Read Online The Ghost Network by Catie Disabato - Free Book Online Page A

guilty on both counts. The judge sentenced her to life in prison, without the possibility of parole for twenty-five years. In her ten years of incarceration so far, she’s agreed only to two interviews, the aforementioned one with Anna Kirkpatrick, during which she expressed remorse for the life she took but excitement that the city took the opportunity to “better the property” she had damaged by building an improved new station. The secondinterview, actually a series of interviews, was with me, toward the end of the assembling of this book. She spoke to me because Berliner negotiated the meeting.
    When I asked her if she felt remorse for killing a security guard, she snapped, “Yes, obviously. I’m not a murderer.”
    “But, you admit to killing someone?”
    “If you don’t mean to kill someone, you aren’t a murderer, not in your heart. My violence accidentally caused a person’s death. That’s unfortunate, I have nightmares, I’ve cried, but I’m not a murderer.”
    She also told me the article about her in Vanity Fair , written by Nancy Jo Sales, and the movie based on that article, directed by Sofia Coppola, are both “complete bullshit.” However, she did like that she was played by Jennifer Lawrence in the movie, even though Lawrence looks nothing like Kraus.
    During our conversations, Kraus barely spoke about the New Situationists. Although I now know more about the New Situationists than anyone outside the membership ever has, except Molly Metropolis, the organization remains a mystery to me. Berliner says he still doesn’t know the names of the New Situationists’ leaders. He wouldn’t give me the names of any of the members, or even describe them using pseudonyms. He insisted that he could only speak about people who were already “out in the open,” and he told me that I was lucky the person he was the most “emotionally involved” with was already identified, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to talk about the New Situationists at all. If someone other than Kraus had been arrested, this book couldn’t exist.
    Everything Berliner did admit, the details of his induction party for example, he ran by his “higher-up” before he told me. “So, the New Situationists still exist?” I asked him.
    “Yes and no,” Berliner said vaguely, as was typical in the conversations we had about the group: “There were a few projects in motion when the group disbanded, I didn’t even know about themduring the real days, or until the whole thing with Cait, but a skeleton crew, myself included, has to keep them going now. They’re not the kinds of things we’d want to stop in the middle.”
    “Can you tell me about any of these projects?”
    “Not really.”
    “You can’t tell me anything at all? Do they take place in Chicago?”
    “I really can’t say.”
    “Is someone keeping you from talking? Threatening you in some way?”
    “No. When I said ‘can’t’ before, I meant ‘won’t.’ ”
    “Are they paying you anything to keep quiet?” I asked.
    “They are paying me to work, and I keep quiet because I want to.”
    “How much are they paying you?”
    “I won’t say.”
    Berliner delivered all these refusals to speak with a schoolboy smirk, smoking cigarettes and looking very pleased with himself.
    “So, no new projects, no new members?” I asked.
    “No new projects,” he said, “But as for members, I might say Taer was a member. Before she died. And, after everything happened, we asked Nix if she wanted to join so we could look after her. We offered her a job.”
    “When you say we,” I asked, “do you mean to imply that you have become a decision-making member of the New Situationists?”
    “I really won’t say,” he said.
    When I asked Nix about her membership in the group, she said, “I didn’t need their help, but I did need a job and the money’s good.”
    “Are you still working for them?” I asked.
    “I am and I’m not,” she said.
    “Talking to me