Of course, there was the lapdance chair in the room behind the stage, or the sex room in the skybox for those customers who wanted more than just a blow job. But her employer took twenty percent, and that seemed unfair. So she had set herself up here on Revere. A private house, her own rate card, and the promise of fabulous sex if the customer guaranteed confidentiality. She would lose her job if the boss found out, and jobs in SL were at a premium these days. Competition was fierce. There were a lot of beautiful AVs out there. And she needed the job to pull in the customers.
She had spent a long time furnishing this house as she imagined a whorehouse might look. Cheap, flashy, gaudy colours, porno pics on the wall. She particularly liked her sex bed. It had nearly a hundred animations, and she had sole charge of the control hud, the window with all its menu options appearing in the top right corner of her screen.
For the moment she was sitting astride the client, naked apart from a flimsy top that barely covered her large, perfect breasts, and the animation she had chosen was making her slide slowly up and down on his very erect penis. She was barely aware of the banalities he was uttering in open chat.
Gray: Yeh. Yeh. Fuck me, baby...
Her mind was somewhere else altogether, creating the future she dreamed of with all that money. Discreetly, and over time, so as not to arouse any suspicion. She could transfer some of it through PayPal to an offshore account in Europe. Take out a dollar debit card. Who would ever know?
Gray: Oh, baby, you turn me on.
She looked at the menu, and selected an option to flip them over into a missionary position. Time to make him do a bit of the work. She uttered some words of encouragement.
Quick: Oh, I’m so horny, lover. Go faster. Gimme all you got.
Gray: Going faster baby. Giving it to you big time.
And she returned to her fantasy, unaware of the female figure lurking in the twilight outside, a shadow against the night sky, hovering on a level with a second floor window that was blacked out so no one could see in. But the hovering figure picked a spot on the outside wall of the house, zoomed in and swivelled left, swinging her POV beyond the wall and into the bedroom, affording her an unfettered view of the sex act being performed on the bed, unseen by either of the participants.
Gray Manly was surprised by the message that appeared suddenly in his IM box, from an AV called Green Goddess. It wasn’t a name he recognised.
Green Goddess: Hi, Gray
Manly’s sexual concentration was broken, to his annoyance.
Gray: Who the fuck are you?
Green Goddess: I’m your worst nightmare, Gray. I know who you are in RL. I know where you live. The name of your wife. Her email address. I don’t think she’s going to be very happy when I tell her you’ve been fucking other women in a virtual world. Or show her the proof. All the photographs I have of your AV in action. She helped you create it, didn’t she? When you first came into SL. She’ll have no doubt it’s you.”
There was a time lapse of nearly half a minute before he responded. Panic apparent in his silence, as he took in the implications of this threat.
Gray: What do you want?
Green Goddess: Simple. Just TP out of here. Now. No questions. Just go.
Manly didn’t need any second telling. He teleported out.
Quick barely had time to register his disappearance before Green Goddess clicked on the vacant blue poseball and adopted the departed Manly’s missionary position on top of the hooker. The animation had previously placed Quick’s hands on Manly’s chest, as if pushing him away. Now they were holding on to the swell of Green Goddess’ ample breasts.
Quick: WTF?
Green Goddess detached herself from the poseball and stood at the end of the bed. And as Quick sat up the intruder’s arm extended toward her, an elaborate-looking handgun held in a steady hand. A single shot rang out, tearing a large hole through Quick’s nearly naked torso. Blood spattered all around the bed and across the wall behind it. And Quick’s screen went black.
Jennifer Mathews had lived the life of the millionairess she had been destined to become. Then a single bullet had torn a hole through her chest, passing through her second life into her first, and bringing her prematurely to that place where all lives end, for both rich and poor.
She lived in a luxury apartment block high on the hill overlooking the marina. Her red Porsche 911, parked in its private slot close to the entrance, was almost completely obscured by the accumulation of police and forensics vehicles in the lot. Unlike the whorehouse on Revere, this three bedroom condo was filled with expensive, Swedish-designed furniture and scattered with oatmeal linen cushions. Signed, limited-edition, Vettriano prints hung on the walls, and thick-piled woollen carpets covered the floors. This was a $10,000-a-month apartment, with a west-facing balcony that looked out over the Pacific sunset. In the sumptuous master bedroom, where walls displayed tastefully erotic Helmut Newton photographs, the white silk sheets of her unmade four-poster bed were stained red by her blood.
The cops had no idea who she was when they first arrived at her apartment, following a panicked 911 call from the maid. When Michael came to photograph her, spreadeagled naked on the bed, she was just another murder victim. A clumsy uniformed officer had already tripped on the power cable that connected her computer to the electric supply, so the screen was dead. And the pale green, open-palmed logo in its top left corner was long gone.
Chapter Eight
It was one of those classic Newport Beach sunsets that began with a reddening sun sinking beyond the mountains of Catalina, and ended with rivers of blood flowing around Balboa Island.
Angela stood on the terrace outside Michael’s office and gazed upon it with wonder. “I get great sunsets from my house, too,” she said. “But nothing like this. It’s the elevation you have here. It’s just spectacular. I feel house envy coming on.”
Michael emerged from the interior with a bottle of chilled chardonnay and two wine glasses that he set on the parapet to fill. He handed one to his therapist and they chinked. “We used to watch it almost every night when we were here. It was a kind of ritual. Sunset, sunrise. The best times of the day.”
They sipped in silence from their glasses, and she raised an eyebrow. “Mmmm. Wonderful wine. Toasted oak. Very subtle.”
“It’s a Bourgogne.”
“Oh? Is that in Napa or Sonoma?” But she could only hold her face straight for a moment, and he grinned.
Michael said, “Mora was something of a connoisseur. It was a kind of passion passed on by her husband. There wasn’t much she didn’t know about wine, and hardly any limit to what she would spend on it.” He shook his head. “Before she met Tom she hadn’t known the first thing about the stuff, except that she liked it. He was really well connected in the wine world, a friend of the Mondavi family. He used to take her to France and Italy and Spain, wine-tasting in all the best vineyards. Teaching her about the different varietals, the best vintages. How to smell a wine, how to taste it, how to differentiate the various flavours.”
He sipped thoughtfully on the buttery white chilled liquid and let it slip slowly over his tongue.
“There is a large wine cellar attached to the garage, kept at a constant 12 degrees centigrade. And she had a room in a wine storage facility in Newport. Between the two there must be thousands of bottles. Tens of thousands of dollars worth of wine.”