“I want it,” said Raymond Pascal Gusarov, in a way that made me think he wasn’t used to being denied.
Dr. Mendelson grunted. “I’ll have copies made and leave them with my secretary.”
“At least 300 dpi, so I can use them,” said Raymond.
“Only the best for you,” Dr. Mendelson replied indifferently. He held the door open. “You can pay the secretary for them when you pick them up.”
Raymond cut ahead of me and offered the doctor his hand. “Thank you, Dr. Mendelson. I appreciate it.”
Dr. Mendelson squinted at him. The light blinked off his glasses as he shook the patient’s hand. “My pleasure.” The doctor waved me through ahead of Raymond. I stepped up, because if the doctor’s asking you to do something, you can’t let a patient beat you to it. Twice.
The thought of Raymond Pascal Gusarov nagged at me for the rest of the day. I didn’t know why. Most of the aesthetic patients are trim, fit, and obviously very conscious of their appearance. When Dr. Mendelson asked a young mother if she weighed a hundred pounds, she sniffed and said, “Please! Ninety-five!”
Raymond Pascal Gusarov’s fox face seemed to follow me home as I hurried down Côte-des-Neiges, past Saint Joseph’s Hospital. Even though I was surrounded by people spilling off the blue-and-white STCUM buses, groceries hooked on their arms, walking into businesses hung with tinsel and Christmas lights, I found myself checking over my shoulder, deliberately ignoring the Notre-Dame-des-Neiges Cemetery as I turned right and huffed myself halfway up the hill to my apartment. My grandmother hates that my new address overlooks a graveyard, despite my fancy digs and twenty-four-hour security guard.
I felt slightly better after I locked the door behind me. As soon as I kicked off my boots and dropped my backpack onto the hardwood floor, I googled Raymond Pascal Gusarov. He came up right away.
The same green eyes stared out at me from a dozen different shots. Some of them were black-and-white, most of them color, nearly all of them professionally photographed. He looked younger in some of them, with a rounder face. Less fox, more chicken. But he never looked innocent.
He was on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram. He had a fan page on Facebook with only seventy-seven likes. Even from our brief encounter, I figured it would really bother Raymond Pascal Gusarov that he wasn’t more popular.
I scrolled through his fan page. He frequently posted pictures and videos of himself, little messages that I didn’t want to think too much about, like: I’M DOWNTOWN, BITCHESS!!!! Cum & C me.
My phone buzzed with a message from Ryan Wu: What’s up?
I had to smile. Ryan had just given me the world’s most beautiful iPhone for my birthday. I couldn’t look at it or touch it without thinking of him, which was probably what he had in mind.
I texted back: I’m looking something up.
Work?
Sort of. I didn’t want to text anything else, because I’d just caught my third murderer, and Ryan thought that I should hightail it out of Montreal and join him in dull but safe Ottawa.
Ryan was calling now. I rolled my eyes before I tapped the green key to answer the phone. He knew me too well. “Hey, babe.”
“Are you on another case?”
“Not officially.”
His voice tightened. “I thought you were going to avoid those.”
I didn’t answer for a second.
“Right?” said Ryan.
“I’m just looking something up on the computer. I’m not getting strangled or anything like that.”
“For once,” he muttered, which I chose to ignore. “What are you looking up?”
I couldn’t tell him without breaking patient confidentiality, but Ryan is a computer whiz — he could be so useful on this. “Let’s say that I have someone that I want to look up online. How would I find more information?”
“What have you got right now?”
“Some Google images, his Facebook and Twitter accounts, plus a pretty website with some contact information.”
“What are you looking for?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It just feels fishy to me.”
“You want me to do it?”
“I can’t tell you his name.”
“Okay. So what do you want to know?”
“I want to know more about this guy. I want to know where he lives, and if he’s doing anything questionable.”
I could practically feel him thinking through the phone. Ryan has a fairly massive brain, not to mention a long, lean runner’s build, and — don’t get me started. “You might try looking at the Exif,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The Exchangable Image File Format. I’ll send you some information about it. It not only stores the file format, it tells you the time, date, and GPS coordinates of where the picture was posted.”
You mean you could Snapchat a naughty picture of yourself, and freaks could figure out where you lived? I ignored the niggling voice at the back of my head saying, Isn’t this an invasion of privacy? Are you violating the Hippocratic Oath? Huh, freak?
Instead, I scanned and clicked the various articles Ryan sent me. “This isn’t illegal, though, right?”
He laughed. “How is information illegal?”
Oh, Ryan. He was so innocent sometimes. I told him I couldn’t wait to see him on Sunday, and hung up the phone.
Long-distance relationships officially suck.
I’ve never been a huge computer person. I like them, I use them, but I can’t make them sit up and purr the way Ryan does. So I was pretty excited when I started tracking down Raymond’s locations — mostly downtown and East Montreal, a few in the Plateau. Never Côte-des-Neiges where I lived. Phew. Because of its three hospitals and one university, my neighborhood’s got a lot of students and immigrants, as Mireille, another resident, put it.
I turned back to Raymond Pascal Gusarov’s social media accounts. I clicked on a few links he’d recommended, links that recommended other links, that recommended still more links, most of which were posts by users named TearsOfAClown and Heart’s Blood.
TearsOfAClown had posted pictures of gerbils, hamsters, and other fuzzy animals. Strange. I would’ve guessed that Raymond Pascal Gusarov didn’t love other living things as much as himself. Maybe I was totally wrong about him. Except TearsOfAClown started posting more photos. One hamster was clearly dead, its little body lying stiffly on its side.
In the next new photo, another hamster posed with a tiny chainsaw over the dead hamster.
My heart thudded. What the heck? Was this Photoshop? I couldn’t tell. I’ve got no skills like that.
In the third photo, the dead hamster was decapitated. Its small golden head was sitting on the ground, severed side down, eyes closed, while the chainsaw hamster stood above it, wearing a miniature face mask.
More photos. More decapitated hamsters. The murdering hamster seemed to wink as it held its little chainsaw aloft.
Some of those hamsters, I’m pretty sure, had been alive up until the moment their necks had been cut.
Oh. Em. Gee.
What could I do about this? I thought this guy was as nutballs as you could get, but could we arrest him for cruelty to animals?
So far, I’d only put away people who’d killed other people. I could call the Humane Society, of course, but what if he said the animals were already dead? What if he claimed it was art? I felt sick.
Before attending medical school, my undergraduate literature class had read “The Sin Eater” by Margaret Atwood. Atwood correlated modern doctors with eighteenth-century sin eaters, who used to consume food and drink placed on a deceased body, theoretically absorbing the dead’s sins so that he or she could ascend to heaven while the sin eater got a square meal. For a few days, I wandered around thinking, Atwood’s right; why am I applying to med school, anyway?