by Andrea Speed
He walked up to them and didn’t even have to ask. Gordo started telling him. “A gunman came up to the door of the church at 7:38 this morning and started firing. He killed three and injured five before he was shot by the church’s part-time security guard. He’s en route to the hospital, but he was critical. He’s probably not gonna make it. There’s a possibility he’s a disgruntled cat or something, but after what we found in the front seat of his car, we don’t think so.”
Seb had it, sealed in a see-through plastic evidence envelope. Even from here, he could see written in blocky, almost elementary-level letters on a scrap of white notepaper: ALL ABOMINATIONS MUST DIE.
“I hate to say it, but you got lucky last night,” Gordo went on. “Or maybe you’re just so damn scary, that asshole couldn’t commit to trying to kill you face to face.”
“You’d have ripped his face off,” Seb noted. “Maybe he was a smarter breed of idiot.”
Roan nodded, slightly distracted. It could have been purely a coincidence, but he didn’t think so. He’d bet everything he had this guy would turn out to be a white supremacist too.
So why had they declared war on infecteds? And why now?
17
Spark
Before Gordo and Seb were given their walking papers to leave the scene, Roan heard a familiar voice arguing at the barricades and went to find Rainbow trying to get in. Roan got the cop to let her past, but he knew that was a mistake almost instantly, as he had to stop her from rushing up to the door. No one could go in right now.
So Rainbow ended up clinging to him and sobbing until his shirt was soaked with snot and tears. He still felt bad for her, as he always felt bad for Rainbow. There was just something about her, about her naive sense of belief and peace, that made his cynical side shrink back and take a seat. She wasn’t a cynical opportunist or a teenager looking for a thrill or a spoiled brat looking to shock her parents by joining a religion they would disapprove of. She honestly believed this bullshit. She wanted to be a part of something bigger than herself, and as much as he wanted to begrudge her that, he couldn’t. It’s not something he would have chosen for himself—it wasn’t something he could completely understand—but there was no malice in this, no judgment of others; she just wanted to belong to something. And he had to give her that.
Eventually, a female paramedic came over—he didn’t recognize her, but Roan got the sense she knew him—and led Rainbow away from him, giving her a sedative and sitting with her on the back bumper of an ambulance, extending as much comfort as a sympathetic ear could give. He wrung out his shirt as much as possible while still wearing it, and Gordo and Seb agreed to keep him in the loop. They also agreed to check out his white supremacist angle.
When he got back to his car, he just sat there a few minutes, staring at nothing, wondering what bothered him the most about this. He wasn’t sure, to be brutally honest. He hated the church and all it stood for, but did he want some psychopath to murder them? No, of course not. But he did hate them. This was the very textbook definition of mixed feelings.
He checked his phone, in case Grey had called to report they were under siege (or, more likely, Tank had beaten someone half to death with the coat rack), but it was only Fiona who had called him in the hour (had it really been that long?) he’d been at the church. She told him he might want to stop by, as she'd found something he might like to see.
With Hatcher not answering his phone calls, he'd asked Fi, when she called to ask if he was okay, to look into the site for him. He sometimes forgot, but dominatrix wasn’t her first career. She used to work at Microsoft; she had some serious computer skills, only recently displaced by her whip-handling skills.
She lived downtown, in a shabby chic apartment block known as Sunrise Terrace. She was on the third floor, in apartment 318, and as he knocked on the green-painted door, he realized this was the first time he’d ever seen where Fiona lived. That seemed like an awful oversight on his part.
He heard a couple of locks being thrown before she opened the door and said, “Come in you—what the hell happened to your shirt?”
“I got sobbed on.”
She blinked at him for a moment. “Well, that’s not the worst thing I thought of.”
He didn’t dare ask what that was.
Fiona was dressed in a loose navy T-shirt advertising Aero Leather, black sweatpants, and orange Crocs, suggesting she wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Her apartment was only a three-room one, but not too small, and over the scent of recently heated-up cinnamon rolls, he smelled a cat. “Um—” he began, but he didn’t have time to finish.
“Don’t worry. I shut Mandy in the bedroom.”
“Mandy’s your cat?”
“She is indeed. I didn’t know if she’d freak out on you or what, so I thought it best we didn’t find out. Now who sobbed on you?”
“Rainbow.” At her look, he was forced to explain. At least he got a chance to look around her place while talking. The combined living room/kitchen area wasn’t overly neat. It had a lived-in look, but the clutter was just low level enough to be homey. She had your typical good quality thrift store couch and coffee table, a TV on a stand (that was supposed to be a nightstand, but what difference did it make), and a bare bones Ikea desk where an Alienware computer setup dominated the surface, with an extra (?) hard drive stack on the floor beside the desk and small neon lights of red and blue flashing inside the rectangular metal tower. What appeared to be a Bose-style CD/MP3 player sitting on the kitchen counter was softly playing Tori Amos. A dominatrix who listened to Tori Amos? Oddly enough, that sounded about right. “You a gamer?” Alienware was mostly a gamer’s computer, or at least that was his impression.
“Used to be. Rather than kill my ex, I killed trolls. But lately I haven’t had the time to game, and besides, I couldn’t give a shit about my ex anymore.” He assumed she meant her ex-husband, a person she didn’t talk about at any great length—she simply said “the ex” like he was a near-fatal disease she'd once caught. “Can I get you something? I have diet soda and tap water. Pick your poison.”
“I’m okay. Thanks, though.”
“What about another shirt?”
“Better not. Dylan smells a woman on me, he’ll get crazy jealous.”
That startled a short, sharp laugh out of her as she sat at her desk in front of the computer. She had a really nice desk chair there, high-backed padded leather, and that alone told him how much time she spent on the computer. “How are you doing, by the way?” she asked as her fingers flew over her sleek, ergonomically designed keyboard. “I felt bad about calling you, but after I found this out I felt you’d wanna know.”
“I’m fine. It wasn’t the first time someone’s tried to kill me.”
“He tried to burn down your house.”
“He scorched my porch. Which almost sounds like a Dr. Seuss title.”
“How’s Dylan?”
“He was a little shaken up, but I think he’ll be okay. So what did you find?”
She looked up, her tight red ponytail swishing back with authority. “Well, I looked around for the owner of the domain name of that snuff site, and I eventually discovered—through means that might not be legal—that it was bought by Visionics Limited.”
He chewed that over for a moment. No, time wasn’t improving it. “What the fuck kind of name is that?”
“I know. But it’s a shell company, a phony thing made up by Dermot Cook.” She paused and looked up at him dramatically, like that was supposed to mean something.
“Who the hell’s Dermot Cook?”
“Robert Hatcher’s original business partner. The two had a big falling out, and Hatcher bought out his share of the business a couple years ago.”
“So the porn site is Cook’s new business?”
“No, he’s dead.”
“What?”
She turned back to her computer and called up a Wikipedia page. “He died last year. Dropped dead of a heart attack on a treadmill.
Can you imagine that? Dying in a gym while exercising? Fuck that. I’d rather die face first in a pie.”
He was down with that, although he wasn’t a huge fan of pie. (Unless it was shepherd’s pie, then maybe.) “This is Wikipedia. You can’t trust—”
She jumped ahead to the Seattle Times’s webpage and the huge obituary they ran for Cook. Okay, now he believed it. “He bought the domain name when?”
“For the snuff site? Six months ago.”
“From before he died?”
“No, hon, six months ago.”
Yeah, okay, that didn’t make sense. “Who’s the head of Visionics Limited now?”
“No one. It’s a dummy corporation.”
He knew Fiona wasn’t trying to be irritating, but this kind of was. Would it kill her to just spit it out? “Who’s in charge of Cook’s estate?”
“No one.” Her blue eyes gazed back up at him expectantly, as if she was hoping he would make sense of all of this. “His family was gone, he was an only child, he never married or seemingly had a serious girlfriend. I think he was closeted gay or asexual. Anyways, his will stipulated that all his money be shared between six different charities.”
“So the Visi-whatever the hell name is up for grabs.”
“Technically, although not a lot of people know about it.”
Roan considered this all carefully, feeling he was getting closer to something big and ugly. “Hatcher had to know about the shell corp.”
She bit her lower lip in thought. She wasn’t wearing makeup right now, but she was still attractive in a warm, open way that you really wouldn’t anticipate from someone with a footlocker full of whips and nipple clamps. “You’d think so. But you don’t think the snuff site is his, do you? Why would he hire you if it was? He wouldn’t want this coming out.”
“How would it? He hired me to look for Jordan, not for the owner of a snuff site.” A couple of things seemed to suddenly pop up in his mind, like corpses finally rising to the surface of a stagnant pond. “That’s why he’s been ducking my calls. He can’t find the owner of the site ’cause it’s him, and he doesn’t want me to know. Bet the server isn’t in Romania either. Son of a bitch.”
“But if Jordan’s run off to find the snuff film location, wouldn’t he know?”
“Hatcher’s a busy guy. I bet he’s not hands-on with the site. In fact, he may just profit from the fucking thing, and someone else runs it. Someone who wouldn’t know Jordan on sight, especially if he gave them a phony name.” Did that sound right? No, none of this would ever sound right, but it felt sickeningly plausible. Was that how Jordan found the site in the first place? He found the name somewhere among his dad’s stuff and checked it out and discovered he liked it. But he never let his father know he was in on his dirty secret. It allowed him to hide in plain sight from his father, and who would look for him on a porn site? Certainly not Hatcher.
“Then…,” she began, turning back to the computer screen. She sounded like she didn’t know what to say. “Are we dead? Is he gonna have us killed ’cause we know his dirty little secret?”
“You watch too many bad movies. Killing us would just bring more attention to the problem he’s trying to sweep under the rug.”
“So how would he sweep us under the rug?”
She locked eyes with him, and he felt something loosen in the pit of his stomach. A man like him would delegate, would get someone—someones—with no connection to him whatsoever to take care of the problem.
Like white supremacists? He suddenly wondered how you went about hiring a gang of them, and how much it cost.
If Hatcher had started this ball rolling, Roan didn’t care how much money and power he had. He was going to kill the bastard.
18
Woolen Heirs
Roan stormed out of Fiona’s place with a full head of steam (not just a cliché—it actually felt like it, like his head was a teakettle, and steam was just going to erupt through his ears at any moment). He called Hatcher’s number and got his machine again, so he simply said, “Either get back to me immediately, or this is all over the web. Hope you’ve had a colonoscopy recently, ’cause the Feds will be crawling up your ass by the end of the day. Close your eyes and think of England, you sick fuck.” He felt like throwing the phone, but he would have broken it. He made himself remember that this was his cell and not Hatcher himself. He just had to wait; then he could pick up Hatcher and throw him, hopefully from a very tall building.
What if his own money-grabbing exercise had killed his own son? Would that convince him that maybe, just maybe, this was all a big fucking mistake? Hard to say with raving capitalists sometimes.
He had just got in the car when his phone went off. Checking he saw it was home calling. In a way, he hoped it was trouble, because then he could vent some steam on some assholes. “Yeah.”
“Honey,” Dylan said in a quiet, lilting voice. “I don’t want to alarm you, but our home has been infested by hockey players.”
“Not the entire team, I hope.”
“No. Actually, Tank is a hell of a cook.”
That was a surprise. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah! He made these buttery, cheesy omelets that were so good, I swear if he was gay, I’d have left you for him.”
“That’s it. Pack your shit and get out, you disloyal bastard.”
Dylan snickered. “He claims he can only cook breakfasts, though. Omelets, pancakes, crepes.”
“He makes crepes? Hot damn, I’ll leave you for him first.”
“I’ll try and save you some eggs, but hockey players eat like pigs. Scott already had to take off on an egg run.” He paused briefly. “Tank has an interesting story.”
“He’s been talking?”
“No, but he doesn’t have to. There’s a surprising amount of depth in his eyes. He always seems to be thinking. I bet he’s a hell of a lot smarter than he seems to be, probably—no offense to the rest of the Falcons—the smartest guy on the team. He’s also surprisingly good-natured for a man I wouldn’t trust around a loaded firearm. Speaking of which, I called my therapist.”
Dylan used to see a therapist on a regular basis but had quit about two years ago. Roan scoured his brain, trying to dig up the name. “Savage, right?”
“Yes, Doctor Savage. She has an opening on Thursday and can squeeze me in.”
“The problem is me, not you.”
“Bullshit. I learned how to manage my anger effectively, and I backslid. I don’t want to keep falling backwards.”
“Then you probably need to get away from me.”
“None of that. My wanting to protect you isn’t a failing on your part. It’s me needing to deal with my issues.”
“You know, it’s very sweet you want to protect me. Most people figure I’m on my own.” He leaned back in the driver’s seat and closed his eyes. For some reason, anger often exhausted him.
“Well, you are a super-macho dude.”
“And inhuman. Don’t forget that.”
He sighed dramatically. “Don’t take this the wrong way, sweetie, but fuck you to hell.”
That made Roan chuckle. Really, he deserved no less. “You okay?”
“Yeah, just a little tired. I still can’t believe someone did that. Also, I can’t believe I’m entertaining a bunch of jocks from Canada.”
“Grey’s American.”
“Which explains so much about him. Of course he’s the team enforcer. Can we sue the Falcons for stereotyping?”
“You know, you’d think we should be able to. But it’s a fair cop, and society is to blame.” It was stuffy in the car, so Roan rolled down the window and noted how much better he was feeling. When he'd first got in here, he was ready to kill someone (Hatcher). Talking to Dylan had pulled him back to sanity, which was probably the best thing for everyone involved.
“You can’t go to the Monty Python well forever.”
“You’ll pry Monty Python from my cold, dead hand.”
“Wow. There’s so
many things wrong with that sentence.”
“Yes, well, there’s so many things wrong with me.”
“Knock off the self-pity shit. But does that explain why you sounded so pissed off when you answered the phone?”
“Yeah, I was expecting another call. In fact, I’d better get off. And you’d better buckle up, ’cause there might be a shitstorm after this.”
“Another?” He sounded genuinely exasperated. “I know money is tight, but can we go somewhere and get you away from all this trouble you seem to be causing? Drive to California or something? What about Canada? We can go back to Canada.”