Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

“Views don’t matter a lot to Thomas,” I said. “You’d probably be best saving the better one for someone else.”

Each of the rooms was roughly twelve by twelve feet. There was a bed, a couple of chairs, and a desk. There were two bathrooms on each floor.

“You’ll want to bring him over,” she said, “to check things out.”

“Yeah,” I nodded, feeling anxious.

Another woman approached. She was wearing a cardigan that looked a couple of sizes too big, a peasant skirt, and a pair of those neon purple plastic sandals, Crocs. Her hair was long and frizzy, and she looked pretty riled.

She stood in front of the two of us and said to me, “Are you Ray Kilbride?”

“Yes,” I said, hesitantly.

She extended a hand. “I’m Darla Kurtz.”

Slowly, I accepted her hand and gave it a shake, all the while looking at my tour guide. She smiled sheepishly at me.

The new Darla Kurtz said to me, “I’m sorry. I got held up at a city hall meeting.” Then, to my guide, she said, “Barbara, you’ve been very naughty, again.”

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Kurtz.”

“I’ll talk to you later.”

“Okay.” Barbara turned to me and said, “I hope Thomas gets to come and stay here. He sounds really interesting.”

I got out of there about an hour later. The real Darla Kurtz was every bit as welcoming as the phony one, but she had more specific questions. She also wanted me to bring Thomas in for a visit.

I was getting into the car when my cell rang.

“Get this,” Julie said.

“What?”

“So I’ve been getting bounced all over the place at Whirl360. The place is in absolute chaos.”

I slammed the door and reached for the seat belt with my free hand. “So they have been hacked?”

“No, shit, not that. One of their top people got killed.”

“What? When?”

“Yesterday. Him and his wife.”

“Who are we talking about?”

“Hang on, I made some notes. Okay, the guy’s name was Kyle Billings, and his wife’s name was Rochelle. They live in Oak Park, in Chicago. That’s where the company’s head office is. The wife’s sister was trying to get in touch with her last night, couldn’t get her or her husband on the phone, no answer at the house but both cars were there. So they called the police, and they were both in the basement. Dead.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Julie said. “Guess what Billings did at Whirl360?”

“Tell me.”

“He’s the guy who wrote the program that automatically blurs faces and license plates and all that kind of thing.”

I was about to put the key into the ignition and stopped. “Jesus.”

“And this other stuff, I just got this off the Chicago Tribune Web site. They’re attributing this to unnamed sources in the police department. How they died.”

“Go on.”

“Okay, so Billings was stabbed. Something very long and pointed, like an ice pick, maybe. But the wife-are you sitting down?”

“Julie, for Christ’s sake, just tell me.”

“She was suffocated, Ray. Someone put a bag over her head.”

Lewis Blocker went online and read everything he could find about Kathleen Ford and her new Web site. She had a lot of money to put behind it, and was said to be attracting big names to write for it. She’d lured a prominent columnist from the New York Times. Some well-known talking heads from Fox and MSNBC had agreed to be regular contributors. There’d be plenty of celebrity gossip. In these respects, it was much like the site it was taking on. But Kathleen Ford was going to offer a few new things, too. She’d attracted two or three novelists-Stephen King and John Grisham were among those rumored to have been approached-who would write serially for it. Every week, a new installment, just like in the old Victorian newspapers. There was even some mention of an animated political cartoon, but there was no hint as to who might produce it.

Lewis took special note of that.

He wrote down a few questions, thought about how he was going to play this, and then found a contact number for the public relations department of Kathleen Ford’s enterprise.

He was put in touch with a woman named Florence Highgold. Lewis couldn’t believe it was a real name, but she did actually work there, so what the hell. Lewis explained that he was doing a freelance business piece on Ford’s new Web site for the Wall Street Journal. He was particularly interested in the kind of talent pool Ford was intending to draw from.

“This whole serialized novel thing,” Lewis said. “I’d heard that the guy who wrote The Da Vinci Code had been talked into writing something.”

Florence laughed. “Even with the resources Ms. Ford has, I’m not sure she could afford him.”

“Well, if she can afford King and Grisham-”

“We’re not confirming that either of those men have in fact been commissioned to do anything for the Web site,” Florence said.

Lewis asked her about the launch date for the site, how many visits they expected it to receive. Would it be a site you had to pay to read? And if not, would all their income be derived from advertising?

He made it sound like an afterthought when he asked, “And what about artists? Does a site like that need a lot of illustrators?”

“Well, you certainly need Web artists to come up with a concept for the site,” Florence said. “You need a distinctive graphic design. But once you have that up and running, it kind of runs itself.”

“So it’s not like you’d have contributing artists in the way you would contributing writers.”

“That’s not entirely true. We’ve already said we’d like to do animated political cartoons.”

“You have someone for that?”

“We do,” Florence said. “Are you familiar with Ray Kilbride’s work?”

Even as she said the name, Lewis was tapping it into a search engine. When the results popped up, he hit Images.

The screen filled with dozens of postage-stamp-sized pictures.

“Yeah, I believe I have,” Lewis said. He clicked on an illustration of Newt Gingrich that had appeared in a Chicago magazine, credited to Ray Kilbride. “He did that Gingrich drawing, didn’t he?”

“He may have. He’s done so many,” Florence said.

Lewis clicked again and up came a caricature of noted New York crime boss Carlo Vachon, sticking up the Statue of Liberty. “And I remember one he did of that mob guy.”

“Maybe,” Florence said. “Like I said, he’s got a pretty comprehensive portfolio.”

“Uh-huh,” Lewis said, clicking to a second full page of images.

One of them was not an illustration, but a photograph. He clicked on it. Up popped a photo of a man leaning over a drafting table, sleeves rolled up, an airbrush in his hand, smiling at the camera.

The photograph was from an art magazine’s Web site, and accompanied a short article about Ray Kilbride, who lived in Burlington, Vermont.

“Are you there?” Florence said.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m here,” Lewis said, holding alongside his computer monitor the printout he’d been showing around the art store, comparing the two faces.

“Was there anything else you needed to know?” she asked.

“No, I think I’ve found the answer to my question,” Lewis said.

“Do you know when the article will be running in the Journal?” Florence asked. “Because Ms. Ford will want to-”

Lewis ended the call, then went to the online phone directories. He found a listing for an R Kilbride in Burlington.

He picked up the phone again, dialed Howard.

“Yes, Lewis,” Howard said.

“Found him,” Lewis said.

Octavio Famosa couldn’t decide what to do.