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“Parlez-vous anglais?”
“Yes.” But the weary female voice didn’t sound willing to.
Beth stared through the lounge pane at the automated window-cleaner on the office block opposite and prepared for her belated enquiry to be rebuffed. She’d put the call through to the admin department of SAMU – Service d’Aide Médicale Urgente – that was the central control function for emergency services.
“I was in a traffic accident in Normandy, on the Route du Fresnay, a few months ago and have only recently been discharged from hospital here in the UK. Thing is, if I could, I’d like to personally thank one of the paramedics who attended me there...’
The woman the other end was silent.
“I obviously don’t know her name. Would it be possible to find out if I give you the details of the incident?”
Beth could hear the woman’s sigh boom against the mouthpiece.
“Un moment.”
The office atmosphere cut out and a low hiss filled her ear. Beth had just resigned herself to the fact that she’d simply put the phone down on her when it connected to a ring tone.
“Administration?” an effete male voice stated.
“Parlez-vous anglais?”
“Un moment. Nathalie!”
“Can I help you?” a brighter female voice said.
She hoped Nathalie would be less implacable and explained her predicament. Nathalie took the incident details from her and made no promises, but said she’d do her best. Beth was told to call back at the end of the day.
“Is there some way of editing the clips together?” Beth had been leaning outside the bathroom waiting for Jody to emerge.
He only had a faded purple towel around his waist and self-consciously knotted it tighter to his paunch. “What for?”
“To put them all in sequence.”
Jody pouted his lips and theatrically examined the underside of his wet ginger eyebrows. It was his way of thinking or, at least, giving the impression he was. She’d never been able to guess which.
“Watching them separately makes me feel like I’m missing something...’
“Missing what?”
“I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think it would help if I could watch them sequentially.”
“I doubt it, and I’m not sure how you would lift a clip from a YouTube page...”
Or was he not prepared to think of a way?
The constriction of the towel made him walk in short steps to his room. He looked like a geisha girl. “Let me have a think,” he said over his shoulder as he quickly closed the door after him.
*
Kelcie Brooks was the one person you could rely on to post the most mortifying images of her friends on Facebook. In fact, her online community joked that it was so instantaneous, it was almost as if she’d uploaded them before the events had happened.
She liked that she’d been given that label of lovable infamy. Kelcie had always lacked in social skills, found it difficult to interact even with her close inner circle of school friends. But Facebook allowed her to communicate with masses of people and to present an outwardly likable persona, bolstered by her obsessive habit of bombarding them with virtual ice creams and gifts.
But it was her eye for a compromising digital still, however, and her alacrity to share it with her 1577 friends, that had brought her the renown she craved, and at parties people tended to try and get on her good side before they got drunk.
Kelcie knew she would always have a humdrum existence. But she comforted herself with the fact that all the party animals destined for greatness would live to regret their indiscretions in the future. Just as they’d achieved some semblance of professional respectability, Kelcie would be standing by to flourish the evidence.
Lying face down with their knickers bunched at their knees, exposing their breasts with their eyes rolled into their heads, collapsed on the tiles with dried vomit about their lips. It was harmless fun for them now, but she knew the images would be bargaining chips in the future. Payback would come sooner or later for Kelcie as well as the people who didn’t take her seriously.
Kelcie wasn’t a bad person, and she didn’t mind being branded at teaching college as the requisite quiet one who might be a lesbian but nobody cared to find out. For Kelcie, dating was exclusively what she did online. She found older, married guys who used fake names and posed as singletons, and, using the promise of her sexy avatar, gradually extracted info from them so she could track them to their Facebook page and dig out photos of them with their wife and family.
It was then child’s play to locate their wife’s profile. How would they like to hear about what hubby was up to? She’d built up quite a database. That was the fun part, being in possession of so much damaging information.
Kelcie loved her secret agenda, was fond of the idea that behind her quiet demeanour, there was a plan she’d methodically instigated long before anyone suspected it. She’d archived everything. With one click she could open a folder with the name of one of her close friends and examine a selection of images they’d definitely want buried in the future.
But it wasn’t only stills. She had hundreds of phone clips that awaited their YouTube debut. When her friends awoke the morning after and tried to remember what had happened, she knew the last person they would recall would be strait-laced and dumpy Kelcie lingering quietly out of sight.
She realised that without the slip-ups of other people’s lives, her own presence was barely discernible, but she was very comfortable sitting in the margins. It was a safe place. She knew secreting herself there made it unlikely that anything exciting would ever happen to her, but that security was reward enough.
Security was very much a part of her philosophy. Earlier that evening, she’d been doing something else that nobody would ever have suspected her of: target practice at the Flathead indoor firing range. As a single girl, it was a safeguard she took seriously. She’d taken her beloved M1911 single action pistol, and as she did every week, she’d thought about all the human outlines in her sights as those she could easily shoot down in the future. She was so in love with the notion of using the pressure of her finger on an iPad screen rather than a trigger to wreak carnage.
Tonight, Kelcie was doing what she did most evenings, collating her friends’ media CVs curled up on the couch with her iPad on her legs and the TV soaps turned down. She had two windows open at once – Facebook and her archive. It was quite a therapeutic process. Kelcie smiled when she happened to be exchanging “likes” and comments with one of the people she was cataloguing.
In her taskbar she noticed she’d received some mail and maximised her Outlook Express. There was some junk and a message from a “nightvisitor” via her “smilingassassin” YouTube channel. She wasn’t familiar with the name.
Cool footage, LOL. I have a recording from same night. Interested in it for your channel?
The clip referred to was the one she’d captured on the exchange trip – the car crash girl who had started beating up on the crowd. It had earned Kelcie her highest hit rate: 7,133,462 and counting. She’d made quite a few bucks from advertising on that page. It had certainly reinforced her belief she could benefit financially from what she shot with her phone. When she’d agreed to chaperone the exchange students for the French trip, she’d thought there’d be rich pickings in terms of drunken indiscretions. Especially from her fellow escort, Ramiro Casales, who had mistakenly thought he was going to be knee-deep in horny sophomores before he started his medical training. But she hadn’t expected hitting pay dirt at the crash site they’d encountered on the drive back from Le Mans.
Maybe she could make even more cash by posting a new clip. Must have been one of the students. She thought she’d seen all the recordings from that night uploaded. Maybe a sixth person had used their camera. Perhaps whoever it was had captured something interesting enough to make it differ from the others.
She sent a response to nightvisitor:
R U on FB?
Kelcie couldn’t have known her reply appeared on an iPad less than thirty feet from her. It was inside the charcoal Toyota Corolla parked up behind the dumpster at the rear of her property.
*
Mimic looked up from the screen to Kelcie’s illuminated lounge window, wiped at the sediment at the corners of his mouth and pocketed the handkerchief. He’d been watching her all day and was now using her WiFi. Hacking her passwords had been easy, but it wasn’t just the removal of the clips that was paramount. He had to ensure that backup material was never uploaded again.
He’d confirmed she was more than happy to make money out of someone else’s misfortune. Not on the scale he did, but she certainly had her head screwed on. Trip Stillman was just a stupid kid that had uploaded something he shouldn’t. Kelcie Brooks had smarts.
With all of his targets now within a small area, his options were limited in terms of plausibly replicating historic homicides. It was his last contract, and the notion of dispensing with procedure was very tempting, particularly given his desire to take in the vista of the Flathead Valley from Lone Pine State Park.
Kelcie’s rented Four Mile Drive cabin was remote and surrounded by scrubland. He could easily get out of the car now and put a bullet through her skull. Nobody would hear. But Mimic had a dependable system and was too long in the tooth to start changing his ways, particularly when he was in no hurry and had accessible options at his fingers.
He grazed his nail over the iPad screen and found the news story that had piqued his interest. It had happened just over a year ago and twenty-two miles away from Kalispell.
ELDERLY WOMAN MUTILATED IN BIGFORK
Police have revealed that the body of eighty-four-year-old widow Virginia Greenspan, discovered at her Bigfork home in the early hours of last Sunday morning, had been extensively mutilated. The weapon used was a broken ketchup bottle found at the scene. The perpetrator forced entry and, after attacking Mrs Greenspan, had attempted to set a fire in the apartment.
The Flathead County Sheriff’s Department would like to interview a teenager seen in the immediate area wearing a Billings Bulls sweatshirt from their ongoing investigation.
Mimic did some further research and discovered they hadn’t.
