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 both hands over his mouth and looked away.
She spoke wistfully. “I call it Gypsy Joker, Long Blonde Hair, Twenty-Seven Years Old, Tortured to Death, Heat Gun.” She lifted her sunglasses, but only for a wink. “Catchy title, don’t you think?”
Schlo plucked out an earbud. Bumped his cup and sloshed coffee. Snatched a napkin from the dispenser and mopped the table. He ripped out the other earbud and flung them both at her. Pushing himself away from the table, he shoved, red faced, past the waitress. As his parting shot, he muttered, “You should maybe see a priest.”
Mitzi gathered the fallen earbuds, calling after him, “My work is its own church.”
The server watched him exit through the glass doors and stagger across the parking lot toward his Porsche. She said, “I love his films.” A waitress playing an actress playing a waitress.
Mitzi looked her up and down. She nodded after the Porsche. “You want to be in his next release?”
The girl asked, “You a producer?” She looked to be twenty-three, twenty-four, with just a trace of corn-fed twang to her words. She hadn’t been in the Southland long enough to fry her skin and hair. No wedding ring, either. Promising details.
Mitzi looked at her nametag. “Shania? You know what a Foley artist is?”
She shook her head, Nuh-uh. “But you know people, right?”
In response Mitzi lifted the packet from the table and fished out a thick bundle of bills. She thumbed off one, two, three hundred and held them up, waiting to see whether or not this new talent would take the bait.
Robb called him at home. To check in, he said. He asked if Foster would be at the group for their next meet-up.
Foster studied the bite mark on his hand. The small horseshoe of baby teeth, scabbed over in fresh blood. And he told Robb to look for him in the church basement.
Before he could hang up, Robb’s voice barked something, words pent up until this last chance. Foster brought the phone back to his ear and waited for a repeat.
Robb asked, “Why Denver?”
Foster fished his memory for how long he’d known Robb. When they’d met in the group, any details Robb had shared about Robb’s own dead child, an infant, a son, back when Foster had first joined the support group.
Again, Robb asked, “What’s so important in Denver?”
Foster bit back the truth. A monster was in Denver. A chat room avatar had let slip that Paolo Lassiter would be doing a piece of business there. Nobody was anyone on the dark web, but this chat room stranger had called Lassiter a big name in child sex trafficking, and said he’d be stopping over in Colorado for a day, maybe two.
Denver had been a long shot. But Foster had loaded his phone with screen grabs of Lassiter and made a list of the most likely hotels and set off on a fantasy of throttling the kingpin and beating out a confession about Lucinda.
If he told Robb that much, Foster would be needled to confess about his entire descent into chat rooms and galleries, and that would negate all his good intentions.
Instead, Foster said, “I was meeting a girl.” He paused as if he were embarrassed, but actually to cobble together more lies. “I met a girl online. We might, you know, get married.”
By now his luggage would be touching down in Denver. Going around the baggage claim carousel. Maybe even in transit back to him.
The line went quiet. Foster listened for sounds in the background, hints of Robb’s life since his son’s death. There was nothing. His wife had walked out. Robb might’ve been calling from a government bunker, the silence was so thick.
“Don’t lie to us,” said Robb, his voice burning with contempt. “You’re not trying to resolve anything.” Playing some ace, he added, “We know exactly who the girl in Denver is, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself.” And as if to drive home the shame, he lowered his voice and said, “The entire group knows!”
It was Foster’s turn to be stumped and confused, confused and frustrated, frustrated and to hang up the phone.
The past lived on in her hands, the way they’d shaken when Mitzi took her first DAT into a pitch. The memory lived as pain in her scalp, the old tug of her hair. She’d such long hair back then. High school–long hair, she’d pulled it tight, knotting it into a French braid she’d pinned down. Her French braid pinned to the back of her head, pinned as cruelly as any butterfly or scarab beetle pinned to the board in freshman-year Biology of Insects.