by R. J. Blain
Well, it had for them. My foot disagreed with the whole situation, and the damned thing throbbed. “I am not looking forward to a long drive anywhere.”
“Does your foot hurt?”
I regarded my cast with narrowed eyes. “Don’t give me a knife and some motivation right now. I might be tempted to cut it off.”
“Breakfast can come with painkillers, although we’ll have to keep an eye on you to make sure you don’t start having trouble breathing again.”
I expected somebody would be hovering until I escaped the cast and made it back into a boot. “And what were the odds of not having someone lurking over my shoulder in the first place?”
“Approximately zero. I’ll go get my mother, who has volunteered to be your personal servant for the day, as Jezabella wanted to see the first murder site before heading over to your parents’ place.”
However much I hated it, I would need help with the basics for another few weeks. Fighting it would only lead to misery. Not only would my stench offend the noses of those unfortunate enough to have to put up with me, I gave it a few hours before my skin began crawling with the need for a bath of any sort. “I appreciate that, and I am not above asking for help at this stage in my day.”
“Just hang in there for a few more weeks. Everything’ll be a lot better by then.”
I hoped so, because I had no idea how much more I could take before I snapped.
Thanks to a prolonged stay in the hospital, the idea of having someone help me for the basics only bothered me a little. Bradley’s mother, however, struggled with the reality of caring for me, until I set her straight, told her to stop treating me like a china doll, and treat the whole thing like an unpleasant chore. Comparing myself to cleaning a toilet landed me in trouble and earned me a scolding, but things went smoother after she realized tiptoeing around the reality of my situation hurt rather than helped.
While my foot fermented in the cast, the rest of me met my standards of cleanliness.
Cleanliness made the rest of my situation bearable, especially when my hair could go from fine to itchy grease weasel with a severe case of rabies in five seconds flat.
As warned, Bradley’s mother drove us to my parents’ house, but she made us leave Ajani at her house. My cat did not complain about my cruel abandonment, taking over Bradley’s bed as her throne. I muttered curses the entire trip to the car, and I managed to wheel myself half the way before I ran out of steam and Bradley took over. I opted to sit in the backseat so I wouldn’t be hovered over any more than I’d already suffered through, pleased to discover even the back had sufficient leg room for my cast. When the rest of my life had taken a sharp left turn into chaos, the little things mattered.
Breakfast consisted of the greasiest fast food money could buy, and Bradley devoured his share as though he feared his mother would go back on her decision to provide him with meat in the morning. The old habit of checking his food for dairy kicked in, although I had nothing to worry about.
While sausages sometimes had cheese, his didn’t, and he ignored the other foods in his meal that might, which were donated to my cavern of an empty stomach. The extra pancakes and biscuits went a long way towards convincing me I wanted to stick around, although I feared the ploy might be a cruel trick to lull me into a sense of security.
“Carnivores,” Bradley’s mother complained.
I decided to take the nice approach, and aware of why she had turned vegan, I asked, “The butter doesn’t have the protein you’re allergic to in it, right?”
“It doesn’t, which is why I have opted to completely slather my pancakes in its delicious essence, as I realistically cannot have the syrup. Technically, I’m cheating having the pancakes at all, but I have my insulin with me, and if I have to use extra, this is me not caring. In good news, eggs don’t bother me much. The butter almost makes up for it.”
As the inheritor of her share of the syrup, I wouldn’t complain. “And since Bradley can’t have dairy, you usually don’t have it because you don’t want to deal with him being sick all the time because he likes it more than he should.”
“It’s so gratifying to see your education was not wasted on you.”
I grinned at that. Eating breakfast in a fast food parking lot amused me, although it also annoyed me, not that going into the restaurant would have made things any better. Most didn’t realistically provide the space needed for a wheelchair, and the last thing I needed was having Bradley carrying me around in public. Somebody might recognize him, start taking pictures, and any hope of privacy would go up in smoke. “How are we going to go about trying to figure out who is behind these killings? While Godrin’s murder is fairly fresh, there’s just not a lot to go on.”
Bradley grunted, stabbed another piece of his sausage, and bit into it. In a way, the manifestation of his temper amused me. However, it also worried me, as his display indicated there might be something else tripping his trigger.
Rather than ask, I waited for one of them to decide to answer me.
Bradley’s mother sighed. “We’re going to go all the way back to the beginning, get all of the information we know about the first killing, and see where we can get with that. So far, Senator Godrin’s killing is the perfect murder. Nobody has any idea who did it, and they don’t even have a viable suspect. They put your friend Mickey on the suspect list despite his documented phobia. Ridiculous, if you ask me. They’re looking at all the known staff at the library, because that’s all they have to go on. The murder happened on the stairs into the library, so as such, a librarian must have done it. The only librarian who could have done it was several blocks away far outside of her known attack range. They did look into you, but the street cameras show you being a hefty distance away and also capture your general confusion about the murder scene on tape, with you never approaching the library. They can’t book you for murder. They’re out for a scapegoat at this point in time.”
“And the only scapegoats they have are librarians?”
“You know an investigation is not going well when they’re targeting people utterly incapable of committing the crime. They don’t know what they’re doing at this point.” Bradley’s mother stabbed her pancake. “To be fair, we don’t, either. We’re going to be relying on a lot of interviews and information gathering to try to piece together the motive on this one. Finding out the motivation behind the killings is our best bet for finding the killers. I think we need to focus on learning if this is the act of a group or a serial killer. I’m leaning towards a group because I’ve never heard of a single person having all of the talents required to pull the killings off.”
I considered the situation, which, on the surface, surrounded the documents that would completely turn the United States upside down—and transform people with my abilities into slaves likely destined to die on some battlefield. No matter how the Hampton family tried to dress up my for life contract, the new legislation would remove all the benefits to having signed the contract and turn me into someone who lived only because I’d been purchased for a purpose.
Going into the contract with my eyes wide open helped to a certain degree, but then I thought of Daniel, who might have signed to escape something worse, not necessarily because he wanted to be the living property of someone else.
As the killings all seemed to be political in nature, there was something we could do without needing any form of private investigator license. “We’re going to have to look at a lot of political documentation, aren’t we? To figure out who might be behind this. Was the document currently going through debate even around during the first killing?”
“In its earliest form, yes. It was introduced to the House of Representatives two months prior to the first killing.”
“Wait. The House?” One thing had stood out to me: all the victims were senators. “But it’s a Senate proposal.”
“Not precisely. The original version of it was concocted by Representative Kennedys of Alabama. Kennedys was unable to g
et the needed number of votes, so it died in the House. That’s when a group of senators picked up the idea, made it their own, and went overboard with it. The variant proposed by Kennedys left a lot to be desired, but it wasn’t quite the human rights violation the second version became.”
“Do we have a copy of the first one? That was rejected by the House?” I asked.
“We do. Representative Kennedys sent it to me when I asked for a copy. I claimed to be working on a research project involving dead bills. To cover my tracks, I made a bunch of similar requests of other bill authors who proposed failed legislation in the same time period,” Bradley’s mother replied. “While he’s less-than-ideal as a person, he also recognizes when he made a mistake. He’s a pleasant enough man for a politician.”
I had to give the woman credit; her method of hiding her activities made a great deal of sense. Making use of similar tricks might help in our investigations, too—especially if we didn’t want people aware of what we were looking for.
I’d never realized quite how complicated investigating anything could be.
Then it occurred to me Bradley’s mother had gone straight to the source for a copy of the failed proposal. “He’s not dead?”
“No. He has not had any problems involving his safety following his proposal.”
How odd. “Yet everyone involved with the second version is dead?”
“Yes.”
I frowned, poking at my pancakes with my fork. “Am I the only one who thinks that’s odd?”
“No, you’re not. It’s odd.”
“Your thoughts, Bradley?”
“I think this is a stinking pile of shit.”
Bradley’s mother snorted. I considered our situation, right down to eating in Bradley’s new family car, a practical vehicle that could handle carrying my folding wheelchair and offered me leg room even in the back seat. Surreal didn’t quite cover the situation. “Yeah, that it is. So why did Representative Kennedys avoid any problems with his version of the bill? If it’s what inspired the human rights violation that got six people killed for writing it, why is he walking and they aren’t?”
“Well, the first version of the bill was only twenty pages of restrictions for those with inconvenient or dangerous abilities and expansions of for life contracts. It did include a draft element for those with the right abilities. The updated version is a lot harsher. So while Kennedys took a hit to his general reputation for proposing the bill in the first place, it died in the House without much of a fight. His willingness to withdraw the bill and allow it to die helped his cause, I think. Few know about the bill because it was one of those quiet sessions nobody paid much attention to—and it died young. Had it moved forward to full debate, it would be a different story. It didn’t even make the news.” Bradley’s mother closed her container and returned it to the bag. “On the surface, it looks like a dead lead, but I think we might learn something from looking into this specific proposal, why it was written, and who supported Kennedys. There might be something there.” She hesitated, and then she shrugged. “It could also be yet another red herring.”
“We haven’t been looking into this long enough for there to be any red herrings yet,” I muttered.
“They’re coming. They’re just lurking right under the surface, waiting to annoy us—or worse, lead us astray.”
Considering the police hadn’t had any luck finding the killer, I expected we’d find a lot of red herrings and nothing of substance. I kept quiet, no matter how much I doubted we’d learn anything of use or bring the killer to justice.
I would do my best. I could only hope my best would be enough.
My parents’ house wasn’t designed for a wheelchair, which meant I got to deal with being carried everywhere. To humor me, Bradley had demonstrated there really was no way I could navigate through the narrow hallways even with help. As moving me around required preplanning, the dining room became my haven.
To help me cope with the restraints, my doctor approved the use of crutches for no more than an hour a day, which offered the illusion of more freedom.
It took one circuit around the dining room and adjacent kitchen to develop a better respect and understanding of my limitations. My lungs hated me for my short journey, and it took almost half an hour for my chest to stop hurting and fully catch my breath.
“Idiot,” Bradley muttered under his breath, confiscating my crutches and putting them out of my reach. “You can have those back if and only if you need to go to the bathroom. Otherwise, you have an entire house of servants who can fulfill your every need.”
The gathering of people, ranging from my co-workers to my parents, all glared at Bradley, and their expressions promised retribution in one form or another.
I thought his choice of words offered a good opening to discuss the serious work ahead of us. “Mrs. Hampton, if you were to use the original proposal as a method of expanding your household’s wealth or political power, how would you go about it?”
“It would only benefit me if I were to do so through use of for life contracts,” she replied, placing her briefcase onto the dining room table, opening it up, and taking out a stack of papers. “Now, parts of the second bill were sourced from this one in regard to the for life contracts, eliminating loopholes to allow the contracted individuals to exit the agreement. It does not increase the base cost of the contracts unlike the new one, which would significantly benefit anyone acquiring such a contract. There is an interesting limitation in the Kennedys version that’s absent in the newer one.”
“What limitation?” Bradley asked.
“One for life contract per member of the household, and the household is defined as legitimate members of the family living at the same address. So, Bradley, for example, would only be able to hold your contract, leaving Jezabella with her contract with Daniel. That would allow your father and me to pick up one contract each. The new bill would allow every household to have as many for life contracts as they can afford, and while it does up the minimum payout by double, the current minimum payout isn’t all that high, truth be told.”
“How much is it?” I asked, and while aware I’d been paid a substantial fund, which had gone to my parents for their retirement while I received a salary for my work done, I’d never paid much attention to the minimums.
I could only assume I hadn’t been paid a minimum.
“Fifty thousand.”
In shock a human life could be purchased for so little, I opened my mouth, spluttered, and stared at Bradley, who’d paid substantially more for my for life contract. “You could have gotten me for fifty and you paid how much? Are you an idiot who hates money?”
The Hamptons all dared to laugh at me, as did my parents.
“That’s just rude,” I complained. “Why are you laughing at me?”
“You’re worth more than what we paid for you,” Bradley’s mother soothed. “But wouldn’t you rather your contract value be private information?”
Well, on second thought, I supposed discussing the specifics of my contract might make my co-workers uncomfortable, especially when they might never make the amount I’d been purchased for during their entire lives. “There’s no point in hiding it. I’m an adept exsanguinator. That made my price tag rather horrific. But I did it for a good cause.”
“You did it to support your parents and allow them to retire comfortably,” Beatrice said, although the woman raised a brow. “The rumor mill has already had its way with your contract, Janette. We had questions, and we kept asking them until we were told the truth.”
I considered the Hamptons and which one would be the weakest link, deciding Bradley would be the easiest one of them to interrogate for information. “You snitched, Bradley?”
“I wouldn’t call it snitching. I would call it wisely surrendering before they brought my mother into it. They cornered me via conference call.”
“You could have hung up on them.”
“While I could have, they would have ta
ken that as a challenge to get the information out of me in a more painful manner. They were determining if they needed to launch a rescue mission.”
I considered the likely culprits behind a planned rescue mission, settling on Beatrice or Meridian as the likely suspects. As Beatrice would enjoy watching me suffer a little before rescuing me, I focused on Meridian. “Do you feel a rescue mission is still required?”
“That depends on a lot of factors. If he’s going to buy you books, treat you well, and otherwise pay your medical bills, I’ll permit his presence. If he interferes in any of those things, I’ll have words with him.”
I laughed at the thought of Meridian trying to face off against Bradley. “I can handle one rowdy adept with minimal assistance. Right now, he’s my functioning pair of legs, so please leave him somewhat intact, but if he doesn’t do his job as my functioning pair of legs, you can educate him.”
Bradley sighed. “I probably deserve that, but do you have to, Janette?”
“Absolutely.”
Bradley’s mother cleared her throat. “I know it’s easy to get excited, especially considering the situation. Let’s stay focused. I’ve put together a timeline for the murders, the progression of the original bill, and I’ve done some basic research on prior failed bills that might also be linked to the one currently working through the senate. With the time since the prior killings and our general restrictions until we can get the cell officiated, we’re going to have to work with publicly accessible information. Fortunately, it’s usually simplistic enough to get copies of failed bills, especially when you present it as a research project. Some of the bills are public record, as they were made available through the government following sessions. However, current laws state that the bills need not be made public unless they’re up for a full vote and may progress to the opposite chamber before being sent to the President. About seven years ago, a law passed making it no longer mandatory for dead or dying bills to be made public. The bill information only becomes public information if it passes in one of the chambers.”