First Born(39)
‘If it’s anonymous, how do you know it’s Bagby?’
‘We have ways and means. His username contained three numbers. I traced other usernames on other forums, specifically chat forums around men and fasting and health. Eventually found a defunct YouTube channel started by Bagby two years ago. It’s called Seeking Alpha and it’s all about tips for lame-ass guys to talk to women. Ways to trick them into bed if you catch my meaning, all sorts of horseshit from the best shoe-risers to make them look taller, to vocal exercises to deepen their voices. Anyway, the contact email from that YouTube channel was a Gmail account and the email address contained the same three numbers. Then I cross-referenced the sentence structure Bagby uses when he writes long-form, on a Reddit or his own blog or in the descriptions of his videos. There’s one word he routinely misspells. It’s a dead giveaway. A tic, of sorts. Bagby was a toxic incel, all right. Not sure if he is any more, I think he’s moved on, but he did talk online about how women like your sister don’t deserve to live.’
‘Does he have an alibi for that afternoon?’
‘Not that I can tell.’
‘How long before Martinez makes an arrest, do you think?’
‘Won’t be long, Molly. They’ll be accruing evidence first, try to get a confession out of whoever did it. A solid case for the DA to work with. Don’t think it’ll be more than a few days. Last thing we need is this bastard walking around the streets of New York a day longer than necessary.’
Chapter 20
I walk back to my hotel, leaning into the wind. Outside the New York Public Library, where brass plaques are sunk into the paving stones, a bearded man dragging a shopping cart full of plastic bags chants, ‘The end is nigh, the skies will be falling upon us all.’
There are people walking out of 7-Elevens holding multipacks of water. Not just the odd customer. Every customer.
I head to Times Square instead of going straight to my room, and there are warnings displayed on the big TV screens, and on the moving messages that wrap around buildings. Newsreaders analysing Hurricane Teresa. The mayor of New York talking into a nest of microphones, saying something about Long Island and Staten Island. Warning of electrical issues downtown. Saying the subway system may have to be shut down from tomorrow night. Hopefully I’ll have already left JFK clutching KT’s ashes, flying away from the hurricane. I will not board the plane if the storm has already made landfall, if it intensifies. I will not face that kind of turbulence; I have a knot in my stomach just thinking about it.
Mum calls and we talk about what to do tonight, our last night here. She says, ‘Your father wants us to have a special dinner, something to say goodbye to Katie, one of her favourite places.’
‘I’m not sure we can afford that, Mum.’
‘That’s what I told him,’ she says. ‘Your father says we should mark the night, with tomorrow being tomorrow and all.’
She can’t say the word cremation, just like she can’t say the word bankruptcy. Mum can’t face up to the fact that KT will be cremated in Brooklyn instead of buried in our village. The idea is too violent and too foreign for her to vocalise.
‘KT loved diners, actually,’ I say. ‘We could go to our diner again?’
‘That’s what I told your father,’ says Mum.
I hear Dad take the phone from her. ‘Hi, Moll. Your sister thought our diner was a generic Midtown tourist trap – her words. What about Chinatown?’
‘Sure, Dad. Sounds like her kind of thing.’
I go and get my coat and five water purification tablets from my hostel room. If the storm were to hit freakishly early, the number one priority will be drinkable water. Then I walk to the diner and it is steamy inside. I don’t get my favourite table but I get the one next to it. Good view of the room. I try to order a bagel with cream cheese and lox, which is what they call smoked salmon here, but they’ve run out of bagels.
‘What’s a fountain soda?’ I ask.
The waiter points to a drinks machine.
‘I’ll just have chocolate milk, please.’
Twenty-eight hours until I board the red-eye back to London. Twenty-eight hours to hand over something substantial to Martinez. Something concrete. A lead that he may not yet have found, something to push the case forward so it doesn’t get forgotten about as soon as I leave American soil.
I research Shawn Bagby some more. If he hates women so much, then that could be motive in itself. Couldn’t it? Couple that hatred with seeing my sister every day, maybe her rejecting his advances. That could drive some men to extreme violence.
Bagby has over one hundred and forty thousand subscribers. His videos are generally about exercise and diet, but also cover general mindset subjects with video titles like I woke up at 4am for 4 weeks and this is what happened and How to talk slow so you never get ignored and 5 tips to look taller and Beard shape tricks to bring out your inner alpha and How to turn a no into a yes every single time.
The comments are toxic but I watch enough YouTube tutorials and vlogs to know that comments are usually toxic. Even on innocent-looking videos, the comments, for whatever reason, are horrific. His subscribers seem to be, almost exclusively, angry young men. Someone calls him a ‘retired volcel’ so I research what that means. A volcel is voluntarily celibate as opposed to an incel who would be involuntarily celibate. A sub-comment argues with this, saying Bagby is much worse, he’s a fakecel now, someone who, although previously an incel or volcel, has worked so hard on his appearance, physique, manners etc that he is now more of a Chad than an incel. A Chad. I recall that word from Bagby’s T-shirt the day we visited KT’s apartment. Something like ‘Destroy Chad’ or ‘Death to Chad’. I’d thought that was weird, having connected the word Chad to the country, not the male forename. I dig deeper. A Chad is a male version of a Stacey, an attractive woman. Apparently, a Chad is someone who is gifted – unfairly, in the eyes of incels – with all the classic attractive attributes of masculinity: a square jaw, confidence, strong posture, height, good hair, broad shoulders.