by Cubed, Magen
“You sleep recently?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Long night. Domestic dispute.”
She smirked. “Somebody I should know about?”
“Don’t worry about it. Any info on the latest attack?”
She shook her head and put her phone in her pocket. “Same as last time. Remote detonator, homemade explosive device from commercial cleaning chemicals and fertilizer.”
“Any witnesses?”
“If anybody saw anything, they’re either dead or not talking.”
“He’s not done yet.”
“I know. Which is why I’m here, actually.” She opened her car door, stooped to reach across the seat, and produced a slim file folder. “The name Damon White ring a bell by any chance?”
“Can’t say that it does.” He shuffled through the pages quickly and skimmed over the uneventful life of Damon White. Amid the documents, there were photographs of Rebecca from Sonya’s wallet, a death certificate, and a plot at Primrose Pine Cemetery. Her white dress gave him pause. “Why?”
“His wife came in to talk to me the other day. It seems she’s convinced he’s our bomber.”
“She have any proof?”
“It’s all circumstantial, but it matches your profile. White male, forties, a chemist at a pharmaceutical company. About a year ago, he was laid off from his job in a routine downsizing. Then, he lost his daughter in an accident at a subway station in Camden and he disappeared six months ago, went completely off the grid. Cashed out his 401K around the same time, which would explain how he had the cash to fall off the face of the earth. I can’t do much without the FBI looking over my shoulder, but from what I’ve looked into, her story checks out.”
“Where did his daughter die?”
“St. Bart’s,” she answered. “And he used to bank with Welsh Regional until they foreclosed on his house in Plymouth Beach.”
“And if I had to venture a guess, he lost his insurance with IGC when they cut his benefits?”
She nodded.
“So, he hit everybody who wronged him, one by one. The pattern fits.” He reshuffled the papers and closed the file. “What do you think?”
“I think he’s worth looking into, and I think you might have an easier time doing that than me.”
“You said you weren’t into this vigilante crap.”
“I’m not, but I also can’t talk you out of it.”
“Not really.” Looking at Rebecca’s photo again, he sighed. He remembered her smiling face on the train and the flutter of her white dress on the street beckoning him to the bank. Of course, he could say nothing of that. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Do you think I’m an asshole?”
She laughed. “Is that a trick question?”
“It’s been brought to my attention that I’m not a team player.”
“That’s not exactly news to you, right?”
“I’m being serious.”
“You’re not exactly an easy person to be around, no. Neither am I, really, so that’s probably why we broke up in the first place.”
He leaned against her car door and slumped his shoulders. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For back then. For pushing you away. For making it impossible to be with me.”
“You know we don’t need to have this conversation, Kyle. It’s in the past.”
“It doesn’t feel much like the past these days, does it?”
She sighed. “You know why I didn’t come visit you in prison?”
He shook his head even though he already knew the answer.
“You scared the shit out of me when you and Douggie got picked up that night. Hell, you scared all of us, but I knew you’d rather do something drastic than ask for help. That was the way you guys were raised, and I get that. That’s when I realized, no matter how much I loved you—because I did love you, Kyle—we couldn’t keep doing this. I couldn’t go back and see you in prison, because no matter where you were, there’d always be that wall between us. You’d see to that, one way or another.”
Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he nodded. “Sounds about right.”
“That doesn’t make it any less chickenshit.”
“Maybe not, but I can still be sorry for it.”
“Okay. Apology accepted, then.” She shrugged. “So, now what?”
“About what?”
“The case.”
“I don’t know yet,” he admitted. “But I’ll get back to you when I find out.”
IV.
Norah never spent time in East Essex before she packed up her apartment for Bridger’s boarding house. She came from Somerset—the land of four-bedroom homes, manicured lawns, and corporate retail chains on every corner. In East Essex, delis and stores run by the grandchildren of the immigrants that established the borough in the 1920s populated every corner. Some shop owners were conservative; others were reformed. Everyone sold imported goods, handmade treats and kosher products with labels she couldn’t read.
Adam made the best of it on his shopping trips with Bridger’s help, but Norah didn’t have the luxury of a tour guide much of the time. Most days, it took Norah the afternoon to make her biweekly grocery run. Hannah roamed the aisles behind Norah while she compared canned soups and bagged breads she had never even heard of. The years spent walking the poverty line had taught her to be frugal and shop wherever she could afford. She tried to acclimate to shopping local and making the best of her resources. But with a picky child to care for, there was no winning the battle.
Eventually, Norah gave up, gathered Hannah close to her side, and boarded the subway bound for Camden and its selection of department stores and organic food markets. By 4:00, with bags loaded in her arms, she walked Hannah back to the nearest station. On East Chase and 28th, one block from the station entrance and separated by Culver Park, people lined up. They waited in edgy, angry rows, driven toward a security checkpoint flanked by armed police officers. Each person was patted down. Their pockets were emptied. Wands passed over them, looking for explosive devices or incriminating evidence. Coming to the back of the line, Norah leaned forward to speak to the woman ahead of her.
“What’s going on?”
The woman shook her head. Her long, brown ponytail swayed down her back. “Nobody knows. There was some big press conference two hours ago and now cops are putting up security checks all over the city.”
“Can they even do that? Just stop people and check them on the street like this?”
“Apparently. I have a class in twenty minutes and there’s no way I can get there with this mess.”
“Yeah, and I’ve got a week’s worth of groceries and a hungry kid to get home,” Norah said. “Is there another route I can take?”
“I don’t know. You can try the Latham Station, maybe?”
With a shout, a skirmish erupted in the line next to Norah’s. Two men arguing with a cop were shoved to the ground in a flail of kicking legs and eager fists. The commotion slipped out into the surrounding rows as people startled out of place. Some sidestepped the scene; others craned their necks for better looks. She found herself pinned between two clusters of disquieted people as they began circling around the skirmish with raised voices. Setting down the bags, she called for Hannah to stay close and held her daughter by her side.
At the head of the line, a police officer got on a megaphone to demand their silence and cooperation. Another man threw a punch and struck a cop handcuffing a man on the ground. Hannah shrieked and stumbled as shifting elbows and knees knocked her off-balance. When the screaming came, so did the pushing as people shoved and stomped. Bodies clashed with the metal of police batons as uniformed officers rushed in to break up the violence.
Norah picked up Hannah and held her tightly. Around them, the air popped and crackled, swelling hot and fast. Without thinking, Norah opened the ground beneath them: first the concrete, then the m
etal and the soil, which swallowed them in a wide throat. Hannah screamed as they passed through the street to fall onto the subway platform below, clinging to her mother’s shirt with fisted hands. Norah landed flat on her back in a hard thump. Hannah fell on top of her for a softer touchdown. Opening her eyes, Norah watched the ground close like a suture. The concrete mended itself of its own accord, leaving no evidence of their safe passage.
Hannah gasped, pushing her way out of her mother’s lap. “Did you do that?”
Norah hauled herself upright and stared at the final fissure as it closed itself over. “I have no idea,” she muttered, “but Adam can do the shopping next time.”
V.
“That’s him?” Clara stared at Bridger’s phone, squinting at the grainy and inconspicuous face of Damon White. “That’s the guy who’s been killing us all this time?”
“He was outside Donut Delight,” Bridger said. He searched the fridge for alcohol. “Motherfucking Donut Delight.”
Clara wrinkled her brow. “He looks like my old gym teacher. How anticlimactic.”
“What were you expecting?” Adam asked. He sat at the table, nursing a beer of his own. “Osama Bin Laden riding a polar bear?”
“For starters, maybe.”
“Look, the point is, I know what this asshole looks like.” Bridger popped open his beer bottle and took a long drink. “He can’t hide forever.”
“What’re you going to do about it?” asked Clara, passing the phone back to Bridger.
He shrugged. “Don’t know yet. Baby steps.”
The shuffling of keys at the front door signaled Norah’s return, as did the telltale click-clacking of Hannah’s braces. Hannah ran into the kitchen and came to a harsh stop at the end of the table, all but slamming into Adam. He caught the seven-year-old and pulled her into his lap.
“Whoa, whoa—what’s wrong?”
“Don’t go out,” Hannah huffed, red-faced from running. “Policemen are stopping people and hitting them.”
“What?” Adam looked to Norah as she walked in and dropped into the nearby chair. “What happened? Are you guys okay?”
“Barely.” Norah ran a hand through her tousled hair. “Cops have security checkpoints set up coming in and out of Camden. We ended up in the middle of a huge street fight and I had to haul ass out of there.”
“What’re they looking for?”
“I don’t know. They’re just shaking everybody down, controlling what comes in and out of the city. It’s getting crazy out there.”
“We nearly got killed,” Hannah said. “Mom saved us. She used her powers.”
Adam shot Norah a proud look. “You saved her, huh?”
“We phased through the floor,” Hannah said matter-of-factly.
Norah shrugged. “I’m a mom.”
“What does phase mean?”
“She rearranged her molecular structure to pass through solid objects,” answered Clara. “You know. Comic book stuff.”
“I didn’t know you could phase,” Adam said to Norah.
“Neither did I.”
Kyle rounded the corner and took off his jacket. He saw everyone in the kitchen and stopped. “What?”
“Where’ve you been?” Clara asked sourly.
“Out,” he answered. “Picked up a new lead. Not sure how it’ll pan out, but it’s better than nothing.”
“I’ll do you one better.” Bridger handed him his phone. “Guess who I saw outside Donut Delight.”
Kyle looked at the photo. His blood felt hot. “Where was this?”
“In Camden,” Adam answered, bouncing an eager Hannah on his knee.
“I had a fit and saw him,” Bridger said. “Tracked his ass down. I don’t know what we’ll do with it, but it’s a start.”
Returning the phone, Kyle pulled Amanda’s file from his jacket pocket and shuffled through its contents. He pulled out a DMV photo. “This the guy?”
“Yeah,” Bridger said, looking it over. “That’s him. Who is he?”
“Damon White,” Kyle answered. “He’s the guy we’re looking for.”
Chapter Twenty-One
I.
It was 3:00 a.m. when Sonya White’s phone rang in the pocket of her purse. Across the room, the sound was enough to wake her. She got up to rummage around the contents of her bag on the dresser. There was no name on the caller ID. Staring into its warm glow, she held her breath.
“Hello?” she answered, voice soft with sleep. “Who is this?”
“Sonya?” her husband murmured into the phone.
The sob broke her before she could stop it. “Damon. Oh, god.”
“I know it’s late. I’m sorry, I just—I wanted to talk to you one last time.”
“What? No, please. Don’t hang up. We can talk about this.”
“There’s nothing to talk about. Things are moving a lot faster than I anticipated. There have been... complications, I guess. It’s better this way. It’ll end soon. I need it to end soon, for both of us.”
“Damon, you don’t have to do this. You can turn yourself in. Maybe they’ll work with you, get you treatment. They can help you.”
“It’s too late for that, Sonya. And I’m sorry, I really am, but I have to do this. You know that.”
“No, I don’t know that. Don’t do this. There’s always another way. You don’t have to kill anyone else.”
He sighed. “I’m sorry, Sonya. I love you.”
The line clicked. Damon never called back. Sonya never went back to sleep, either, instead sinking to the floor with her face in her hands. Her daughter was dead and soon her husband would join her in a plot at Primrose Pines.
II.
Kyle stared into the pit left of the IGC building in the center of District Heights. His eyes followed the scorched remains of concrete and steel as the supporting walls jutted from the debris, burnt and blown from behind the safety of tarps and police tape. The rise and fall of manmade violence told him everything he needed to know.
It told him that Damon White was a ghost of a man that languished in empty alleys across the EBC. He had no employment history since losing his job as Project Manager at Pharmasuite and no credit card history for the last six months. There was no money coming in or out of the account he once shared with his wife before he disappeared, and there were no other known accounts in his name. Of the many numbers and addresses attached to him, each lead Kyle to abandoned lots and disconnected lines. It left Kyle to wander from scene to scene—from the subway to the bank to the wreckage of the Camden high-rise—staring into what remained of it. He stayed out at night to retrace unseen footsteps. He stayed in the attic at first light and looked at the evidence cobbled together from visions and grainy pictures.
A trail of dead followed in the wake of Damon White and his daughter Rebecca, the memory of the girl at the heart of this mess. Rebecca was the one thread—the one persistent fact that made the rest of the pieces fit together. She was dead at eight after an accident on a subway platform in Camden, a dancer who had her mother’s clear eyes and her father’s brown hair. Of course, Kyle could say nothing of this to Amanda or the others yet. He needed more to go on than the ghost of a dead girl to make his case for the death of Damon White.
At 2:15 in the afternoon, on one of many trips he made to Camden to stare into the void left in the guts of District Heights, Kyle noticed the car parked across the street from his perch at Al’s Diner. It was a broad, black sedan with state plates and dark windows. It had been parked on the curb for the last thirty minutes. No one had been in or out, and the sight of it put a rock in his gut. He gathered his files to hide them in the inside of his jacket, paid his tab at the cashier’s stand, and left. Crossing the street, he casually approached the rear door and opened it. He slid across the backseat before the black suit in front saw him, pulling the gun from his hip and placing it against the other man’s cheek.
“I’m going to ask you some questions,” Kyle told him. “And you’re going to answer me. You mak
e a phone call, scream, fight, or do anything to attract attention to us, and I will shoot you. Do you understand me?”
The driver nodded, his hands rooted to the steering wheel.
“Why are you following me?”
“I’ve been sent to keep tabs on you,” the man answered calmly. “That’s it.”
“By who?”
“I’m not government, so don’t flatter yourself. I represent a private security firm.”
Kyle swallowed. “Kyrios Securities.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You’re a name on my assignment sheet. I don’t know and I don’t care.”
“What does this have to do with Damon White?”
“I already told you: you’re just a name. I was ordered to watch you and report my findings to my superiors. That’s all I know.”
A pause. Kyle finally holstered his gun. “If I catch you tailing me again—”
“I know. You’ll shoot me.”
Kyle slid out and slammed the door behind him.
III.
Adam’s lunch break began at 1:00. Caitlin knew to come by the garage at 12:45. She was waiting in the lobby for Adam’s blond head to bob by the partition window on his way to the office. It was 12:53 when he appeared at the doorway, wiping the grease from his hands en route to the employee washroom. She looked like she thought about smiling. He knew better than to trust it.
“I won’t take your money,” he told Caitlin firmly. “You can stop trying.”
“I didn’t bring it this time,” she said. Her gaze moved slowly from his eyes down to his feet, sizing him up like a cat would a mouse. “Are you busy?”
“I was just about to go to lunch.”
“Then, can we talk?”
He hesitated to answer. “Why?”
“You see him every day. I don’t.” She shrugged a thin white shoulder. “I want to know how he’s doing.”
“You should talk to him yourself.”
“You might have noticed he ran away from home, Adam.”
He sighed. “Give me a moment to clean up, okay?”