Season 3, Episode 12: Cops

"Sorry, Katie," I said. "No fucking way." Then I hung up.

It was a lousy way to treat her. I'll admit that. Except I had neither the inclination nor the resources - especially not the resources - to ride in and fix her problems. What was the point of pretending otherwise? Besides, Katie should have known better than to ask me for what she was asking for.

She'd called in a panic because the previous afternoon the cops had shown up at Craig's house to talk to her about the Les Servantes/Dan Cole mess, and of course Craig acted the ass and made the whole thing 1,000 times worse, to the point that they started trying to interrogate him about it. And that led to a two-hour interview where the two detectives, a guy named Tom Bradshaw and a woman named Louise Prejean, essentially sweated Katie about what she saw at Cole's house.

Worst of all, Abby was there acting as her lawyer, and Abby - who wasn't a criminal defense lawyer; she did international trade deals - was asking more questions than the cops.

It was a bullshit performance Abby had given, and from Katie's description I could tell what had Katie concerned. Abby was doing everything possible to dirty Katie up in front of Craig, because doing that would be a way to make him get rid of her.

And it sounded like it worked.

"I overheard them talking last night," Katie said. "She has Craig thinking about giving little Amy back to her grandmother."

"They say anything about moving you out?" I asked.

"No, but come on. Without Amy, I'm gone next. You know that."

"I agree," I said. "Not good."

"And Oh My God, Oscar, Abby has him completely wrapped around her little finger. She went and got this colossal boob job, like it's just outrageous how she looks now, and Craig has gone STUPID over her now. I know you don't care, but you should see it. He's just an idiot."

"Yes, Katie," I said. "Craig was an idiot before anybody got a boob job, so..."

"Just... OK. It's... whatever."

Then came the ask.

"Look, I get that you can't take me back. I'm not asking for that. But can you please, please talk to Craig and put a good word in..."

Then I cut her off and said the shitty thing I said.

Because Katie was the absolute least of my problems.

I had taken the call while I was in the waiting room at the police station. Amber was in the interview room with Patricia Dufresne, our attorney, talking with Bradshaw and Prejean. I had no idea what was happening in there, and what's more, I was going in next.

I didn't know Patricia. She didn't know me. We didn't really hit it off. I hired her because Drew Haggard, who'd been my best friend since we both pledged Sigma Chi our freshman year at LSU and who was my lawyer, had recommended her. Drew, I knew and trusted. And like a dumbass, I'd given him to Stella without even considering that meant he couldn't represent me when the cops called me in for an interview.

"You want Patricia," he said. "Criminal defense is her game and she's great at it. I'm more like a jack of all trades, plus I do civil litigation. You're better off anyway."

My bank account didn't really agree once I'd paid her retainer.

Patricia said that the legal angle of a case involving Factory Girls was really intriguing and that's why she was interested in representing us. Except I could tell that Amber and Caroline absolutely gave her a case of the ick, and she kept giving me this look like I was a pervert.

I shrugged it off, and I got a kick out of the fact that she had zero idea how to handle Amber, who couldn't have been nicer to her.

I enjoyed Patricia's existential struggle, which makes me a bad guy, I get that, but I at least come about it somewhat honestly.

Or not.

The fact is, the last Patricia to come into my life had been an absolute wrecking ball. And I guess I sort of held a grudge against all the Patricias after that.

Her name was Patricia Gary, and I'd gotten set up with her by my friend Georgia Rogers. She had a job as a secretary for some insurance broker, and she was gorgeous. Georgia knew her from college; they'd been sorority sisters at Louisiana Tech. Georgia was the homecoming queen at Tech in 1996, but she said Patricia was the better looking one of the two and she was right. Which was definitely not a shot at Georgia's looks.

Anyway, I liked Patricia right away, she seemed to like me, we started dating. I'd just come off a nine-month-long relationship with an absolutely psycho girl named Charlotte, who had a really off-putting habit of telling totally provable lies in order to get attention. And what hooked me on Patricia was that she advertised that she was honest to a fault. Thank God, I thought.

Except what I found out was that people who tell you how honest they are can be counted on to be the biggest liars you'll find.

Patricia lied about absolutely everything, and once I started digging to find the truth she wouldn't tell me it was like a bottomless pit of shit her lies were covering up. And as is often the case with the best liars, it was months into the relationship before I started catching on to what was happening.

A year in, I broke up with her. That lasted a month. The fallout from that breakup was so intense - I could tell you that story, but it's a whole episode in itself - that I gave up and got back together with her. Then I couldn't take it and I broke up with her again, and that fallout was also disastrous so I agreed to take her back.

And again, and again. Two years of my life, held hostage to a psycho who would call my clients at three in the morning telling them I was sexually assaulting her. Shit like that.

Drew got me a restraining order. She violated it. She went to jail. I got a call from a reporter I knew at Channel 9 asking whether this crazy story about me dealing drugs was true. It was almost implausible how vindictive and unstable Patricia was. And finally, she called me and told me that she was done with me.

"You've treated me horribly," she said. "But I'm going to be the better person and let you, and all of your toxicity, just go away."

"I think that's the right move for you," I said.

And finally, that was it. I was free. But I'd had the stuffing knocked out of me at that point. It was three years later before I would even ask anybody out on a date again. And when I did, it was Peyton, and that turned into two years of booty calls and plus-ones and a pretty toxic friends-with-benefits cycle that didn't break until I got Amber and then fell in with Erica. If there's a silver lining to that absolute soul-crushing nightmare, it was that I learned to play absolutely everything out in my head, mapping out visions, strategies, tactics and actions, before deciding on a course of action if I was about to do something important.

None of that shit involved Patricia the lawyer, mind you. But being a Patricia, she'd brought it all back. So the initial consultation, with her acting bitchy and superior over me having Amber and Caroline while professing to be interested in the case because of the novel Factory Girl stuff, rubbed me the wrong way.

As did her fee. Did I mention the astronomical fee? Yeah. Anyway, so Patricia took us on as clients, and then she called the cops and scheduled the interviews. They wanted Caroline first, on Wednesday, then Amber and then me on Thursday.

The Caroline issue was the really problematic one. Because Keegan and I had basically nuked her brain. We didn't know what else to do. I didn't have access to Drew in order to know what the cops knew about the upload-download thing after their interview with Stella, so taking her off-line was the only way to insure we'd have control over what she could give the police.

I wasn't concerned about getting arrested, you understand. We hadn't done anything criminal. The prospect of us holding evidence of Cole committing crimes in that basement and not having turned it over to the cops was a little problematic, but it was nothing a decent lawyer couldn't handle.

What terrorized me, and the more I thought it through it got worse and worse in my head, was that if Cole was running a sex trafficking game with some Mexican cartel and he was moving girls in and out of there while using Les Servantes as a cover - he had all the gossips in town whispering that he was building a sex cult of some kind, and the slave-girl costumes he had the Les Servantes girls wearing while cleaning his house were just a set dressing for his front - then anybody close enough to give the cops information they could use was in mortal danger.

It would be nothing for Cole's cartel buddies to send some sicario to take out Keegan and me if they knew we'd been gathering video footage of their sex trafficking adventures in that basement. The smart play, if you're a cartel boss, would be that you cauterize the entire situation.

And I was working under the assumption that Paula and Dan Cole had only been the first step in that process. Sure, it was possible the two of them had gotten on Cole's yacht and made out for the open ocean. It was just as possible they were feeding the crabs on the ocean floor.

How could I insure neither Keegan nor I would be next? Or Stella?

We had to be squeaky clean. We had to go through the police meat grinder and come out quickly with nothing on us. I figured they'd be watching and their perception of us had to be that we didn't have anything incriminating on them. That's how we'd get left alone.

And I had an answer for how that would play out, so I put it in motion. Sitting in that waiting room, I had a reasonably good feeling this was going to work. On the other hand, I had no idea how Amber's interview was going, and not a ton of trust that Patricia The Lawyer would know how to handle a Factory Girl as a client in a police interview.

And the longer I watched that door not open, the shakier my confidence got. I didn't even think Amber had anything to tell them and I was still getting nervous.

Damn, I thought. Could we just get this shit over with?

Finally, the door did open. Detective Bradshaw waved a meaty hand at me to summon me into the interview room, and out popped Amber with a sorrowful look on her face. She didn't say anything as she passed, and I saw her plop down in the chair where I'd been sitting as I made my way into the interrogation.

I shook hands with Bradshaw and his partner, dropped a compliment to Detective Prejean on the bracelet she was wearing - it was a charm bracelet she said her daughter had given her, and she showed me the little pair of handcuffs that was one of the charms and a little pistol in a holster that was another - and sat down next to Patricia.

"How are we doing?" I asked. Patricia nodded.

"Listen," Bradshaw began, "I really appreciate your cooperation so far. I know this is inconvenient. They tell me you're supposed to get interviewed for a story the Business Report is doing on you; I imagine that means you're a pretty busy guy."

"I'm happy to make the time," I said. "What y'all are doing here is more important than my stuff."

"These Factory Girls of yours are fascinating," said Prejean. "I've never seen one before. Amber's... I mean, the whole time we had her in here I really struggled not to see her as human."

I smiled. "I know. Patricia had the same reaction and it absolutely freaked her out. Right, Patricia?"

"No comment," Patricia said, which got a laugh out of everybody at the table.

"I do wish Caroline had been able to give us more information, though," Prejean said. "She would have been at the Cole house, what? Two days before the raid?"

"I think that's correct," I said, "but I'd have to check. But yeah - Caroline was there a lot. I expect Amber told you that Caroline was... traumatized, I guess, by what she saw there."

"And she told you what was happening in the basement," said Bradshaw.

"She did. But my read on it, and until you raided the place and cast some doubt on whether I was right, I guess, was that this was over her head. See, what we thought was going on was that Cole was doing some sort of NXIVM sex cult sort of thing and it was a consensual deal."

And I told them about Cole's mindworm psychological things he'd been doing, and the rumors that Sasha and her gang had been spreading around about the sex cult.

"So I was wrong, I guess," I said. "And my current theory is that Cole may have set all of that loose - he even had the Les Servantes girls wearing slave-girl outfits to clean his house - to sell it as a cover for what was really going on."

"Interesting," said Prejean.

"OK, so I'll need to explain, or give you some context, on Caroline," I said. "So first off, you notice there's a giant difference between her and Amber, right?"

They both nodded their heads.

"OK. There's two factors which play into that. Like you said, Amber's insanely close to being human in how she speaks, acts and so on. Caroline is cute as a button, but she's not quite there."

"She's glitchy," said Prejean. "Like, barely functional."

"Right. I'll get to that. So - and I guess you guys talked to Stella, and she explained that Amber and Katie worked for Les Servantes and it was a three-month lease, basically, for both of them, and then Caroline went to work there. Caroline's head is Stella's and her body is mine, so it's like a joint ownership thing. Anyway, Stella bought the cheapest head the company sells, so the computer that drives her is a lower grade than Amber's."

"OK," said Bradshaw. "Keep going."

"So when we got her, the main thing was that Stella needed her to be able to do maid stuff, but beyond that, what we decided we wanted was to make her have a really high emotional IQ, and it was OK if she wasn't so hot at problem-solving."

"So she's a bimbo," said Prejean.

"Ehhhh, it's probably more accurate to say she's a real sweetheart and she functions sort of like an overgrown kid."

"Why did you do that?" asked Bradshaw.

"When I tell you, you're probably gonna laugh, but Amber wanted a little sister."

"Oh my God," said Prejean. "That is cute."

"I know. But so here's the downside. The Factory Girls' brains are not set up so that they're naturally resilient like a human mind is. Something traumatic can actually damage them. I'm a little out of my depth talking about this but they process all of their experiences by essentially writing code all along the way, and stuff which is too heavy can produce code which wrecks the matrix, so to speak."

"Right," said Bradshaw. "I think I follow. Go on."

"OK, so, the fact that we set Caroline up to be a sweet kid instead of a tough adult meant that weakness in the face of traumatic experiences was an even greater risk than normal. Couple that with the budget CPU she has, and yeah - glitchy. I can't say for sure, but Caroline might very well have been damaged by something she saw at Cole's. But I don't know that for sure, because there's something else."

"Which is?" said Bradshaw.

"So did Amber tell you about how these girls need resets and how they do file backup and file-sifting?"

"This is what we understand," said Prejean. "Once a day or two, you take off their head for an hour or so and it's like clearing a cache on a web browser, and when you put it back on they feel like a million bucks."

"Correct," I said.

"And then every three or four days, they plug in a USB cord at the base of their skull, attach it to a laptop and upload the full contents of their brain to a server, which sifts through those files and then sends back a compacted version."

"Think of it like short-term and long-term memory," I said. "You keep important things in your long-term memory, so like you probably remember where you were on 9/11 but if I ask you where you were last May 16 you'd likely not have a clue."

"OK, right."

"So a couple of days ago, Caroline plugged in for her upload-download, and she hasn't been the same since. She was, essentially, a really sweet kid kinda touched by the angels, and now she's a defective unit you have to tell everything twice."

"And this isn't normal," said Bradshaw.

"Not at all," I said. "Let me ask you - y'all have Millie, right? Stella's Factory Girl? Is she in good working order?"

"She doesn't work at all," Prejean said. "Our tech guys don't know what to make of her. She just sits there shaking and she's unresponsive."

"Well, now THAT is weird. And did you guys mess with her any sort of way?"

"No," said Bradshaw, a little offended. "We locked her in the evidence room and then when we went to get her, she was fried."

"Hmmm," I said. "It could be that getting locked in there was traumatic enough to knock her out, or - maybe she went too long without the upload-download. But the other theory which could explain this is a hack."

"You think somebody hacked into both of these girls?" asked Prejean.

"I don't know how, OK? I'm not the tech guy. I assume you're gonna talk to Keegan Davis, who's my IT consultant in my business and he's turned himself into the wizard of Factory Girl brains. But what I can say is that Keegan and I got a consulting contract from VS Industries because Virgil was convinced that Dan Cole was hacking into his company servers and stealing bid information that he was using to undercut bids on these big industrial projects. Cole had worked for Virgil, you see."

"Well, was he?" asked Bradshaw.

"See, that's the thing. There was absolutely a hack. We couldn't pin down where it came from. We ended up proving it was Cole, though not enough to take to court or anything, by having Virgil build his bid for a big project at BASF offline and put a fake bid on his company servers. Cole swallowed that and Virgil got the contract with his real bid. But from a tech standpoint Keegan couldn't solve it. We had to completely rebuild the file structure on Virgil's company servers and encrypt it so it couldn't be hacked."

"You think Cole went after your Factory Girls." That was Bradshaw.

"It's conjecture," I said. "Maybe Keegan and I can prove it, but probably not if we couldn't prove it in Virgil's case. Cole's geek is really good. But it's a theory I have. Does it pan out? I dunno. And I don't want to lead you guys on a wild goose chase, but if you're asking why the two Factory Girls who were at that house and would have collected video and audio of what was going on there are all of a sudden blue-screened or close to it, that's a theory for why."

The two detectives weren't crazy about that answer, I could tell.

"You know," I said, "the big player in the Factory Girl market? The Z Company? Know who owns most of that?"

"Who?" asked Bradshaw.

"The People's Liberation Army. Chinese Communist Party. Talk to Keegan and he'll tell you these things are the single greatest espionage engines in world history. They can record everything - sight, sound, smells. And upload it all to a server. That's why Keegan built our own upload-download system. I expect you were gonna ask me about that next. He essentially pirated a copy of the system the ChiComs built and then reworked it so that it only did file-sifting and not the nefarious shit Z Company was sending back in the downloads. But we're working with a closet full of servers at Keegan's house, not a full data center in Shenzhen or somewhere, so what we'll keep is 30 days of data and then whatever the file sifter keeps and gives back to the Factory Girl in the download."

"Wait," said Prejean. "You're telling us that you would have a file backup with video evidence of what happened in that basement?"

"In theory, possibly," I said. "But if they could hack Millie and Caroline... I don't know."

Patricia, who'd just been listening, spoke up. "Obviously," she said, "we would need to review those files ourselves before anything could be turned over, and you're going to need to make a legal request..."

"Patricia," I said, my hand on her arm, "I think we're just going to give them everything we have."

She looked at me like I was crazy. Maybe I was. But so far, this had gone just like I wanted.