Gideon

by Grant Rosenberg

  And all of this could have been avoided.

  I’m only one man, and I know I’m not responsible for the actions of anyone else, certainly not for the heinous acts carried out by psychopathic serial killers. Having said that, I can’t help but feel the yoke of judgment and inaction.

  When I killed Clarence Musselwhite, I felt as if a huge burden was lifted off my shoulders. The burden to avenge the death of my wife and the injury to my daughter, not to mention the pain and suffering Kelly and I endured. There was a strange dark elation that came along with Musselwhite’s final breath.

  The seventeen people I have killed since then brought me no sense of joy. They were abhorrent individuals who had done terrible things to innocent people and they deserved death, but the vengeance was for others to celebrate. I firmly believe that over the course of my work as Gideon, I’ve saved lives and spared future victims from heinous acts of cruelty.

  The case of Hope Miller was unique. It was the first time I had the opportunity to stop a mass murder. If I had killed Hope, would Khalid Nozari have ended up shooting those children? Perhaps, but it’s highly unlikely. If someone would’ve killed Hitler before he rose to power, would another anti-Semitic dictator have risen to power and killed six million Jews? Perhaps, but it’s highly unlikely.

  What I take away from this experience is that what I do DOES matter. I’ll continue to be extremely selective about my targets, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I have an important, if not critical, role in the grand scale of things. I haven’t developed a God Complex and I’m not suggesting that I’m any more significant than the other seven and a half billion people on this earth, but I truly believe that in today’s society, with its crumbling morals and rising conflicts, Gideon is needed more than ever.

  Kelly closed the journal, tears running down her face. Was her father a killer or a hero? Can someone be both? Is it possible to consider murder pro-social?

  She had read her father’s journal cover to cover and now held it in her hands, staring at it, wondering. Should she shred it, should she keep it locked away, or, perhaps, should she use it to record future exploits of Gideon?

  Would she take that next step?

  EPILOGUE

  Two weeks had passed and the painful after-effects of the events that followed David Harper’s death were finally beginning to ease up. Kelly had no illusions about her life ever returning to what it had been, but she was hopeful time would heal at least some of the emotional wounds.

  The clinic was still struggling, but the influx of money from Benedetto helped tremendously, as did the fact that Dr Krishan Danabalan was working for minimal wages (although Kelly did convince him to accept a slight increase in salary). Also, Dr Knudsen made good on his promise to put Kelly in touch with the hospital’s facilities manager and St Francis had already donated three “slightly used” multi-parameter vital sign monitors to the clinic. They were a much-needed upgrade, and the price couldn’t have been better.

  As the final patient of the night was leaving, Alma and Diego entered. Diego looked uncomfortable on his temporary prosthetic, but his face brightened when the staff gave him a warm and boisterous welcome.

  Kelly emerged from her father’s office and broke into a smile.

  “Diego. How’re you feeling?” Kelly asked.

  “Okay,” he said shyly.

  “He is doing very good,” Alma said. “The doctors say they are happy with his progress.”

  “That’s great news,” Kelly said.

  Diego shrugged. “My knee hurts all the time.”

  His mother chided him, “You’ll get used to it.”

  Diego didn’t want to ‘get used to it’. He hated it. He hated being a cripple. He hated being different. Kelly read his face and knew what might brighten his outlook.

  “I just remembered. We have something here that belongs to you.”

  Diego was puzzled. “Me?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” Kelly said. A moment later, Annie came out with a long flat box wrapped in gift paper.

  Diego had no idea what it was, but that didn’t matter. What ten-year-old didn’t love presents?

  Annie laid the box on one of the beds and Diego looked at his mother for permission. Alma shrugged. “Dr Kelly says it’s for you. Open it, mijo.”

  Diego ripped off the paper and prised open the box. When he peeked in, his eyes lit up, then started to tear up.

  “Que es?” Alma asked.

  Diego pulled out a high-tech prosthetic with a carbon steel blade on the bottom.

  “A blade! It’s so cool!” Diego squealed with delight. He turned to Kelly. “It’s just like the one you showed me in that video!”

  Alma looked at Kelly with wonder. “It’s too much. We can’t…”

  Kelly took hold of Alma’s hand and smiled. “The doctors and nurses here wanted to do something for Diego. It’s our pleasure.”

  “You’ve already done so much for us.”

  “The doctors at St Francis did the real work.”

  Alma shook her head. “They nursed him to health, but you saved his life.”

  “I only…,” Kelly began, before Alma cut her off with, “I know what goes on in my family, doctor.”

  Kelly blanched. She wondered exactly how much Alma knew.

  Alma drew Kelly into a hug. “We are all one big family, you know? And family needs to watch out for each other, mija.”

  Kelly decided not to try wading through that cryptic statement. If Oscar had told his mother about their agreement, Kelly was in serious jeopardy. But she highly doubted he’d confess his multiple sins to his mother.

  Alma turned to her son. “Diego, no tienes algo para Dr Kelly?”

  Diego stopped marveling at his new blade and pulled a folded piece of paper out of his pocket, which he handed to Kelly.

  She opened it to find a pencil sketch of her face. It was incredibly lifelike. On the bottom of the page, ‘Thank you’ was scrawled in incongruously bad handwriting.

  “Diego, this is beautiful.” She meant every word, and he knew it. Diego blushed and looked away.

  Alma beamed. “I told you. This one has a future.”

  Kelly smiled. “I think you’re right.”

  It had been two weeks since the fire in the auto repair shop. In that time Pete had seen Kelly twice; once for lunch and once for drinks. Both times were very cordial. He still didn’t know if their relationship was off or on, primarily because neither did she.

  After their last “date”, they agreed to spend a day together the following weekend. Lunch in the park, followed by dinner some place nice in the city, maybe one of the trendy new restaurants springing up in the Mission. Pete took that as a good sign. He loved Kelly and thought she felt the same, but the events in the past month had taken a major toll and created a chasm between them that was proving difficult to cross.

  The case binders on his desk were accumulating a layer of dust. The search for Tommy Moretti’s “mysterious brunette” proved fruitless, and by now the trail was ice cold. The Harper case had become an afterthought within the department, since their official position was that it had been solved. Pete had vowed to himself, and to his partner, that if nothing new turned up in the next few days, he’d move the binders into storage.

  The police in Oakland had also come up dry on the Angelo Moretti case. They’d interviewed the employees at the restaurant, the ex-delivery boy, and any neighbors who would talk to them (none had seen anything suspicious). The facts pointed to Angelo being poisoned, but there were no suspects and no one really cared if the case went unsolved. Angelo Moretti was nothing but dogshit on the bottom of an old shoe. He wouldn’t be missed, and was quickly being forgotten.

  Pete was at his desk, Googling local restaurant reviews, when he got the call. It was Bibble in Arson. “The lab ran the DNA on the briquette in the garage,” he said in between bites of something crunchy. “Guy had no criminal record, but some over-achieving Poindexter in Forensics cross-checked the resul
ts with military records because of the Strider knife and everything.”

  “And?” Pete was starting to get anxious. Somewhere in his well-trained gut he sensed something was about to turn his world on end.

  “The pile of ash was a guy named Anthony Moretti.”

  “Anthony Moretti?” Pete wasn’t expecting that.

  “Yeah. The Army made the lab double-check because they’d listed him as killed in action a couple of years ago. Got caught in an ambush in Afghanistan. Fucking Army. Keep worse records than us. Anyway, the guy must’ve been suffering from PTSD or some such shit to set himself on fire like that.”

  “You’re sure the last name is Moretti?” Pete was still reeling.

  “Yeah. I’ll send the file over.”

  Pete sat back in his chair, letting the incredulity of the moment spin around in his brain. Another Moretti, another strange death. Even though this one was clearly suicide, it was one too many coincidences.

  This threw doubt on everything. The Harper Case, Tommy Moretti and Angelo Moretti. They were connected somehow. They had to be.

  And Pete wasn’t going to stop until he figured out how.

  Early the next morning, Kelly drove out to Colma.

  She was finally ready to have a long talk with her father.