by B. E. Scully
She was as attractive as any other kid, but she put no effort into her appearance. She was smarter than most, but she got mediocre grades in school and only studied subjects that interested her. She was clever and had a sharp sense of humor, but she hid it from most people behind a shield of silence. Although Blythe and Sam’s friends were too polite to say it, Blythe knew they considered Justin the smart, charming one and Emma the dull, awkward one. And honestly, who could blame them? Emma only showed her sharper side to her family and the occasional friend that never seemed to last long.
Sometimes, that sharpness was as exacting as a surgeon’s scalpel. Blythe could still remember a time when Emma was no more than thirteen or fourteen-years-old. The advertising company where Blythe worked had spent months designing a logo for an awards ceremony celebrating the city’s top female chefs. They’d come up with a woman’s mouth open just slightly, the tip of her tongue protruding toward some tantalizing imaginary dish. The design made it all the way to the marketing team and then hit a big pink wall.
Blythe knew there was going to be trouble when marketing called a meeting to “dialogue” about the design. The head of the marketing team stood in front of a huge screen projection of the logo. Then he hit a few keys, and the logo turned sideways.
“This” he said, tracing the outlines of the cherry-red mouth, “looks exactly like the lips of a vagina. And this,” he added, pointing to the tongue, “looks exactly like the tip of a penis.”
The room went silent. Blythe considered pointing out that one, the logo wasn’t supposed to be turned sideways, and two, the tip of a penis would technically be going into the vagina lips, not coming out. But she decided on silence instead.
One of the marketing director’s assistants gave the design team a reassuring smile. “I’m sure no one intended any such representation. But we have to consider how offensive this logo might be perceived, especially since the ceremony is meant to honor women chefs.”
By lunch, the vagina-penis controversy had exploded all over the company. Some people thought the head of marketing, who had the triple-strike privilege of being a white male heterosexual, was an outrageous sexist for projecting his fantasies of female genitalia onto a simple design of a mouth. Others thought the logo clearly was sexual in nature, and would have happily called the head of the design team a sexist if she hadn’t been a woman. Some women felt violated by the design, and some felt violated by the controversy itself. There were calls for company-wide sensitivity training and a possible sexual harassment investigation.
The logo was put on hold until the company president could weigh both sides. And even though the majority of men and women thought the whole thing was ridiculous, being neither outraged nor offended didn’t count as a side.
At home one night with a commiserating bottle of pinot, Blythe spread a poster-sized printout of the infamous mouth and tongue in front of her on the kitchen table, wondering where they’d gone wrong.
The rest of the family was cleaning up after dinner, and Sam came over and looked at the logo. “I hope my penis doesn’t look like that.”
Blythe considered the offending pink tip. “Eh, not in good lighting.”
“Ouch! I knew you were sneaking parts of my anatomy into your designs.”
“Don’t tell that to my boss. He’ll think it’s my vagina and I’ll be arrested as a pornographer.”
Despite Blythe and Sam’s many candid conversations with their children about sex, the words “penis” and “vagina” still sent Justin into fits of teenage-boy hysterics. But Emma came over and stood beside Sam, studying the design with the seriousness of an art scholar.
“It doesn’t look like any of the vaginas I’ve seen,” she said. “It looks like a mouth with a tongue poking out. And even if it does look like a vagina, so what? Is looking like a vagina something bad?”
The next day, Emma went to the company president and repeated what Emma had said word for word. “If my thirteen-year-old daughter sees it that way, then maybe we’re the ones acting like children here.”
After some compromise tweaks to the proportions and color, the mouth-tongue design went forward. The marketing team was happy, and the controversy died a sensible death. The celebrity chefs loved the logo, and everyone in the company got bonuses that year.
But just like a scalpel, Emma’s sharpness could have a cold, hard edge.
It cut deepest in Emma’s love-hate relationship with her brother Justin. When she was younger, Emma worshipped her older brother, following him around everywhere and imitating his every action. Justin had more patience for it than most kids would, and Blythe had always been pleased at how well the two of them got along. But that started to change when Justin hit adolescence. Eventually, impressing his friends and the newly considered creatures called “girls” began to edge out his fondness for his weird little sister.
The family piano ended Emma’s battle for her brother’s attention. Both Emma and Justin had started taking lessons at an early age, but whereas Justin soon grew bored with the instrument, Emma could sit at the piano for hours, improvising melodies or experimenting with scales. Listening to her play, Blythe began to envision her daughter’s future for the first time—of course, she would be a musician! Where else but the arts are prickly personalities and oddball eccentricities not only tolerated, but celebrated?
Then one day when Emma was ten, Justin brought home his first girlfriend. The girl had just start taking piano lessons, and she sat down and played a simple little sonata for her new boyfriend’s family.
The whole time she played, Justin sat there beaming as if he was at Carnegie Hall. When the girl had finished, he said, “Wow, that’s great! My sister’s been taking lessons for years and she’s still working on chopsticks!”
Everyone laughed, including the girl. Everyone except Emma, that is. It was a silly, thoughtless remark from a hormonal thirteen-year-old trying too hard to impress. But after that, Emma never played piano again. At first Blythe and Sam left her alone about it, and then they gently urged her to start playing again. Finally they resorted to bribery and downright begging.
“But honey, you loved the piano so much! And you were so good at it!” they’d say.
But Emma would just shrug. “I’m not interested anymore.”
Apparently she wasn’t interested in her brother anymore, either. After that, Emma kept Justin at a cool distance. Unlike a lot of her friends’ kids, they rarely fought or bickered. In some ways, Blythe would have preferred it if they did. As it was, Emma regarded Justin like some stray dog that had wandered into the house uninvited—cute sometimes, mostly harmless, but an irritating invader nonetheless. Sometimes Blythe wondered if Emma regarded her and Sam in much the same way.
The surgeon’s scalpel could either heal or harm, and no one ever knew which it would be. And Emma could just as easily cut herself with it as others. Hence the nickname Blythe knew Emma hated—“Evil Em.” Blythe hated it, too, and had asked both Justin and Sam to stop using it. The name would disappear for a while, but eventually it would reemerge, like toxic mold hiding behind the walls just waiting for a spell of bad weather.
Blythe had always worried that one day Evil Em would show up and take over entirely. Only maybe now Evil Em just had a new name: Seneca.
After Emma had told her about the supposed “viral video” that had somehow gotten high school kids interested in ancient Roman philosophy, Blythe had spent hours scouring YouTube. Ever since the “Nostri” stories had been in the news, hundreds of videos about Seneca and Stoic philosophy had appeared. But apart from a few philosophy lectures with view hits in the low double digits, there hadn’t been any “viral” philosophy videos before that.
And now Emma’s mysterious new friend didn’t go to the school she said he did. Or any school at all that Blythe could find.
Blythe stared at the phone still cradled in her hand. Even if she called the police, what was she going to say? “Hello, Officer, my daughter has a friend who m
ight not be who he says he is, so maybe you could take time out of fighting actual crimes to help me find him?”
She put the phone away. The conversation had to be with Emma, and it had to be as soon as possible.
Emma could be an odd, difficult kid, but Blythe had never known her to be a dishonest one. If Blythe was lying about her friend Darrell Ward, there had to be a reason.
It looked as if an ancient Roman philosopher was Harold and his damn purple crayon all over again. Only Blythe wasn’t four-years-old anymore. And she wasn’t just drawing pictures of imaginary worlds anymore, either.
Now it seemed as if she was turning those worlds into reality.
4
The forensics team and photographer had finished up over an hour ago, but the crowd was still three deep around the barricades. The body had been found in an overgrown meadow near a footpath at the south end of Pioneer Park. Most of the park’s five thousand acres was a maze of trails winding through moss-covered trees and man-sized ferns. But the streets and neighborhoods bordering the park’s south edge meant easy access for both the press and the just plain curious.
Considering who the victim was, that included a lot of people. The cops assigned to secure the scene perimeters were doing their best, but the area still looked more like a rock concert than a murder investigation.
Detective Monte Martinez could already feel the sausage sandwich he’d had for lunch lighting a fuse in the middle of his gut. If that particular bomb went off before they released the crime scene, he’d be in a world of hurt. It wasn’t as if there were a lot of facilities in the middle of a damn meadow.
“I told you that heart attack in a bun would come back to haunt you.”
Martinez looked over at his partner. She was kneeling down next to the body, too far away to have heard his stomach rumbles. But he didn’t even have to ask how she knew the sausage had returned to take its revenge. After seven years, Detective Cassie Shirdon knew Martinez as well as his wife did. Maybe better, in some categories. He liked to think he knew her just as well, although with Shirdon it was hard to tell. She kept her doors locked up tight and double-bolted for good measure. Every now and then Martinez would get a peek through the cracks, but not often.
Martinez walked over to where Shirdon was still inspecting the body. “Maybe I should just let it loose on that reporter over there hell bent on putting a dead kid’s body on the nightly news.”
“Oh, this one’s going to be all over the news, nightly and otherwise.”
“No kidding. One of the many reasons the lieutenant wants the body out of here as soon as possible. Forensics and the medical examiner have done their thing, Cass. Body’s ready to go whenever we are.”
“You’ve got a hot date tonight that you’re in such a hurry?”
“When you’ve been married as long as me and Jen, with three kids and a sky-high mortgage thrown into the bargain, ‘hot date’ means T.V. night when the air-conditioner’s broke.”
Eight months ago, Martinez wouldn’t have joked about the state of his marriage. Eight months ago, Martinez’s marriage had been headed straight downhill and into some strange, uncharted new territory. At one point, the dreaded “D” word had even come into play, though luckily when it came down to it neither one of them could actually imagine living without the other. Still, though, it had scared him how close they had come to ending up like at least half the other couples they knew.
At least he never had to worry about Shirdon’s love life, because Shirdon didn’t have a love life. Over a year ago, after months of playing frustrated Cupid, Martinez had finally gotten his partner to go on a date with his cousin Dave, a recently divorced high school teacher in sore need of a smart, independent woman like Cassie. Martinez had been sure they’d make a perfect match, but after less than three months of dating, the whole thing fizzled out.
“Yeah, I liked her,” Dave would once again tell Martinez after another round of questions about what had gone wrong. “In fact, I liked her a lot. And she liked me. But a relationship isn’t built on like, Monte. No offense to your partner or anything, but she doesn’t seem like the kind of woman who needs someone in her life one way or the other, you know? I got the feeling that it was fine if I was there, but just as fine if I wasn’t. Independent is one thing, but a self-contained island is another. No room for an interloper, you know?”
Martinez did know. It had taken seven years for Shirdon to tell him that her sister had committed suicide when she was only seventeen-years-old. True, Martinez had known about it already, but he’d still wanted to hear it from his own partner. When Martinez’s marriage was going south, he’d dumped his problems on Cassie probably more than he should have. During those long nights of drinking at the Slammer, Martinez had confided some pretty personal things. In return, Cassie had hinted at some secret in her past, something even darker and more frightening than her sister’s suicide. But hinting is as far as it ever went, and Martinez knew better than to ask too much.
If Shirdon was a self-contained island, it was well-fortified and more or less deserted, as far as Martinez could tell. At least he could row out for a visit now and then, though from now on he’d leave his Cupid wings at home.
Martinez went over and knelt down by his partner, his knees cracking in protest. He’d been gaining weight lately, even more than his usual ten-pound negotiation with a middle-age metabolism. He’d always been the kind of guy with a frame big enough to “carry the weight,” but if he didn’t watch it, his weight was going to start carrying him. Straight to an early grave, as his wife liked to remind him.
Cassie was studying the blood evidence that had been marked and placarded by the forensics unit. “Victim was shot three times—twice in the chest and once in the left leg, just above the knee.”
“Probably the leg shot was first,” Martinez said, gesturing to a patch of flattened weeds in front of the body. “The shooter is kneeling down here, about twenty feet off the path, waiting for the kid to come by. Then the shooter gets him to come over somehow. Maybe pretending to be hurt or needing some kind of help. Maybe the kid even knew the shooter and that’s why he comes over. When he does, the shooter hits him in the leg to bring him down, then gives him two more in the chest to finish off the job.”
Shirdon stood up and scanned the open meadow. The trail of flattened weeds leading up to the body traced back to a stretch of abandoned asphalt that had been a turn-around point for dairy trucks in some long-ago time. “They entered the meadow at the only place not built up with houses and street traffic.”
“And left that way, too, from the looks of it. They definitely had this thing well planned—a remote outdoor setting, a crime scene littered with red herring evidence from dozens of park visitors a day, and unless the secondary searches turned up some literally smoking gun, probably damn little forensics evidence on the actual killers.”
Cassie nodded. “But we do have one thing to go on. A rock solid motivation.”
The victim’s body had been found with a sheet of paper pinned to the right sleeve of his white t-shirt. Typed in large capital letters were the words, “ONE MORE GUN RISK, TAKEN BY NOSTRI.”
The note had been thoughtfully enclosed in a plastic sheet protector to guard it from the elements. Lieutenant Dan Mickelson, the head of homicide, had ordered that detail withheld from the press, but based on the number of people who’d seen the body before the police had secured the area, it was just a matter of time before it leaked.
“Yeah, and that motivation is exactly why the lieutenant wants the body out of here as soon as possible, Cass,” Martinez reminded her. He glanced over at the reporters and onlookers still rubber-necking around the barricades. “Why do you think the vultures are still hanging around? Can you imagine what kind of fireworks will go off if this kid’s father turns up?”
Cassie could imagine it all too clearly. In fact, it just might involve actual fireworks, because the kid lying dead with two bullet holes in his chest wasn’t just some rand
om victim. The kid was James Parker, the fifteen-year-old son of Gordon Parker, president of the Oregon Right to Firearms Coalition and the state’s most vocal gun rights advocate.
PART II
1
Not one ray of sunlight had penetrated the Parker household for eight days, thirteen hours, and fifteen minutes. And Gordon “Gord” Parker, the erstwhile head of the household and last functioning adult left in it, was not inclined to change that dreary state of affairs.
Why shouldn’t the inside of his house be as black as the rest of him? In fact, Gordon Parker doubted he’d ever have any use for the sun again. Eight days, thirteen hours, and—Gordon glanced at the clock ticking away in merciless oblivion of its watcher—sixteen minutes ago, his world had gone dark. The sun had been extinguished along with his son, and his world had died with them.
Only it hadn’t died. Brenda, his still very much alive wife, was in the bedroom surrounded by the mountain of pill bottles that softened the edges of her own private darkness, to which Gordon so far had not been permitted to enter. His two also still alive children were worried sick about him and their mother. His oldest son lived in Idaho with his own wife and new baby and his daughter was all the way across the country in her second year of college, but they’d both come home as soon as they’d heard about James. Gordon assumed they were the ones arranging the funeral, since he sure as hell wasn’t. Not like there could be any funeral until the coroner released the body.
The body. His child. The body of his child.
The clock on the shelf in the living room kept ticking away just the same as if a boy named James Parker had never existed. And Gordon Parker kept sitting there watching it, waiting for the hands to turn back eight days, thirteen hours, and twenty minutes.
Then he could have told his son not to go on his daily run. Ever since making the track team his freshman year of high school, James had been running the steep and winding pathways of Pioneer Park. He went every day, even in the sheeting rain. That was his way—one-hundred percent or nothing. “Runs in the family,” Brenda would say, and it was true. Both sides came from the kind of pioneers and mountain men who had crossed the Rockies to settle the untamed wilderness of the Pacific Northwest. Brenda always said that in those days you had to be crazy to come, even crazier to stay, and tougher yet to survive. Gord’s grandmother had lived to be ninety-eight, and apart from a few short stretches at the beginning and end, all of those years had been spent farming the same patch of land her great-grandfather had claimed when Oregon was still a territory. Gord had left his hometown years ago, but his oldest sister Jessie and her family had settled on the same patch of land. Knowing Jessie, she’d probably live to be a hundred-and-eight.