The Detectives

Thread: "Who is the man in the video? A working file." (opened by quill_and_ink, 9:02 PM, 214 replies)

quill_and_ink · 9:02 PM · 190 likes: Ground rules. We don't post the video. We don't post anyone's address. We find what is already public, and we write it down. If this is a hoax, we have lost nothing. If it is not, someone should have been paying attention.

cold_open_77 · 9:10 PM · 142 likes: I'm in. What do you need?

mothlight · 9:24 PM · 118 likes: Honestly kind of scared how into this I am.

A_Cole_Case · 9:31 PM · 96 likes: I can contribute a timeline of the account's posting hours. I'll format it for the shared document.

It took exactly one weekend for the joke to become a job.

Nobody decided it. There was no meeting, no vote, no moment at which the room changed its mind. On Thursday night it had been a thread of laughing faces under a story about a cook and a pot of soup, and on Friday morning a few of the laughing faces had stopped laughing, and by Saturday noon there were two hundred and fourteen people in a new thread, under a title in plain white letters, and the man who had called himself quill_and_ink was giving instructions.

He wrote like a schoolmaster. That was what struck Asher first. His sentences were short and orderly, and his punctuation was perfect, and he had a way of putting a request that did not sound like a request but like a fact that had not yet taken place. We need a list of every account Exterminators has followed. We need the dates. Two people take the first hundred, two take the second. Someone should check the film sites; the account in the video appears to have been a lover of films. Someone should read the comments, not the posts. People are more themselves in the comments.

And the room obeyed him. That was the astonishing thing. A forum of strangers, of jokers and posters and idlers, who had spent two months making puns about a hairdresser, divided itself in an afternoon into squads, with captains, with deadlines, with a shared document that began as a single page of bullet points and by Sunday night had a table of contents.

Asher watched it happen from the edge of his bed, with the laptop on his knees, in a state of feverish and pleasurable excitement that he had not felt since the night of the drawings. He wrote a comment. He wrote a second. At twenty to ten on Saturday night he put up his timeline, a clean, professional spreadsheet in six colors, with every post by the account called Exterminators sorted by hour and by day, and the trough at seven in the evening marked with a gray band, and a note in the margin that said Consistent with a regular family dinner.

There was a pause of about four minutes. Then:

quill_and_ink: Thank you. This is exactly what we needed. Very careful work.

Asher read the words.

He read them slowly, once, and then once more. He sat there on the bed in the lamplight with his hands lying open on his knees. Thank you. No one had ever written those words to him on a screen in front of two hundred people, with the weight of the room behind them, and he felt the feeling rise in his chest, warm and enormous, until his eyes pricked and he had to look away at the wall.

He had been thanked.

It was strange. It was so strange that for a moment he did not recognize it, as one does not at once recognize one's own name spoken in a foreign voice. He sat with the word in his mind and turned it over. Thank you. He thought of the green envelope of coffee receipts in the drawer. He thought of Dana's face in the green-tiled men's room. He thought, with a quick sharp stab, of a pair of tired hands setting a plate before him, and a voice saying, Eat. You're too thin. And all of it fell away behind him, as the platform falls away behind a train.

…

The first match came on Monday.

It came from a girl called velvet_hour, who had been quiet since the night of the video, and who posted at six in the morning a screenshot and three lines of text. She had gone through the friends list of the dead account. The account of daniel_k_nights, the strange gray one that had come to life on the day after the great day, had been open for eight weeks, but its owner had kept another page on a film-reviewing site, under his real name, since long before. It had a small picture of a bookshelf on the front. It had four hundred and twelve entries.

Four hundred and twelve.

The number sat there in the white type, and Asher read it once and felt a tiny chill. He knew the number. He had read it in an introduction, in a plain shy post, on a Thursday morning in the sixth week. I've watched four hundred and twelve films. He had been so superior, so amused. He had put a three beside the name.

His name was Daniel Kessler, wrote velvet_hour. Thirty-six. He worked nights at a warehouse in the east end. I found his employer from a comment he left about a coworker's retirement party. He was nice. His reviews are really kind. He never gave anything below a two.

She did not write anything more.

cold_open_77: ok this is not funny anymore

mothlight: This could be anybody. A lot of people watch these films.

quill_and_ink: It could. That is why we write it down. Does anyone have news? A report? A missing-persons notice?

There was a silence in the thread. It lasted a quarter of an hour. And then the replies began to come in, one by one, from every corner of the room, brief and guarded. Nothing. No notice. Nothing in the local papers, nothing on the police blotter, nothing on the sites where such things are listed. A thirty-six-year-old man had stopped posting, stopped answering his messages, stopped reviewing, on a Friday ten days before, and not one living soul had said so aloud.

It means nothing, wrote mothlight. Adults leave. It happens.

It does, wrote quill_and_ink. Write it down anyway.

…

By Thursday the document ran to nineteen pages.

It was a plain thing, with no design, and it lived on a shared drive that nobody owned, and the heading on the first page said WORKING FILE. Under it, in small type, were the rules. Under the rules was a list, and under the list another, in numbered items, of what had been found. A man named Daniel Kessler. A warehouse. A habit of posting at night. A friend who had not seen him. A mother in a suburb who had said, in a comment on a family photograph, that her son was shy. A bakery near his home where a woman had written, in a review, that the nice young man with the rye bread had not been in.

Asher had never been so busy. He spent his nights at the laptop with a notebook open beside him, a real one, with a red cover, in which he copied out the entries in order and cross-referenced them. He drank tea until his hands shook. In the mornings he stood at the copier in a daze with a stack of Pelham pages, and at lunch, with no canteen to go to, he ate a sandwich at his desk and read the thread on his phone, and Hargrove, passing, twice said Cole in a questioning tone and twice got no answer.

At the group chat, on Wednesday, Marcus wrote: ok I'll admit it, this is the most fun I've had in years. like a real case

Priya: I'm not having fun.

Marcus: you're doing a whole spreadsheet tab

Priya: because someone has to do it right. if this IS real, I want it done right. I don't think it's fun. I think it's a person.

Noah: I think so too.

Marcus: wow ok. the mood.

Noah: I'm not trying to ruin it. I'm just saying. If it's him. If that's him. He's a guy, Marcus. He had a mother.

Asher read the lines. He felt, deep under his excitement, a small cool shifting, like a stone turning in a stream. But the excitement was louder. He typed, Of course. We all feel that. That's why it's important to be methodical, and sent it, and was pleased with how grave it sounded, and went back to the document.

…

At noon on Friday Dana stopped by his desk with a paper bag.

"I got you a sandwich," she said. "Turkey. Don't say anything about paying."

"Thank you," said Asher, and he heard it come out of his mouth and was surprised, because it was the first time in weeks he had said it to her without being reminded.

She looked surprised too. She set the bag down on the corner of the desk and stood for a moment with her hands in her coat pockets, studying the legal pad that lay beside the laptop, which was covered in a tight small writing and a web of arrows.

"You look better," she said carefully. "You've been... lighter, this week. I'm glad. Is it the Brennan thing? Did Hargrove put you on it?"

"No. It's something else. A project."

"A work project?"

"A research project. A group of people. We're helping to establish the identity of someone." He lowered his voice, though no one was near. "It's quite important. I can't say more."

"Okay." Dana's brow furrowed very slightly. "Is it... like, official? Is a lawyer involved?"

"I'm the lawyer."

"Asher, you're an intern."

"I'm the one with the legal training," he said, quite gently, as one explains a point to a child, and she stood looking at him for a moment longer, and her face did something odd, a flicker, a small quick tightening at the corner of the mouth, and she nodded.

"Well," she said. "Be careful. Okay? With whoever it is. Real people can be a lot more complicated than the internet."

"I'm always careful."

"I know you think so." She smiled, a little sadly, and tapped the desk twice with two fingers, and went away.

He ate the sandwich while he worked on the table of dates. It was good. It had mustard on it, the kind he liked, and he did not wonder how she knew.

…

On Friday evening he met Hargrove in the elevator.

It was ten to six. The car was nearly empty: two clerks with umbrellas, and a woman with a baby carriage folded under her arm, and, at the rear, in his gray overcoat with the leather folder under his arm, the head of the department. The doors closed. The cables began to hum.

Asher stood by the panel, and found, to his surprise, that he was thinking about a matter of chain of custody.

He thought about it for the whole of the ride. He thought about the video, and the saved copy, and the question that velvet_hour had raised about the timestamp, whether the file's metadata could be admitted, whether it might be possible to prove which device had made it. He went over the points methodically. Behind him, so close that he could have felt the movement of the air, stood Hargrove, with the pen, and the stiff white collar, and the mole at the nape of his neck, and Asher noticed, at the fourth floor, that he had gone through five floors without looking round.

Something had gone out of him.

It was not an effort. It was not forgiveness, certainly. It was only that there was a gap where the tight hot thing had been, in the pit of the stomach, the thing that had turned his hands to ice in that same car, a month before. He felt for it, as the tongue feels for a missing tooth, and found only a smooth and puzzled absence. The gap had been given a job. It was full of cross-references and cell numbers and the quiet voice of a man who had written thank you. There was no longer any room in it for Hargrove.

The doors opened at the lobby. He stepped out. Behind him he heard, as from a great distance, the dry tap of a pen against a leather cover, and he walked on across the marble floor with a light, quick, almost happy stride, under the high clear glass, into the cold evening.

He did not look back. He was thinking of the next entry, which was number twenty, and which would be his.