Revenant in Death, Chapter 12
by Technomad
Rayleen Straffo
Rayleen looked around at the mini-apt. It was spartan and tiny, but would do for what she wanted. She didn't plan to live there, after all. But she needed complete privacy, and anonymity, and those were amenities the apt had that her quarters at Mame Burnside's did not. Not that Mame herself was snoopy, not at all. Mame believed in allowing her employees freedom to amuse themselves as they pleased, and with whom they pleased, so long as the work got done and the household ran smoothly. But Agnes Gooch had a habit of hanging around in Rayleen's room there, both when she was present and when she wasn't. While Rayleen was very conscientious about keeping anything remotely incriminating out of that place, she had things to do that she could not risk even the slightest chance of her employer or fellow employees finding out about.
She was well out of her usual area, which was another attraction. The apt was off on the other end of the tri-state metro area from the one she had originally rented, where Willow Mackie was living. It had been rented under a false name, using a set of false identification she had made up, so that even if people did get suspicious, there would be no clue traceable to her, either under her birth name or her pseudonym.
She had fooled everybody into thinking that she had been released from prison after a short stint for being involved in an illegals ring at the behest of an ill-chosen boyfriend. Mame herself had no problem with illegals, per se, and didn't even think they should be illegal, so she was unconcerned about Rayleen's ostensible past. But such a person as she pretended to be would not have even known how to do what she was about to do.
She sat down at the computer, flexing her fingers as she got ready to log on. The computer was third-hand, and not registered to either her birth name or pseudonym. That was another precaution to avoid traces. So far as she knew, the portal by which she accessed the Dark Net was safe, but she had learned her lesson, the hard way, about not taking every possible precaution to avoid detection.
Experimentally, she tried her usual route onto the Dark Net, and she smiled to see that it still did work. She smiled. She loved computers and the Net, and this was almost like coming home, or talking with Willow. A chance to let most of her masks slip, and be who she really was. One of the youngest serial killers on record, talking shop with others of her kind.
That was one of the few things she really missed about her years in prison. The confinement had grated on her, and until she became used to a Spartan lifestyle, the lack of comforts was a constant annoyance. But at least there, she didn't have to pretend to be anything but what she was save when interacting with the staff. Just being able to relax around others who were nearly as bad as she was felt like slipping out of tight, uncomfortable clothes into a comfy bathrobe for lounging around the house.
While Rayleen was a gifted actress, being "on stage" and pretending endlessly could wear on even such as her. She was more than ready to talk frankly with someone other than Willow. While Willow was her best female friend (or friend in general) Rayleen often found her very limited and focussed on one thing, killing.
She saw the logo for the "IH8LTDallas" forum, and input her username and password. She smiled at the welcome message:
Hello, Rhoda. Long time no see.
She settled back on her seat and metaphorically rolled up her sleeves. Hello all. I'm back. I'm getting on line from a different portal, as you can see.
Good to have you back, came the answer. This is Loeb. Leopold's off in the hole. He'll be back in a few days, and I'll tell him you said 'hi.'
You do that. Who else is here?
Sarge is celling with me.. He's off in counseling right now. LOL He'll never see freedom again, so what's the use of counseling him?
Don't know. They never changed me a bit. Is Reaper still where you are? The last Rayleen had heard, before her release, was that Jerry Reinhold, who pretentiously called himself "Reaper" on the Dark Net, and boasted of the money that he said was rightfully his, was probably going to be transferred to an institution for the criminally insane.
He had a breakdown. They dragged him off screaming in the night. This is Sarge, by the way. Loeb had to go distract the bulls so we wouldn't get caught.
I understand. I won't keep you. Before I go-could you ask around among people who're newer there than we are, about places to access a sniper laser under-the-counter here in the metro?
Why not ask Willow? I heard she's out.
She was in about as long as I was, and didn't have contacts. I need something fresh.
I'll ask around. TTFN!
SYL.
Closing down the computer, Rayleen got ready to go back to work. She had the day off, but it was getting on toward evening, and she had a reputation for utter punctuality and reliability to keep up. And she didn't want to be seen around that apt more than she had to be. Once she had what she needed, she'd abandon the apt after carefully wiping the computer's hard drive. She had learned her lesson about evidence, the hard way.
Back at Mame's, Rayleen was soon caught up in the preparations for the first of the parties Mame and her coevals were planning to throw. The logistics were complicated, and she went completely back into her "Jane Mollenbeek" persona, willing herself to forget all about Eve Dallas, sniper lasers, and murder plots. She had never realized, before joining Mame's household, what a demanding role it was to be one of the East Coast's leading social lights.
Eve Dallas
Eve was putting together the notes she needed for her next lecture at the Police Academy. She planned to cover a few of her more well-known cases…the Icove case, to be sure, but there were others with which her name would always be associated.
She planned to cover Rayleen Straffo, in some detail. Rayleen had been a prime example of the "hide in plain sight" murderer, as well as being one of the youngest serial killers on record. Unlike, say, Jesse Harding Pomeroy, whose two known murders were motivated mainly by pure sadism, Rayleen was more motivated by ego, in Eve's opinion. If Rayleen had been a little less sure of herself, and had made sure to be on the other side of the school when her teacher's body was discovered, Eve thought she might never have looked twice at Rayleen, and the case would have remained unsolved.
The criminal ego. It makes our jobs so much easier. That was a good thought, and she wrote it into her notes. Many a criminal had been undone by bragging. In sweet Rayleen's case, she had made the stupid mistake of bragging to herself, in a diary that Eve had recovered. Eve shuddered at the memory. Even now, thirty years later, she thought that that diary was one of the most chilling documents she had ever read. Her friend Mira had excerpted it in several papers she had written about sociopathy in the young.
Idly, Eve called up a mugshot taken of Rayleen Straffo at the time of her conviction. From the screen, Rayleen stared at her, her expression set and defiant despite the tear-tracks down her cheeks. Oh, yes, Eve thought, you were good at turning on the water works when you needed to, weren't you, Rayleen? I wonder…did you ever feel anything at all? For anybody?
There was something indefinably familiar about Rayleen's face, other than the fact that Eve had seen it before. Something was niggling at her…she relaxed slightly, letting the thought come. Just out of curiosity, she set the picture to age. Every year, convicts were mug-shot again, to keep the records of their appearances current. It would not do, after all, for a middle-aged man to somehow escape custody, and the only pictures the authorities had of him be the ones taken when he was young and freshly convicted, would it?
On the screen, the pictures flipped through, year after year. Eve Dallas watched Rayleen Straffo grow, becoming what even Eve had to agree was a rare beauty. Somehow or other, she had avoided the trap many imprisoned women fell into, of gaining weight on the starchy diet and low-exercise lifestyle they lived. Finally they came to the current year, and there the picture stopped. A blonde beauty gazed out of the picture, her expression a mixture of boredom and mild disdain. Under her was Rayleen's prison number, and the name of the facility where she was then imprisoned.
Eve suddenly sat up, focusing intently on the screen. The facility in question was not the orbital facility she had always envisioned as Rayleen Straffo's permanent home. It was a low-security facility for low-risk convicts, on Earth! How the hell had that happened?
At the time of Rayleen's conviction and sentencing, Eve herself, along with Mira and several other professionals who had examined Rayleen and her case, had written strongly-worded recommendations that she be kept strictly confined for the duration of her natural life. Preferably in an off-planet facility. The advantages to those places were that they were much harder to get out of, since breaking out would expose the escapee to hard vacuum.
By now, Eve was worried. She'd checked earlier, and had found that Rayleen Straffo was in a coma in a prison hospital, and likely to be in that coma for the rest of her days. Even so, she still wanted to know just how the sociopathic woman had managed to get herself back planetside, much less into the lenient facility she had apparently been in when her accident had occurred.
Although she was officially retired from the NYPSD, Eve Dallas still had access to a lot of records. She called up the records on "Straffo, Rayleen" from the Department of Corrections, and began perusing them carefully.
She saw a record of apparent compliance and penitence that would have fooled nearly anybody without direct experience with Rayleen's true self. Rayleen had swiftly settled in to her new home, following all the rules with apparent zeal, and had soon been winning her keepers' good opinions. Compared with many of the people they had to deal with every day, Rayleen Straffo was no problem at all, and for underpaid, overworked administrators and guards, that made her a jewel beyond price.
Somehow or other, the recommendations that Rayleen be kept strictly confined for the rest of her life had been lost. Eve suspected incompetence; the e-geeks that worked for the corrections system were not, to put it mildly, the elite of their profession, and such mistakes happened. Without those recommendations on her file, Rayleen had eventually qualified for re-transfer back to Earth. Since space was at a premium in the orbital facilities, Eve understood why this had happened, although she was furious that this particular prisoner had somehow or other managed to return planetside.
Eve noticed that Rayleen had kept up her education. If she'd been on the outside, she'd have eventually qualified for any of a bunch of high-paid professional positions. That, at least, was no surprise. Before her downfall and arrest, Rayleen Straffo had been one of the top students at an elite private school, and her intelligence made her all the more frightening, coupled, as Eve knew it was, with an utter disregard for other human beings other than as tools. Mira had described her privately to Eve as "the youngest pure sociopath I have ever encountered!" And Mira had been very worried that somehow or other, sweet Rayleen would get loose, to wreak more havoc among the unsuspecting who were taken in by her surface charm, beauty and good manners.
At least, thought Eve, she's in a hospital, and never likely to leave it again! Putting worries aside, she went back to assembling the facts she needed to cover in her lecture.
Rayleen Straffo
Rayleen was accompanying Mame Burnside, Vera Charles and some of their friends on a cultural outing. Their first stop was at an art gallery, where some paintings by people that Mame and her friends had helped were on display.
Mame and her friends oohed and aahed at the paintings, while Rayleen, just behind Mame as befit her indispensable assistant, watched the proceedings with a critical eye. She noticed that while Mame herself was apparently quite knowledgable, and made comments on the paintings that showed that she'd had education on the subject, most of her wealthy friends were utterly clueless.
Behind her impassive mask, Rayleen sneered. She was a very good painter and artist herself. She'd been good before her conviction, and had been encouraged to keep up her painting in prison. Her keepers saw it as useful, therapeutic activity that kept her occupied and out of trouble. Not that she was known for getting into trouble, anyway. But she had found that it did serve as a way to show her keepers that she was harmlessly passing the time. Her thoughts, while painting, were her own. As always.
She thought that many of those rich, tasteless, clueless women would be very easy prey for a knowledgable art forger. Rayleen could pastiche several well-known painters' work well enough to easily pass it off as theirs, and if she could fake provenance successfully, her paintings would sell for vast amounts of cash. As long as their origins were not called into question, the buyers would be just as satisfied as if they were the work of their purported creators.
Rayleen thought that was utterly foolish. While she loved art, she was not sentimental at all about "originals." To her mind, a good, accurate reproduction was just as good as an original, and cost a lot less, too. Rayleen knew that she was entitled to be wealthy, but one thing her parents had taught her was that even wealthy people did well not to spend money wildly. And Rayleen did not appreciate art for its power to impress her friends. Other than Willow, she had no friends, and liked it that way, on the whole. And Willow could not have cared much less than she did about art.
The thought of profit, Rayleen believed, would attract Willow's attention. She hadn't considered art forgery and fraud as potential money-spinners before this, but the idea had its attractions. Of course, provenance for her works was going to be a problem. She needed to do some research, and maybe ask her friends on the Dark Net for help. While Rayleen was very smart, she always was willing to admit that there were things she did not know.
After the art gallery, the ladies repaired to an elegant restaurant for dinner, and Rayleen, of course, was invited along. Some of the ladies raised their eyebrows at Mame allowing a "servant" to eat with her, but Mame gave them an icy stare and they visibly wilted.
"Don't mind my friends, dear," Mame murmured, once conversation and music had started up loudly enough for her to speak to Rayleen in private. "Some of them are very old-fashioned, and a few are the most dreadful snobs you'll ever meet!"
"Then why do you tolerate them?" Rayleen asked. She was honestly curious about that point. While Mame never forgot that she was a grande dame of New York, she was never other than gracious and polite to those she met. Rayleen had never seen Mame condescend to anybody, even the lowest sidewalk sleeper. And she was well able to deal with behavior she disapproved of, even from women on her social and financial level.
"They have their uses, dear." Mame winked. "Hanging around with them, being a friend to them, helps me get money out of them for things like the Nixie Swisher Foundation. And at least I know that they are not going to try to con or bilk me out of money!"
"I wonder if any of them know about you and Ms. Charles in the Urban Wars?"
"I think that if they knew that Vera and I were actual combat veterans from that time, they'd clutch their pearls, put their hands to their foreheads, and faint dead away, darling." Just then, the first course was brought in, and Rayleen and Mame tucked in with the others. Eating, Rayleen was reminded of her girlhood. Her parents had loved good food and brought her up to love it, too. Having to exist on the stuff fed to prisoners for decades had been one of the harshest things about confinement for her.
Afterwards, the party headed off to see a show. The Kirov Ballet was touring America, and, of course, they had performances scheduled in New York. Rayleen had to admit, being one of Mame Burnside's party had its points for that sort of thing.
If she had attended on her own, the only seat she could have afforded would have been way up in the back, and she'd have had to strain to see the performance. Mame and her friends, on the other hand, could afford the best seats in the house, and had them. Since Mame liked having her nearby to help out with the little inconveniences of daily life, Rayleen got the benefit of accompanying her to events like this.
Watching the performance, Rayleen felt a pang of regret. One thing she hadn't been able to keep up in prison was her dancing, which she regretted bitterly. She had known that she was talented; her teachers often praised her and applauded her rapid progress, and she had often thought of being a top ballet dancer. She was rather amused at the ignorant comments some of Mame's friends made about the performance. Some of them seemed to be only interested in the male dancers, murmuring to each other about how attractive they were.
Rayleen settled back to enjoy watching the performance, basking in the knowledge that she was quite a bit more knowledgable about such things than most of Mame's wealthy friends. With one part of her mind, she was wondering what her friends on the IH8LTDallas boards were coming up with for her, and with another, she was considering schemes to relieve some of those women of the crushing weight of their wealth. Rayleen felt that such wealth was better-utilized by such as her.
