Zeitgeist

by Grace Jelsnik

  Brandon gave her a sharp glance while unloading luggage from the trunk. “Not the red pickup. The silver Buick?”

  She grabbed her suitcase and the backpack. “You have a good memory.”

  “That’s one of Brandon’s specialties: observation,” Charlie commented while leading the way to the elevator. “After we got to your place and noticed Farley’s body was still warm, he began listing every vehicle we’d passed on the Worthing road. It’s not a busy road, and by accessing DMV registrations for Worthing residents, we were able to identify all but the red pickup and the silver Buick. You were careful.”

  Charlie pressed the button for the top floor, and the elevator began its slow ascent. The memories evoked by a ride in this particular hotel elevator were not fond, but they were clear. Two blocks away, she and a contract killer had laughed while making snow angels in six inches of fresh snow, standing close together afterward, close enough to brush fingers, while viewing their handiwork. They’d ridden upward to his room in silence, their fingers entwined. She remembered smiling and loving and knowing she’d begun a new phase in her life. She glanced at Grant, catching him staring at her with the penetrating look specific to him, and she quickly looked away. Sometimes, he seemed to know what she was thinking.

  This elevator ride was equally silent, with none of them speaking until the doors opened on the penthouse suite, and they stepped into a sitting room decorated in tans and creams with splashes of green. In the center of the room, two short sofas faced off over the low circular coffee table between them. At each end, two armchairs squatted at angles, making for a near-perfect furniture circle.

  Grant and Fiona set their suitcases beside the door, but Charlie towed Linda’s suitcase toward a sofa, sitting down and staring at the black leather bag in what appeared to be confusion mixed with sorrow. Three years ago, he’d lost a cousin whom he’d loved a great deal, and the strain in the copper face revealed the inner anguish he struggled to conceal. He was a handsome man, with his sharply chiseled nose, his high cheekbones, and the glossy black hair rippling past his shoulders, but his face was taut with strain and lined with pain.

  While moving toward the couches and chairs, the metal case in one hand, Brandon gestured at Grant and Fiona with his free hand. “Sit anywhere. Don’t mind Charlie. He’s had a rough several days, ever since Grant made the call to Denver. He didn’t sleep, couldn’t sleep, until he saw you shopping this morning, and then he had only a nap.”

  While pulling Linda’s purse from the backpack, Fiona sat on the couch opposite Charlie. Before sitting, Grant dug through his pockets, tossing a baby monitor and a USB drive on the coffee table. He frowned while patting his back pockets.

  “What’s wrong?” she whispered, earning a sharp look from Brandon.

  He shook his head and sat beside her, their thighs touching. Again, she drew comfort from his presence. He’d progressed from stalker to sidekick to ally to friend, all in three days. He didn’t need to know this. Although learning to trust once again, she hadn’t yet learned to admit to trusting. She wondered whether she ever would be.

  Charlie glanced up at her. “Linda’s purse?”

  After removing the keys to Linda’s car, she leaned across the coffee table and handed him the purse. Turning to Brandon, she tossed him the keys. “The key to the metal case is on that keyring. I left her car in Worthing. I imagine you already made arrangements to have it shipped to you.”

  Brandon nodded while fiddling with the case’s lock and opening it. In silence, the two men examined the contents of the metal case, leather suitcase, and purse, not for the purposes of inventory, their actions seeming more those of guests at a wake. Both sought closure from sorting through Linda’s possessions. After closing the suitcase, Charlie looked at Fiona. “You kept everything?”

  “That’s all she had. Everything is there but the cash. I can pay you back once Whitley’s in jail.”

  He shook his head. “I’m not worried.”

  “You didn’t use the gold,” Brandon commented.

  “You need ID to sell gold, and I hadn’t reached the point where I had to sell it. I planned on returning once I was ready, which would have been about the same time I used up the cash.”

  Charlie swiveled his face toward the door when two people entered, one a stunning African American female with close-cropped hair, a latte complexion, and almond-shaped, expressive eyes; the other a man of Middle Eastern descent, possibly Iranian or Saudi, tall and slender with a short beard, a mustache, and a soul patch. “Claire, Kevin, this is Fiona Delaney and Grant Haldeman. They dropped into our laps while we were surveilling Whitley.”

  The woman approached them, her languorous movements those of a runway model, her sharp eyes those of an interrogator. After inspecting them while shaking their hands, her eyes softened, and she smiled while taking the armchair next to Brandon. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. We’ve looked forward to this moment for a long time.”

  Kevin gave both hands a brief shake before dropping into the armchair closest to Grant and turning to Charlie. “I’ve disconnected the elevator. No one can follow.”

  “Good. Thanks.” Charlie addressed Fiona. “Tell me about Linda, what she said, what happened at the airport, how the switch occurred.”

  Fiona saw her own pain reflected in his eyes. They’d both lost that day. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to make the switch. At the beginning, I tried to leave, but she seemed desperate. I felt bad for her. I remember I felt bad for her. My father’s secretary—Vince was stonewalling her. Linda’s words, not mine. I didn’t like Vince, so I told her I’d show my father her findings. Even that wasn’t good enough for her. She had to be the one to show him. She continued to press, and then I agreed. She was very persuasive.”

  Twisting his mouth into a grimace, he shook his head. “She was. Linda could talk a polar bear out of his fur. I don’t blame you. At first, I did blame you, and then I met your brother. He had this other man, the one you killed, plant the bomb.”

  He stated it as a fact, but Fiona suspected he sought validation. “Yes. I heard him and Chad, the other man, conclude the transaction. I drove home afterward, but I hid when I heard company arrive. Whitley had asked Chad to make a video. They discussed it. Whitley paid him.”

  “And you didn’t go to the police?”

  “They wouldn’t have believed me.” It occurred to her these four people were the “cops” mentioned by the NSO leader. “You know why.”

  Grant stiffened beside her, and when he placed his hand on hers, she didn’t pull away. She saw sympathy rise in Claire’s eyes. Brandon and Kevin looked away.

  Charlie’s eyes sharpened. “He hinted at several suspects, including your ex-conquests, giving us a list of men. A long list. He said he thought one of them planted the bomb, a revenge murder to get back at you for spurning him.”

  Grant’s hand tightened on hers, and he spoke for the first time. “And most of them were delivery men and maintenance workers, right?”

  Charlie raised his eyebrows. “Yes.”

  Grant spoke again, this time his voice thick with suppressed anger. “Whitley Delaney’s sick. She had no idea how sick until she returned home. He’s a pedophile who’s been eyeing her since she was young enough to walk. We don’t know whether he’s acted on his urges with other young girls, but we did find a self-mortification room he uses to curb his impulses, so we’re hopeful he hasn’t. Whatever he told you about Fiona is a lie.”

  Linda’s cousin narrowed his eyes and scowled. “We didn’t suspect pedophilia, but we did suspect the lie. The only time he allowed genuine emotion to show was when he discussed his sister’s promiscuity. We asked around. Claire spoke with Fiona’s friends. We found out the list was a lie.” He directed his next comments to Fiona. “We argued, wondering why you ran. Were it not for that, we would have honed in on Whitley right away.”

  “Valencia was next on their hit list. She’d suggested we exchange identities for three days, but after
her death, I was stuck with her identity. I went to her hotel room and found a message from Chad on her phone, setting up a meeting. You can hear the same message on her cell phone. I grabbed her things and ran, barely missing him on his way to her room. I had no one to turn to. As Valencia McDermott, my brother and my lover”—she raised her chin in defiance, daring them to judge her—“wanted me dead. I opened Linda’s metal case and saw the contents and worried you’d want Fiona Delaney dead. I’d just lost my father. I loved my father. I was afraid.” She again raised her chin. “I’m not afraid anymore.”

  “It’s plausible, Charlie,” Brandon stated. “If I’d seen two guns, two IDs, and all the cash and gold, I’d have thought the worst, too. That was my assessment,” he said to Fiona, “that you were as afraid of us as you were of your brother.”

  Charlie stared at her for a long moment before nodding. “It’s over and done. Thank you for keeping Linda’s things. Now, to your brother: Why did you have to escape from your house tonight?”

  Before Fiona could respond, Grant gave her hand a quick squeeze and released it, leaning forward on the sofa, his hands braced on his knees. “We’ve been forthright. We commiserate with your loss and would like to share with you all of our findings, but we need more from you first. Other than your obvious relationship with Linda and a mutual dislike of Whitley Delaney, she has no reason to trust you, and we’ve put a great deal of legwork and research into our findings. Tell us about COPs. You share, and we share.”

  Fiona stared at him in surprise. Having been independent for so long, she at first resented his high-handed assumption he could assume control of the discussion. Then, after considering his words, she understood his reasoning. They had been open, sharing with these strangers the meeting with Linda and the reason she’d fled, but they hadn’t received anything in return, and they may well receive nothing in return. What was to prevent these people from shutting her out of the rest of it, once they shared what they knew?

  They were only two against four, and one of their two was a man whose weapon of choice was words—the odds weren’t in their favor, and she was damned if she’d set aside her desire to exact justice for her father’s death. Grant was establishing a relationship founded on mutual respect. She relaxed back into the sofa and waited.

  Charlie glanced at his three partners before speaking. “Linda and I founded COPs five years ago in response to a series of anomalies while researching a problem brought to us by some friends. I won’t go into detail, but Linda saw patterns, and I saw corruption. We enlisted Kevin, a college friend and technophile, to help us research. Claire wormed her way in by threatening to expose our activities, which weren’t wholly legal.” He shot her a fleeting smile before continuing.

  “Like Brandon, Claire’s another observer, but she’s handy with guns and interviews, too. We formed an association: COP, Children of Privilege. All of us have parents with wealth in the nine-figure range; all of us were at loose ends, neither interested in pursuing our parents’ dreams nor interested in our various vocations. Put simply, we were bored. Since then, we’ve tackled four other cases. We visit chatrooms and look for red flags. When a chance phrase or an intriguing thread catches our attention, we research it, looking for patterns and corruption.”

  “And Linda found a chatroom reference making her research my father’s company for patterns?”

  “Yes.” His face tautened briefly before relaxing. “She found a thread discussing zeitgeist. As a cultural anthropologist, it caught her interest, not so much the word itself as the context. Zeitgeist is used in conjunction with the past. You don’t create zeitgeist; the word references ideas and beliefs specific to a past era, as in ‘her brother exemplified the zeitgeist of antebellum South.’ Linda was bothered by the use of future tense, as in ‘this will be the zeitgeist of the twenty-first century.’ Your father’s company came up twice throughout the thread, and she began looking for patterns. She had a mind like a computer and could process data every bit as quickly. She brought her data to us, we evaluated it, and we disagreed.”

  Kevin interrupted. “It was thin, Charlie. Even she said it was thin. We know now they were experimenting with the search parameters back then, seeing how far they could push the reading public and Harley Delaney without being found out. We can’t blame ourselves, and you have to quit beating yourself up over it.”

  Charlie gave him a bleak smile. “We were working another case at the time, and Linda said she wanted to follow through with Delaney.com on her own. Kevin prepared her two identities, and Brandon packed her a case. Because of the guns and the gold and because I wanted to make certain she was able to run if necessary, she drove rather than fly. Her fallback plan was a border crossing into Canada, using the Susan Nisman passport, with Brandon flying in to pick her up there. She never had a chance to use it. I wish I’d listened. I wish I’d known. I’ll regret my decision for the rest of my life.”

  “Our decision,” Claire corrected him. “You weren’t in it alone, Charlie.”

  He didn’t look at her, his eyes darkening while he addressed Grant. “Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough. I’ll let Fiona explain, but first I’ll give this to Kevin.” Grant plucked the USB drive off the coffee table and handed it to the man.

  “What’s that?” Fiona asked, surprised.

  “You mentioned your father used a USB drive to upload his home files. While you were looking in the safe and the files were printing, I grabbed a USB drive and downloaded Zeitgeist to it, in case we needed a backup.”

  Charlie’s eyes sharpened while staring at the USB drive in Kevin’s hands. “You found Zeitgeist?”

  “We did,” Grant replied, leaning back into the couch and thus giving her the floor.

  “We found Zeitgeist on my father’s computer. I won’t go into detail on it, other than to mention Grant calls Zeitgeist the NSO’s version of Charles Manson’s Helter Skelter, a plan to set opposing factions against one another and sit back while inferior races, religions, and creeds wipe each other out. You probably already know Whitley’s a neo-Nazi, a member of the NSO. What you don’t know is since Whitley was eight a family friend, possibly a Delaney.com employee, has been grooming him to one day take over the company, the first step being to blow up N1Delaney.”

  Charlie’s posture straightened, and he tore his eyes from the USB drive, fixing them on her. “Which family friend?”

  “I don’t know. We found journals, but Whitley never mentions his name. We overheard the friend talking with Damon Reinhardt. I recognized his voice, but I haven’t been able to put a face to him, not yet. It’s been too long.”

  Charlie turned to Brandon. “I’ll bet it’s the friend we saw him with tonight. Did you get a good look at him?”

  Brandon shook his head. “The windshield had too dark a tint for me to make out anything but skin color. He was white.”

  Charlie looked back at Fiona. “And this friend is responsible for your need to escape?”

  “We overheard this friend say Whitley’s out of control, that he thought he saw me in Sioux Falls, which is likely, and since then he’s been seeing me everywhere. I suggested we use his instability against him, and Grant came up with gaslight.”

  “Brilliant!” Brandon exclaimed. “An excellent film, one of my favorites. We saw you purchasing it. I never imagined.” He addressed Grant. “Bergman’s performance can’t be bettered in that one. My favorite part—”

  Claire leaned over and whispered in his ear, and the big man looked abashed. “Sorry. It was a good film.”

  “Where she pretends she’ll let him go. Reverse gaslight,” Grant finished for him, nodding in satisfaction.

  Brandon brightened. “Yes! Classic revenge. Classic. So you decided to drive the brother over the edge. How?”

  “I taped voices. Fiona’s father had family films on DVD. I cut-and-pasted words from them, making the father, the mother, and Fiona say things calculated to drive him out of his mind. I’m sure Kevin could have done a m
ore realistic job, but I think they turned out well.” He shifted his gaze to the floor. “It might have worked, too, if it weren’t for a slight plumbing problem.”

  He was being kind. She never should have flushed the groom from the top of the wedding cake down the toilet. She addressed Charlie. “When Whitley used the facilities during the gaslight, the toilet overflowed, and he slipped, falling and knocking himself out. I wanted to shoot him. I didn’t. We wound up running.” A lesson in brevity, she thought. Ten minutes with emotions running high—anger, fear, panic—reduced to four sentences.

  “There’s more you’re not saying,” Brandon stated, his eyes dropping to her hands. “You’ll need ice-packs for those.”

  She glanced down, surprised to notice the abrasions and swelling. “I got in a few hits before we ran.”

  Charlie nodded in apparent comprehension. “Let’s talk bombs. You wanted us out here in case your first plan, the one to make your brother snap, didn’t work, and you requested a bomb expert. What does Whitley have planned?”

  “Not Whitley. Damon Reinhardt, the head of the NSO. Tomorrow morning, somewhere in the vicinity of a Jewish synagogue at 1300 Lexington Street, Whitley will be delivering a bomb.”

  “And this is why you need a bomb expert, which would be me,” Brandon said, straightening in his chair and assuming a professional demeanor. “Any ideas what kind of a bomb?”

  “No, only that Whitley thinks it will go off at 9 AM when in fact it will go off at 8:30. They forged a manifesto, putting it in the safe, wherein Whitley claims to be a Muslim and acting in the interests of Allah. If we could have driven Whitley completely insane, they would at least have had to table the plan. Now it will go through.”

  “And we’re Plan B?”

  “Yes,” Fiona responded, turning to Grant. “You never did tell me what Plan B entailed.”

  “Plan B is simple, but we’ll need Brandon’s help dismantling the bomb and Kevin’s help with logistics. Here’s what I came up with. Whitley will arrive at 8 AM. The friend told him someone named Fortney will be collecting the bomb from him and placing it in the synagogue. What Whitley doesn’t know is the friend has no plans to show. Whitley will blow up long before 9, at 8:30. So, he’s sitting in his car, waiting for this Fortney, and Fiona walks by.”