I DON’T REMEMBER anyone openly sleeping with Alejandro back when I was in the Circle. That’s not to say it didn’t happen; most of my time there I was either too young or too angry to notice social signals with any subtlety. He was a handsome, charismatic guy. No doubt men and women all but threw themselves at him all the time. I’m curious to see what it was about Klein that made him pick her out from the faithful to travel all this way with him.
Her background file arrives as I’m putting my belt back on, trying to shrug off the sense of physical disorientation following the immersion. I ask Tia to read me the pertinent details as I splash my face with cold water. Her full name is Selina Jane Klein, a thirty-year-old divorcée originally from upstate New York. According to the file she used to be chipped and had a high-profile job in one of the thousands of data-management firms on the East Coast of America. I scan her resume and former job profile. Nothing there suggests she has any specialties that would make it easy for her to doctor the security footage, but I’m going to keep an open mind. She might have been working with someone else or she might have learned it outside of work. Either way, being unchipped, she would have to have some sort of portable unit to even access the local node, and nothing in Alex’s report lists anything like that found in her room. For the first time I wonder whether she and Theo actually worked together and if he took such a unit with him.
I review the medical file citing removal of her chip for “reasons of psychological well-being” a month after her divorce was finalized. Two months after that, her official residence became that of the Circle. That was three years ago.
I shrug on my jacket and drop my room key into the pocket. Before I saw the crime scene in detail, I was all but convinced Theo was the one who did it. Now she is equally in the frame, at least until the blood analysis comes in.
“What’s the ETA on those blood test results?”
“The sample is currently en route to the pathologist’s lab, where it should be tested immediately,” Tia replies. “I estimate two to three hours.”
Of course, out in the sticks like I am here, there are no administrators with twenty-four-hour schedules who’d be able to physically find and package up the sample the moment a request comes in. The request must have been picked up this morning, hence the delay. Toxicology tests used to take weeks, apparently. At least I don’t have to wait that long. I leave my room.
Klein has been put in a room on the second floor at the other end of the hotel to the Diamond Suite, almost directly below my room. There’s a local copper on the door, making sure she doesn’t leave and that no one interferes with her while the investigation is under way. The copper, a freckled redhead who looks like he’s barely old enough to wear a uniform, reports that no one has been in or out and that he personally has checked all daytime room service before it goes in and when it comes out.
“Hardly touches a thing,” he says. “I wondered whether I should tell the doctor that came to see her on the morning it all kicked off, but then I heard you were here so I thought I’d tell you, sir.” I have the feeling he’s enjoying being on the periphery of such a high-profile case.
I don’t want to do anything to tarnish that. “Thanks for letting me know, Constable.”
He opens the door for me after a brisk knock and I go inside. The curtains are drawn against the milky November sunlight and the air is stale. In the gloom I can make out nothing more than a shape on the bed. A tray of untouched morning pastries and fruit is on the floor beside it, illuminated by a rogue shaft of light poking through a gap at the top of the curtains.
“Ms. Klein?” I say, closing the door behind me. “Are you awake?”
“Yeah.” Her voice is flat.
“My name is SDCI Carl Moreno. I’m running the investigation. Do you mind if I open the curtains?”
“I guess not.”
I draw them back and hear her moving in the bed behind me. When I turn, I see that she has shifted out of the brightest patch, keeping her face in as much shade as possible. I pull back the other curtain and then there’s no shadow left for her to hide in.
The bedside table is covered by a small mountain of used tissues and the bin nearby has a scattering of more, balled up, tossed and fallen short of their target. A glass of water is perched on the bedside table, holding some of the tissues back from falling off the edge, and has specks of dust and a hair floating on the surface.
She pulls herself up into a sitting position and I see she’s wearing a hotel dressing gown over a silky nightdress. Only the counterpane covers her, the room too hot and stuffy to merit the use of all the sheets and blankets on the bed. I’m struck by how incredibly pale she looks, her cheeks drawn, brown eyes bloodshot and puffy. Her hair is a tangled mess of brown curls that tumble chaotically to her shoulders. She pushes some of them back away from her face as she squints at me and I note how well manicured her nails are. Not something I remember any of the women in the Circle having when I was there.
“Do you mind if I stay in bed?”
I shake my head.
She looks at the tissues and frowns. “Sorry about the . . . mess.” Her voice is hoarse.
“Do you want some water?” I ask, and she nods.
I take the glass with me, letting some of the tissues tumble silently to the floor, rinse it out in the bathroom sink and refill it. There’s a packet of complimentary toiletries, unopened, next to the tap. All of her belongings are still in the Diamond Suite and will be until I sign off their removal.
The room is smaller than mine, the bed just a standard one without posts. It’s still opulent and just as pristine in the areas untouched by her grief. I hand her the glass and she manages a weak smile of thanks. She drains it and I refill it without asking.
“I guess you want to talk to me about . . . him,” she says as I pull a chair over from its place beneath the desk and sit next to her by the bed.
“In accordance with Noropean law, you need to understand that anything you say to me is being recorded and can and will be used as evidence in this investigation, should it become necessary.”
“Okay. What do you wanna know?”
“Let’s talk about you first.”
“I was sleeping with him. Let’s just get that out in the open, straight off the bat. I know you Brits get all antsy about that kind of stuff.”
I don’t bother to tell her I’m not the typical British citizen, whatever that’s supposed to be. “Is that why you came with him to Norope?”
She nods. “Yeah. Well, partly. I really wanted to come with him. I’ve never been outside of the States. He said I could travel on his visa as an assistant.” She looks past my shoulder, out of the window. “I can’t believe this is happening. I keep expecting him to come through the door, to tell me it’s all some fucked-up mersive or something. Not that it would even be possible.”
“You had your chip removed,” I say. “Was that to join the Circle?”
“I was going to do it anyway.” She brushes back a few curls that have fallen forward again. Her fingers are trembling. “He just gave me another reason to do it.”
“He recruited you personally, then.”
She nods, her eyes sparkling with tears. “In New York. He was on a tour, doing talks, you know. I went to one. It was . . . a tough time for me and he was the only person on the goddamn planet making any sense.”
I nodded, wanting to give her the impression I understood. And I did. Alejandro had a knack for finding the most vulnerable at the lowest point in their lives and making them think he had all the answers.
“My divorce was being finalized at the time. I had some difficult choices to make. I didn’t want to be chipped anymore, but if I trashed it I’d be trashing my career at the same time. He showed me that choosing to live unchipped wasn’t about what I would lose, but about what I would gain.”
“What career was that?”
“I was an information architect and UX specialist. I created intuitive hierarchies and data-filing systems and designed user interfaces for corps managing massive data sets. It was a good job. Well paid. I was climbing the ladder with the rest of them.”
No wonder Alejandro plucked her from the crowd. She’s attractive, even now; back then she probably stood out more. Well educated, successful, technical background. Those were his favorites. People who had seized all they could from modern life and were still left empty. He liked them even better if they had been broken by it too, like my father had been.
“The US gov-corp file says you were married. Did your husband object to your joining the Circle?” I know that’s unlikely, timing wise; I just want to hear what she has to say.
“Oh, all that happened before I even met Alejandro. My ex-husband was the reason why I didn’t want to be chipped anymore.”
“I thought the US antistalking laws were pretty robust, especially in divorce cases.”
She fishes out the end of the dressing gown’s belt from under the cover and twists it around her fingers. “No. It wasn’t that.” After a long pause she shrugs to herself. “You’ll dig it all up anyway. He fell in love with his APA and I found out.” She mistakes my silence for disbelief. “I know, right? I mean, what kind of fucking world is this where a guy can choose a woman who doesn’t even exist over someone real who loves him?”
Now I see where the modern world broke her just enough for Alejandro. “Was it a difficult divorce?”
“Aren’t they all? At first he denied it, but I knew. I overheard him talking to her when he thought I was in a mersive upstairs. He’d started internally projecting her avatar, you know, to make it seem she was like a person, there all the time. I mean, JeeMuh, it was like having some goddamn ghost in the house. I freaked out when I realized, and he promised he’d only do it when he was alone. But it was already too far down the road by then. I heard him talking to her like she was real. I mean, we all do that, right? But talking like she was a real person he loved. She was just a projection from his own chip. He was such a fucking narcissist.”
“And when you challenged him . . .”
“Oh, he carried on denying it, but I knew. A friend of mine is a lawyer specializing in virtual-adultery cases so I went to her. She knew a sympathetic case officer and I presented my suspicions and the evidence I had. It was enough to file a demand to have a third party examine the data held in his cloud and rule whether there was an unusual amount of activity . . . types of activity . . . Stuff. You know.”
“And they reported back to the case officer that he was spending too much time with his APA?” I’d heard about cases like this springing up more and more. It wasn’t a criminal act, but even if it was, I wouldn’t want anything to do with it.
Her forehead crumples as she frowns at the toweling twisted around her fingers. “More than that. He was spending time with her at the same time as me. At the same time as us making love. He was having sex with me while he was superimposing me with her avatar. JeeMuh.” She rubs her free hand over her face, shaking more now. “It was a goddamn nightmare. And the lawyer he got was so good. Argued it was all totally understandable because of some Jungian anima crap that I still don’t understand. I moved to New York, my life totally falling apart, and I met Alejandro. And we talked. I mean, really talked. He listened to me. And when I’m with him, he’s really with me, you know? He’s totally present every—” She stops and her face crumples. “Oh God. He’s gone. I can’t believe he’s gone.”
She breaks down in front of me. I watch her fumble under her pillow for a tissue and blow her nose. I’ve seen some pretty damn convincing acts in my time, but my gut tells me she’s genuinely upset. I can’t eliminate her based on that though, and there’s still a lot more I need to know.
“Sorry,” she mutters, wiping her top lip. “I just . . . I just can’t stop crying. What will we do now? How can we go on without him?”
“The Circle?”
“Yes. There’s so much . . . so much to be done and I don’t know how we’ll . . .” Her voice cracks and I fight the tug of memories trying to pull me back to that place where people thought he was the center of the universe. I feel a flash of hatred toward her for being so broken by the loss of him, for needing him so much when he was just a man who scooped up the human detritus from the edges of society and fooled them into thinking they were part of something special. I pause as the feeling subsides, giving her a chance to compose herself too.
“I need to ask you some more questions,” I say. “Why don’t you try to eat something? You’ll feel better for it.”
She leans over the side of the bed and looks down at the tray as if lumps of clay are sitting on it. She finally reaches down and plucks a small bunch of grapes off the plate. “What do you wanna know?”
“Why were the three of you here in England?”
“Alejandro used to travel quite a lot. There were donors all over the world, people who believed in his message but weren’t ready to come to the States. There was someone in London he had to see, someone very rich, I think. That’s the impression I had, anyway. He didn’t talk about the details.”
“But why stay in a hotel hours away from London?”
“He said it was a good place for people who aren’t chipped. And it’s private too. It would have been a circus if we stayed in London this close to the capsule being opened and all. He said the press here wouldn’t see him as himself, but as one of Cillian Mackenzie’s rejects, so he wanted to keep a low profile. This place has lots of famous people staying here. The staff are used to getting rid of the press.”
I think of the doorman. It seems plausible enough, but there are many high-security hotels in London. Perhaps there was another reason he picked this one, one he chose not to share with her.
“Did he meet with this person in London?”
She nods. “He went last week.”
“By himself?”
“Yeah. He went up on Wednesday morning and came back”—she looks up at the ceiling—“on Sunday afternoon.”
“Didn’t you want to go with him?”
She nods again, twisting the cord. “I had the feeling he didn’t want me there though. He organized a tour for Theo and me, up to Bath and Stonehenge—you know, tourist stuff. Like he wanted us to not feel left out when he was obviously leaving us out of his London stuff.”
I stay quiet, feeling there is more she could say about this. Sure enough, the pressure of silence makes her draw in a breath.
“I wondered if he was going to see a lover. He said he couldn’t tell me about it because the person he was seeing wanted it all to be secret. He . . . I dunno. It seemed to me like it was a big deal.”
“Did he seem nervous about the meeting?”
She shrugs. “I guess. Tense, maybe.”
“And when he got back from London, how was he? Did he mention if the trip went well?”
She looks back down at the dressing-gown cord and then disentangles her fingers to pluck a grape from its stalk. “I don’t think so. He didn’t seem himself. He went for a really long walk the day he got back. Said he had a headache and wanted to get some fresh air, and when I asked if I could go with him he said he wanted to be alone. That wasn’t like him. I wondered if he was getting sick or something. He didn’t want to be with me much at all. Nor Theo. And Theo being Theo, he thought I’d said something to upset Alejandro.”
I see the first signs of animosity when she speaks about the other person from the Circle. I want to keep her focused on Alejandro for now. “And what about the rest of that Sunday? How did Alejandro behave?”
She frowns at me. “I haven’t heard anyone outside of the Circle call him that. It’s kinda weird.”
I silently admonish myself. “It’s what you call him,” I say, covering myself. “How did he seem that last afternoon and evening?”
She rolls the grape between her fingers, as if the idea of eating it hasn’t even occurred to her. “Distant. Distracted, I guess. It wasn’t a good day. I guess . . . I guess it stirred up some stuff for me, being with someone who didn’t feel fully present.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Like he was off in deep thought, meditative almost, but at random points in the day. I thought he was bored of me, if you really want to know the truth. I thought he met a lover in London and when he came back to me, I didn’t measure up anymore.” She drops the grape onto the bedcover. “I tried to talk to him about it but he denied it. But I knew. I know what it feels like to be replaced.”
She starts to cry again, scattering the grapes as she searches for a clean tissue. I recall a box in the bathroom and get it for her, which she accepts gratefully.
“You know, I’ve started to wonder if he wanted to bring me at all,” she says after blowing her nose again. “I think back and I can’t remember him being all that keen, you know? Theo definitely thought I shouldn’t have been here. Have you seen Theo? How is he holding up? God, I haven’t even thought about him. He must be—”
“He’s missing,” I say, and she looks genuinely shocked.
“For how long?”
“Since the night of the murder. Do you have any idea where he might have gone?” She shakes her head. “Any distant relatives, any friends he made while you were touring?”
“No, none,” she says, and then pales further, until she looks like she could faint. “You don’t think Theo . . .”
“He is a suspect.”
“No, that’s crazy. He loves Alejandro just as much as I do. Did. Shit.”
“In the same way?”
“He wasn’t gay, if that’s what you mean. At least, I don’t think he was.”
“You seem uncertain.”
She wipes her nose, the skin around her nostrils reddened. “Theo is . . . What’s the best way to put this? Pretty repressed. He might be gay, but if he is, he’s the last person on Earth who’d admit it. He’s got issues, you know?”
“No. Tell me about him.”
“He joined the Circle years before I did. He always traveled with Alejandro. He was there when I met him in New York, but I didn’t notice him. I mean, no one else is in the room when Alejandro turns on the charm, you know?”
Oh, I did. But I didn’t show her that I knew. “Go on.”
“Theo saw himself as Alejandro’s personal assistant, I suppose, when he traveled. Not so much back home. He was so pissed when I told him I was coming with them to England.”
“You two didn’t get along?”
“Oh, most of the time everything was fine. I guess he didn’t like the thought of having to share him, especially not with the whore of Babylon.”
“He called you that?”
She smirks. “Not explicitly. Theo came from a hard-core religious sect in the Deep South. For him, the Circle was, like, the most progressive place ever. He never missed the personal tech because he didn’t grow up with it. Apparently Alejandro spent a long time helping him transition out of their brainwashing, but some of those ideas never go away. I don’t think he liked the fact we slept together.” She shakes her head. “He was pretty childish a few times here, before Alejandro went to London. Sulking at the sight of us together, like a kid. Jealous, I guess.” She looks back up at me. “Oh, but he isn’t a horrible person—don’t get me wrong. We had a nice time touring, when it was just the two of us. I guess he could relax when Alejandro wasn’t there. I really don’t think he did . . . that. I mean, no one who actually knew Alejandro could do that to him, surely?”
“Theo checked out just after five a.m. on the morning the murder was discovered,” I say, and she visibly shudders. “Did he mention leaving early? Was he scheduled to go on any trips without you?”
“No. We were only supposed to be here another day or two. Alejandro said he hadn’t made up his mind, but it wasn’t going to be much longer. Theo wouldn’t have risked going away by himself that close to our departure. He wouldn’t have wanted to inconvenience Alejandro.”
“I’d like you to talk me through the last night you had with Alejandro,” I say, keeping my voice soft. She’s more open than most—being American certainly helps—but she could close up any moment if she feels threatened.
Her eyes well up again and she looks up at the ceiling. “He was pretty low at dinner. Distant, like I said. Theo was struggling with it too and being an asshole to me. I guess he thought we’d had a fight or something and obviously it would have been my fault. Alejandro said good night to Theo after dinner and said we should have an early night. Theo stomped off back to his room, probably because he thought Alejandro meant more than he did. We went back to our room about nine p.m. No, maybe it was closer to ten. I don’t know exactly.”
“And how was Alejandro when you were alone?”
She wipes her nose and sniffs. “He said sorry. I asked him what for and he said he hadn’t been himself and it wasn’t fair to me and that he was sorry for that. I was relieved. I asked him if he wanted us to be over and he . . .” She stops, frowning into the space behind my shoulder. “He seemed sad. He said it wasn’t the time to talk about it and that I looked tired. I was. I took a bath. I don’t know what he did while I was in there. I got dressed for bed and went into the main room to see if . . . if I could take him to bed. He kissed me, but not like he wanted more. He had a drink, whisky I think, but he’d made me a chamomile tea. He said I should go to bed and took the drink through for me. I . . . I got into bed and he sat on it next to me, stroking my hand. He told me to drink up and that he’d tuck me in. Like I was a kid, almost. I got sleepy. I guess the bath and him being there kind of relaxed me. I drank the tea, he kissed me good night and tucked the sheets around me. And the next thing I knew, there was this man yelling in the room next door. I felt groggy, like I was still jet-lagged. I thought I dreamed it or something. I think I went back to sleep—that sounds crazy but I did—then I heard the door again and I got out of bed, and the hotel manager was telling someone to get out of the way, from the door into the suite. I got out of bed and went to the door and I saw his . . . I saw his foot.”
She breaks down again, this time sobbing uncontrollably, sometimes almost screaming into the tattered tissue in her hands. For a moment I wonder whether to move over to the bed and hold her, but decide not to. She’s too vulnerable and I’m not the right person for her to cling to. Instead I go to the door and the constable stands rigid to attention when I open it.
“Ms. Klein needs psych support right away. She’s been by herself too much already.”
“Sorry, sir. I was told that no one—”
“Not your fault, Constable, but see to it, would you?”
“Right away, sir!”
I leave him outside and return to stand by my chair. She’s on her side now, fetally curled around a pillow, her distress muffled. The dressing gown has slid from one shoulder, revealing a dark bruise the size of a thumbprint on the front of it, a couple of inches above her armpit. I lean over and look at the back and see four smaller bruises, just as black.
“Ms. Klein,” I say gently, but she doesn’t hear me. Now isn’t the time to ask about them. I stand there, a reluctant witness to her world imploding, until a psych-support officer arrives with a small leather case and a professional smile. I leave him to do his work after saying a superfluous good-bye and thank-you to the second victim of the crime.