“We should. I didn’t see anything concrete screaming of algorithm-rigging. Most readers are intelligent enough, literate enough, to be offended by incorrect usage and ham-fisted punctuation. I say we look at subject matter, reading the descriptions. That’s the first thing readers look at when making their selection, well, that and the covers, but there are no shirtless, headless men with a thumb suggestively tucked into the waistband of their blue jeans on either of these.”
Fiona laughed out loud, surprising herself. When had she last laughed? “Could it be you’re jealous of cover men?”
He gave her a quick glance, the quizzical look in his eyes suggesting he was as startled by her laughter as she. “No, I like having a head, thank you very much, and I prefer to use my thumbs for other activities. Hooking them inside one’s blue jeans strikes me as an odd and potentially dangerous use for a thumb. As for the shirts, I’ll bet those cover men—Alpha males who, despite what has to be an excess of testosterone, never grow chest hair—spend a lot of time at the dermatologist’s office with festering bug bites, scaly sunburn, and oozing rashes.”
Through lowered lids, she made an involuntary and surreptitious examination of the muscular chest revealed beneath his knit top. The man worked out. Despite his professed contempt of typical cover men, with his shoulders and chest, Grant could pose for the covers of his own romance novels. When his hands, strong, capable hands, went motionless above the keyboard, she raised her eyes, catching him looking at her with amusement, and had to fight her way past a blush. “You’ve clearly invested some thought on book covers. I’m not surprised. On to descriptions, then.”
He smiled to himself while turning back to his monitor. “Let’s start with the first book on the list. I’ll read the description out loud. You see whether you think there’s anything hinky about it. Here goes. ‘When Matthew finds himself stranded in the projects late at night, he learns the true meaning of fear. Hounded by street gangs, propositioned by hookers, and mugged by a black man, Matthew is forced to fight back to survive a darkness extending beyond the absence of light. Based on a true story, this is a tale of one man’s triumph over adverse circumstances.’” He looked at her, his brow slightly furrowed. “What do you see in that?”
Fiona flashed back to the anger she’d felt when he’d asked her whether she’d seen evidence of increased misunderstandings. All the hate crimes. So many dying. That was a stretch, she decided. She was applying her baggage to the jigsaw puzzle, trying to make the pieces fit by pounding them in. That did them no good. “Read the other one.”
He gave her a searching look before keying in the title. “When Marilee’s Christian daughter becomes involved in a serious relationship with a Jewish man, she demonstrates tolerance, reasoning love should be able to conquer all. Then the phone calls begin, hang-ups, in the middle of the night. Fearing for her daughter’s safety, she turns to the one man who has always been there for her and her family, her church pastor, Alan, but is she too late? Her daughter’s disappearance after last being seen entering a local synagogue has Marilee and Alan following a trail leading them across the world, to the seedy streets of Jerusalem.” He stared at her in silence for a full minute. “I’m seeing a pattern, and I think you are, too. When you were talking about increased misunderstandings, was this what you meant: hate crimes?”
“I’m going to tell you what I meant, and if I sense the least amount of condescension, you can leave. Fair enough?”
He nodded, his expression a model in poker-faces.
“I didn’t watch the news while I was growing up. I had no need to know what was going on in the world around me. I lived a secure, sheltered life. I had no fears. After I ran, I pretty much did nothing but sleep and watch television for the first two years. I began to notice crime, in particular, hate crimes: black against white, heterosexual against homosexual, Christian against virtually every other faith, ditto the Muslims. And I wondered whether hate crimes were on the rise. I don’t have a point of reference, though, never having paid attention before. I was young.” She stopped, studying his expression. He didn’t look superior. In fact, the crumble of cracker clinging to the corner of his mouth made him look considerably less than superior.
He raised his eyebrows. “Interesting. Let’s look.” Turning back to his laptop, he keyed “hate crimes on the rise” into his search engine.
Fiona leaned closer, reading the results: “Race Hate Crimes Reported on US Railways Rise 37% in Five Years,” “Hate Crimes against LGBT People on the Rise,” and “Crimes against Muslim Americans and Mosques Rise Sharply” were the first three results, all from reputable dailies. “I was right. They are increasing. So how about this? What if Whitley wanted hate crimes to rise? What if the novels his algorithm flags to the top encourage hate? What would be his motive?”
“Maybe he just likes to stir the coals, pitting people against each other.”
She studied his face, seeing wariness in his eyes. “But you don’t believe that.”
“No, but what I think is little out there.”
“There’s a surprise.”
He managed to look offended at her dry tone. “Here’s what I think. His motive could be the same as Charles Manson’s: Encouraging race wars or religious wars or both. Charles Manson believed a race war was in the offing, what he called ‘Helter Skelter,’ and he worked to foster its beginning. His original tactic involved music. He believed an album filled with songs encouraging young white women, mostly the hippies then gathering in San Francisco, to join his cult, would cheat the black men out of enjoying a taste of their charms. Enraged, they would rise up in violence against the whites. The whites, scared of black men, would retaliate, escalating the animosity between the races. In a war of black against white, the primitive blacks would emerge victorious, but then they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. They’d need intelligent leaders to guide them. Manson would bring his cult out of hiding, and they’d rule the world.”
“You’re right. That is out there. That’s also not how I heard it. I heard he killed a bunch of white people.”
“That was his plan B. He didn’t get funding for his music album, so he had to employ another strategy. He began slaughtering whites and trying to pin it on the blacks, reasoning no one would ever believe white people capable of such atrocities.”
Grant made interesting deductive leaps, too interesting, too pat. “You read too much.”
He gave her a look that could only be described as dismayed. “It is impossible to read too much.”
“You give the lie to that statement. What does my brother have to do with Charles Manson?”
“Not Manson. I used him as an example of race wars encouraged through the arts. Manson wanted to use music to generate a race war. Maybe Whitley wants to use books to accomplish the same thing.”
A thought occurred. “Maybe he does, but doesn’t this strike you as too simple? In two hours of searching, we found what Linda only suspected. That can’t be right. She said her friends thought she was seeing patterns where none existed, but these patterns are pretty clear.”
“Your father was still alive back then, and Whitley couldn’t be too obvious. Once your father was dead, he could do whatever he damned well pleased with the company, and no one could stop him.” He broke off, his eyes sharpening. “Do you have a basement here?”
Fiona nodded, wondering where he was headed with this. “Why?”
“The promotion of hatred doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Hatred is a team sport. With the exception of the rare misanthrope, hatred of one’s fellow man needs validation through association.”
“And this has what to do with a basement?”
“Encouraging animosity between certain demographics is a common practice among the white supremacists, like the KKK, neo-Nazis, and White Aryan Nation. If I’m right, there’ll be a meeting room, either in the basement or the garage or even in the turret room, someplace hidden, where he and his cronies can stand around and snap salutes and s
hout ‘Seig Heils’ and plan the next world order, the Fourth Reich.”
She stared at him in astonishment. “From these two novels, you get that Whitley’s a Nazi?”
“A neo-Nazi. Think about it. It would explain a lot of what we’ve seen so far: his hatred toward you, a half-Indian woman; the red, black, and white color scheme in his bedroom; the way all the third-floor bedrooms are prepared for guests, perhaps out-of-town members; and this, what we’ve discovered thus far about Linda’s patterns.” He waved a negligent hand at both laptops. “I think it’s worth taking a look, anyway, and the basement would be a good place to start.”
“If he’s a Nazi, wouldn’t he meet at the Saint Paul Nazi headquarters?”
He gaped at her. “Is there a Saint Paul Nazi headquarters?”
“Wouldn’t there be? Around the same time Whitley had Chad blow up Daddy’s plane, an old SS commander was discovered in Minneapolis. He’d been living here since the late 40’s. I wonder what they ever did with him. I think he was in his nineties. Anyway, we know there was at least one original Nazi in the area. It stands to reason there’d be some of the new variety, birds of a feather and all of that. They’d need a place to meet.”
“But the head of a major online retail store wouldn’t be caught dead associating with that sort of people. There’d be no better way to founder a major company than to associate it with racism and bigotry. No, he’d hold his meetings here, where no one would ever suspect the purpose of large numbers of guests arriving. ‘Oh, that gadabout Whitley is entertaining again,’ the neighbors would say. I think you’ll find meetings are held here, in the security of his own home.”
Security of his own home. The words stung. It wasn’t Grant’s fault, but hers. She’d made the choice to run instead of fight, and as much as it hurt to admit it, that had been the right choice for the Fiona she’d been back then. She hadn’t had what it takes to fight, not back then. Now, three years later, she was ready. “Follow me. And no stalking humor.”
“Knock, knock,” he said.
Recognizing the beginning of what was certain to be a lame knock-knock joke, Fiona had no problems ignoring him.
Chapter 16
Fiona tried the basement doorknob, expecting it to turn with the same ease as the other rooms they’d toured and surprised when it didn’t. “You might be right,” she commented while attempting different keys. “Why would he keep this door locked and my bedroom door unlocked?” A ridiculous sense of satisfaction, of having beat Whitley at his own game of hide-and-freak, rose when a key finally worked. Pushing open the door, she turned on the staircase light and began her descent. “I haven’t been down here since I was seven or eight, maybe even younger.” At the bottom, she flicked on the light switch, casting illumination on both the room and her understanding of her brother.
Grant had been right. This wasn’t the basement she remembered. That basement had never been finished. Daddy had wanted to finish it, but other projects had always taken precedence, and although this basement still retained the original plain character of concrete floor studded with age-blackened wood beams, that was all the new one had in common with the old one.
Whitley had moved in several rows of linked metal chairs with blue-padded seats, bolting them onto the concrete floor and turning the basement into a hall seating at least four dozen. The seats faced a raised wooden platform the size of a garage bay and topped with a podium and three metal folding chairs. On each side of the platform, a flag drooped from a pole plugged into a flat, circular base. She recognized one flag as the red-white-and-black Nazi flag with its distinctive swastika in the center, but she wasn’t familiar with the other, it consisting of three even stripes: black, yellow, and red. Behind the platform, an expansive whiteboard clung to the wall. On the left wall, a blanket-sized Nazi flag had been draped, flat and straight, from ceiling to floor. On the left wall, a long folding table had been pushed against the concrete backing.
Her gaze fixed on the banner hanging above the folding table, a broad, white satin ribbon with the black word Zeitgeist emblazoned along its length. Fiona found her voice. “Zeitgeist. That would be a Z-word. What does it mean?”
Grant shrugged his shoulders, surprising her by admitting to something he didn’t know. “I’ve never heard of it. We’ll have to look it up. I guess this answers my question about Whitley’s political leanings. You know, this might answer other questions, like why he has such a problem with you.”
“Because my mother was from India, and I look like her? That occurred to me. Is it as simple as racism?”
“There’s nothing simple about racism, and if he’s a member of one of the neo-Nazi movements, then his problems with you may go deeper than racism.”
Her thoughts went to the devastation inflicted on her room. May go deeper was kind. Tearing her gaze from the banner, she focused on the rows of chairs. “Those chairs look familiar. My father had season tickets to the Vikings. Those look like the stadium seats they had at Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, before it was demolished and replaced with the U.S. Bank Stadium. I wonder why he didn’t buy new ones. These look pretty beaten up, with tape on some of them.”
“Maybe they’re associated with fond memories.” At her questioning look, he added, “Of attending games with his mother.”
That hadn’t occurred to her. For the first time, she realized Daddy hadn’t kept videos of Julia, and she wondered why. “I don’t recognize the flag with three stripes.”
“That’s the German flag, probably something to do with the rise of the Fourth Reich, Hitler’s Germany having been the Third Reich,” Grant remarked while slipping past her. “This isn’t what I expected.”
“Why? It looks to me like exactly what you expected.”
Resting a hand on one of the stadium seats, he glanced at her, his brow furrowed. “It’s not Whitley’s taste, not based on what we’ve seen so far. Think about the rage he invested in redecorating your room and the opulent decadence of his own room. From an excess of wanton destruction to an excess of self-indulgence, Whitley strikes me as a fellow lacking in self-discipline. By contrast, this is wholly functional, Spartan. Concrete floors, concrete walls, a folding table, stadium chairs bolted to the floor, a platform looking like it was constructed by hand—he doesn’t possess this restraint. Someone into function over form, someone in control of his emotions, had a hand in designing this meeting room.”
“Whitley is following someone else’s lead?”
“I think it’s extremely possible. This doesn’t reflect what we’ve seen of Whitley’s taste. It’s too plain and too functional. He’s not the top dog.”
“The Grand Poobah.”
Grant appeared taken aback. “Grand Poobah?”
“The leader. Isn’t he called a Grand Poobah?” She enjoyed watching him struggle to frame a tactful response.
“No. The KKK has an Imperial Wizard. I think the Grand Poobah was on the Flintstones cartoons.”
A man of odd emphases. He may not know the definition of zeitgeist, but he knew the origins of a cartoon character wearing a horn-bedecked fur hat. “Same thing.”
“Not really, but I’m not going to argue the point. We’re approaching twelve hours of goodwill, and I’m not about to blow that. What matters is knowing Whitley doesn’t lead. I’m betting he’s second-in-command, probably because he owns the meeting place.”
Grant was making another one of his off-the-wall comments. This time, she needed to call him on it. “That doesn’t make sense.”
“Of course it does. When I was a kid, the boy next door, Clinton, had a treehouse. I was invited to join his club if I brought the treats. He was the leader; I was his follower.”
“How many in the club?”
“Two.”
“A pattern emerges. You were as desperate for companionship then as you are now.”
He grinned. “My mother had a local reputation for baked goods. It opened many doors for me. I tried to enlist her assistance in stalking you, but s
he refused.”
She tilted her head, narrowing her eyes while she considered his mother’s baking. “It would have taken an entire pan of khaman to get you into my house.”
“What’s that?”
“A snack made from chickpeas, flour, turmeric, besan, and a bunch of other ingredients. My mother used to make it for us. I loved it. Whitley hated it. No,” she stated after considering the possibility. “Even khaman wouldn’t have worked. Your mother was right to refuse.”
“That’s what she said. So Whitley provides the meeting place and the refreshments. The other person provides the leadership skills. The other person designed this room, going for workmanlike.”
“I’ll bet this explains why Whitley kept the reception food. They have another meeting coming up. That would mean a short honeymoon. We need to determine his schedule. He could walk in on us right now.” Fiona pointed toward the giant flag. “How about the monstrous Nazi flag hanging on the wall? That kind of shouts Goodyear Blimp or Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade to me, right up Whitley’s alley.”
“It does. That flag strikes the only flamboyant chord in this otherwise basic room, doesn’t it?” He strode to the flag and grabbed one side, pulling it back, pausing, and glancing back at her over his shoulder. “A room, Fiona.” He disappeared behind the flag and then reappeared, his face disappointed. “May I see those keys?”
While walking to him, Fiona felt a sense of ugly presentiment. What might Whitley be hiding beneath a billboard-sized flag of hatred? Rather than open the door herself, a task she didn’t relish, she passed Grant the key ring. “Have at it.” She waited while he disappeared behind the flag once again, watching his form move to the center of the flag and listening to keys jingling.
He reappeared two minutes later. “I can’t open the door. None of these keys work. He must keep the key hidden somewhere else.”
“It’s just as well,” Fiona stated pragmatically while dropping into one of the stadium seats. “I’m not certain how much more I can take in one day. How could Whitley, raised by the same father as I, grow into someone with so much hate?”
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