Unknown Diners

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Lorne browsed through the PussMakr images on bmexx. "Christ, he was still updating this stuff after he was charged. The newest one is 20 August 2003, during his trial, a week before he was convicted."

"Dedicated." Catherine shook her head.

"He was likely screaming for help in the only way he knew. He was so calm in the courtroom. Anything interesting with the comments on Cynthia's posts?"

"Mundane. Nice, cool, rad, and comments like that. A few questions, technique and pain-related, mainly. I'll keep scrolling."

Lorne expanded an image, took a screenshot and saved it. He repeated this a few more times with other images Connolly had posted of himself, then he set-up a new PussMakr account on imBMEX.ru. "Time for the new PussMakr to go bottom fishing."

"Let's see."

He clicked on the first image and turned his screen toward her. She sat staring at the picture with her hand to her mouth. He put his arm around her shoulders and hugged. "Not pretty at all, is it?"

"And he made you watch as he did this to himself? Fuck!"

"Guess I slowly became numbed to it. He treated the sessions as anatomy lectures, explaining the layers as he cut..." He felt her tense and stopped. "Time for another break." He picked her up and carried her to the bed. "Cuddle and nap time."

A little past fourteen thirty, he sat again at his computer as she put the kettle on for tea. "Here we go. One comment already. Listen to this: Pleased to see you're out. Welcome to the site. I'll PM you. rubme."

"Rub me? Is that inviting a tug job?" She laughed. "Hey! One picks up on the jargon going through this stuff."

"A clever name, rubme, asking are you bme and implying the Russian site."

"Do you think it's Robotham?" She walked around the island to stand beside him and look at his screen.

"We'll find out." He pointed to the small flashing flag on his screen. "Connolly has a private message." He clicked the flag, and a half-screen window opened.

Hi Francis: How do you like my new site? When were you released? Tried to track you, but couldn't get any information. Where are you? Bill.

"Bill?" She looked at him. "William Charles. That was it, wasn't it? His name."

"Yeah. A lot of things pointing."

"How are you going to reply? Surely you'll reply."

"Oh, for sure. I need to research first, though. We need a strong line. There's too much risk of losing the fish without it."

"How? What do you need?"

"A storyline, conversation history from a decade and a half ago. I can't risk jumping into the conversation without it. I'll have to dig back through cunt maker's postings and responses. See if I can find comments from Robotham, whatever he called himself. We're back to searching for the needle, but at least we have the haystacks now." He turned his head up and gave her crooked smile.

She bent and kissed the smile. "What about his email files?" She pointed to the USB drive.

"Stupid me. Of course." He stood and hugged her.

"See, there's another reason to keep me around."

He clicked to the drive and started searching. She brought him a tea and sat beside him to watch as he worked his way through trees of contents. Several minutes later, he turned to her with a frown. "As I'd feared, I need to fire-up my old Microsoft clunker to get into this, it's in Outlook."

"At least you've found it."

"Let's hope he did all his email on Outlook, not on a web-based place. A lawyer, early 2000s, most likely." He opened a cupboard, pulled out an old Toshiba and plugged it in. "I haven't been into this in two years or more. It'll take a good ten or fifteen minutes before the battery comes up enough to start the system. You ever use Microsoft?"

"Only when forced to... Libraries and such. I find it awkward."

"Yeah, I bought this piece of crap five or six years ago when I needed to access some emails." He returned to browsing in imBMEX.ru, bringing up rubme's posts. "Take a look at this. It appears he's either stumped himself or he's been lopped."

"Do I want to look?"

"Maybe not." He looked at her. "I'm dragging you into a lot of crap, aren't I?"

She looked at his screen. "This is rather benign compared to some of the crud I've been looking at. At least this isn't still raw and bleeding like Connolly's."

"Yeah, it appears to be fully healed. His files, the USB drive, the image folders. Stubs." He clicked the drive open and scrolled to the document folder and found the image tree. Big, Huge, HugeBoy, Incuse, Me, Micros, Nullos, Penectomy, SelfSuck, Stubs, Trophies. He clicked Me and then on the first thumbnail. "He looks the same now as he did back then."

"Why would he have done that to himself?"

"It could have been done to him."

"Yeah, that's possible. An accident. An angry lover. Fuck!"

"A way to find out here. One of the other folders, Penectomy." He clicked Back, then opened the folder and looked at the first image. After scrolling through a few, he stopped and returned to the first one. "This is what it was like before he started on himself. You don't want to see the rest of them."

She looked up from her own screen and across to his. "He was rather huge — once. I wonder why he would have done it."

"Why do people pierce their ears? Get breast implants? Dye their hair, wear makeup?"

"Yeah. Unhappy with themselves. He must have been very, very unhappy." Catherine turned back to her computer to continue searching while Lorne opened the Toshiba and clicked it on, then waited for it to load.

"I wonder whether they've ever fixed this long load time." He watched the spinning. "Three or four minutes to start and nearly the same to shut down."

"No, still the same. I can open my MacBook, do my emails, Blogger, Facebook and Twitter, and close it before Cynthia can even get into her machine. She still swears by Microsoft, though at times it seems she's closer to swearing at it."

The Toshiba finally cycled on, and Lorne logged in to close a long series of update pop-ups as they bred on the screen. When he finally convinced the ghost of Gates that he didn't want to update, and he had stopped the other harassments, he connected the USB drive. He searched for PST and quickly found his way back to the email files, then clicked around and finally got Outlook to open.

He clicked contacts and scrolled down. "Got him. Here's Francis Connolly." He typed fr and hit Enter. "And here's Gustav Frick. This is going to be interesting."