by Willow Rose
“He doesn’t look good,” was all she could give me.
Then she handed the phone to my mother, who was completely out of it, understandably. I told her I was coming back home as soon as possible and to make sure the kids were all right until then.
“Of course,” she said.
“How are Alex and Olivia?”
“Crying,” she said. “I can’t blame them—what a mess. And the door is completely destroyed. Irvin said he can put up a temporary one.”
“Good,” I said. “Thank him.”
“I…I don’t know how this could have happened, Eva Rae. I thought these people knew us, knew you and…and Matt?”
“They do,” I said heavily. “But they have to react when a call like this comes in. My guess is that someone called in an active shooter situation and it gets highest priority, and well…they didn’t know Irvin. They didn’t know he wasn’t the gunman. He could have been holding all of you hostage.”
“But who would make such a call?” she asked.
I think I might know this one.
“Poor Matt,” she continued, and I could just see her shaking her head and tightening her lips like she always did. “He was completely crushed.”
My heart was aching for him as we said our goodbyes and hung up.
I checked online to look for a flight but wouldn’t be able to get on one till the morning. And they were all filled up till the one at ten o’clock. I looked at my watch. It was a thirteen-hour drive. I would get there faster if I drove. I rang Isabella in the taxi on my way to Avis Car Rental and told her, sobbing, what had happened and that I was going back there.
“Of course,” she said. “That is awful, Eva Rae. Send Detective Miller our deepest sympathies.”
As I got into my rented car and plotted in the address to my home, I felt like everything exploded inside of me. I stared at the GPS on my phone, heart pounding in my chest, ears ringing, while thinking about everything.
It had to be him, didn’t it? Of course, it was him. The Swatter had struck again. And this time, it was personal.
“All right,” I said and changed the address in the GPS. I floored the accelerator, and the car jolted into the street with me hissing in anger and spitting as I spoke:
“If that’s how you want to play it, then so be it.”
Chapter 93
The drive was two and a half hours in the wrong direction, getting me farther away from my family, but I still did it. I loaded up on Red Bull and coffee, then drove the entire way there in one stretch, not stopping once, speeding excessively most of the way, cutting about twenty minutes off the drive.
I arrived after midnight, parked the car in the street, and got out. I grabbed my gun between my hands and hurried up the walkway leading to the front door. I looked inside the windows and saw him in his kitchen.
Cooking at midnight, of course.
I lifted the gun, then reached over to grab the door handle, but it was locked. I then snuck around the house, found a back door, and tried that as well.
Also locked.
I stared at it for a few seconds, then made the decision. I kicked the door down. It slammed open, and I rushed inside, holding up my gun. I had barely made it inside before a knife darted through the air, whistling past my face, stabbing me in the shoulder. I saw it too late to move out of the way. The hand holding the knife let go of the handle, and the person stepped backward. The pain in my arm made me drop the gun to the floor. Blood gushed out of the wound, and I fell forward to my knees.
A set of well-polished shoes stood next to me. They stopped by the gun, which was picked up. I lifted my head, wincing in pain from where the kitchen knife had penetrated.
Liam reached down again, grabbed the knife, then pulled it out forcefully. I screamed and held a hand to my wound, which was gushing blood. I felt lightheaded. Liam handed me a towel. I pressed it against the wound, then looked up at him, biting back the pain.
“Don’t look so surprised,” he said. “I was expecting you.”
I closed my eyes, trying to remove the black spots dancing in front of them, obscuring my sight, then rose to my feet, straining with pain.
Liam had his back turned to me, and I stormed toward him and slammed into him headfirst.
“You bastard!”
Liam was pushed forward and fell to the tiles, sliding across them. I stood above him, grunting like a bull.
“Matt’s son was shot. Elijah was shot. Because of you.”
Liam lifted the gun and pointed it at me, signaling for me to back away. I didn’t obey. I stared down at him, blood dripping from my wound onto his black shoes.
“What do you care? You don’t love him anyway,” he said and stood up. I felt like punching him, but the gun in his hand kept me from it. And perhaps the throbbing pain in my arm and shoulder.
“You don’t know anything about that,” I hissed. “I have loved Matt my entire life.”
“Why are you running away from him then?” Liam asked. “In all the time I have known you, that’s been all you’ve done.”
I shook my head. “What’s it to you?”
The look in his eyes changed. He burst forward, grabbed me around the throat, and lifted me in the air, pressing me against the wall behind me. I screamed and then fought to breathe, gurgling. Liam kept pressing harder and harder until my face felt like it was about to explode.
“Please…Liam, let…me…go.”
His expression changed, and he let go of me suddenly. I slid to the floor below, coughing and fighting to catch my breath. I crawled across the floor, trying to stand up, but he kicked me hard in the stomach, and I fell, face first, unable to move.
“That was exactly what she said,” he said and kicked me again. “But you didn’t let her go. You and your pigs just let her die right there while she fought for her life.”
Chapter 94
“Her…” I spoke between coughs, spitting up blood. “You…mean…your wife, you mean Anna?”
Another kick fell, this time in my side. It felt like he broke every rib in my body.
“Don’t you dare say her name. People like you…pigs like you don’t even deserve to say her name.”
“She was killed, right? She didn’t die from pancreatic cancer like you told everyone. She was killed. At a traffic stop?”
“So, you know, huh? How did you find out?”
I rolled to the side while holding a hand to my stomach. “There were two notes in the reports from the blast in D.C. Two numbers had been written on the side of the document. One was the case file number from your arrest in Orlando. When I ran the other number in the system, your wife’s story came up. Someone in the FBI had run your name in the system and found those two cases and put the numbers in there. They just didn’t put the pieces together the way I did because they’re not profilers. They thought we were still looking for a terrorist organization, not just one mad lunatic. They didn’t know what I knew, that the person we were looking for is someone who holds a grudge against the police because of what happened to him, or rather to the one person he loved the most in this world.”
Liam sat down in a chair heavily, placing the gun on the table in front of him. I looked at it, then at him. I tried to move, but it hurt too much. He stared into thin air, tears shaping in his eyes.
“I did love her more than anything in this world; you’re right about that.”
“But she was sick?”
“She got sick. Six years ago, she suddenly lost her appetite. She was fading away from us, and then she got the diagnosis. She went through treatment, but it wouldn’t kill it. It kept eating at her, and soon she was nothing but skin and…”
Liam stopped talking. I could tell he was getting emotionally distressed by talking about this. He grabbed the gun in his hand again and clenched it.
“But then she got better, much to everyone’s surprise,” he said, clearing up suddenly. “She got better for a little while. She was still heavily medicated, but we had hope,
you know? The doctors said she was responding well to the chemo and that the second time around, it was like she was finally fighting off the cancer. She was getting better. We thought she might actually make it. Then, one day in October, five years ago, she wanted to go buy herself a new scarf. We had a charity event we were going to the coming weekend, and she wanted to look nice for that. I told her she didn’t have to go if she wasn’t up for it, but she said that for once, she actually felt like it. She had energy enough for small talk and all that other stuff that she used to hate. Going to this would make her feel normal again, she said. Like she didn’t have cancer. So, I agreed. I asked her if I should drive her to the store, but she brushed me off, saying I was treating her like she was a child. I laughed and kissed her on the cheek before she left. I can still feel her skin against my lips when I think back on it. She tasted like fall, like rain and fallen leaves.”
“But she never made it home?” I said, finally able to push myself up on my only good arm and sit up while groaning heavily in pain.
Liam shook his head. “No. She didn’t. Because of people like you.”
Chapter 95
“I saw it happen on the footage from the officer’s body camera,” Liam said. He had taken my phone from my pocket and was playing with it in his other hand, turning it between his fingers while talking. “My lawyer had it released to me. I wanted it; I wanted to see what had happened, how she died. At first, I wished I had never seen it, but today, I’m happy that I did. It opened my eyes to what is really going on out there.”
I stared at my gun in Liam’s hand while blinking my eyes to focus better. My head was spinning from all the pain, and I couldn’t really see straight. I needed to buy myself some time.
“So, what did happen to her?” I asked. “How did she die?”
Liam sniffled and wiped his nose with his hand. “She was stopped because she failed to signal when turning at an intersection. That’s the police officer’s story. In the video, you see him walk up to her car and open her door. Anna is scared at this point. You know how we hear all those stories. She’d seen those videos online. It was her biggest fear—that Tim would be one day be chased by the police and killed in the street. You don’t know this, being who you are, but as a black person, this is a mothers’ greatest fear and one you live with every day. A simple traffic stop can become deadly. Now, Anna was scared, naturally, so she started to scream when the officer opened her door. She yelled at him and asked him why she was being stopped. “You’re coming into my own car and threatening me,’ she yelled. ‘Why am I being apprehended? Why are you opening my door?’”
“And all the officer yells back is, ‘Get out of the car. Get out of the car.’ The officer has now pulled out a stun gun that he is pointing at her while he continues to yell at her to get out of the car. Anna doesn’t dare to get out, so she keeps yelling for him to explain why he has stopped her. ‘I will light you up,’ he says. But Anna doesn’t come out of the car. She is screaming in fear, and he reaches inside, then shocks her with the stun gun. Anna screamed even louder, and then he told her again to ‘Get out of the car.’ She finally got out, and he used the stun gun again. Now he was mad and yelling at her, and you see her fall to her knees, screaming, while he shocks her again and again. Anna begins to scream for him to stop, telling him that she has cancer, but he doesn’t listen. He keeps going, again and again, shocking her a total of seventeen times. All you can hear is her screaming, ‘Let me go; let me go.’ Finally, she fell to the ground, lifeless, and that’s when the seriousness of the situation finally occurred to the pig. Anna was taken to the hospital in an ambulance and died that same night from heart failure.”
“Because she was weak after a year of chemo and radiation treatment,” I said. “Her heart couldn’t take it.”
“At exactly eight fifty-six that night, the doctor at the hospital declared her dead. And my world crashed. She was my everything.”
“Why didn’t you tell the world? Why did you keep it a secret?” I asked. “You could have filed a civil lawsuit?”
“My lawyer advised me against it. I was too weak back then, too destroyed with grief to understand how powerful it would have been if I had spoken up right away. But later, I could see the possibilities in it, as soon as the haze was gone, and I could see things more clearly.”
“That was when you began swatting,” I said. “Seeing how it hurt the officers and discredited them, showing the world what was happening by choosing victims that were live broadcasting while gaming and who were famous and had millions of followers who would be angered by this and maybe one day take it to the streets. That is what you wanted, right? To change the system by breaking it apart. But what I really want to know is how did you do it? When I found out that you fit the profile almost perfectly, I kept going back to that one thing that didn’t fit.”
Liam gave me a look. “And what was that?”
“Your age,” I said. “I was so sure the Swatter was a man in his early twenties or maybe late teens, not a man in his late forties. How did you even think of swatting? How did you learn how to do it so you weren’t traceable? My profile was a hacker and a gamer, and I’ve seen you with a computer. That, you are not.”
Faster than I could react, Liam rose to his feet and rushed toward me. He slapped me across the face with the gun. I fell backward, sliding across the tiles until I hit the wall behind me with a deep moan. Blood filled my mouth. Tasting it, I panicked. I rose to my feet, stumbling behind curtains of blood in my eyes, biting back the pain. I tried to run forward, to get away from him, but my head snapped back so hard my feet flew out in front of me. Liam had grabbed me by my ponytail, yanking me toward him, and was dragging me across the floor toward a door. He opened it, slamming it against the wall behind it, and a staircase leading down appeared. He dragged me by the hair downward, my back bumping on every step, me screaming for him to stop.
He reached a door in the basement, then grabbed the handle and pulled me up, so he could look into my eyes. His words came hissing between his teeth.
“I have something to show you.”
Chapter 96
THEN:
Hunter Perry, aka DeVilSQuaD666, stared at his computer screen. His fingers touched the keyboard lightly, but then he removed them. He hadn’t been on that darn thing for weeks now. After his last conversation with FanTAUstic345, he hadn’t dared even to log on. He was so terrified that the police might be able to trace him.
It had gone wrong. What was supposed to be a prank had gone so terribly wrong, and it was all his fault. He hadn’t meant for the guy to get shot; he had just wanted to scare him a little and make a thousand dollars. But the guy had been shot, and that terrified him. Because now they were calling him a murderer.
He had watched them say it on the news when he was upstairs with his grandmother. Hunter lived with her since his own mom couldn’t afford to take care of both him and his younger sister. She worked two jobs, and yet it was barely enough for one child. He had never known his father.
“Whoever made the call might be charged with murder,” the reporters had said over and over again.
“Swatting is no prank,” some guy in a suit had said. The text below him told Hunter that he was the US Attorney for the District of Oregon. “Sending police and emergency responders rushing to anyone’s home based on utterly false information as some kind of joke shows an incredible disregard for the safety of other people. In this case, it resulted in murder and should call for a prison sentence.”
“Prison,” Hunter now said to himself, sitting in his room. He shook his head violently and felt tears in his eyes. He was fifteen for crying out loud. How could he go to prison? It was just a joke?
Hunter felt his eyes burn from all the crying he had done the past weeks. His grandma wasn’t home, so he stood up and walked upstairs to the kitchen, where he found a pack of donuts that he opened and began to eat. The house was dark and empty, and Hunter didn’t like it. He didn’t feel safe anywh
ere these days, and every day, when he went to school, he was terrified of being picked up by the police. If he saw a cruiser, he’d run. He felt like everyone knew what he had done; all eyes were staring at him no matter where he went. But worst of all, he hated that he’d probably hurt his grandma. She’d be so disappointed once she found out what had happened. It would all be revealed. Not just the swat that led to a man dying, but also all the others. The bomb threats to his school, the times he’d cleared out conferences far away, like the Comicon in Chicago, but also all the others. People online had paid him to call in bomb threats to their school so they’d get time off. Some had even paid him to swat other gamers because they killed them in the game. Hunter had never thought someone would actually get killed from it. Especially not some stranger that wasn’t even the person he was trying to swat.
Hunter sighed and swallowed the rest of his donut. He felt awful. But he couldn’t really tell anyone what he had done, could he? He’d end up in jail.
Hunter heard a noise coming from outside and gasped. He walked to the window and looked out into the street. A trash can had tipped over on the pavement. That was probably the loud noise.
It’s okay, Hunter. You’re fine. You’re safe. The guy was killed in Oregon. It’s so far away from California. They’ll never find you. Stop worrying.
Hunter heaved a sigh of relief, then walked away from the window. He wanted to play on his computer so badly but still didn’t dare. He then spotted his old PlayStation and decided he’d just revive some of the old games. He’d missed playing them anyway.