by Nick Svolos
“And that’s not normal?”
“Not for a company engaged in legitimate business. They would need all their records available in the event of a legal proceeding. It’s standard practice.”
“I see.” I felt a bit embarrassed remembering how Backdraft came out of the warehouse’s office when Peacemaker and I showed up. I should have made the connection sooner. “Good work. Any progress on the other thing?”
“Not yet. The laptop’s encryption is like nothing I’ve ever encountered. I’ll keep working on it, but if time is a factor, and my predictive algorithms indicate it is, I may not be able to get you actionable data in a useful time frame.”
“Alright,” I grumbled. “Keep working on it. And thanks.”
I terminated the call to ponder my options. I finally had a lead. You can delete data from a computer, but people are another matter. They remember things. Unless there was somebody with mind-erasing powers in play, those things were still in somebody’s head. I just needed to ask the right questions, in the right way, of the right person, to get at them.
I considered driving out to Romita Shipping. Flashing my press credentials around and seeing if I could shake some answers loose. A lot of people are helpful by nature. But, people also tend to be careful where their place of employment is concerned. I could end up stonewalling myself.
Fortunately, I had another option.
***
The receptionist’s eyes almost popped out of her head when I strode through the door. I grinned, addressed her as “Ma’am,” kept my hands at my side, all the stuff you’re supposed to do to set a normal at ease when they suddenly find themselves in the company of a living weapon in a mask and goofy outfit. To her credit, she recovered from the shock with only a brief pause and let her manager know she had a visitor.
“Captain Stand-In. I’m Dianna Cook.” A slender woman in her mid-forties smiled as she entered the lobby. Dressed in jeans and a blouse, she carried the air of a “hands-on” sort of boss. She had a firm grip as she shook my hand. “I’m so glad to see you. I hope you know how grateful we are for everything you did to protect our business.”
“It was my pleasure, ma’am. I just wish I could have saved your windows.” I gestured to the boarded-up hole in the wall.
She waved it off. “What, those old things? Glass is so last century.”
I smiled at her joke. A lot of people would have given me a ration of grief over the property damage.
“Actually, it’s been a lot more comfortable in here since they boarded it up,” the receptionist added. “When the sun hits that window in the afternoon, it’s like an oven in here.”
“See?” Mrs. Cook grinned. “Seriously, I’m just glad to still be in business. But I’m assuming this isn’t a social call. How can we help you?”
“I have a couple of questions. Do you have someplace we can talk?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Of course. My office is this way.”
She led me out of the lobby and into an office next door. “So, what’s on your mind?”
“I’m just following up on the case. You understand that I don’t have any law enforcement powers and you don’t have to speak to me if you don’t want to, right?”
“Of course, Captain.”
“Sorry. Our legal team makes us say that. I’ll get right to the point. Did you provide a copy of your backup to the police?” She nodded and I continued. “From a source I’d rather not identify, I’ve been told there was a missing entry in the order log.” I gave her the record number. “I was wondering if you could provide any information on that shipment.”
She turned to her computer, “That doesn’t make any sense. Our system doesn’t let us delete records—they all go to the archive.”
“That’s what my source said, too.”
After a second or two, she glowered at her screen. “Well, son of a gun. You’re right.” She pressed a button on the phone and a male voice answered. “Ted, do you know anything about a shipment between the twenty-eighth and thirtieth of last month? The record’s missing.”
“Missing? Naw, that’s not possible. Here, let me check.” Typing fingers sounded clear over the line. “Well, son of a gun.”
Dianna just smiled.
“I don’t suppose there’s a hard copy?” I ventured.
“No, we’re paperless. Ted, do you remember anything about the shipment?”
“Let me think.” Ted went silent for a moment. “There was a government job I’m not seeing here, so that must be it.”
I leaned forward, my reporter instincts tingling. “Do you remember anything about it?”
“Uh, let’s see. It was a point-to-point job. Pickup was in Colorado. Pueblo, I think. Destination was up in Whittier.”
“Do you have the addresses?” I asked. I’d have bet my next paycheck that the Whittier address was Backdraft’s hideout, but Pueblo was a mystery to me.
“Not without the shipping order. They weren’t regular customers—I remember that much.”
“Do you remember what you were carrying?”
“They usually don’t tell us on these government jobs. Just whether there are any safety hazards or special certifications required. I don’t remember any of that with this job, so it was probably just government pamphlets and office supplies. Forms and stuff. They have a big print operation in Pueblo.”
I stroked my chin. This was a lot of trouble to go through just to cover up a load of paper clips. “But you don’t know for sure, right?”
“No. Sorry.”
“Who was the driver on this?” Dianna asked, “He’d know the address.”
“Ed Saunders, but he called in sick today.”
“Thanks, Ted. I’ll give him a call.” Dianna let him go and looked up Saunders’ number. After a few rings, it went to voicemail. “Darn. Sorry, Captain. I’ll keep trying and let you know when I get him.”
“I don’t know if it’s appropriate, but I could check on him.”
She grinned. “In a hurry, huh?”
“Unfortunately. There’s something strange about this, and this is my best lead right now. I hate to ask for your employee’s personal info, but…”
“Don’t worry ‘bout it. Ed won’t mind. He’s a big fan.” She copied the address down on a sticky note and handed it over. “I’m sure a visit from one of The Angels will make his day.”
***
Ed Saunders’ address led me to a two-bedroom tract house in Downey—a green and white, post-war home in a working-class neighborhood near Apollo Park. I dropped to the ground on the narrow walk bisecting the yard’s browning lawn. California was in yet another of its near-perpetual droughts, and a lot of homeowners were just letting their front lawns die out rather than risking their city government’s wrath for wasting water.
I tried the doorbell but didn’t hear a chime. It seemed like the one thing nobody ever got around to fixing was the doorbells in these older homes. I knocked on the door and waited. I waited some more and knocked again. No answer.
There was a nice-looking Ford F-150 in the driveway. A recent model, with a lift kit and tow package. I figured it for Saunders’ primary transportation. That meant he was home. Maybe he was sicker than his boss thought.
I took a walk around the house, peeking into the windows and working my way to the back. While the place was clean and well-maintained, you could tell a single man lived here alone. No paintings on the walls. Just enough furniture to get by. A few dishes in the kitchen sink. Normal guy stuff.
It was when I made it to the back of the house that I started to think something might be wrong. The back door was open. I stopped at the threshold, gave another knock, louder this time, and called out, “Mr. Saunders? Are you home?”
No answer.
I tried to decide my next move. It was a nice day. Most likely, this guy just went out for a pack of smokes or something, walking down to the corner store rather than taking his truck. Yeah, that had to be it. I should just go back out fron
t and wait.
But then, I noticed that the door jamb had a dent in it. A little section of the soft wood had been flattened by something hard, about the width of a crowbar.
That tingling feeling of wrongness worked its way through my gut. It wasn’t something that came with Ultiman’s powers. More of a reporter thing. An instinct that something was out of place and there might be more to this story than I initially thought.
I opened the door and stepped over the threshold.
The house was silent, other than the clump of my bootsteps as I crossed a little laundry room and into the hall. A fly buzzed past my ear. Three doors led off the hall, all but the one at the end open. The fly bounced its head off the closed door, regained its senses and tried again.
“Mr. Saunders, are you in there?” I called. No answer but the buzzing of the fly.
I turned the knob. The door opened easily and the smell hit me. I winced. A rank, sickly-sweet stench assaulted me as it sprang from the room like a cat cooped up in the house too long. I smelled rotting meat and human waste with a touch of something else I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Cheap after-shave, maybe. I stifled my gag reflex and sprinted back outside to gulp several lungfuls of fresh air. After a bit—once I had myself under control again—I held my breath and went back in to confirm what I already knew.
A man I assumed to be Ed Saunders lie on the bed, wrapped in blood-soaked sheets. There was a hole in his head. Feathers from the burst pillow under his head lay scattered on the bed, the floor, a few even adhering to the headboard, glued there by dried blood.
I thought of looking around the room for clues, but suppressed the desire. I could get away with a lot, but poking around a crime scene like this would be way over the line. Most likely, I’d mess something up; disturb the chain of evidence. I was a reporter and a part-time superhero. This was a job for a forensics tech.
I beat a hasty retreat from the dead man’s house. Once out where I could breathe again, I debated who should call the cops, me or me. I’d rather have the conversation as Reuben Conway, intrepid reporter. My car and civilian clothes were back in Santa Monica. I could make it there and back in maybe an hour. A delay like that probably wouldn’t be too bad, certainly not enough to saddle me with an obstruction of justice charge. But then I remembered that Dianna Cook at Romita Shipping had given the tip to Captain Stand-In. That would come into play at some point. Raise questions I’d rather not answer. I groaned and activated the communicator. “Archangel, put me through to the Downey Police.”
XII
I spent the next morning making inquiries at each of the warehouses Backdraft’s team had hit. I stuck to my civilian identity and kept things as discreet as possible. I didn’t need the FBI getting the idea that I was poking around in their “classified” investigation, although that’s exactly what I was doing.
By the time I made it back to the Beacon, the picture was pretty clear. The computer systems at each crime scene had a missing shipment record, and each company had a missing driver. Make that missing or dead. The Fontana police, following up on a quiet tip from their counterparts in Downey, had discovered the body of Dustin Walker, formerly of Parker Drayage Solutions that morning. They wouldn’t answer my inquiry on the cause of death, but I had a pretty good guess it wasn’t natural causes.
The strangest thing was that, as far as I could find out, the FBI hadn’t followed up on any of this. At each of the sites I’d asked if LaBlanc, Forney or any of the other agents had been there. In each case, the answer was that they hadn’t. That seemed like a pretty big miss on their part. If I hadn’t done the legwork myself, I’d have never believed it.
I walked through the Beacon’s parking lot, grateful for a chance to get some blood moving around, hoping to shake an idea loose from my subconscious. As suspicious as I was about the feds, they were good at what they did. This didn’t seem like the kind of thing they’d miss. I figured they were here to cover up Backdraft being one of theirs, but could they be burying the evidence of his crimes as well? Man, I was willing to believe the worst, particularly where the ERD was involved, but this was over the top.
I had enough to write a story, although if I went with what I had, I’d expose this angle to the feds. I wasn’t sure what they’d do in that case. If they were as dirty in this as I was starting to believe, they could force my sources to recant, leaving me out in the cold. A bunch of dead bodies linked to a string of arsons and burglaries might be enough to justify going after a supervillain, but when your suspects are agents of the federal government, you need more than just a pair of super-strong fists and a winning smile. I needed hard evidence. Something so solid they couldn’t lie it away.
I put in a call to Dawson, hoping to bounce this off him and get an update on the gunmen from the airport. All I got was his voicemail. I left a message but left out any details. I couldn’t take the risk that someone else might intercept the message. Hopefully he’d get back to me. I really needed a cop’s perspective on this.
That left me to mull over other ways to confirm my story. I didn’t get far before being sidetracked by an email notification popping up on my screen. A response to my Freedom of Information Act request on Agent Lucy Wells. I’d filed it after seeing her at the FBI field office, and for once they’d responded in a decent time frame. The trick to a FOIA request was to ask for the exact documents you needed to see. If you didn’t, well, they didn’t exactly laugh in your face, but your request ended up in the “special” pile where paperwork went to die. I’d studied several manuals detailing what paperwork gets done during an internal affairs investigation, and the homework had paid off. My request had landed in the pile that actually got processed. I downloaded the attached archive and started going through the documents.
If you stare long enough into the abyss of government bureaucracy, eventually it starts to stare back. The documents on my screen returned my gaze with the patience of death itself. They had the usual trappings of official FBI documents: form numbers, headings, privacy act statements, official letterheads. But they held no useful information at all. Anything not already public record was blacked out. Redacted. A heavy, black-lined glare of impassive emptiness returned my gaze.
According to an accompanying note, the denied information was subject to some provision of the act that protected the agency from having to reveal information that “would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions, or would disclose guidelines for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions if such disclosure could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law.”
Yeah, that’s a mouthful. You could hide anything behind a wall of text like that. Like, how an FBI agent could use superpowers on a reporter on national television and get away with it.
This thing was looking dirtier with every step I took.
I clicked a link that took me to an appeals page and started filling it out. I figured it was a waste of time, but damned if I was going to let them get away with this without a fight. Besides, you have to be thorough in this line of work. Persistence is an underrated weapon. I dug out a memo from our legal department on the correct language to use when challenging a FOIA decision and started typing in the appropriate blocks of text. The legalistic mumbo-jumbo seemed like magic words, and I felt like I was crafting some kind of eldritch incantation to convince a demon on the other side of the website to do my bidding.
Mental note: I probably needed to stop reading Lovecraft before I went to sleep.
While I worked, there seemed to be some sort of hubbub coming from the breakroom. I grabbed my noise-canceling headphones, the cube-dweller’s secret weapon, and put on some music to drown it out.
I was making good progress on my conjuration of arcane gobbledygook when a hand tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up to see a worried Ratna. I took off the headphones just in time to catch the last half of what she was saying, “—gotta see this.”
I followed her down the aisle to
the breakroom where a small crowd of newsies had gathered around the television. “—no response from either the LAPD or The Angels on this development. Recapping our top story this hour,” I could hear as I got close enough, “startling footage shows Captain Stand-In apparently fleeing the scene after an arsonist’s fire broke out at the Starlines Storage warehouse in Wilmington nearly three weeks ago. The video was delivered by an anonymous source to Channel 5 a little over an hour—”
My blood ran cold and I tuned out the commentator as I watched the video they were looping. The shaky cellphone video showed flames erupting in the Starlines warehouse. The view suddenly jerked upward to show a man in a black and red skinsuit flying overhead, away from the scene. The newscast obligingly froze the playback and zoomed in to let everyone get a good look at the man. It gave a good view of him, right down to the barcode insignia on his forehead.
It was me.
“It’s gotta be fake,” Ratna whispered.
“Yeah,” I responded, mind racing. “It’s gotta be.”
But it looked real enough to fool anybody. Hell, it looked real enough to fool me.
***
It was hard to say which shook me more—that someone had gone through a preposterous level of effort to implicate my alter-ego in Backdraft’s crimes, or that I’d been scooped by Channel 5. To tell the truth, it was probably the latter.
I trotted back to my desk, pulled up their website, and found the video on the front page. I spent a few minutes pausing, rewinding, freezing, and rewatching it. The accompanying text was the usual inflammatory anti-super rhetoric I’d come to expect from them.
“Spot anything?” Ratna asked.
I started, not realizing she was there. I shook my head.
“Neither did I. I called over to see if they’d release the original, but they say they’re holding it for law enforcement.”
