Web of Justice

by J J Miller

  WEB OF JUSTICE

  (Brad Madison Legal Thriller, Book #2)

  J.J. MILLER

  © 2019 Innkeeper Publishing

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Also by J.J. Miller

  Force of Justice (Brad Madison Legal Thriller, Book #1)

  Code of Justice (A Brad Madison short story)

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Note from J.J.

  For my dear, late mother

  1

  A dead weight tugged at my arm as I pushed through the crowd. Holding my hand was not just the fifty-pound weight of my seven-year-old daughter but about two hundred pounds of resentment. Each sullen jerk reminded me, again and again, what a lousy father I was. We were late, and it was more than my fault—it was as if I’d contrived to ruin what was meant to be the best day of Bella’s life.

  The crowd was mostly teenagers, but it wasn’t just that that made me feel out of place. This was VidCon, something I’d never heard of until Bella had breathlessly mentioned it to me months back. A three-day love-in for the world’s most popular YouTubers and their fans. Before Bella wised me up, I’d have thought the local McDonald’s would have been a big enough venue. But here we were at the Anaheim Convention Center—sold out and swarming with kids.

  I’d surprised Bella with a ticket to a meet and greet with Cicily Pines, a young singer she’d been raving about. Of course, I’d never heard of Cicily Pines. She had no records out, was not listed on any Billboard chart, and her music was never played on the radio. She was purely an online phenomenon, a YouTube “creator” with a channel full of videos showing her singing originals and a few covers.

  But Cicily Pines wasn’t the headline act of VidCon. From the massive billboards around the venue, that honor seemed to fall to Team 5MS—a group of teens bursting out of that two-dimensional space with untold enthusiasm and vitality. To me, they were fabulous nobodies. To this crowd, they were gods.

  From the moment I’d picked Bella up, she knew we were going to miss the start of the meet and greet. Her mother, my ex-wife Claire, had said as much. In the car, after Bella had cried and scolded me, she’d fallen into a silent funk. Then she ordered me to turn around and take her back home. I tried reassuring her, telling her we’d make the show, but she knew even I didn’t believe what I was saying. And in the past few months, she’d learned better than to take me at my word.

  I only got Bella every second weekend, and yet over the past few months I’d managed to regularly sabotage our time together. Some of that was my own doing, some of it was not. Usually, the excuse was work—a criminal defense attorney’s job can’t always be shoehorned into a Monday to Friday work week, and I’d had to leave Bella waiting while attending to some client’s predicament that couldn’t hold until Monday.

  Other times, there was no one to blame but me. I’d been hitting the bottle pretty hard of late, and more than once I’d woken up late with a blank memory and a strange woman, only to realize I’d broken yet another promise to Bella. Today, I hated to admit, was one of those days. I’d spent the night with a young paralegal—getting slam drunk in some bar before winding up in my bed. Both of us slept through my alarm. Only Claire’s persistent calls had finally broken through, and when they did, I raced straight over to pick Bella up, still smelling of sin.

  The Cicily Pines meet and greet was scheduled to run for thirty minutes. When we were issued our wristbands at the entrance, only ten minutes remained.

  “We can make it,” I kept saying to Bella as I led her into the first of a series of expo halls. “These things always start late. You watch.”

  It was all Bella could do to keep herself from bawling as she followed. Her despair only grew heavier as we drew nearer, the reality that the event was all but over hardening in her mind.

  With guilt driving my denial, we hurried past booths belonging to tech companies, social media platforms, phone companies and game consoles. In this weirdo world, I was beginning to sense, geekdom was linked to glory, and technology offered a path to pop-star-level fame. These kids were into all of it, each walking around with show bags donning “cool” IT company logos. If their faces weren’t buried in their phones, they held them aloft, ready to record every key moment.

  Suddenly, a scream erupted about fifty yards ahead. It was a wild, excited Ed Sullivan-Beatles-type scream, and a wave of girls swept past us, many running with their phones, on record, held high. They stopped and then turned in circles like a pack of bloodhounds desperate to retrieve a lost scent.

  “Who is it?” I heard a kid beside me ask as she ran.

  “Dunno, I think someone said Haydon Crane.”

  Haydon Crane?! Who the hell is Haydon Crane?

  The burst of excitement lifted Bella’s mood. She was now infected by the vibe of the place, and suddenly she fell in beside me almost at a jog.

  We were deeper inside the building now, the third expo hall down, but running against a tide of people streaming into what appeared to be a concert room.

  Up ahead, a huge video screen towered over us. On it a young guy was being interviewed. I could barely make out the audio, but he was, like, too cool for school—sunglasses, punk hair, multiple face piercings, hyper-stoked and loving the attention. The screen flashed with a clip of him jumping out of a plane and skydiving down to a nearby lot. Short videos showing what, I assumed, he was famous for were stitched into the interview—cruel pranks and mindless, brattish fun.

  “Who’s that douche bag?” I asked Bella, pointing up to the screen and mentally shunning the fact that I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

  “Luke Jameson,” Bella replied.

  “Who?”

  “Luke Jameson. He’s huge. He’s got something like twenty million subscribers.”

  Whatever the hell that meant.

  I enjoyed a sharp sense of relief that Bella didn’t appear to be at all interested in this character. And it made me all the more grateful that, if she was going to idolize someone, at least it was Cicily Pines.

  I’d done my homework and watched just about every post on her channel. The clips were all similar—just her, an acoustic guitar and a voice from heaven. She was sweet without being guileless. She seemed humble and genuine. There was a hint of religion about her but nothing overt. She occasionally expressed her gratitude to God, but that was about it. A few minutes on Googl
e revealed she was aligned with some Christian network of social media stars. I was okay with that. Wholesome is just fine when it comes to a seven-year-old girl’s role model. I didn’t expect Bella to grow up a saint, but I wasn’t going to complain if her influencers were people who encouraged her to like herself and not strive to please others—boys, namely—in order to feel validated in life.

  At last, I caught sight of the venue we wanted. I’d desperately been hoping for some kind of hold up and, to my immense relief, there was: a queue forty yards long was parked outside.

  “Look, Bella. It hasn’t started. I told you we’d make it!”

  Bella smiled nervously, not quite sure whether to believe it was true. But as we got near it became clear the Cicily Pines event had not yet begun. Bella’s face beamed. I almost felt like a decent father.

  A woman wearing a lanyard was making her way down the line, telling everyone they’d be let in soon. I could hear her apologizing for the delay.

  As she walked past us, I spoke up so Bella could hear for herself that we’d missed nothing.

  “Excuse me, ma’am,” I said. “The show hasn’t started yet, has it?”

  “No, it hasn’t. Fate conspired against us today, I’m afraid, but we’ll be getting under way shortly.”

  The woman’s conservative appearance and bearing seemed a little out of time and place. She wore a gray skirt suit and flat shoes. Her blond hair was pulled back with a hair band, she wore very little make-up, and her sole piece of jewelry was a string of pearls.

  “We were so late. I thought we would miss Cicily for sure,” said Bella. “I was mad at my dad.”

  “So you’ve been fretting, dear?” said the woman, flicking a quick glance my way before bending down to Bella. “That won’t do, will it? Well, how about I make sure you get some one on one time with Cicily? How does that sound? I’m sure she’d love to meet you.”

  Bella bounced up onto her toes, her spirit soaring. All was right with the world.

  As the woman turned away a teenage girl walked straight up to Bella with an excited smile.

  “Excuse me. You’re Bella Madison, aren’t you?”

  Bella nodded silently with a half-smile.

  The girl was looking her up and down with admiration. It was clear she was taking stock of Bella’s “look”. Until now I’d barely given Bella’s outfit a moment’s thought. Normally I’d complement her but my admiration got lost in the rush. She did have a striking talent for putting clothes together, something that was evident even before she was out of diapers.

  “Oh my gosh, I follow you on Instagram,” the girl said. “Can I get a photo with you?”

  Bella looked flattered. As I watched her chat with the girl and join her for a selfie, I felt proud of the humble, graceful way in which Bella conducted herself. I never liked the idea of her having an Instagram account. According to the platform’s terms of service, users had to be older than thirteen. I’d argued with Claire about it a couple of times, saying she was too young to be making images of herself public. But Claire insisted I was overreacting and that Bella enjoyed having a dynamic outlet for her love of fashion. She assured me she had total control of the account and that she’d had the social media version of the “birds and the bees” talk with Bella. When I raised the subject of creeps who followed kids online, Claire said she didn’t want their lives to be dragged down by perverts. She said she scanned Bella’s account daily, blocking and reporting anything inappropriate. I remained dead against it but eventually gave up arguing.

  In most of Bella’s photos she wore items of jewelry designed by Claire, all part of a children’s line launched last year. I couldn’t help but point out to Claire that Bella was a marketing tool for her business. She scoffed and told me I was out of touch.

  The girl stood beside Bella as she worked her phone and asking Bella to choose the filter she liked best.

  “I like that one,” Bella said, pointing at the screen.

  “So do I,” said the girl who then tapped away again. “Done. Posted. I’ll tag you. You’ll be sure to like it, won’t you? That would be so awesome.”

  “Okay, no worries,” said Bella. She pulled her phone out of her small handbag and tapped away the screen. “There you are. Done.”

  The girl swooned at what she saw.

  “You’re following me! You’re amazing. Thank you so much.”

  A huge scream erupted from the adjacent theater, the one we’d seen so many people enter. Loud music began to play—upbeat and rap.

  “Oh, I’ve got to go!” said the girl. “Team 5MS is about to start!”

  As she dashed off, Bella turned to me. I gave her a look of mock incomprehension.

  “My own daughter has a fan club?”

  “Not really, daddy. They’re just followers. They like what I do. They like my style—how I dress.”

  “I know that. I just find it weird, and I don’t like it. Not one little bit.”

  “Oh daddy. Just wait til I start my own YouTube channel.”

  She said it like she knew it wasn’t something she would do tomorrow but rather in years to come, and that I’d object, and that she felt sorry for me in advance. I took that as a sign of her nascent maturity, something I marveled at. It encouraged me to think she was going to be okay, that she would be able to thrive in the world.

  “Bella, you have plenty of time to make it as a designer or anything else you put your mind to. But right now, I don’t think this Instagram thing is something you’re ready for.”

  “You mean it’s something you’re not ready for.”

  “I suppose you’re right. But you really don’t know what people can be like, how cruel they can be.”

  I paused. She stood in silence, looking ahead. She’d heard me beat this drum many times. I changed the subject.

  “What does 5MS mean anyway? You know, Team 5MS.”

  “Five million subscribers.”

  “Oh, I thought it was ‘five meatball sandwiches’.”

  Bella laughed and bumped against me.

  “You’re silly, Daddy. Look, the line’s moving!”

  Sure enough the people ahead of us were being let in. We shuffled forward, holding hands. I smiled, knowing we’d been lucky. We could well have been traipsing back home, Bella having missed the show and me having no way to redeem myself. But now our time together promised to be something we’d cherish for a long time.

  CRACK!

  CRACK!

  The sounds were loud, sharp and unmistakable.

  I didn’t need six years in the Marines and two tours in Afghanistan to tell me they were gunshots.

  A dreadful high-pitched din erupted from within the theater where the music had been coming from. Screaming, hundreds of young kids screaming. This time, it wasn’t the sound of excitement but pure terror. Within seconds, a rush of frantic bodies came sprinting out of the entrance. They ran for their lives, tears streaming down their terrified, baffled faces, heads swiveling desperately to find the quickest way out.

  “He’s shooting at us!” one boy cried.

  “There’s a gunman! Run!” shouted another.

  Everyone around us did exactly that. They bolted for the exits. But amid this sudden chaos, I knew that’s what I couldn’t do. It had been almost ten years since I’d served, but that Marine instinct flipped on like a switch. Like most Americans, I’d wondered many times what I’d do if I was caught in a public shooting. Even though my daughter was with me, that didn’t give me pause—I had to run and hide ... that is, run down the shooter after hiding Bella.

  I looked down at my daughter. She was frozen in fear. I looked around and saw a nearby stall. Between us and it, though, was a stampede, a boiling river of chaos. People were sprinting, tripping over each other, pushing, screaming, crying. We had to get through. I gripped Bella’s hand and swung her up into my arms. I walked steadily through the turmoil, buffeted by the frantic torrent of bodies. When we reached the stall, I swung Bella down and knelt beside her.
Seeing her terrified face did make me stop and think twice.

  For a brief second, I landed in mental quicksand. Do I get Bella out or go for the gunman? How could I live with myself if I got us out safely while other defenseless kids were slaughtered? My mind was made up.

  “Daddy what are you doing? We need to get out of here!” Bella pleaded, her face sheet white. I didn’t know how to explain my actions to her. It was part instinct—I was hard-wired to engage the enemy—and part duty. I just couldn’t let another Columbine go unopposed.

  “Bella. You’ll be safe here.”

  “What do you mean? What are you doing, Daddy?”

  “Sweetheart, I need to stop this man,” I said breathlessly as I lowered her down and moved some plastic storage containers out of the way. “I can’t let him go on shooting innocent people. I need you to stay here. You understand? Don’t move. Please. And don’t make a sound.”

  “Don’t leave me here, daddy! What if you get shot?”

  It was the obvious question for which I had no answer.

  “Darling, I’m going to come back for you real soon. You hear me?”

  The noise all around us was unearthly terror. Sadly, it was something I’d heard several times before when we’d stormed villages in Afghanistan. But here, it felt surreal, and I struggled against the fatherly instinct to save my daughter’s life above all else.

  Under my guiding hands Bella obliged. She lay down, her expression still bewildered yet trusting.

  “Please come back, Daddy. Please come back for me.”

  “I promise,” I said, as I quickly piled up the storage containers around her to conceal her presence. “Now not a sound, under any circumstances. Is that clear?”

  She nodded. It killed me to see her so afraid, but I snapped myself out of it and got to my feet. I leapt back into the tide of hysterical kids and pushed my way upstream until I reached the entrance of the theater. I’d heard no more gunshots, but that didn’t mean the killing was done.