City of Lies

According to the metal nameplate affixed to his uniform, the desk sergeant trying to calm Megan’s father was called Martinez. His words did nothing to mitigate Jonas’s anger.

‘When I told my daughter to call the police two and a half hours ago, I expected an officer to go to her apartment to start an investigation. Then she tells me she’s required to come into the precinct, so her mother and I drove into the city from New Jersey, expecting something to be done about this. My daughter has done everything one could ask of her. She missed a biochem lab today. She found each and every mention of her name on this disgusting Web site. She printed out copies for you.’ He shook the quarter-inch stack of paper for emphasis. ‘And now you tell us there’s nothing you can do to protect her?’

‘Sir, I’ve tried to explain, we have received more than our fair share of calls in this precinct from other NYU students, all complaining about what people are saying about them on this very Web site. And we’ve run our options past the district attorney’s office, and the same problems are going to apply here. First of all, the site doesn’t require users to give a name, address – anything. It’s totally anonymous.’

Jonas was already shaking his head. ‘That’s not true, that’s not true. I called the IT person at my company, and they tell me there are options. There’s a way to track – you can track the IQ or something like that. What’s it called again, honey?’

‘IP address, Dad.’

‘Yes,’ he said, pointing to Sergeant Martinez.‘The Web site should have that information. You can use it to –’

‘And that’s the second problem, sir. This company is not willing to release that information without a subpoena –’

‘So go get a fucking subpoena.’

Megan flinched. Except for the time her cousin had head-butted her father with his first catcher’s helmet, she couldn’t remember ever hearing her dad use the F word.

‘Let the man talk, Jonas. Please.’

Megan’s father set his jaw. He was clearly angry, but at least he was being quiet. For now. Sergeant Martinez gave Patricia Gunther an appreciative glance.

‘We can only get a subpoena if we have cause. And, as difficult as I’m sure it is for your daughter – for you, Megan – to read something like this on the Internet, the posts are not directly threatening.’

‘But my schedule. Someone’s watching me.’

‘You said yourself that everyone who knows you knows your class schedule and your workout routine. Unfortunately, messing with someone’s head isn’t a crime. If you’ve had any disputes with anyone lately – a former friend, a boy –’

‘There are no disputes, Officer.’ Jonas was interrupting again. ‘My daughter has no idea who would do something like this. You have to listen to us.’

‘That’s true, sir, and I have. I have listened now for more than twenty-five minutes. And I’m sorry, but that’s all I can do for you today. If it’s of any consolation, you might want to take a closer look at the other stuff on that site. A whole bunch of it is even worse than what your daughter’s going through.’ He looked directly at Megan. ‘You can’t let this get to you.’

‘You can’t just make us leave,’ her father said. ‘You must –’

With just the placement of her hand on her husband’s forearm, Patricia Gunther silenced him. ‘Do you have a daughter, Sergeant Martinez?’

Martinez cleared his throat and then looked Megan’s mother in the eye. ‘I do, ma’am. She’s fifteen years old. So pretty, it scares me. And if you ask me as a father, I’d say the scumbags who run this Web site should all find Molotov cocktails in their cars tomorrow morning. But if you ask me as the desk sergeant of the Sixth Precinct, there’s nothing more I can do for you folks. I’m sorry.’

As Megan led the way out of the precinct, she reread the final page she had printed about herself from campusjuice.com. She had printed not just the original posts, but also the comments that had been posted by other users in reply:

Post

11:10 AM – noon? Life and Death Seminar

12:10–3 PM? Bio Chemistry Lab

3–7 PM? Break: Home to 14th Street?

7–8 PM? Spinning at Equinox

Megan Gunther, someone is watching

Comments:

Seriously, Dude, what is up with you? I’m in Math 210 with her and she’s not even hot. Go have your rape fantasies on someone else.

Both the original comment and the reply were obviously posted by a couple of virgins who need to get a life, and some respect for womyn.

Got stalk? Yo, this site is whack.

Not to kill the party, but does this chick know about this? Maybe someone should notify campus security? Looks odd to me…

Reply to Comments:

Good luck with security. You’re all anonymous, and so am I. They’ll never find me.

And neither will Megan.

As Megan left the overhead fluorescent lights of the Sixth Precinct and stepped into the gray overcast of West Tenth Street, she stopped fighting the wave of emotion that had been building in her since she had first spotted her name on that vile Web site. She did not try to choke back the sob in her chest. She let the tears begin to roll.

Chapter Ten (#ulink_c7de809a-ce04-5150-8bc9-226ebeb38c0f)

3:15 p.m.

Katie Battle rang the doorbell first, just to be safe, and then slipped the key into the lock. She enjoyed a mental sigh of relief when she felt the familiar tumble of the interior pins. She couldn’t count the number of times she had schlepped a client to a showing, only to learn that the seller had left the wrong keys with the doorman.

‘Hello?’ she called out through the cracked door. Another annoyance avoided; the sellers were out of the apartment, as promised. ‘So this one’s just over eleven hundred square feet, which means you could easily convert it to a two-bedroom.’

Her clients today were Don and Laura Jenning, who were looking to purchase their first New York City apartment. Some clients came to Katie with a sophisticated understanding of the market, formed through countless hours perusing the New York Times real estate section and the plethora of Web sites devoted exclusively to property listings.

The Jennings were not that type of client.

‘Wow,’ Laura said. ‘This is so much nicer than the other ones.’

‘I wanted you to see it, just to give you an idea of the difference it can make if you’re willing to stretch.’

Katie, of course, was not surprised that the apartment – a large one-bedroom condo just off of Madison Park – was more impressive than the six other properties she had already shown the Jennings earlier in the day. After all, the entire purpose of this day’s viewing tour was to lead them to this apartment. Today was what Katie called a We Can Do It tour.

Like many of her clients, the Jennings had leaped into the fluctuating New York City real estate market with unformed and unrealistic expectations. ‘We don’t really know what neighborhood we want to be in: downtown ideally, but the Upper West Side’s fine, too, or even the Upper East.’ Already, that first sentence from Laura had been a giveaway. To a person who considers downtown her ‘ideal’, the Upper East Side is definitely not fine. Either Laura didn’t know Manhattan – unlikely, given she’d been renting in Chelsea for six years – or she just wasn’t being honest about her preferences.

And then there was the budget. ‘We want to stay under 700. We’d love to get a two-bedroom, but know we may have to get by with a one-bedroom-plus to start.’

It was a so-called compromise that Katie heard all the time. The reality, though, was that a true ‘one-bedroom-plus’ – a one-bedroom with a separate space for an office or a crib – was the same square footage (and price) as a small two-bedroom. And neither could be had for anywhere near seven hundred thousand dollars, no matter what people heard about so-called bargains in the down market.

If Katie believed the Jennings’ budget cap to be real, she would not have wasted her time on a We Can Do It tour. She instead would have arranged a Come to Jesus tour. In a Come to Jesus tour, Katie would drag a couple like the Jennings to six nice (and, ideally, overpriced) two-bedroom apartments. When the clients finally realized they could not afford apartments of that size, she would lead them to a nice, reasonably priced one-bedroom. It would be time for the clients to Come to Jesus: either get into the market with a small place or rent for the rest of their lives.

But the Jennings didn’t need a Come to Jesus tour. They needed the We Can Do It tour, designed not to persuade the clients of what they could not afford, but instead to convince them of what they could afford.

Katie knew from the Jennings’ mortgage application that quiet, petite Don pulled in a quarter mil a year as a ‘director of credit risk policy’, whatever that was. Since shacking up with Laura, he was living month to month, but in the decade before he’d met her, he’d managed to save an entire year’s salary. Laura was a jewelry designer who sold her wares at open fairs and to a few small boutiques. Lucky, lucky Laura – whom Katie tried not to resent – had never made more than twenty thousand in any individual year from her craft, but had her father – and now, Don – to fall back on.