Stolen Prey

Channel Eleven headlined his comments: rape, torture, murder. Finger joints, eyeballs, castration, throats cut with razors. Themessage on the wall. “We’re coming”—the producer supplied the missing apostrophe on the phonied-up blue-screened graphic behind the anchorwoman.
    The Channel Eleven report set off a media firestorm, which intensified when another station “confirmed rumors from earlier today….”
    The media was large in the Twin Cities. A juicy murder would go viral in seconds.
    R UMORS OF the massacre at the Brookses’ house swept through Sunnie Software minutes after the bodies were discovered. Patrick Brooks had been scheduled to meet with marketing and development and hadn’t shown up. Neither he nor anyone else answered the home phone, and his cell phone rang and was never picked up.
    The vice president for sales, named Bell, had had a bad feeling about it. A lawyer friend of Bell’s lived near the Brooks home, and Bell had asked the lawyer to call his wife, who ran over and found the front door cracked open.
    Nobody answered her call, so she’d pushed the door open with a fingernail and peeked inside….
    Started screaming.
    As she ran back down the street, she called 911, and then her husband, who called back to Sunnie with a garbled story of blood and murder.
    The cops came, and then the BCA.
    Then the media, ambushing employees in the street.
    “This is really fucked,” said one of the account managers, ayoung man with hair to the middle of his back. “Who are they going to suspect, huh? The guy with the hair…”
    “Rob, stop thinking about yourself,” one of the women said. “They’re all dead.”
    “But who are they gonna think did it?” Rob cried.
    Several of them told him to shut up, and guiltily gave thanks for their neatly coiffed hair.
    T HE MURDER STORY caught Ivan Turicek and Kristina Sanderson at work in the systems security area at Hennepin National Bank. Sanderson was getting ready to go home: she worked the six-to-two shift, while Turicek came in at noon and took it until eight. They were alone, with a bank of computers. Turicek had seen a fragment of a story on a television in the Skyway, and now had one of the computers set to catch the Web broadcast from Channel Eleven.
    Channel Eleven was the one with the source: rape, torture, murder, eyeballs, castration … “We’re coming” with an apostrophe.
    “Oh my God, what have we done?” Sanderson blurted, staring at the screen. A thin schizophrenic with blond, frizzy hair and a fine white smile, when she used it, she was pale as a sheet of printer paper, one hand to her mouth.
    Turicek shook his head: “Not us.”
    “Ivan, I don’t want to be bullshitted,” Sanderson said, as she looked down at the flat panel. “This was us and you know it.”
    They were alone in the security area, but cameras peered down at them from the end of the work bay. They supposedlydidn’t record sound, but Turicek was an immigrant from Russia, and never believed anything anybody said about limits of surveillance. In his experience, somebody was
always
listening.
    He said, “Shh.” Then, after a moment, “We need to call Jacob. Or you should go see him. He’s probably still asleep, doesn’t know about this.”
    She looked at her watch: two o’clock. Nodded. Jacob Kline normally worked an eight-to-four shift, but was out, sick, again. “Yes. I should probably go see him.”
    “And it wasn’t us,” Turicek said again. He turned to her, worried. Sanderson suffered from a range of mild psychological disorders, and he considered her fragile. She didn’t use meds, and the bank put up with her occasional acting-out because she was also obsessive-compulsive when it came to the neatness of numbers. If a number was out of place, Sanderson could sense it and push it back where it belonged.
    That made her an excellent programmer and an asset for a bank. But still, she was a head case, and, at times, delicate. “One thing I learned in Russia is, if you didn’t do it, you didn’t do it,” Turicek said, pressing the case. “You’re not responsible for what other people do. You can’t be. If you are, there’s no end to the chain of responsibility, so then nobody winds up being responsible.”
    “I don’t need a philosophical disquisition. I was a philosophy major for three semesters,” Sanderson snapped.
    “We need to be calm,” Turicek said. “We keep working, we keep our heads down. We know nothing.
We know