My oncologist says he’s cautiously optimistic, whatever the fuck that means. Talk about hedging your bets! Unlike the Bulgarians he seems perfectly comfortable with ifs and maybes.
The body I read about in the paper that morning was identified as Esmeralda Marie Sutanto, twenty-two years old, of Long Island City, New York. She had been found a few days earlier by a lost hiker in a state park in Orange County. Although the body wasn’t in the best of shape, there were signs she had been tortured before being suffocated. The cops weren’t very specific, but Fuqua had all the details when he called me later in the day.
“They used a black latex mask to suffocate her,” he said. “It was designed so that one might cut off the air supply to the wearer. From the shape of her, they did her a favor by killing her. Her murderer was very angry with her. The upstate authorities are putting it down to a sexual assault and homicide.”
“You sound unconvinced.”
“The homicide did not happen where the body was found, yet the murderer left Esme’s suitcase with her body.”
“So.”
“I have gone over the inventory of the things in the suitcase. They were mismatched. It was as if someone else packed the bag for Esme to make it appear as if she had left her apartment in a rush.”
Even in my frail state, I could read between the lines. I had no part in contacting the women Esme and Tillman had raped and blackmailed. Natasha said she would handle that. But none of us, not Pam nor Natasha nor Fuqua nor Devo nor I believed that simply getting Esme out of town would be the end of it. Devo said it to me straight, that there were no guarantees the videos wouldn’t resurface, that there were billions of hiding places in cyberspace and that any half-assed kid could embed videos in places no one would think to look. Basically, we’d all chosen to ignore the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. What Fuqua was saying was that one of us had decided not to it ignore it at all.
“What are you gonna do about it?”
“Do?” he puzzled. “I will do nothing.”
“I thought all victims were equal in murder.”
“Not all victims,” he said. “Not all. It is not my job to increase the pain in the world. It is my job to stop it.”
I let Fuqua hold on to that myth because as long as humans walked the earth, the pain would be there and we would go on doing what we could not help but do: inflict pain on one another as easily as we breathed. People can change, but they cannot change their essential natures. We were hurt machines and whether we evolved into them or God made us that way seemed beside the point.