Aftershock

by Andrew Vachss

“I won’t,” he said. Nice and calm—I believed he meant it.

  “If the trial goes on for a while, you can start calling some of your own shots.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Take Court TV, okay? I’ve watched it a couple of times, but not enough to know who’s for real. Not yet, anyway. But the next time that door opens, you’ll know the only one who gets to walk through it. Understand? You’ll talk to Mr. X. But only to Mr. X. They don’t like that, they can do what, exactly?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “The only thing we have to watch for now is the last-minute-substitute game.”

  “Now I really—”

  I cut him off with “They tell you it’s CNN, so you naturally think you’re getting interviewed by an actual reporter. A journalist. But CNN, it’s actually a lot of different channels. When they sit you in a chair in Portland, you can’t see who’s on the other end. But you’ll hear everything. If it turns out to be anything but a straight news show, you just say you were told you would be speaking with a reporter, unhook your mike, and walk off.”

  “But why would they pull a stunt like that?”

  “CNN also has all those stupid ‘crime shows.’ The ones with the host in the middle, surrounded by little boxes, each one with a different person in it, all kissing ass. Why? Because if they don’t their little box gets closed down—the star in the center controls all the mikes. But if you walk off the set when CNN tries to put you in one of those boxes, you’re going to be more famous than if you sat in one every night.”

  “I’m not doing this to be famous.”

  “Who said you were, Brad? You’re using the media to help your client. So, if the media won’t keep its word, you won’t deal with the media at all. That’s strategy, not mugging for the cameras. But it wouldn’t be your fault if folks respect you for doing the right thing—going on TV for your client, not for yourself.”

  “Of course,” he said, as if no lawyer would go on TV for any other reason.

  I did a quick body-check. His hands were steady; his eyes were good. We’d tape his appearance later that night, and I’d get Dolly to tape Court TV every day, all day. Like Patrice told me so many years ago, before you put down your whole week’s packet, you had best study the form.

  By accident, I almost walked in on one of Dolly’s meetings. But I was able to pull back before any of them knew I’d gotten so close.

  “She’s not one of us.” A girl’s voice.

  “What’s that mean?” Another girl. A girl drawing a line in the sand.

  “Oh, not that” was the reply. “I just mean, she doesn’t hang out with us, that’s all.”

  “That’s not the question,” Dolly said. Nice and soft, like she was explaining something. Then the softness turned to iron: “The question is, are you one of us?”

  “I don’t … I mean, of course. Right?”

  “There’s no ‘of course’ to this,” Dolly told her. “We all agreed that we were going to fight for MaryLou. You were there when we made that decision. So it’s very simple now: are you with us, or not?”

  “Maybe if MaryLou had shot anyone but precious Cam you wouldn’t be hemming and hawing,” another girl said.

  “That’s got nothing to do with …” the girl who had to make the decision started to say. Then she starting crying.

  I faded back to where I’d come from.

  “JoAnne, the girl who said MaryLou wasn’t one of us? When Cassidy made that crack about ‘precious Cam,’ it was a vicious shot. Everyone knows JoAnne was with Cameron. For a few hours, I mean. He tossed her out like a used Kleenex when he was finished, but that hasn’t stopped her from still crushing on him.”

  “You got the CD of the lawyer from last night?”

  “Sure. But it only went a couple of minutes.”

  “Good.”

  I pushed the “play” button. Dolly must have reset the disk so that it started off with the camera coming in on some guy with white hair—he looked too young to have hair that color, but he was good-looking enough to make it into a trademark.

  “Can you talk a little about what makes this case so different from all the other school shootings that seem to have infected America ever since Columbine?”

  “Other than the obvious—”

  “You mean, that the shooting was done by a girl? Or that she had a different motive than the others?”

  “All I feel comfortable saying about the case at this time is that it’s not over. Not close to over.”

  “Is that a hint that you may be thinking of an insanity defense?”

  “No. And it’s not a ‘hint,’ it’s nothing more than what I said. By the time this case is finished, the jury is going to learn some things they never even imagined. And what they learn is going to be a game-changer, that you can take to the bank.”

  “Is that your way of telling us—?”

  “That’s my way of telling you what I’d tell anyone else. No more, no less.”

  “Uh, well, on that note, I suppose this is as good a time as any to go to break. When we come back …”

  When they did, Swift wasn’t on the set.

  “Nice job,” I told him a couple of hours later. I just walked past the harried slob behind the phone bank. She was telling someone she’d take a message. I could tell she’d been saying that all day.

  “The phone’s been ringing off the hook.”

  “I expect so,” I told him.

  “But one of those calls was from the DA’s Office. And that one I returned,” he said, speaking from somewhere inside that narrow band between egotistical and self-assured. “The pistol did have a serial number. It was purchased about a year ago. By her father. Nothing even remotely illegal about it. He had a license, and the sale was registered.”

  I made some noise that could have meant anything.

  “Does that help or hurt?” he asked.

  “Helps. Means the gun was probably just lying around the house, already loaded. No need for questions about who sold it to MaryLou. And now we have confirmation that it wasn’t a gun-show buy.”

  “A what?”

  “If you want to buy certain kinds of weapons, you can go to any of those gun shows you see advertised in the paper all the time.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “The guys at those shows, they’re all ‘collectors.’ So they can sell a weapon from their private collection to another collector. Not even illegal. And if you don’t want to leave a paper trail, some of them can help you with that, too. But nobody like that would want the pistol MaryLou used.”

  “Because …?”

  “Because it’s got nothing going for it. Not a heavy-caliber semi-auto, and even if you were dumb enough to put a silencer on a revolver, that two-inch barrel couldn’t be threaded for one.”

  “They didn’t say anything about the barrel. I didn’t ask, either. Should I, you think?”

  “No. You have to play this like you know a lot more than they do. That was the seed you planted on TV.”

  “I didn’t know you couldn’t put a silencer on a revolver.”

  “When it comes to metal fabrication, you can do just about anything. But an assassin would know that the construction of a wheel gun makes it impossible to quiet it down that much. Besides, why bother with a silencer when you’re shooting in front of so many witnesses?”

  “Yeah …” he said, as if he understood all that. Which was good. For now, at least.

  When I got back, Dolly’s crew was in full swing. I couldn’t tell if the girl who’d had a problem with helping MaryLou was still there; I’d only heard her voice, not seen her face.

  “I hacked into his Facebook page and—” one said.

  “Posting something on his wall doesn’t mean you hacked into it,” another cut her off. “Unless you took over control of his account. Is that what you’re saying?”

  The silence was an answer.

  “But Regina could be onto something, anyway,” Dolly said.
“Everybody here has a Facebook account, right?”

  More silence.

  “Okay, so you can all log on. Fire up those laptops and get to work.”

  “On what?” another girl asked.

  “See if his account is still open. It was when Regina looked, and that was just last night, yes?”

  “Yes,” the girl who had to be Regina said.

  “So we want to look at all the Facebook pages of anyone who could be involved.”

  I tilted my head. “I’ll be right back,” Dolly told them, and followed me down to my den. I closed the heavily baffled door behind us, but we still spoke in whispers.

  “Make sure they check one page. One that they may not have thought of. Uh … wait a minute. That’s too much information for them. If they get to a page for MaryLou’s sister on their own, fine. But if not, can you make up an account for yourself, so we can check that one out ourselves?”

  She gave me one of her looks. “I already have one, honey.”

  “But wouldn’t that mean anyone could—?”

  “No,” she said, too impatient to get back to her crew to wait for me to finish. “It’s not my name. And I use the Mac laptop for it, not the PC we have upstairs. All the IP would tell anyone is what Wi-Fi zone I was logging on from—there’s dozens I can use, and I’ve got a proxy for e-mail. On top of that, I’ve only got three ‘friends.’ I made them up, too—every time I go anywhere away from here, I make a new friend. You have to be my friend to post on my wall, or message me, or … Oh, never mind, Dell. I’ve got this part, okay?”

  As I passed by on my way to the basement, I’d heard enough to learn that MaryLou didn’t have a Facebook page of her own. That wasn’t a surprise. But she did have what they called a “fan page.” Another thing to ask Dolly about.

  Too many hours until daylight, so I stayed down in the basement, looking through all the paper Dolly had managed to coax out of her computer.

  When the place emptied out, we got a chance to talk. Turned out I never had to ask Dolly the question I’d been planning.

  “MaryLou doesn’t have a personal page, but she sure has fans. You search for ‘Mighty Mary McCoy’—or even ‘M3’!—and you get a whole bunch of people. Softball fans. Most of them in college. By now, they all probably know she’s been arrested. But before that, they were all saying why she’d be going to one school or another.

  “Franklin doesn’t have a page. Cameron’s page is still open. Mostly all kinds of love notes or tributes or similar nonsense. But there were a few I want to see if I can get someone to track down.”

  “Why?”

  “One, they were anonymous. New accounts, set up just to do this.”

  “What’s ‘this’?”

  “Mostly references to ‘karma.’ You know, the ‘what goes around, comes around’ thing. Some were really … I don’t want to say ‘nasty,’ considering what side we’re on, but stuff like ‘I wish I’d thought of that.’ I know that’s not much. Kids, they say things like that all the time. Especially on the Internet. But maybe one of them actually knows something.…”

  “Could be.”

  “Yes. But here’s what you wanted, Dell,” she said, handing me a few pages of printout. I sat down to read.

  MaryLou’s little sister did have a page. Her friends called her Danyelle. She had more than three hundred of them. Looked like all of them were male.

  I scanned them hard, looking for … I don’t know what. Whatever it was, it wasn’t there.

  “Cameron friended her quite a while back,” Dolly said. “On this address—Facebook, I mean—that means within the last couple of years or so.”

  “Friended?”

  “You have to ask someone to accept you as a friend. Cameron seems to have accepted a lot of friends. But he doesn’t post much on his wall—that’s public, anyone could see it. So I think he did all his contacting with IMs—those you can’t see.”

  “Are there pictures? On his page, I mean.”

  “Oh yes. He’s as pretty as a model, but doesn’t look a bit effeminate. There’s even a close-up of both the tattoos, so I didn’t need to burn a favor to get you one. See?”

  She handed me a full-page color shot of the red symbol against the black square on his right biceps. I looked at it under a magnifying glass, sector by sector. The closer I looked, the more certain I was that I’d seen it before.

  But I couldn’t be sure. The only mercs who put ink on themselves were the ones dumb enough to show them off in bars. Patrice had warned me to steer clear of those kind of bars. For every lion, there’s a lion-hunter. And lion-hunters don’t like fair fights.

  At least you could keep tattoos like Cameron’s covered up. A Russian merc I worked with on a job had all kinds of marks on his hands and fingers. He was real proud of them, said you had to be “entitled” to wear tattoos like his. If you didn’t have the credentials, a tattoo on your hand that said you were a killer would get you killed.

  A pair of Japanese mercs—twins, I think they were—they had tattoos all over. I didn’t know what the tattoos meant, but I saw the ink never went below their wrists.

  I didn’t see where it mattered much. You might fix things so most people didn’t see any tattoo you wore, but that wouldn’t last long if you were ever taken captive.

  Thinking about how the Japanese had looked down on the Russians didn’t narrow the field—they looked down on everyone. But …

  If I closed my eyes, I could see something like that symbol. It wasn’t a unit mark, but I’d seen it before. In Southeast Asia.

  That mark couldn’t be one of those “Japanese” ones you see in comic books. If you worked Southeast Asia, there was only one foreign language you’d let other people see.

  Chinese.

  So I knew what language the tattoo was in, but not what it meant. And there was no way a kid Cameron’s age had worked as I had. Kids all over the world are conscripted into wars by “legitimate” governments. Or kidnapped, drugged, and terrorized into some warlord’s army to defend or depose them, depending on who put up the cash. But Cameron had probably never left home his entire life.

  “The school, it would have yearbooks from every graduating class, wouldn’t it?”

  “Sure,” Dolly said. “But we’d never be able to get hold of Cameron’s—the police must have it.”

  “How about a yearbook he signed?”

  “He probably signed every girl’s in school.”

  “Probably got asked, anyway.”

  “I’ll get my hands on one.”

  “I know you will,” I told her.

  It was dark by the time I woke up. Dolly was still sleeping next to me. We’d never slept together in the basement before.

  I padded away, careful not to wake her. But Rascal spoiled that plan. The mutt had planted himself across the threshold, and he wasn’t about to move. The instant he sensed me, he yapped like he’d just spotted a squirrel.

  “Good boy!” Dolly shouted behind me.

  He sure as hell was.

  Working alone doesn’t bother me. Working any job with partners is always a plus-minus: it could make the job easier, but it leaves whoever you worked with too much knowledge. About you, I mean. And that’s a card they could play anytime.

  I thought about Franklin. I had no doubt he’d help out with what I needed next, but I was afraid he might go too far with it. And even though I wasn’t worried about his talking, I knew he could be recognized by size alone.

  I would have bet a lot that he couldn’t move as quietly as I’d need him to—that wasn’t something any football coach would have trained him to do.

  All I wanted was one of their jackets. But I had to make taking one look like it meant something else was going on. A branding iron would do it, but the brand had to at least look like it meant something. I decided on a “club,” the kind you see on playing cards—a spade or a heart would be too tricky, and a diamond could be mistaken for too many other things. To make a club, I wouldn’t need more
than a stencil of a circle, a few pieces of iron, a pair of tongs, a small sledgehammer, an anvil … and a lot of heat.

  Sooner or later, one of them would walk off into the wooded area just past the pool of darkness. They weren’t dealing in anything but the chance to hang out with them. But if you’re selling “cool,” you can’t do it in a place that stinks. The shack that someone had slapped together in the woods behind that day-care place didn’t have any lines for electricity, and I was betting against plumbing, too. So a visit to the other part of the woods would be mandatory at some point—I just needed to wait until one came out there alone.

  From where I was waiting, I could see one move off. But he wasn’t going to come anywhere near where I’d been watching from, so I had to parallel him to reach the intersection just before he did.

  A .177 air gun makes even the most silenced firearm sound like a cannon. He probably thought the sting in his neck was a mosquito. I’d had to go damn near full-strength on the load. Even if it wasn’t so dark, I’m not good enough with a pistol to take a chance—I had to get him unconscious before he could scream.

  I was on top of him while he was still crumpling to the ground. By the numbers: Feel around for the dart, pull it loose, and pocket it in a little plastic bag. Wrap his face with duct tape from just below his nose to the Adam’s apple. Stick a couple of cotton wads into his nostrils, loose enough so he could still breathe through them.

  Then I started bagging everything he was carrying, from his wristwatch to his wallet. Three gold chains around his neck, three different lengths. Heavy ring on his wedding-band finger. A little squeeze from my tube of a slicker-than-Teflon mix let me slide it away—cutting off the finger would have turned what he’d probably never admit to into something he couldn’t deny.

  His black slacks were beltless, but I checked the waist anyway. I didn’t go too far before I felt a little lump. I tried passing over it, but it was too long. So I moved all the way to the end, then pushed my thumbnail toward where the slacks had been buttoned. Capsules dropped into my hand one at a time, like a dispensing machine.

  Finally, the jacket. I wasn’t surprised to find a push-button knife inside. A quick wrap with one of the precut duct-tape strips made sure it wouldn’t pop open by accident. I’d check it properly once I got it back home. I couldn’t risk his cell phone’s having a GPS unit, so I just popped out the SIM card and the battery.