“He was all nervous and shit. When we brought him onto death row, he was always looking over his shoulder like he was afraid one of those cages would pop open any second.”
It was Yuri all right. “And he took the pics?”
“Yeah. You should've seen the RIPs in the cages.”
Maggie interrupted. “Rips?”
“Yeah, you know, Rest in Peace. These assholes, they're already dead. That's what we call them. Anyway, these RIPs were all jerking off and shit. Last time any of them were going to see some titty. And that girl had a nice pair on her, too.”
“You didn't think of bringing her someplace private?”
“Ian didn't want to. He wanted to shoot her in her cage.”
“How did he get her to pose?”
“He told her we'd pass her around the cages if she didn't. He said he'd move her from cage to cage, an hour in each one. He said it loud enough for the RIPs to hear. They went apeshit thinking they were going to get some.”
Maggie put her face in her hands. Her voice came out muffled. “You told her she'd get raped if she didn't strip.”
“Don't get all righteous now. That girl is a damn murderer. Making her strip is nothing compared to what she did to her parents. Beside, it's not like she was a virgin or something.”
Maggie pulled her hands away, revealing a face I'd never seen before. “Dunk him,” she said.
George stopped bailing. “Shit, lady, calm down. We weren't really going to do it. Ian didn't want anybody screwing her, not even us guards. Nobody touched that girl.”
She was pointing at me. “Dammit, Juno, I told you to dunk him.”
I shook my head at her, saying no and shaming her at the same time. This wasn't her. “Why did Ian give the hands-off order?” I asked.
“Ian wanted to keep her fresh. He had plans for her.”
“What kind of plans?”
“You gonna let me go if I tell?”
I nodded.
“How about you?” he said to Maggie. “You gonna let me go?”
Maggie made a disgusted face but nodded.
“What about Ian?” he asked. “What am I gonna do if he finds out I talked?”
“We'll take care of Ian,” I said.
“But what if you don't?”
“Would you rather die now?”
That finally did it. “Ian came to me almost a year ago,” he said. “I hardly recognized him. When he started at the Zoo, he was this little stick boy. I took him with me on rounds his first day. I was showin' him around, and he looked like he was about to cry, his eyes were all misty, and his nose kept running. The kid was scared, seeing all those faces looking out at him from the cages. I thought, this kid's never gonna last, but he hung in there. Gotta hand it to him, he hung in there, long enough to get a posting at KOP. Anyway, he came up to me about a year ago, and I couldn't believe I was looking at the same guy. He had all these muscles and shit, and he had this new attitude, actin' like he was the man, you know what I'm sayin'?”
“What did he want?”
“RIPs.”
“I don't get it.”
“He buys RIPs, man.”
I still wasn't getting it. “Take it from the beginning,” I told him.
He took a deep breath. “Ian told me he had a partner, right? An offworlder. I never met him. Like I said, Ian tried to keep everything on a need-to-know basis, so I don't even know his name, but Ian told me the guy's story. This offworlder opened a business doing sex tours for offworlders. But he found out real quick that that shit's a competitive business. He had to take any business he could get. So when he'd get these crazy-ass requests from people, he'd try to accommodate them when the competition wouldn't. No matter how freaky the fantasy, he'd try to set it up. He did that for a long time, long enough that he eventually got known as the go-to guy for anything outside the norm. At least that's what Ian told me.”
“Go on.”
“Well, from time to time he'd get these S amp;Mers who were into snuff. They'd never come out and say it, but they'd hint around, see? They'd ask questions like, ‘You ever wonder what it would be like to kill a person?’ So Ian's offworld partner took the hint. He saw a big money opportunity and started checking into how to go about it. He scoped out the barges and found some good isolated sites. Then he hit the streets and started befriending some opium heads and orphans, looking for good candidates. You know, the kind that don't have any friends or family that would miss them. He got it all together, but when it actually came time for his clients to pay up, none of them came through.”
“Why not?”
“At first he thought they were just trying to get him to cut the price. So he made it clear that price was negotiable, but he still didn't get any takers. None of them had the guts to go through with it. He almost let the whole idea go, thinking they were all talk.”
“Were they scared of getting caught?”
“That's what I thought, but Ian's partner was smart. It occurred to him that the problem might be that these people actually had a conscience, you know what I'm saying? These offworlders aren't used to seeing O addicts and orphans where they're from, and they feel sorry for them.”
It was beginning to make sense to me. “So he figures that if he can find victims who deserve to die, it might help sales.”
“Right. He dropped all that snuff talk and started marketing it as your chance to be an executioner. Shit, that's when it took off. He had enough customers lining up that he was able to auction off the first RIP. We're talking serious money.”
“How many did he do?”
“I don't know. I didn't count. At least twenty.”
“And he auctioned every one of them off.”
“Like I said, big money.”
Maggie was disbelieving. “So you're trying to tell us that instead of putting the death row inmates into the gas chamber, you sell them off so the highest bidder can execute them?”
“Right.”
“But that's impossible,” she said. “All the gassings are authenticated by witnesses.”
“Those witnesses aren't in the same room, though,” he said. “We bring in the judge and the families, and they watch it from the visitor's center, on a vid screen. That photographer guy, the one that took pics of the Juarez girl, I let him come in one time to film the gas chamber. That guy can work some magic, I tell you. He just puts holos overtop the gas chamber background, and it looks real. He does the whole thing, the executioner doing the strap down, the cloud of gas that keeps getting thicker. Hell, I couldn't tell the vids weren't real, and I knew they weren't real. All I have to do is run the vids on the vid screen in the visitors center.”
I let go of his head, the constant bailing having finally lowered the water level enough that his face could stay above the surface without my help. My brain blossomed with understanding. So many things suddenly made sense, starting with why nobody ever missed the barge murder victims. They were all going to die anyway. And then there were the offworlders who were checking out the nudie pics of Adela Juarez, the whole lot of them preparing to outbid each other for the right to execute her. Or how about the realization that there was no serial killer, just a string of rich offworlders playing dress-up, which explained why it was so hard for Maggie to match up murder dates to a single offworlder.