All these ashes, p.16
All These Ashes, page 16
“So, you guys have no leads? No ideas?” I asked.
“Well, we know the how, but not the who,” Key replied. “A few months ago, Mariana started getting alerts on all her devices. All her social media. Account logins from unrecognized devices. It started during a council meeting, so she wasn’t checking her phone.”
That had to have been done on purpose.
“She didn’t notice until hours later,” Key continued. “We went through every account. No messages were sent. Nothing was deleted, but whoever went looking probably had at least two hours to go through Mariana’s private conversations uninterrupted, and she isn’t exactly shy.”
“Plenty of time to find things to fill other envelopes,” I replied. “Also, back up. Was she getting password reset notices? Or just the login e-mails.”
“The latter. Which means it was someone who knew, or could guess, her password,” Key replied.
“So maybe it’s personal, not professional,” I replied. “An ex?”
“That’s where she wants us to start,” Key replied.
I leaned forward on the broken stool, rubbing two fingers on my temples. Pestering a politician’s ex-lovers to determine their potential risk to her campaign was the exact PR-type task I’d always dreaded. I was going to hate this, but then again, Key was going to hate what I asked her to do.
“You’re sure you can deliver on Cynthia Bell?” I asked.
“Once we take care of—”
“No, not once we take care of anything. I need her and Abel Musa in the same room tomorrow,” I said.
“Russell…”
“Key. Time’s a factor here. For both of us. Musa’s dying. And you don’t know how long Lynch is going to wait to try to do something with these photos again,” I said. “You didn’t sound all that sure you could deliver Cynthia for me, so I asked Bill for advice.”
“Bill Henniman?” she asked. “I’m not working with that piece of shit.”
At least there was one thing they’d agree on.
“Just like I told you I wouldn’t work for a politician?” I asked. “C’mon Key. I’m holding my nose. You owe me the same. He thinks he knows how you can convince her to walk into that hospital room.”
I told her what he’d said about Cynthia’s lifelong desire to hear a confession.
“I am not gonna lie to that woman,” Key said.
“You’re only lying to set her up to hear a more important truth,” I replied, hating myself for the way it sounded. “If we ever find out who really did this, she’s going to learn it wasn’t Musa anyway, right?
Key leaned back in my desk chair, eyed me for a second like she wanted to argue, but for once, I had the high ground in one of our disagreements. She nodded, and I left it at that, taking the silence as a yes.
After Key left, I spent the next few hours going through the list of Mariana Pereira’s lost loves she’d put together for me. Background checks, lawsuits, arrest records, social media. Whatever I could find to determine what they had to gain, or lose, from throwing knives into the councilwoman’s back.
. The first name on it was Marisa Latyn, Mariana’s longest and apparently most serious relationship since she’d been elected. They’d been together about a year, cutting things off not long before Mariana announced her mayoral bid. Key said they kept their relationship out of the public eye, and I had to wonder if Mariana ended it due to fear of her sexuality becoming a campaign issue.
LexisNexis—the public records dragnet that saves journalists, investigators and attorneys hours of leg work each year—told me Ms. Latyn had never been arrested or sued, at least not in New Jersey. Her mailing address came back to downtown Jersey City, and it hadn’t changed in three years. She was local, but she had to be making good money to afford a place in a gentrification hotbed like that.
Latyn’s Facebook and Instagram pages weren’t public, and if she had a Twitter account, I couldn’t easily find it. I pulled up the Essex County Registrar’s website next, and after a few errant clicks on some poorly worded tabs, I found the campaign finance page. I ran the last name Latyn, and found two $500 donations to the Pereira campaign that appeared to be from the councilwoman’s ex. Nothing came up under Watkins’s donors.
It was possible she made the donations as cover, but it was also possible I’d get hit by lightning while doing a handstand, just not likely.
I moved to the next name: Leslie Canino, an on-again, off-again dance partner Key said had been mostly off for the past two years. There had been the occasional late-night Facebook message, but the councilwoman had no interest in rekindling things.
Spurned love would have made sense as a motive. But Leslie’s Facebook page was public, as was her album of profile pictures. The last three showed the future Mrs. Canino smiling as a man dropped to one knee in front of her, blushing in a wedding dress and then pressing her hand to what looked like a baby bump. All the pictures had been posted in the past two years, which made me wonder if her now-husband was a then-boyfriend when Leslie and the councilwoman had their dalliance. Seemed like Leslie would be risking a lot to expose her relationship with Mariana.
It went on like that for another hour. Me scrolling down Key’s list. A public record or Internet search disqualifying a name. Frustrated and needing a bit of a break, I did what came naturally to anyone in their early thirties when they had a difficult work task to tackle: I started dicking around on Facebook.
Just not my own.
Mariana had three pages. One a sanitized “official” profile of Councilwoman Pereira posing in front of city hall with a confident smile. Another seemed to be the Facebook hub for her mayoral campaign. Neither of those interested me. They were probably run by interns.
The third one, with her last name intentionally misspelled, showed a slightly younger Mariana, arms draped around two friends in what looked to be a bar, a much looser smile spread across her face. Like she wasn’t entirely sure the flash was coming.
This was probably her personal page, but the terms of my potential new employment didn’t come with a Facebook friendship. At least not yet.
Key could probably fix that, but I wanted to poke around without her over my shoulder. An ex who wanted to cause headaches for Mariana might have kept tabs on her through social media, and he or she would know the real accounts. I tried my luck on Twitter, though the only account that obviously belonged to Mariana had a blue check mark and the language on it screamed public relations team.
MariPosa872 on Instagram had some potential. The profile picture was the same image from the councilwoman’s personal Facebook page. I recognized the Spanish word for butterfly, but maybe the handle was more a play on the councilwoman’s name. Either way, it was vague enough that it wouldn’t have come up on a cursory search of “Mariana Pereira.” But a few competent reporters I knew followed the account, and so did Key. Not that they needed to. The page was public. The councilwoman was going to need to learn better Internet discipline if she wanted to be mayor.
I scrolled down and found pictures uploaded years ago, from the early stages of Mariana’s entry into political life. There were college graduation pictures, workout pictures, some images that might have been taken after more than two drinks had been consumed.
The mouse wheel wandered through years of photos, until I slowed down around late 2017. The League of Municipalities’ annual conference was in November, when Key said Mariana’s fling with her staffer started. Sure enough, I found a picture of the woman from Lynch’s envelope and the councilwoman clinking glasses in workout clothes, smiling over a caption that read “Brunch After Barre With The Best.”
The picture didn’t tell me anything about their relationship, but one look at Denise’s finely toned body in yoga pants made it obvious why the councilwoman wasn’t thinking too clearly about the politics of their affair. I briefly stopped to think about the last time I’d been on a date, then went back to work before I had a chance to come up with an answer I didn’t like.
The photo had about one hundred likes. I opened up a Word document and started scribbling down any names of interest, leaving off accounts that had a large number of mutual friends with Mariana. I whittled that down to about twenty, and then started checking them against the likes on other images where the councilwoman was either posing with another attractive woman or showing off her own form. After a sampling of about thirty-five pictures over a few years, one account kept popping up over and over that didn’t have any mutuals with Mariana. The same account that seemed to have stopped liking pictures after Mariana announced she was running for mayor.
I clicked on the profile for Agony Doll. The woman behind the page had posted picture after picture of herself in corsets, modified and mutilated wedding dresses, and black cross earrings. She didn’t smile, so much as gasped or smirked in each image. She was incredibly attractive, but also kind of terrifying. I assumed that was the point. Other photos showed her wearing black headphones, tinkering with knobs while purple light and shadow filled the frame.
I ran “Agony Doll” through a search engine and came across a music blog that identified her as a dark wave, synthpop DJ whose real name was Celia Cain. Before my imagination got out ahead of the facts, I went back to LexisNexis and ran that name. I got two hits for an arrest and a petition for a restraining order in Passaic County Superior Court.
William Paterson University was in Passaic County. Mariana, according to her campaign page, had graduated from Willie P. I couldn’t see the files without driving to Paterson, but I thought back to a few hours earlier. Tiago shouting in the restaurant about his daughter’s sexuality being a college phase.
Agony Doll’s Instagram was back on my screen. I looked at the last image posted. It was the bill for her next performance, later that night, at a venue called QXT.
People are always surprised when I remind them Newark has a goth club.
Especially one so close to city hall.
Twelve:
There was a long line outside QXT, filled with enough people sporting black boots, garters, dreadlocks, latex and leather to make the cast of The Matrix blush.
I didn’t have the wardrobe to hover around that crowd for too long without drawing attention, and attention is bad when you’re trying to have a private conversation with the woman whose presence is the reason for the line.
Downtown Newark tends to clear out at night unless there’s a Devils game drawing thousands to the Prudential Center. But with The Rock’s lights dimmed, the entire neighborhood was a shadow: darkened buildings, shuttered storefronts and yawning, vacant parking lots. The only activity around the neighborhood was the old sandstone building with the ominous black doors that swung out to the sidewalk.
If you weren’t in line for QXT, you had almost no reason to be around. Every leather Daddy hat, chainmail corset attachment and mohawk turned my way as I trudged up Mulberry. It wasn’t their attention I wanted though. It was the guy with the bullseye tattoo on his forehead at the door.
The heavyset Black man with the shaved head and the frosted white contact lenses fit the part of QXT’s gothic guardian. He was short and chubby, but eighty percent of what hid under his trench coat was muscle, not fat. His hair was close cropped and dyed green, and a ring sat hooked under his nostrils, peering down at the snakebite piercing near his chin.
The gargoyle might have dissuaded anyone else trying to cut the line and get access to the venue’s top talent, but thankfully, I knew his first name. And he owed me a favor.
“Obie,” I shouted as I stepped to him, drawing looks from the line.
An arm blocked my path. It belonged to the other security guard who was checking IDs. If Obie heard me, he wasn’t acknowledging me, keeping his gaze on the line.
“Obie,” I said again. “Your friend here seems a little confused.”
I looked up at the head controlling the arm blocking my progress. Obie’s partner was a white man with longer black hair that curled at the neck and a goatee that seemed shaved into a point at his chin. He was in the prototypical black security shirt and pants, not trying to fit the mood of the building. Probably just an extra hand for a busy night.
“There’s a line,” the other guy said. “You should get in it.”
“I’m impatient. Also, I’m not here for…whatever that is,” I replied. “Obie, I really don’t have time for this.”
Obie uncrossed his arms and turned his artificially deadened pupils my way. Then his hands shot up and under my armpits as I turned around, lifting me straight off the ground.
I felt my legs kicking helplessly as Obie flung me over his shoulder and carried me like a rolled-up carpet. A few members of the line started laughing, and the other guard seemed satisfied with the departure of my mouthy ass, unaware that I’d gotten exactly what I wanted.
When we were out of view and around the left side of QXT, Obie put me down gently, then immediately shoved me into a wall. The burned part of my shoulder took the brunt of it, sending pain radiating into my neck.
“If you want to keep having an in with the doorman,” he said, his voice now an octave or two up from the cement mixer put-on he demonstrated out front, “then maybe stop bragging about it at the fucking door.”
“I’m sorry, but you won’t have to worry about that after tonight,” I said. “I’m cashing in.”
I didn’t know Obie because I’d gotten really into The Cure in college or previously dated a woman from the leather and lace crowd. I’d never even been inside QXT.
But the cops had. Multiple times.
In the summer of 2015, relatively early in my Signal-Intelligencer career, there had been a spate of sexual assaults in a six- to eight-block radius around the nightclub. With almost no other businesses open in the area at that time of night, the NPD got it in their heads that someone was targeting women leaving QXT. They were right, but lacking for suspects, it didn’t take long for them to zone in on the club’s Black bouncer who was always sober and always aware of who was leaving the place in the worst condition each night.
It didn’t help that the bouncer looked like he could punch through granite and went by Obsidian, which likely sounded like a gang nickname to a cop. The moniker actually referred to the black stone that formed from cooling lava.
With public pressure mounting on the police and city hall, someone got it in their heads to leak the identity of a “serious person of interest” in the case to me, hoping maybe a story about how police were closing in would stifle concerns. Except when I went to QXT to confront Obsidian, he got his manager to show me security footage they’d provided to the police. Security footage that, once the detectives got around to reviewing it, would show he was at his post the exact time two of the assaults took place.
I killed the story and decided to stop trusting leaks from Dameon Lynch.
Obsidian, relieved to not be wrongfully linked to a serial rape investigation, told me to reach out if I ever needed anything. I laughed it off, wondering what possible favor I’d ever need from the head of security at a goth nightclub. Right up until the second I did.
“I need a minute with your headliner,” I said, rubbing at my still throbbing shoulder.
“Agony Doll?” he asked. “You’re writing about the scene now?”
I didn’t know exactly what scene he was referring to, but it seemed Obie thought I still worked for the Signal-Intelligencer. Guess he hadn’t picked up the paper in a while. For once, I was thankful for declining readership. Now, I knew what string to pull.
“Not exactly. I don’t really want to get into it right now, but she’s being accused of some things and I haven’t been able to get a hold of her through her website or on the phone and, well, if she doesn’t say something, then…” I let the sentence trail off, not wanting to make the lie too elaborate.
“You can’t just wait to talk to her after the show?” Obie asked.
“Middle of the night after a set doesn’t sound like the best time for an interview,” I replied.
“Maybe I can help you get in contact with her another day. I’m sure the managers have a cell number or something if they booked her,” he said.
“Obie, man, you know better than anyone how this stuff could go if I don’t have her response in the first story.”
His white capped eyes wandered down the alley, toward what looked like a service door. He was on the hook.
“It’s just that… she’s got fans. Some of them are creepy. She’s not gonna like being approached at random,” he said.
I wanted to comment on the idea of me being creepy as compared to the Transylvanian delegation out front, but then realized I was the one out of place here.
“I’ll be delicate, I promise,” I said. “You’re doing a good thing for her here, Obie.”
He scratched at his nose and narrowed his eyes, before nodding slowly. He walked over to the service door and pounded on it twice, waited a beat and then smacked it twice more. It opened.
“I better be,” he replied. “This makes us even. And if you do anything to distress her, I’m going to treat you like anyone else who isn’t supposed to be back there. Understand?”
I nodded.
“Down the hall, make a right, second door. It’s the closest thing we have to a green room,” he said.
I followed his instructions, moving through mostly darkened passageways toward the pulsing beats and droning synthesizers that had to be emanating from the main room. Occasional beams of purple and white mood lighting were all I had to make sure I didn’t trip over anything.
The second door on the left was cracked slightly, a streak of fluorescent light peeking out into the hall. I nudged the door a bit with my foot and waited for any kind of response. When nothing came, I tried my luck a little further and stepped into the room.
The green room, as Obie called it, was really just a place the venue seemed to be stacking spare parts. There was an old couch, a cooler full of what looked like the best of a Rite Aid’s beer selection, and a wide mirror where I found the woman I assumed to be Agony Doll.
