by Willow Rose
“It’s a long story, and I really need a shower. Listen, do you know if Liam will be released too?”
She shook her head. “He won’t. Not now, at least. I was able to convince them that you wouldn’t run away, that you had the children to think about and aren’t a threat. I think I might have convinced them that you didn’t know what was happening, so now they only think Liam was behind it and that you were merely an innocent bystander. You still have some credit from Miami and catching that killer on Amelia Island, at least with those sitting in higher places like me. But don’t consider yourself safe yet. Every freakin’ agent around here is working on this case, and if they find even the smallest indication that you knew what was going to happen, they’ll lock you up. Do you hear me? And don’t come crying to me again. I’m tired of having to bail you out.”
“But Liam stays in?” I asked.
She nodded. “So far, no bail has been set. I don’t know if there will be. If he is considered a domestic terrorist, then who knows what will happen? I’ll keep an eye on it, though.”
“So, you believe us?” I asked.
She gave me a stern look. “You have never given me a reason not to. At least, not so far. But stay out of trouble, do you hear me? Stay away from anyone who might be the least bit anti-police or pro the Blue Lives Murder movement.”
I paused in my tracks. Isabella noticed and stopped too. She shook her head. “Oh, no, you don’t. You’re not going up there, do you hear me? You’ll get arrested, and then no one will believe me. I should have left you in that jail, at least till the march was over. Eva Rae, promise me you won’t go to D.C. and be in that demonstration. Promise me?”
I shook my head. “I can’t. I have to go.”
She pointed her finger at me like an angry teacher. “No, Eva Rae. You’re not.”
“But don’t you see? I have to stop it from happening. Please, listen to me, Isabella. You can help me with this. I told you about the swatting. I know you believed me or at least part of you did, right?”
She sighed heavily. “I think you might be onto something. I’ve been wondering about the number of fake calls and how a lot of them have turned deadly. But you don’t have enough for me to open an investigation, Eva Rae. We’ve been through that.”
“I know, Isabella. But this is important. You have to listen to me. It’s a war he wants. It’s been a part of the plan all along. The victims he chooses, the shooting last night. It was all part of it.”
Isabella stared at me, then shook her head, walking backward. “You know what? I can’t take any more of this from you. I have work to do, loads of it, and I only came because we were once good friends. I have to get going. I can’t deal with this right now. This is the last time I bail you out, do you hear me? Go home and be with your kids. If you go up there, I can’t help you anymore. You’ll risk losing everything, including your children. I can’t do any more for you. You’re on your own.”
Chapter 73
Isabella was right about one thing. I was truly on my own. Liam was still in police custody, and Matt said he didn’t want to talk to me when I called him on the way back, then hung up. The only one I could still rely on was my dad, who had helped me all along. But even he couldn’t help me out with this.
I went home, took a long shower, then returned to my computer and did a couple of searches, finding some info I needed. As I dug deeper into it, more pieces were beginning to fall into place, creating a picture that frankly had me terrified.
My mom was in the house when I came back and wanted to know why I had spent the night in jail and why there were reporters all over town asking questions about Liam Berkeley.
A couple of them had even called me while I drove home, asking stupid questions about him, but I had hung up or let voice mail do the answering for me. His face was everywhere, on all the TV channels and my Facebook newsfeed. A lot of people were applauding him for his actions, being a part of the Blue Lives Murder movement, while others were writing that he had gone too far. Journalists were writing nasty stories about how he had grown angry at the police for what happened to Tim, his son, and then planned an ambush, killing four officers as revenge. None of them seemed to think he was innocent or even cared about the real truth to this story.
At one point during the day, a reporter even came to my door and knocked, but my mom shooed him away, literally. I could hear her shoo at him from my room and couldn’t help laughing. No hungry reporter was any match for my mom. It made me happy to know this because if things went wrong for me in D.C., she’d have to be the one to take care of the kids.
I needed her to be a bulldog.
My kids came home while I was packing for my trip. Alex came running up the stairs, yelling, storming into my bedroom.
“Mom!”
I sighed and grabbed him in my arms, then sat with him on the bed, holding him tightly. I enjoyed the fact that he was still so small that I could actually carry him and hold him in my lap. Both my girls were too big for any of that now. I wasn’t looking forward to losing that closeness with my little man as well.
You might never see him again if it goes wrong, Eva Rae.
I kissed his head, then smelled his hair. “Are you going away again?” he asked as he spotted my sports bag of clothes. My gun was placed on top of it, and I reached over to cover it up.
“Mommy has some work to do, buddy, and needs to go on a little trip for a few days. But Grandma is here, and she’ll take real good care of you.”
“Ugh. I hate her food; you know that. And she never reads the story the fourth time like you do, and she doesn’t do the voices correctly. I’d rather have Matt take care of us. He’s really good at bedtime stories and at playing cops and robbers.”
My heart sank when hearing his name. He hadn’t even wanted to talk to me when I called earlier. He told me he was in the middle of something important, and that we could talk later, then hung up before I could even protest.
“I know, sweetie,” I said. “But I’m afraid that we’ll have to try and do without Matt this time, huh?”
Alex pulled himself out of my grip, then jumped to the floor. “You shouldn’t have invited him to move in with us if you didn’t plan on keeping him,” he said. “It’s like that dog that followed me home from school one time. You told me I shouldn’t have invited it inside the house, remember? It’s like that, Mommy. You should have known better.”
With that, he walked to the door and left my bedroom. I sat back with a feeling of defeat as the realization sank in.
I had lost Matt, hadn’t I? I had lost him for good this time.
Chapter 74
Matt stared at the phone like he had for the past hour. He had hung up on Eva Rae when she called, but now he regretted it. He wanted to talk to her; there was no one on this planet he’d rather talk to than her right now, but he simply couldn’t. He couldn’t stand being dragged into more trouble or any more muddy emotions. It was simply becoming too encompassing, too much for him.
“You wanna go again?” Elijah asked.
Matt nodded and grabbed the stack of cards. They were playing UNO, their favorite game these days. Ever since Matt had put a limit on how much screen time the boy was allowed to have, he and Elijah had been spending a lot more time together, playing cards, reading, or even just talking. Elijah still didn’t say much, but Matt gave him the time he needed, never pressuring him, and listened carefully and attentively whenever he did open up. Soon, he had started to learn things about the boy as he shared details about himself. Like the fact that his favorite color was purple. That he liked to watch Anime. That he hated school, but if he had to choose, math was probably his favorite subject. He also learned that Elijah didn’t enjoy sports, but he loved to draw and that his big dream was to become an animator once he grew up.
Matt handed out the cards and picked them up to look at his hand. He couldn’t stop thinking about Eva Rae and worrying about her, even though he really didn’t want to. He was waiting for he
r to come to him, for her to ask him to come back, say she was sorry for how it had all gone down with him moving in.
He just feared that she never would, and right now, he couldn’t even stand talking to her, let alone seeing her again. He needed a break from her and all the drama constantly surrounding her.
He didn’t understand her; he had to admit. What had happened to her? It was like she didn’t even care anymore. She didn’t care about them anymore. Was it just because of losing Chad? Was it her grief that made her so distant?
“It’s your turn,” Elijah said with a sigh. “Hello? Where are you?”
Matt smiled and returned to his son. He grabbed a card. “I’m sorry. I don’t know where my head is at today.”
“Where it always is. With her,” Elijah said with an exhale. “You’re always thinking about her, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
“Oh, I’m sorry about that then,” Matt said.
“Yeah, well, it’s getting annoying. She’s not that special, you know. There are other women out there who’d treat you a whole lot better.”
Matt stared at Elijah, then down at his cards. Was the boy right? Was he just being blind?
“UNO,” Elijah said.
Matt stared down at his cards, then put one down on the pile. Elijah grinned and put his last card on top of it.
“I win again.”
“Argh,” Matt said, laughing. He then reached over and grabbed Elijah and began to tickle him. The boy laughed loudly, and so did Matt when the doorbell rang.
“Give me a sec,” he said, then rushed to the door and opened it.
“Alex?” he said, baffled.
Matt looked behind him and to the side to see if Eva Rae was with him. The boy stormed past him into the living room.
“What are you doing here…alone?”
The young boy turned to face him, his eyes determined, arms crossed in front of the chest of his police uniform.
“Matt. We need to talk.”
Chapter 75
“I know it’s a lot to ask to have me here, but I didn’t know where else to go. I can’t exactly afford a hotel room since I’m not really making much money these days.”
I blew on my coffee and looked up at Priscilla, whose daughter had been victim number six. I had known Priscilla for years while living in D.C., and her house hadn’t changed one bit. I couldn’t exactly say the same about her. Losing her daughter had burned its marks into her usually so pretty face. She had lost at least fifteen pounds and seemed so fragile I was afraid she might break. On the counter behind her stood pictures of Stacy from when she was just a child. I remembered that happy girl as she played outside in the street, learning to ride her bike, and then later, as she took care of my girls once they were born and played with them in our yard or babysat for us if we needed it. She stared back at us from those deep brown eyes like she was begging us to figure this thing out and find the person who murdered her. I had promised her mother I would, and I wasn’t going back on that, especially not now with everything that was at stake.
But it meant I would have to risk everything. I was well aware of this. If I was arrested up here, during the protest, there was no way I could argue that I wasn’t a part of the Blue Lives Murder movement. Isabella had convinced the investigators in Orlando that I had no knowledge of the ambush, but they could still change their minds. Cops had been shot, and they were hungry for justice. The sensible part of me knew I should have listened to her and not come to D.C., but how could I with what I knew?
“It’s good to see you. You’re welcome here anytime; you know that,” Priscilla said, placing a hand on top of mine.
I sipped my coffee, nodding. “That’s really sweet of you; thank you.”
“So, what’s going on?” she asked.
It was getting dark outside as the sun had set. I felt exhausted from all the traveling, but I wasn’t ready to go to bed yet. I was too stirred up inside to be able to find rest. “Why are you here? I’m guessing it’s not for the protest tomorrow.”
I swallowed while tapping my nails on the side of my cup. “Actually, that is exactly why I’m here. See, I realized recently that I had been looking for the wrong motive. This case isn’t about those that are being swatted.”
A deep furrow appeared between her eyebrows. “What are you talking about?”
“One hundred and twenty-two police officers have killed themselves so far this year in the U.S.,” I said. “One of them was the man who accidentally shot a young guy named Peter James in New Orleans after getting a call stating that he had just shot his dad and was about to shoot his mother and sister as well. On November twenty-second last year, dispatch received the call to nine-one-one, and Officer James Reed, leader of the SWAT team in the New Orleans Police Department, was the guy who gathered his team and surrounded the house. As the boy came to the door, they believed he went for a gun. They believed he was armed since that’s what he’d said in the call, and they shot him right there on his mother’s front porch. A second later, his mom comes running out, screaming, the same woman they believed he had shot. In that second, Officer Reed knew he had made a huge mistake. After the story came out, the public demanded that Reed had to be fired and prosecuted because Peter James was unarmed. And so, he was. He was acquitted in court, but he couldn’t escape the hurt inside from having taken this young boy’s life, so on September twenty, almost a year later, he grabbed his gun, placed it in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. His five-year-old daughter found him in the shed in the backyard. Her life is ruined too. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
Priscilla still looked at me like she didn’t quite understand. Priscilla was a professor and taught math at Howard University. She was a very smart woman.
“It’s like ripples in the water,” I said. “As I looked through all the cases that I suspect our Swatter is behind, I see similar stories. Six of the officers who were involved in deaths during these swatting incidents have committed suicide. Eight have been fired, three have left the force voluntarily, at least two that I have found have been divorced, one is in a mental institution.”
Priscilla nodded. “So, what you’re saying is that they hurt too.”
I nodded. “I kept wondering about the Swatter’s motives. He couldn’t possibly know that the people he swatted would be killed or even hurt. A lot of cases don’t end badly, and that’s what bothered me until I found out that they weren’t his targets. It wasn’t the gamers that he was attacking.”
“It was the police,” Priscilla said.
“Exactly. It was all about the police all along. They were the real targets. It was meant to hurt them, to make them suffer. No one will ever get over shooting an innocent boy. The gamers and your daughter Stacy were just a means to an end. This killer has a message for us all, and it’s not very pleasant.”
“But what does he want out of it?”
“Exactly what he is getting. He has chosen famous gamers or other celebrities like Liam Berkeley’s son, just to make sure the media would write about it. Sometimes, it was even broadcasted live if they were live streaming at the time of the swatting. He doesn’t just want to hurt the officers involved; he wants us to hate the police. Look at what happened to Officer Downey’s son, Nathan Downey. He was beaten up on his way home from school by a mother and her children. He almost died from his head hitting a lamppost. As far as I know, he hasn’t woken up yet. It’s stuff like that he wants. He wants a war against the police.”
Priscilla stared at me.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” I asked. “Look at what is happening tomorrow. Millions of people will protest against police brutality. People are angry. Amal Bukhari, who is behind the march, was one of his victims. Look at how much hatred she has been able to stir up toward the police. I fear more people will get hurt tomorrow on both sides of this. As Matt said, there are no winners here; there’s only more hurt. Meanwhile, the Swatter can sit back and enjoy his
work. No one will ever know what he has done.”
There was a long silence between us as I drank my coffee, staring at my old friend while she pondered this information.
“Say something,” I finally said.
“I…I don’t really know what to say, to be honest. It’s just a little hard, you know? To see the police as victims,” Priscilla said. “After what happened to my baby. I wasn’t there when it happened because she was in her own condo, but they shot her, an innocent and unarmed young girl. I can’t help but be so incredibly angry with them. Our kids are being shot down in the streets, Eva Rae.”
I nodded. “I know. And it’s awful; of course, it is. But we can’t let this guy win. He’s the murderer here. He’s the one who made the calls, and he’s doing it again and again all over the country, destroying lives all over the place. We can’t let him continue, Priscilla. And we can’t let hatred win.”
Chapter 76
Amal looked at herself in the round handheld mirror that Samir was holding up for her. She was trying to put on a little make-up, but the eyeliner kept smearing, making her eyes look like she had been crying.
“Ugh,” she said, trying to fix it.
“You look fine,” Samir said, smiling. “You don’t need any more.”
Amal tried once again with the eyeshadow, but her hand was shaking too badly to be able to do it properly.
“Here, let me,” her brother said and took it from her hand.
Amal hadn’t slept much the night before. She had been in terrible pain and couldn’t find rest, even though she took the pills the hospital had provided her. It was like they didn’t really help anymore.