Killman Creek (Stillhouse Lake #2)(58)
Suffolk has gotten quiet. Staring down at the table. The demon has gone back to its lair, somewhere deep inside. He fidgets, looks uncomfortable, and finally, he mumbles one word. “Absalom.”
“Uh-huh,” Lustig says. “And?”
“Absalom sold me the video. I sold stuff to them, they sold stuff to me. You know. A market exchange.”
“How?”
Suffolk lifts one shoulder and lets it fall, like a sulky kid. “I paid in Bitcoin. That got me a link.”
“So you’re not part of Absalom. You’re just a customer.”
“And a supplier.” He gives Lustig a sudden, unsettling grin. “I get discounts.”
“What do you supply?”
“You know.” He shrugs again. “Retouched photos. Edited videos. Commission stuff.”
“We’ll have a long talk about that in a bit, but let’s keep moving. So who do you know in Absalom, then?” Another shrug. No answer. “How about the name Merritt Van Der Wal? You know him?”
“Nope.”
“Napier Jenkins?” I’ve never heard either of these names, but I can only assume that he’s making them up . . . or he already uncovered more Absalom members without us. That’s probable.
“No.”
“How about Lancel Graham?”
The hesitation gives Suffolk away. He hadn’t expected that name, and of course he knows it. We all know it. I flinch all over at the name, but I keep my focus on Suffolk. “Don’t know him, either.”
He should. That name, of all of them, absolutely ought to ring a very loud bell for him.
“Carl, I’m disappointed in you. I know you know Lancel Graham, because you didn’t buy that damn video with Bitcoin from Absalom. You got it straight from Lancel Graham, copied right off his hard drive. You know we can track that digital footprint, right? You’re not stupid. So now you’re going down for a federal slam dunk of criminal conspiracy, and possession and distribution of child porn, plus you’ll be enjoying the great state of Kansas’s tour of its legal system for conspiracy to murder.”
“I never murdered anybody!”
“Roll the other one,” Mike says, then looks up at the camera. The tech in the room with me presses buttons, and a new video begins. Same set, but subtly different simply because of the proportions of the room it’s crowded into. This one, I realize, was filmed in the cabin basement up above Stillhouse Lake. Lancel Graham’s place. It’s his re-creation of Melvin’s torture chamber . . . and there’s a girl shown in this one, too.
The girl with the butterfly tattoo, the first one Graham killed and dumped in the lake to implicate me in her murder. I catch my breath, because I remember her from around town in Norton. She sat across the restaurant from me and Lanny as we ate cake, and she’d been a normal, smiling, sweet young lady.
I’m seeing her last, awful minutes on earth in this video.
The tech shuts it down once it’s made an impression, and I realize I’m shaking. I turn away so I don’t have to look at the freeze-frame of her face.
Mike Lustig is saying, in the same calm voice, “That video is Lancel Graham murdering his first victim, and the time stamp tells me you had it on the same thumb drive before the second young woman was killed. So yeah. Conspiracy to murder, Carl. I don’t think you’re going to see a computer screen again before we’re all jacked into the net by our brains. Unless you want to talk to me.”
Suffolk is shaking, I can see it. He’s a sadist and a coward, and he knows damn well that all of those charges could be leveled at him, and possibly more.
He’s also dangerous. The way he went after me, the unhesitating way he choked me, tells me it isn’t the first time he’s tried to kill someone. It might actually be the first time he’s failed.
“I don’t know anything about Absalom,” Suffolk finally says, and Lustig sighs and starts to kick his chair back. “Except a couple of names, that’s all! Just some names. Screen names, not even real ones. You know. Graham made some side deals with me, that’s all. He and I had . . . common interests. We swapped videos. I didn’t know he was the one killing those girls! I thought he got ’em from somebody else.”
“Sure you didn’t. Let’s start with screen names,” Lustig says, shoving a pad of paper and a felt-tip marker across to him. “And throw in anything else you can come up with that might save your ass from twenty-five to life in a federal penitentiary, too. Because I can predict with a fine degree of certainty how pleasant that vacation stay’s going to be for you. Bet you can, too.”
It takes half an hour for Lustig to get a full picture of the things Suffolk collected, beyond the photos and videos he supplied to Absalom’s marketplace. He enjoyed a very special kind of horror: graphic videos of torture and murder. Snuff films. The official FBI position has always been that they don’t exist, but it comes as no surprise to me that they do, and that there’s a marketplace for them on the dark web.
It’s a nasty surprise, though, that Absalom deals in those, as well as child pornography. Their sideline in blackmail and Internet tormenting is just that: a hobby, though it helps them attract and identify potential customers. Psychopaths recognizing psychopaths and then catering to their particular pleasures. Layers and levels to all this evil, and at its core, a heartless, soulless greed.