‘I want you to remember me the way I was’.
Memories are quirky and unreliable, and they only seem to stick when something out-of-the-ordinary occurs. The final night she’d spent with her mother was one of those times. It was a blissfully uneventful Tuesday; a starless winter night when slurping spaghetti in front of reality television was the only item on the agenda. At five feet tall her mother was a wisp of a woman; her porcelain skin remained tight and the laugh lines around her eyes had barely aged her, despite the fact that when they were together, they did little else. She looked vaguely adult-like in her work clothes, but in flannel pajamas with her platinum hair gathered into a messy braid she could’ve passed for a college student.
Thunder struck the front door, and a SWAT team spilled into their living room; guns drawn, visors down, screaming for them to get on the floor. Their home was torn to pieces. Sofas were gutted, books ripped apart by their spines, lamps shattered. Someone even put a boot through the drywall. In the end, they just wanted a laptop. A cursory examination was enough to convince the team leader that Julia had ‘conspired to commit treason’, whatever that meant—they weren’t forthcoming with the details. Men in suits took over, flashing badges and spouting jargon about national security. Calista kicked and screamed while her mother was detained, knocking men twice her size off-balance.
They read Julia her rights, handcuffed her, and dragged her outside; she fought just as ferociously as her daughter. It took a small army, but they eventually wrestled her into the back seat of an SUV. The door slammed shut, and she was torn away from everything she knew and loved.
Then she was gone.
And then she was here.
Inside Culpepper the halls were modern and bright, a result of fairly recent renovations. Veined marble walls reflected crisp overhead lights. After producing a photo ID and signing in, Calista crossed a corridor and approached a metal detector flanked by guards. She stopped short of the rectangular frame.
The guard on the right, a gangly redhead with a lopsided sneer, waved her forward with a flick of her baton.
“Phone, keys, and loose change in the bucket,” the woman groaned, scooping a flat plastic tray off the table. “Boots, too. Your buckles will screw with our sensors.”
The other guard—a stocky barrel of a woman with a salt-and-pepper buzzcut—snatched a black wand from her station. Calista spread her arms wide.
The wand burbled and clicked, and let out a wobbly chirp when it passed over her chest. The guard stared at Calista bug-eyed like she’d caught her trying to smuggle in a machine gun.
Calista tugged at her collar, exposing a heart-shaped locket dangling from a chain. “It only looks like a harmless piece of jewelry,” she replied, completely deadpan. “But when I open it up, it fires a laser beam.”
Apparently the buzzcut wasn’t in a joking mood. “You’ve got twenty minutes,” she said. “Put on your boots and follow me.”
The visiting room was a featureless gray box with a row of plastic chairs facing another row of plastic chairs, bisected by a sheet of glass. Windowless doors allowed access to either side of the partition. No phones, no intercoms, no other inmates. It was eerily sterile. Her mother wasn’t in the room.
Apparently satisfied her laser necklace would be unable to penetrate the glass divider, the buzzcut left Calista alone, but not before reminding her of the timeline for visitation with a snide little ‘tick tock’ motion, tapping her wrist.
I heard you the first time, Calista wanted to fire back, but the ice she was skating on felt perilously thin. She sat on the center chair. A moment passed while she picked at her cuticles, staring at her ghostlike reflection in the divider.
The door on the far side of the glass creaked open and a prisoner emerged. Her mother was much thinner than she remembered, cheeks sunken, lips chapped and pale. Her almond-shaped eyes were dark from a lack of sleep, or a lack of nutrition, or from being punched in her sockets—it was impossible to tell. Against her ash-white complexion, they looked like craters.
A vise clamped down on Calista’s heart.
Her mother staggered. The chains binding her ankles forced her to take shuffling steps, and her wrists were cuffed in front of her. A burly mustached guard followed her in.
She wobbled and fell, palms and knees crashing to the floor.
The guard scooped his prisoner up by her armpits like a bouncer ejecting a patron who’d kicked back a few too many. But instead of flinging her into a cab he dropped her on a chair.
“What have you done to her?” Calista screamed. Without realizing it she’d bolted upright and was hammering the glass.
“Sit down,” the guard said, cool and businesslike.
“You can’t kick the crap out of inmates! She has rights!”
“Sit,” he barked, jamming his finger at Calista’s overturned chair.
Not sure what would happen if she disobeyed, she righted her chair and sat, rigid and tense.
“The prisoner is fine.” The guard reverted to his businesslike tone with the flick of a switch. “Nurse just gave her a sedative. She was out of control, tearing apart her cell.” He rumpled her hair like a father palling around with his son. “This one gets a little feisty now and then. Don’t you, Jules?”
Calista seethed—teeth clenched, chest heaving. “Get your goddamned hands off of her,” she said, as calmly as she could manage.
The guard smirked but declined to reply. He strolled towards the door. “Twenty minutes,” he said without turning around.
The door slammed at his back with a metallic boom. They were alone.
“Mom, what have they done to you?” Calista leaned close to the glass.
Julia’s head lolled forward. Her blond mane was a tattered mess that covered her eyes and stuck to her lips. “Callie?” she whispered. “Is it really you?”
“What happened? Are you all right?”
“I don’t know … I mean, I think so …?” She righted her head and clawed her bangs aside with both hands, chains rattling.
Calista swallowed hard. “Did they mention a court date yet? Uncle Frank and I haven’t heard anything in months.”
Though she hadn’t been formally charged, Julia Scott was branded a terrorist. That single, radioactive word granted the government—her former employer—the right to do pretty much whatever they wanted.
They’d appointed Julia an attorney, who had appealed for a court date but had yet to secure one. ‘Any day now’ was their refrain. There was no rush because terror suspects rarely receive trials. But that was the rub: she wasn’t a terrorist. She was a network security admin who brought soup to work in a thermos and scrapbooked on the weekends. She wasn’t part of some radical sect bent on global destruction—she was just mom.
Julia’s day on the stand couldn’t come soon enough; the day she’d straighten out this mess, proving her innocence. It was coming. Calista was sure of it. After all, she was in a maximum security prison—which, given the circumstances, looked bad—but they hadn’t shipped her to some underground hellhole where terrorists were left to rot in the limbo of indefinite detention. She was on US soil, and was allowed visitation. Her day in court was inevitable, just as soon as the paperwork was sorted and the red tape had been sliced through.
Julia shook her head. “No date yet. Are you staying with Frankie?”
“Yes, you know I’ve been staying at Uncle Frank’s ever since—”
“I’ve always loved Frankie,” she interrupted. A tendril of saliva dripped from her bottom lip, streaking her orange jumpsuit. “He’s quite the detective … I always saw so much of him in you. I know I don’t have a cool job, but I’m still a pretty cool mom, right?”
“Yeah, you’re the coolest. But about Jackson—”
Her mother smiled at the sound of his name. “Are you still seeing that boy? He’s so polite, and quite the cornerback. Or quarterback. Is there such thing as a cornerback? Footballs don’t have corners …”
“Mom,” Calis
ta said, slapping a palm into the divider. “He’s dead. Jackson, his mom, his dad. All dead.”
Julia’s eyes widened, though her lids were so heavy with sedation the expression barely registered. “Oh dear. Is this … recent?”
“Yes, very. His house burnt down.”
Julia’s gaze fluttered around the room, tracking an invisible butterfly. “Cleansing Protocol. That sounds juuust about right.”
“Wait, what’s a Cleansing Protocol?”
“Gets rid of your NDAs. Or is it DNA? I always get those two confused. Which one is in your skin?”
“You’re not making any sense,” Calista pleaded. “Can you try to focus?”
Julia hunched over and stared into her palms. “Have you ever studied your fingerprints? They’re like tiny galaxies, all swirling …”
“Mom, please! We don’t have much time. I need to ask you about network security.”
“That was my job … at the Pentagon.”
“Yes, well, this is sort of related. Jackson had a burner phone. I need to know if it’s possible to track it.”
A flicker sparked Julia’s eyes, as if her familiarity with the subject was helping to cut through the haze. “Track it?” she said, adding a curious tilt of her head.
“Yes, locate it. I called, and it’s ringing, so it wasn’t destroyed in the fire. I think … I don’t know, maybe someone has it.”
“Hmm … accessing the GPS is possible if you have the number, but it’s tricky. And not every burner has a GPS, especially the cheap ones, so that makes it even trickier.”
“But it’s possible, right?”
“It is, but Callie …” she lowered her voice, pitching forward until her head clunked against the divider. “You shouldn’t be here, and you shouldn’t be talking about burners.” She brought a finger to her lips. Her voice shrank to the faintest whisper. “Go back to school, stop being a detective, and don’t come here again. Digging around will only lead to bad things.”
The door behind Julia flew open and guards burst in, three of them this time; the mustached man and two more in riot gear. They were reacting like this frail woman, shackled and drugged out of her mind, was in danger of overpowering them and rampaging through the prison.
“Visitation is over,” the mustache shouted.
Calista sprang from her chair. “I’ve been here for like five minutes!”
“We found contraband in her cell. We’re locking her down in solitary.”
This time, Julia didn’t resist. She allowed the guards to pull her away, the heels of her bare feet dragging along the floor. Her fire to fight back had been extinguished by the cocktail of sedatives coursing through her veins. Or maybe it had been snuffed out long before that.
Calista gathered her belongings and called a cab. It rained for the entire drive. And she didn’t stop crying until she was back in North Valley.
A talisman doesn’t need to be mystical to hold incredible power.
– Passage in the North Valley Grimoire
6. War Crimes
THE HAYASHI’S EPIC BUNGALOW sat on a wooded lot—gray slate and pecan-colored brick, topped with a chimney used for actual fires. It was difficult to imagine anyone chopping wood or gathering kindling in North Valley, but the Hayashi’s were traditionalists to a fault.
Rain pattered the roof. The gloomy weather had followed Calista back from the prison, drenching the city with a frigid downpour. She shivered beneath the portico and rang the bell.
Kaz flung open the door, revealing his casual weekend look: his school uniform without the tie.
Calista stepped inside and peeled off her thin sweater. The tank top underneath remained mercifully dry.
“I’ll make a fire,” Kaz offered. “My mom freaks whenever I touch the fireplace, but you’re soaked.”
His parents were absent, as per usual. Hiro was a corporate lawyer, and Asuka was a cardiologist, which explained both their jaw-dropping estate and the fact that they were rarely around to enjoy it.
It was ten minutes of hot chocolate and warming herself in front of a fire before the chill left her bones, and twenty more before Kaz was able to drag the story out of her.
“I’m not saying you’re crazy, but I don’t know if this burner phone theory makes any sense.” He leaned in and poked a log with the fire iron. “Even if it wasn’t destroyed, it could still mean nothing.”
She nursed her oversized mug of hot chocolate, gazing at the crackling embers as they drifted from the hearth. “Whenever you’re about to explain how crazy I am, you preface it with, ‘I’m not saying you’re crazy.’ It’s terribly confusing.”
“You always back me into these corners, Callie. It limits my options for a response.”
She chuckled for the first time that day. “Come on, that’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it? Everything is binary with you—one or zero, all or nothing. ‘Believe my kooky conspiracy theory or you think I’m a whack job.’” Kaz replaced the iron in the alcove next to the fireplace and clapped the soot from his hands. “Jackson always blamed the CIA for his dad’s breakdown, and after what they did to your mom, I don’t blame you for being paranoid, too. But both of you always believed there was a larger conspiracy at work. I’ve never bought into it.”
“Your parents are clearly stunting your emotional growth.” Calista motioned to the L-shaped leather sectional she was lounging on, littered with textbooks and steno pads. “This much calculus has warped your perspective on reality. It’s unhealthy.”
He brushed some of the debris aside and sat. “Be that as it may, you’re still coming off like a crazy person.”
“Wait, didn’t you just say I wasn’t crazy?”
“I was trying to be tactful.”
“Well, can’t we get crazy for a minute? I’ve had a traumatic day.”
Kaz sighed. It was the universal noise of resignation. “Fine, but only for a minute. I have work to finish.”
Calista leaned in on her elbows, hands cupping her mug to absorb the last of its warmth. “We’re finally speaking my language.”
“Let’s assume someone was targeting Jackson.”
“Someone was,” she said without missing a beat. “And whoever it is could be on that phone.”
“Who are we talking about, then? I mean, if I had to guess, it’s drug dealers.”
It was a valid point. While Jackson didn’t seem like the type, even Calista had suspected that steroids played a part in his meteoric rise in athletic ability. As a freshman he was a scrawny bundle of nerves, and couldn’t cross the foyer without spilling a pile of textbooks at his feet. He’d left for summer vacation as a toothpick-armed bookworm, and when classes resumed the following September, he’d sprouted half a foot and was sporting biceps that looked CGI-enhanced. His shoulders were broad, jawline chiseled—he was barely recognizable. The two-month gap between freshman and sophomore years had morphed Jackson in ways that puberty and a well-timed growth spurt seemed incapable of explaining, at least without some serious pharmaceutical enhancement.
Jackson tried out for quarterback a few weeks later and, despite never having played a sport in his life, was throwing touchdowns like an NFL superstar. Jackson Carter—the kid who broke his collarbone in seventh-grade after a playful shove from Molly Pullman—was suddenly being courted by every college recruiter in the country.
“Okay,” Calista said. “Let’s say you’re right.”
“And let’s assume he was dealing to some of his teammates, too,” Kaz added. “It would explain why half of them look like bodybuilders. It also explains why he had a disposable phone in the first place. So if the burner isn’t in his house, where is it?”
Calista stared at the marshmallows bobbing in the dark mocha liquid. “When my mom was arrested they searched our house. Police and these other guys, maybe the FBI, I don’t know. They tore the place up.”
“They didn’t find anything, did they?”
“Sort of.” She chewed her lip. “Well, aside from my
mom’s laptop, I mean. They found a bag. A suitcase buried in the basement under a box of Christmas ornaments. It had clothes, cash, a passport. She also had a burner.”
“Damn. That doesn’t look good.”
“I was upstairs in the living room, but I heard one of the agents refer to it as a ‘go bag.’”
Kaz took a moment, fumbling to find his words. “Wow, I didn’t know she was … I mean, not that she was guilty, but that she was planning to—”
“She wasn’t going to run,” Calista said, “because she’s innocent. But if Jackson had a go bag of his own or a stash of … I don’t know, whatever, that could be evidence. It could lead us to the people who killed him.”
“Allegedly,” Kaz added.
“What are you, a defense lawyer? All right, the ‘alleged’ killer who ‘allegedly’ killed him. Either way, that phone is still in one piece.”
He held up his hands in mock surrender. “Okay, so is that the next stop on the tour bus through crazy town? A go bag? But even if the phone survived, it could be buried under a mountain of ash. We’ll never find it.”
“Unless,” Calista said, pressing a finger to her lips, “he was worried his mother would find it. It could be hidden.”
Jackson’s mother was a relentless snooper. She’d ransack his personal space any chance she got, prompting him to continually increase his security measures, including padlocks, a deadbolt, and a hidden camera he’d concealed inside a tiny football helmet on his desk—a device that did nothing to deter her raids.
If Jackson had anything of value, it was unlikely he’d risk hiding it where ‘Sherlock Shelly’ could find it during one of her routine sweeps.
He needed off-site storage. Somewhere accessible.
“What about a safety deposit box?” Kaz wondered aloud.
“Not likely. Jackson would’ve needed a bank account and ID to get his own box. It would be traceable.” Calista stood and paced the room. “If I wanted to hide something, somewhere free and easy to access, in a spot no one could get their hands on it …” She stopped cold, feet locked in place. “I know exactly where I’d put it.”
The North Valley Grimoire Page 5