Sinister Justice

by Steve Pickens

  “Yeah, and quite a bit of other stuff,” Jason said, beginning to pace.

  “Go on.”

  “The first thing I found were the Social Security cards. About a half dozen, all in different names. A few different driver’s licenses in different names.”

  “Oh boy,” Jake said under his breath. “Right out of Hitchcock.”

  “Hitchcock?”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen Marnie?” Jake asked, astounded.

  “I haven’t,” Jason confessed.

  “You were living it. Marnie Edgar, played by the lovely Tippi Hedren, is a career thief. In one scene it shows her opening a compact with a false back that hides her Social Security cards, all with different names.”

  “Well I’d never say Jennifer was particularly creative, so you can add plagiarist to her list of offenses.”

  “What else did you find?”

  “Weird stuff. File upon file of information on different religious leaders. Well known people, like Paul Carlson, the head of the Seven Thousand Society, that dolt who ran for president a decade ago. Jerry Falwell. People like that.” He sighed. “To what purpose, I don’t know. I have some suspicions, but I couldn’t say for certain. She also had a lot of files on coworkers. Lists upon lists of little indiscretions. Nothing earth-shattering, but enough to be embarrassing,” Jason said.

  “And if I’m reading her character right, she had one on you. Maybe me, maybe Sam?”

  “The folders for you and Sam were empty, but they were there. And yes, one on me.”

  “What’d you do?”

  “I burned it all in the fireplace. I packed up her stuff, and waited for her to get home. We had a great, blazing, screaming fight. Someone called the police. They separated us to cool us off. I kept trying to tell them to run her name so they’d find out. I talked until I was blue in face until finally a detective happened to overhear me. He knew who Amelia Darrow was, and was very interested in finding her.”

  “I have a feeling this is where it ends badly,” Jake said, knowing Jason’s destitute condition when he had arrived in Arrow Bay the previous winter.

  “By the time the detective brought me back, the place had been stripped, and she had vanished. Everything I’d owned was gone except my clothes.” He shook his head. “I was lucky my laptop and camera equipment were locked in my car, which I had loaned to Derek.”

  “Did you find out what happened to your stuff?” Sam asked.

  “Sold, mostly, I’ve since found out. Not that it matters. It wasn’t personal stuff. Televisions, stereos, CDs. All stuff that could be replaced. My profound ability to procrastinate paid off for once. Anything I really valued are all in storage at Mom and Dad’s. I hadn’t gotten around to sending for them yet.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “I immediately put out that I had been a victim of identity theft. She had managed to get my Social Security number. I cut that off just in time. I didn’t get to my bank in time, however. We had a joint account, which she drained. Luckily, my savings was still in my name, and she couldn’t touch that.”

  “So you just left?” Jake asked.

  “I left. I couldn’t stand the atmosphere at work. Oh, no one blamed me—they all let me know that right up front. No one ever admitted she’d been victimizing them, but I suspect it was going on.” He shook his head. “No one blamed me, but I was a pariah for having brought this pall upon the office. Guilt by association.”

  “And you didn’t tell us this…?” Jake asked

  “Because I felt such a goddamn idiot. Everything you’d warned me about was true. It was too raw, it was too fresh. I just couldn’t.” Jason’s blue eyes shimmered. “I’m sorry. I should have realized you’d never judge me, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it.”

  “It’s okay, J.D. I understand,” Jake said, standing up and giving his brother a hug.

  “Can you forgive me for being such a jackass?”

  “I forgave you a long time ago,” Jake said, sitting back down on the step. “As usual, you’ve been harder on yourself than I could have ever imagined.”

  Sam let out the breath he had been holding. “Does this have anything to do with Derek Brauer taking a job at the Examiner?”

  “Yeah. Everything, Sammy.”

  “Alex and I talked about that the other day,” Sam said. “Comparing notes about our respective interviews with him. He had a pretty prestigious career with the Chronicle, didn’t he?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Jason. “Derek was a rising star there. This is where it gets creepy. At least for Derek.”

  “What happened?” Jake asked.

  “Two or three months after I left, I got an email from Derek that was somewhat cryptic. He tells me he’s working on a story and then out of the blue asks me about something I’d gotten Jennifer—or Amelia or whatever—for Christmas the prior year.”

  “Which was?” Jake asked.

  “A little gold four leaf clover.”

  “And he was asking about this…why?”

  “It was at a crime scene.” Jason said carefully.

  “What kind of crime scene?”

  “The very strange murder of one of the people I found files on in that file cabinet. One of the folders I’d burned. A mucky-muck in the evangelical Christian movement.”

  “David Donner,” said Sam. “I remember that case very well. One of the most rabid homophobes on the planet.”

  “I remember that too,” Jake said. He hadn’t been particularly sad that the former Klan member turned born-again Christian had been found murdered. Jake had figured it was approximately two hundred twenty pounds less of crap polluting the earth. Sam had chastised him for his language and disregard for human life, but only half-heartedly.

  “Right. Derek emails me a crime scene photo that shows of a little four leaf clover found in a pool of the victim’s blood.”

  “Well, that doesn’t mean much,” Jake said with a shrug. “I imagine there are all sorts of those things out there.”

  Jason shook his head. “Not this one. I had it custom made for her. It was my own design.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Oh shit,” Jake breathed.

  “Yeah,” Jason agreed. “Pretty much.”

  “So what happened after that?”

  “Derek broke the story, of course. After I uh…persuaded him to leave me out of it. Well, now Amelia Darrow is now wanted for questioning in the murder of David Donner. And not long after, Derek starts getting death threats.”

  “Death threats?”

  “They started as threats, but it escalated. Someone took a few shots at Derek. The next letter told him to back off or the next time they wouldn’t miss.”

  “Nothing happened to you?” Jake asked.

  “Oddly, no. She could probably find me if she wanted to, but nothing ever came of it.” He guffawed. “It almost makes sense. At least in the way she could twist things around. I wasn’t to blame. I’d left San Francisco, after all. Even though I confirmed the identification of her necklace, she was the one that left it behind and Derek was the one who wrote the story.”

  “Still,” said Sam, “this is why you were laying low like you said.”

  “Exactly. I didn’t want to kick the wasp’s nest.”

  “And Derek—he followed you?” Jake asked. “Why?”

  “The threats continued. Derek went to the police. They had no idea where she was or if she was even responsible for the violence toward him. Derek had written a series of stories about gangs in the area, naming some of the leaders, and they could have been responsible as well.”

  “You don’t think so though, do you?”

  “I don’t. The way things played out, it just seems to have her personal touch.”

  “I take it things got worse,” Jake said.

  “Markedly. They officially can’t be linked to Amelia Darrow, but I’d be willing to bet on it. Derek seemed to think so, too.”

  “God, what else happened?” Sam
asked.

  “Two days after Derek went to the police, someone ran his mother off the road and nearly killed her. Two days after that, his nephew was almost picked up by a kidnapper. A week later his sister was attacked and beaten while jogging.”

  “Jesus,” Jake said.

  “Again, it could all be a coincidence…or not. Taken as a whole, it is awfully weird.”

  “So Derek left to wait for things to cool down?” Jake said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe I used that cliché.”

  “You did. I’m a witness,” Jason snickered. “Essentially yes, that was why he left. The stress on him, on his family just was too much. I was sending him emails by then about how quiet and peaceful it is up here, and how much better I felt, and he agreed it was time he got out of San Francisco.” Jason shook his head. “Truthfully, I was not happy he landed in Arrow Bay. Trouble has a habit of finding Derek. Now that his name is in print again, with a clear location, it could bring her right back to me.”

  Sam shrugged. “She probably knows already, J.D. She had to figure you’d head back to your family. Unlike Derek, though, you got the hint and left her alone.”

  “That’s what I am hoping, anyway, which probably sounds selfish. Maybe if Derek sticks to covering local politics and the latest drug bust in Kulshan County, he’ll not make her any madder. It’s been a year now, so I’m thinking it is increasingly unlikely she’ll show up. She’d have done something by now if she intended to.”

  Jake shot his brother a hard glance. While Jason was usually hard to read, he wasn’t at the moment. Jason didn’t believe what he was saying. He expected Amelia Darrow to turn up again. For now, it seemed better to let the matter rest.

  “Well if she does,” said Sam, feeling his husband’s leg up, “we can sic Jake on her. He’s good at taking out homicidal women. Aren’t you, Tiger?”

  “Sorry, I’m fresh out of out-of-the-way locations to dispatch them. And besides, that never happened, remember? Our names aren’t anywhere near Little Susie Sunshine’s unhappy demise.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “I hope Derek doesn’t regret moving to Arrow Bay,” Jake said. “Nothing much ever happens around here.”

  “I think that’s what he wants, or so he says. I know Derek too well, though. In a short time, that’s going to wear thin. I worry about that.” He looked at Jake and Sam and said, “So that’s it in a nutshell, dear little brother and brother-in-law. You are not looking at the brightest light in the harbor when it comes to women.”

  “Everyone is allowed to make a mistake, J.D.,” Jake said.

  “I made two big ones, then. Jennifer aka Amelia and going home.”

  “How so?”

  He paused. “Well, I stayed with Mom and Dad for a week. You and I always knew the score between Mom and Dad.”

  “Too well.”

  “Well, it’s worse now,” Jason said with a shrug. “They hardly talk to one another anymore. Their guise of keeping things civil seems to have gone by the wayside.” He shook his head. “It wasn’t that, though. I was used to that. It was being back in my ‘creepy’ room, as you put it, surrounded by all my old things. You know how Mom keeps our rooms just like they were when we left.”

  “Now that is creepy,” Jake said. “Creepy squared.”

  “You had the sense to clean yours out when you left. I was laying in the same bed I’d been in at eighteen, surrounded by all the crap from high school—photos of me as the All American guy, in my football uniform, holding up my report cards with the straight A’s, the levelheaded one who always thought things through,” he said with a grin. “Unlike his little brother who went off half-cocked and said exactly what was on his mind at any given time.”

  “Hey!”

  “Oh, don’t pretend to be offended by that, Jacob,” Sam said, rolling his eyes. “That’s perfectly true, and you know it.”

  “So I’m looking at all this stuff,” said Jason, “and I think about the huge lapse in judgment I’ve made, and I start wondering who the hell am I and what have I become.”

  “Typical mid-thirties angst,” Sam said.

  “A lot of truth to that,” Jason replied. “That and the sudden realization I’ve forever been living up to some perceived expectation of how I’m supposed to live my life.”

  “Ah,” Jake said, getting it at last. “Trying to get Mom’s approval.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Give that one up, J.D. You’re a Finnigan male. You’ll never get it.”

  “Would you believe it has taken me some thirty-five years to figure that out?”

  “Well, don’t be too hard on yourself, Jason. Just your adult life, so only seventeen,” Jake said.

  “Thanks awfully.”

  “And so what? You have to live for yourself, Jason.”

  “I know that now.”

  “Then not everything that happened was bad,” Sam said.

  “No. Bad as it was, no. It’s left me distrustful of people, though. Okay, women.”

  “Not everyone you’re going to meet is going to be a sociopath, Jason. You had bad luck, that’s all,” Jake said.

  “Don’t give up, J.D. I mean, I went from an abusive, sociopathic man-slaughterer to the most wonderful man on the face of the planet. If I’d given up, I’d have never met Raul,” said Sam, trying to lighten the mood.

  “You start with that Raul stuff again, you’re going to be sleeping on the couch.”

  Jason laughed and said, “You two really do give me hope, you know. Sam’s right. I don’t know about the most wonderful man on the planet thing, but…I’m just not ready yet. Until I can meet someone without thinking what are you up to really, I’ve got no business being with anyone.”

  “Jason, there’s no shame in having loved the person you thought she was,” Jake said. “If you still loved her after you found out she was a psychotic harpy, then we’d be working on the paperwork to have you committed to a nice long stay at Northern State.”

  “All sympathy, that one,” said Sam, jerking his thumb at Jake. He turned to Jason and said, “Give yourself plenty of time. It was a few years before I met your brother.”

  “I know, I know…,” said Jason. “I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching. I’ve come to the conclusion I’m not such a bad guy.”

  “Well duh,” Jake said, rolling his eyes.

  “You are a Finnigan, after all,” said Sam. “You’re pretty special.”

  “Except for Amy,” the trio said in unison, all laughing.

  “You know the job. I didn’t want to take it. I’ve been doing well selling my freelance stuff. I made a lot of contacts in San Francisco, and that’s really helped continue to sell my work in different publications. Thank God for the Internet,” he said.

  “How’s it going locally?” asked Sam.

  “The art prints Evelyn has been letting me display in her shop have been selling respectably. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get back into newspapers. I’m not that person anymore, you know what I mean?”

  “We know what you’re getting at.”

  “This is really going to be a fantastic opportunity. I will not only be working for the paper as a photographer, but doing all the technology conversions. I’ll be changing all the archives over to digital format and working with an archivist from the Kulshan County Museum to make sure all the prints and negatives are properly preserved. That’s a whole other field I’ve always wanted to get into. Even if the paper collapses, that work will probably take years to complete.”

  “It sounds perfect, Jason. Not only do you still get to exercise your creativity, but you can feed the tech geek you’ve always been,” said Jake.

  “Tech geek, the man says. Who do you and Sammy always come crawling to when your hard drive crashes?”

  “Who’s complaining? It’s nice having a tech geek so close by.”

  “Thanks, little brother. I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “It was intended as one.”

  “I admit it was
that part of the job that really appealed to me. And the history that must be in those photo archives…you know they have hundreds of glass plates down there?”

  “You’ll have to make prints of the more interesting ones,” Jake said.

  “I never leave any job without having a backup of what I’ve worked on or found interesting on my hard drive.”

  “Be sure and tell Mom that. It’ll give her something else to disapprove of.”

  Jason’s expression darkened. “Did she give any indication of why she’s coming up on Sunday?”

  “You know Ingrid. She likes a sneak attack, so no. Has Dad said anything to you?”

  “No. And I’ve been talking to him a lot. He’s been very supportive of everything I’ve decided to do.”

  “Dad’s always been in our corner.”

  “He has. He was the one who encouraged me to come to you.”

  “Proving once again our old man is smarter than either of us.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “It does make me a little nervous. Sam’s right. She’s going to drop a bomb on us. Nothing unexpected there, we just don’t know—”

  “How much TNT is involved. We could call Amy,” he suggested. “You know she always tells things to Amy before she gets to either of us.”

  “Yeah, but that would involve—”

  “—talking to Amy,” Jason added.

  “I’d rather go to the dentist.”

  “Especially since you run the risk of getting Hector Suggs on the phone.”

  “For a root canal,” Sam agreed.

  Jason glanced at his watch. “I need to get going. I told Derek I’d meet him for lunch and then I need to finalize some paperwork. Doris Woolsey, the receptionist at the Examiner, said I can still do that even though they’re technically on strike.” He looked at Jake, resting a hand on his shoulder. “I’m glad we talked.”

  “Me too, J.D. Don’t ever feel you can’t, okay?”

  “To either of us,” Sam said.

  “Never again,” Jason replied, giving his brother and then Sam a hug. Turning to go, he stopped at the foot of the porch steps and said, “A thought.”

  “Hmm?”

  “A round of Irish coffee on Sunday before Mom blows in?”