Orbis froze to the spot where he sat. “You found him?”
Manny paused in mid-sentence.
“Where you at?”
“At Manny’s office.”
“Good. Already in da Castro. See you in 30.”
“Wait! What did you find?”
“He’s German,” ROM announced definitively. She slapped down a picture of a smiling blond boy with bowl haircut. It was the same boy in Orbis’s photo. “Meet Matthäus Metz, age 6. Son to Karl and Sybille Metz. He’s got an older sister, Bettina. This photo was taken right before he vanished twenty-two years ago from a market in Essen, Germany.” She looked quietly at Orbis. “And your pic musta been right after he vanished.”
“I really wish you could see this,” Orbis muttered to Scepter.
“So do I.”
Mirrorball, Bang, Tug-of-War, and Paine came into the light shone from the single desk lamp. Paine spoke first. “I’m not sure I understand all this.”
“I’m not sure I buy it,” Bang continued.
“It’s just so speculative,” Mirrorball summed up. His muttonchops, flowing like two party streamers down his chest, glowed in the fading light. “You’re taking a huge leap of faith off of other leaps of faith.”
“I know it sounds far-fetched,” Orbis replied. He had shown them the photo he stole from evidence, and ROM’s age progression of it. “Yes, this kid is blond and Vagabond is black-haired—“
“I know a dye-job when I see one,” ROM said, the African-American pointing to her neon-pink ox-horns. “’Sides, he didn’t dye everything.”
“Moving on!”
ROM tossed her head, “Meant the pit-hair, guy.”
“The point is,” Orbis said, veering the conversation back to the matter at hand. “Is that the working theory goes like this: Vagabond-Matthäus gets kidnapped into the ring. Now, I’m not going to go into the gory details of what probably happened to him, but I think we can all imagine. This goes on until he’s in his mid teens, when Paul buys him.”
“’Buys?’” Mirrorball looked aghast.
“That’s usually how it works,” Orbis sighed.
ROM added, “I hacked his records. Everything I could find. His bank accounts were perfect.” She paused. “Too perfect. As soon as I connected my mind to the database, I found traces of another hack. I’ll bet you money they were cleaned up after he died. But there is this time when suddenly Merryman starts paying bills and shit at the minimum. The year before that, he began dumping a ton of stock. Paid out in cash each time.”
“How much?” Bang asked.
“All of it? Around 12 grand,” ROM replied. “In cash.”
“$12,000 in cash?” Mirrorball and Tug-of-War asked in unison.
“God, I get nervous walking around with a $100 in my wallet,” Paine remarked.
ROM shook her head. “This guy had money all over the world. Cashed shit out in New York, Hong Kong, London, Tokyo, some place called the Isle of Man…”
“Merryman traveled for his job,” Orbis went on. “And he lived high on the hog. It looked like he was preparing a pool of cash to wait for him at whatever location he was at. He was already part of a financial circuit that believes in discretion.”
“But what does cash mean?” Tug-of-War asked.
Bang eyed him. “You’re an escort. You know. Untraceable. Untaxable.”
“You don’t charge another human being on ‘Visa,’” Orbis replied. “I’m betting that he was getting ready to buy Matthäus, who was well into his early teens at this point.”
“Merryman was probably an ephebophile,” Scepter supplied.
“A what?”
“Basically, pedophiles go for pre-adolescents,” the psychologist replied. “Ephebophiles go for teen-agers, which is what Vagabond would have been at the time. And lets face it: then and now, he’s a particularly handsome guy. Must have been a hot commodity from day one.”
“I feel sick,” Tug gurgled.
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