl asked.
Marty lifted the gate in the counter and motioned them in.
Verraday and Maclean watched over the girl’s shoulder as she pulled up the files one by one. There was a mind-boggling array of Destinys, of every iteration, more than either of them could have imagined. There was an African American Destiny dressed as Cleopatra. A red-haired Destiny in a thong. There was even a baby-faced young man named Destiny, dressed in the uniform of the Seattle Seahawks’ cheerleading squad, the SeaGals. It consisted of a blue-and-white crop top, belt, and short-shorts, plus white go-go boots.
Verraday had the sudden sense that he would never, ever fully understand the human condition.
“Oh, I remember him,” said the girl, her lip curling into a grin.
“He’d be hard to forget,” offered Maclean.
“Yeah, even around here,” agreed the girl.
On the seventeenth Destiny, Verraday spotted the blonde hair and Freya tattoo of Seattle’s latest homicide victim.
“Stop. That’s her,” he said.
“What’s her name?” asked Maclean.
The young woman leaned into the screen to check the listing information. “Helen Dale,” she responded.
“I’ll need her home address,” said Maclean.
“I’ll print it off,” said the girl.
“Do the customers contact the escorts through the site?”
“No,” said Marty defensively. “We don’t get into any of that stuff at all. The escorts arrange their own means of contact. Usually text. There’s no messaging, either incoming or outgoing on our sites, so we have no way of knowing who any of their clients are.”
“But you could figure out the IP addresses of the people who had checked her out.”
“Good luck with that,” said Marty. “You wouldn’t believe how many visitors we get.”
The emo girl nodded her head in agreement and said, “That guy in the cheerleader outfit?”
She tapped a key and put her finger on a number on the screen. “Twenty-six-thousand three hundred and seventy-one hits since he joined us six months ago. Oh, wait, make that seventy-two. He just had another one.”
“If he got hired anywhere near as often as he got gawked at,” added Marty, “he wouldn’t have to prance around in a SeaGals outfit to make a living. He’d own the whole damned stadium.”
“Okay. One last thing,” said Maclean. “Are there any more pictures in Helen Dale’s file other than what’s on the public web page?”
“Could be,” replied the girl. “A lot of people like to rotate their photos from time to time, change it up so they appeal to new types of clients, plus give their repeat customers something new to look at.”
The girl dragged the cursor over a box and clicked. A number of photos of Helen appeared, designed to appeal to as broad a public as possible. In some, she was nude, in others, she was wearing just panties or lingerie. In still others, she wore fetish gear. And in one photo, she was wearing a flight attendant’s uniform and standing in the cockpit of an empty passenger plane. She held a glass of champagne in one hand.
“How old are these?” asked Maclean.
“They’ve been in her file awhile now. More than a month. Except that flight attendant one. It was uploaded two days ago.”
“Can we see it full screen?”
“Sure.”
A moment later, the large monitor was filled with the image of Helen Dale, a.k.a. Destiny. She stood in the cockpit, grinning seductively, one arm extended to take a selfie. The flight attendant’s uniform that she wore appeared to be vintage and from an airline that neither of them recognized. It was dark outside the plane, as though the photo had been taken at nighttime or in a hangar. In one window, Maclean could make out the reflection of a man’s face.
“Send me an electronic copy of that photo, would you?” said Maclean.
“Sure thing,” said the girl.
Maclean handed the girl her business card. “Thanks, you’ve both been a lot of help.”
As they headed down the stairs toward the street, Maclean turned to Verraday. “I’m sending a forensics team to Helen Dale’s apartment. I’d love to have you come along, but it would attract too much attention.”
“I understand,” said Verraday. “Let me know if you find anything unusual. Anything at all.”
“We need to find out where that flight attendant’s uniform comes from. Could give us a clue about who that man is inside the cockpit with her. He might know something.”
“I’ll check the UW staff directory,” said Verraday. “There might be somebody there who can tell us something about the uniform or the plane. The university has a big aerospace faculty because of the work they do with Boeing. Odds are good that one of the professors is an aviation history geek and might be able to recognize the plane and the uniform. I’ll ask around.”
“Sounds good. I’ll e-mail the photo to you. By the way, did you tell your sister about Robson yet?”
“No, I’m meeting her this evening. Figured it’s better to talk about it in person.”
“That makes sense. Hope it goes okay. Good luck.”