“You said you trusted me.” He spoke behind clenched teeth. “So just listen.”
“I know what I said. But I also trusted you weren’t going to have a criminal at my kitchen table. I was obviously wrong about that. The only thing all of us have in common right now is that we’re all going to be spending our lives in prison.”
“Stop!” Wren shouted from the end of the table, shrinking beneath the volume of her own voice. “I don’t care about my sentencing,” she said softly. “I’ll turn myself in if I need to. I’ll tell them whatever you want me to.” She turned to Jeremiah. “But if you know a way to find whoever made those videos, I want to help. I’ll do whatever I have to. Just tell me,” she said, pulling the sleeves of her hoodie up to her wrists. “I don’t think we have much time.”
Al Green rang through the chorus of “Love and Happiness.” Winding through the words as though he thought they might not end.
Tillman faced Jeremiah, with an expression she hoped carried whatever unspoken words through the space between them. “What’s your grand plan here?”
Jeremiah looked to the girl and paused for her tacit approval, which she offered by staring back at him. “Before we get into a plan, I should be completely forthright with you, Wren. The FBI has enough to put you away for a while on some legitimate charges, it sounds like. But they’ll also leverage for an even longer sentencing.”
She gave a nervous laugh. “No. They can’t prove that I took the ME report from the CPD network.” She quickly added, “I’m not saying that I did. I’m just saying they can’t prove it one way or the other.”
Jeremiah leaned into the table, his chest pressed against the wooden corner, until he was just a foot away from the girl. He reached a hand halfway to hers and tapped his fingers against the surface. “Your friend,” he said. “The girl they brought in with you. Your roommate.”
Wren unwound from her coiled posture. “What about her? Is she OK?”
Jeremiah paused uncomfortably. “She told the FBI you did the hack. She said you retrieved the ME report. Said she could prove it.” He paused, cast a glance to Tillman, and then looked back to the girl. “And she said you might have helped make the videos. That’s what she told them.”
“No.” She shook her head, a slanting smile. “You’re lying to me.”
“I’m sorry, but it’s true. They have her on video making her plea.”
“You’re full of shit,” Wren spat. “You’re working with them. You’re trying to get me to confess. I’m not going to. This is fucked up.”
Tillman stood and went to the sink. She felt sick. She turned on the faucet and watched the water pour over yesterday’s dirty dishes.
“I have no reason to lie to you,” she heard Jeremiah say. “You need to trust me when I say I’m risking my ass to help you.”
“I don’t need to trust you at all. I know Parker. She would never do what you’re saying she did.”
“Look, I was talking with one of the agents back at the station. The FBI only let you come with me because they want to bring down the rest of the Liber-teens and they think you know where they are. He said the FBI gave your roommate an especially tough shakedown. They were promising her a life of jail time unless she told them who hacked the police servers and who made the videos. She held strong for a while, but she broke. Eventually. That’s what they tell me. I don’t think they’d lie to me about that.”
“Well, they did lie to you,” Wren said. “Parker wouldn’t do that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Parker wouldn’t do that,” Wren said. Her short, messy hair whipped across her face as she shook her head. And then, when Jeremiah didn’t respond, she repeated it. Softer this time, without edge or shape. A voiceless sigh for herself to hear and to maybe believe. “She wouldn’t. I know she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t do that to me. She wouldn’t.”
Tillman filled a glass of water. She dropped in two ice cubes from the freezer and set the glass in front of Wren. “Take a drink. Breathe.”
Wren reached unconsciously for the glass, brought it to her lips. She took a small drink, the glass shaking in her hands. She set it down, tears falling freely down her cheeks. She ignored them, stared through them.
“I’m sorry,” Jeremiah said. “I know this is a lot to hear. Only reason I’m telling you this is because I think we can help you.”
“I didn’t make that video,” she whispered. “I would never. I didn’t. I didn’t.”
“We know that. But the FBI doesn’t.”
“How do you know I didn’t?”
“Because I believe you hacked the server. Even if the FBI doesn’t have all the evidence they need, I believe that you played some part in that. Am I correct?”
She shrugged. “If I hacked the report, why would that mean I didn’t have anything to do with the videos?”
“Because whoever hacked the server was probably the same person who sent Marcus Waters another file. A very sensitive file.” Jeremiah paused, leaning across the table. The girl stared back at him, her lips pressed tightly together. “And that seems like information the gunman would love to share, but he hasn’t, because he doesn’t have it. That’s how I know you have nothing to do with that video, Wren. But if you can help us find the person who actually killed those people, well, you might be able to save yourself and probably save a lot of other people, too.”
Wren slumped over and gathered her hair in her fingers. “How?”
“I have some information,” he said. “I’d like to show it to you if you would agree to help.”
“OK,” she whispered.
Tillman glanced between Wren and Jeremiah, inviting an explanation that didn’t come. “What are you talking about?” she asked Jeremiah. “There was another file?”
“It’s not important right now.”
“No,” she said. “If I’m going to be a part of this, I need to know.”
In the living room, her father snored like a band saw against granite.
“It was a letter.” Jeremiah sighed. “From some detectives to Chief Gonzalez, written during the end of the Kingfisher years. They were saying that they thought Stetson was in cooperation with the Kingfisher somehow.” He looked between the two of them. “And if it’s true that the Kingfisher faked his death, then maybe that means Stetson was the one who coordinated it.”
Tillman paused, passing over the spaces between the details. “So that’s why Stetson didn’t release the ME report?” Tillman asked, thinking out loud. “He’s trying to hide that he helped the Kingfisher fake his death?”
“Maybe.” Jeremiah nodded. “And who knows what else he’s trying to hide.”
She again remembered her conversation with Abe. Stetson parked outside the drug boss’s home, as if he’d known the Kingfisher would be there. As if he’d told the Kingfisher to be there. And Penny and Walter inadvertently stumbling upon the same realization. “You really believe the Kingfisher is still alive?”
“It doesn’t matter if the Kingfisher is still alive or not,” Jeremiah said, “and it doesn’t matter if Stetson is trying to cover it up. What matters right now is that people are going to die very soon if we don’t do something.” He turned to Wren. “So let’s talk about what comes next.”
35 BETRAYAL
AND HERE WREN WAS in this unfamiliar apartment, seated across from these unfamiliar faces. Sitting erect, deaf to words being spoken at her. She felt like a tourist inside of her skin, watching the world from an assumed and temporary distance. Every transient thought turned inevitably to Parker. Where was Parker now? Was she sitting in the same holding room at the station, held inside the same phlegm-yellow walls? What was she feeling and what color was her hair when she’d last seen her? What dreams would escape her tonight and was she thinking of Wren right now, just like Wren was thinking of her? What did she wear and if what Wren had heard was true, then why did Parker do what she knew Parker did? And why were fears always impossible questions asked to no one and why did she
fucking care about these stupid little things in a moment like this one, with federal prison a future certainty? And what would she tell her parents when this was over, if this would ever be over, and had Parker said anything as Wren was dragged away from her?
The only thing Wren was certain of was that she never would have done to Parker what Parker had done to her. The word for this was betrayal, but these letters were too soft, too forgiving. There was no word in the world’s lexicon for what Wren actually felt. To capture it in a single word would break the spine of language itself.
“All right, Wren. Take a look at this.” Jeremiah pulled from his back pocket a crumpled sheet of paper.
Wren heard him as though he were a mile away, a shot ringing in her deaf ears. She focused on his lips as she gradually descended into the moment.
“This wasn’t easy to get,” he continued. “Had to make some promises to my colleagues, some of the other detectives who got pulled to assist the FBI with their investigation. May have told them I had clearance, so if this doesn’t work out, I’m in some serious shit with all this.”
“You’re in some serious shit no matter what happens,” Tillman whispered across the table. Wren had noticed that Tillman’s quiet fury had a way of pronouncing itself through small, easily overlooked gestures. She tilted her chin, clicked her teeth together, stared holes through the ceiling.
Jeremiah ignored this as he slid the paper across the table to Wren, “That should be the email address we’re looking for. The email address that sent the first video to Stetson. It’s encrypted, I think. The FBI didn’t have any luck tracing it to an IP. But from what I heard down at the station, you’re pretty damn good with decryption. So all you have to do, Wren, is do what you do with a computer and tell me who it is or where it was sent from, and then we can deal with all the messy shit later. We find where that lunatic is and we have some—what’s the word?”
“Leverage,” Tillman said. Tilting her chin, clicking her teeth.
Wren took the paper. “You said the FBI already tried decrypting this address?”
“Yeah,” Jeremiah said. “But no luck.”
She unfolded it and brought it to her face in nearsighted study. It was written out in block letters, angular and hurried. The only print on the mostly blank page was a line at the top, a seemingly random sequence of letters and numbers followed by a cursory Web address—“@fmrp.net”
“No wonder the FBI can’t use it. It’s not an encryption. It’s just a random throwaway email.”
Jeremiah fidgeted. “You’re supposed to be pretty good with a computer, right? Can’t you just, like, figure it out or something?”
“Jesus,” Tillman whispered.
Wren continued to stare at the numbers and letters as though they might at any moment rearrange and spell out something even halfway useful or usable, a task made considerably more difficult due to a dull, inexact headache.
Parker had always been able to use her so easily. From day one. And for all of Wren’s paranoia about being manipulated by culture, government, religion, and late-night advertising, how could she have missed it when it came from just one single person she loved? A body, flesh and bone. A mind and maybe a soul. Standing in her doorway, lying in her bed.
Wren refocused her attention onto the address.
“What exactly do you expect me to do?” Wren pointed at the email address, her voice carrying a hint of resentment not intended for anyone in this particular room.
“Can’t you, like, plug the email in somewhere?” Jeremiah suggested.
“Plug it in?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” she said. “I can’t do anything with a disposable email. The addresses are generated by a website and erased on a timed cycle. It’s not like Gmail or something, where your email is attached to you. These emails correspond to nothing except for maybe an IP address, which, if it were anywhere at all, would be stored somewhere on the host site, which I’m sure the FBI has gotten a warrant for already. But those sites don’t organize the IPs in any real order. There’s just a mass of IP addresses floating in a massive bank of other IPs they keep in order to monitor their Web traffic. Finding the IP address of this email address would be like bobbing for a single apple in an ocean of apples.”
“OK.” He nodded. She saw him struggling to feign an air of calm. “So what are our options? Let’s figure this out.”
Tillman stood up from her chair and began furiously pacing the confines of the kitchen, like a lion inside a shrinking enclosure.
“Do you have anything else I can use?” Wren asked Jeremiah. “Did the FBI get tower records? Maybe the gunman uploaded the video from a phone?”
“I don’t know. This is all I could get.” He pointed at the slip of paper, speaking through a smile that flickered on and off like an epileptic light bulb. “It needs to work. It just has to, OK? Because if it doesn’t…” He left the thought unfinished, hanging in the air like an unspoken guillotine hovering over each of their tired heads.
She looked back at the address. The sequence of random letters and numbers remained predictably unchanged. Her face must have reflected the despair, rising like a fever to her skin.
“Fuck.” Jeremiah sighed, and then, louder, slapping the table with an open palm, “Goddamnit. Fuck.” He laid his head in his hands. “I’m sorry, everyone. This is my fault.”
Tillman rushed away, disappearing into the living room, where the windows were settling into a deeper shade of evening. Wren heard the television turn off, followed by the sigh of the recliner as Tillman led her father to bed, both of them whispering as their footsteps disappeared down a hallway. The record player continued spinning, a scratchy song Wren didn’t recognize.
“It needed to work,” Jeremiah said dolefully. “It needed to work.”
A clock chimed from the kitchen wall. Each tone struck Wren as unlikely as the last. How could time continue moving forward when her life seemed to be slowing to its end? In a few days time, she’d be in an eggshell-colored holding cell, in a baggy orange jumpsuit, and she knew now that she belonged there. She had always belonged there.
Tillman reentered the kitchen. She didn’t say anything as she walked toward them. She only set the phone down on the table and touched the screen.
“What is this?” Jeremiah asked.
She pointed at Wren. “You need to see this, too.”
Jeremiah’s phone rang in his pocket, and he silenced it.
Wren shuffled forward and saw a video on Tillman’s phone. She knew what it would be, but still she watched as a masked man stood in that same dimly lit room. A swinging light overhead. And behind the man, two hostages in two chairs, burlap masks covering their heads. Wren’s eyes immediately focused on the left hand of one of the hostages.
An engagement ring. It was her. The hostage Wren had tried, and failed, to identify.
“It has become clear to me that the chief of police and the rest of the Chicago Police Department will admit to no wrong,” the gunman said. “They are content to let their citizens die rather than simply admit that they assisted a criminal vigilante’s fake death. It’s shameful. It’s sickening. And, citizens of Chicago, know that it could be you right here. Your police would rather protect themselves than protect their citizens.”
The gunman stepped toward one of the hostages, the one with the engagement ring. He removed the burlap sack on her head with a flourish, a magician’s reveal. The girl in the chair was Wren’s age. Black hair matted to her tear-streaked cheeks. A rope tied around her head, cutting through her mouth. The gunman raked his fingers through the girl’s hair, revealing eyes wide with terror. She writhed against the ropes, twisting and pulling, craning her neck as the rope dug deeper into her mouth. She bit down on it and screamed. The sound passed through the gunman’s modulated voice filter, resulting in something unlike anything Wren had ever heard, could ever dream, would ever forget.
The gunman seemed satisfied by this display. He took his time withdrawin
g his pistol, studying it in his hands. He turned back to the camera. “The police will do nothing to save these people, although all I’ve asked for is the truth. It isn’t that much to ask for, I don’t think. But perhaps there is still someone who can help them. And perhaps it is you who I should have been addressing from the beginning. The Kingfisher. Because I know you’re out there somewhere. And I know you’re watching. I know you’ll see this.”
The gunman leveled the pistol at arm’s length. He turned it to the unmasked hostage and fired into her shoulder. The girl’s head dropped to her chest and the chair rolled back. She raised her head, biting the rope, screaming in jagged bursts. Blood crawled across her shirt like a shadow emerging from within, a shadow dripping to the floor.
“The next gunshot will be the one that kills her, and it will come at midnight. Until then, she will suffer through the most painful hours imaginable. I suspect that, by midnight, death will find her willing.” He paused, allowing for the girl’s tortured screams to fill the space. “But you can save her. The only thing stopping you must be your own fear. But what could the Kingfisher—the great and mighty and powerful Kingfisher—have to fear? Do you fear being revealed? Revealed as what? The hero who left his city to rot? The villain who fled justice? Because you and I know there were crimes you never paid for. Or perhaps you are not afraid at all. You simply don’t care about these people. These strangers. But they are not all strangers.”
The gunman tore the mask off the remaining hostage.
Red hair spilling over her face as she fought against the ropes that bound her to the chair. The man cast a look at her and turned back to face the camera.
Wren leaned in closer while feeling herself drift further away.
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 32