Mixed Signals

by Cooper West

  Not really, at least not in the way Benjamin could disappear if he wanted to (which was utterly and completely, and also “Plan E” on his list of options if MudzNewz ever exploded all over him). No, Francis Devonshire Sheldon III had simply gone to ground. It seemed like he did not work for over a year (must be nice, Benjamin thought bitterly), then popped back up in the society pages here and there at his parents’ parties before signing up with LifeFlight five years ago. Where, from what Benjamin could parse, he had been a dutiful and reliable employee with no scandals or really much of anything interesting happening in his life. The only time another picture showed up was at the funeral for the formidable Gracie Anne Sheldon a little over a year and a half ago.

  It struck him as odd that a man as talented and blessed with charm, intelligence, and good looks could just drop all of his aspirations like a hot potato, but then again, who was he to judge? Benjamin had been twenty years old when his parents were killed in a hit-and-run auto accident, leaving him as the sole caretaker for his young, traumatized sister. At the time he was halfway through a mechanical engineering major and computer science minor at the highly affordable local state university, with plans set in place to get his master’s and doctorate in aerospace engineering at MIT, but there was no feasible way he could uproot Rachel and support them if he did. Now he was twenty-nine and had a doctorate in computer science, but he had never managed to set foot on MIT’s campus, not even to visit.

  The comp-sci department’s dean at the highly affordable state university had tripped over himself to lure Benjamin into staying all the way through to a PhD. It didn’t look great on his curriculum vitae, but it was also, more importantly, a full ride. They had begged him to continue on as faculty, nearly guaranteeing him tenure down the line. Benjamin’s own sense of priorities had been broken apart as thoroughly as his parents’ car, though, and what might have once seemed ideal to him felt like a trap. He got the degree because he could and it would help him down the road on his own projects, then walked away from the academic world at twenty-seven. In the end he had spent more time on MudzNewz than on his dissertation anyway.

  So Benjamin totally understood rearranging priorities based on tragedy, and while nothing compared with losing a parent or two, he could see how a perfect career in the USAF blowing up in scandal and a dishonorable discharge might hit a guy hard. Benjamin scrolled back through his tabs to the shots of young Captain Francis Sheldon both in his flight suit and in his dress uniform, always looking breathtakingly gorgeous and incandescent with happiness. He seemed so young in those photos, and not just because he was in his mid to late twenties. He had the bright, easy, youthful smile of someone who was doing exactly what he wanted to do and was exactly where he wanted to be.

  The shots of Frank Sheldon taken a few years after the scandal showed a man with laugh lines around his eyes and a tight, insincere smile. He wasn’t miserable, but he wasn’t happy either.

  Sighing, Benjamin closed out all the tabs. He had a rule about cyberstalking anyone for personal reasons, which he fully understood was ironic given his “day job” running MudzNewz. He had dug far enough into Sheldon’s life, and he did not need to make himself miserable by digging further. The guy was out of Benjamin’s league, and chances were good they would never see each other again anyway. Although it felt nice to think, just for a moment, that someone as handsome and confident in himself as Francis “Call me Frank” Sheldon wanted to flirt with Benjamin.

  “What are you sulking about now? Aside from the fact that you need a haircut.” Rachel came in and started absently braiding a lock of his hair. He was used to it. The incredibly fancy and expensive cosmetology institute that Rachel had attended before getting licensed had been very intensive and hands-on. He had let her do almost anything she wanted with his unruly mane, short of bleach or a relaxer, and now, three years later, he had the most luxurious hair of any man in his generation, including the metrosexuals. He did not fit the “vain gay man” stereotype even a little bit, except for when it came to his thick, curly, ink-black hair. He kept it long enough for the curls to grow in fully but not any longer than that, but it got unruly quickly if he didn’t let Rachel chop at it regularly. The one time he had really let it grow out, he thought he looked like a hippie, and he had needed a pound of conditioner on it every day to keep it from frizzing out all over the place.

  “Not sulking.”

  “Skulking?”

  “Maybe a little skulking,” he admitted.

  “You got a new politician to take down?” she asked. She was only mildly political, but Benjamin’s little empire had begun because of her, and she was correspondingly invested in it.

  “Not anything you don’t already know about. The governor’s race just got interesting; Paulson Teague put his hat in the ring.”

  “Who?”

  “Exactly.” Benjamin got her to stop braiding and pulled up Teague’s website. “He’s not an unknown. The Teagues are old money in this state. This, though, is personal. He’s going up against Nancy Sheldon-Kane—”

  “Oh, I know her! She’s pretty sharp, saw her Memorial Day speech online.”

  “Sharp and progressive and rich. She was the strongest candidate for the seat until Teague showed up.”

  “So do we care?” She plopped down in the overstuffed lounger next to his desk that was, by default, hers.

  He held up his hand and wavered it back and forth. “Maybe? Sheldon-Kane is clean as a whistle. The most I ever got her on was a property down in Costa Rica that she wasn’t paying taxes on as a residence, but the laws are bit murky in that situation and one of the accountants hired by her family took the fall, so she sold the place and the problem disappeared. Otherwise she’s disgustingly wholesome.”

  Rachel snorted. “I know how much you hate that.”

  He laughed. “Okay, okay. But! Teague. I don’t like him. Gossip is that he’s gay, way in the closet, and has a very unhappy marriage.”

  Rachel frowned but also shrugged. “Yeah, but that’s personal shit. You don’t care about that.”

  “Remember Ecker? I didn’t care about him fucking some strippers on the down low, but then he started embezzling once he got caught in a honey trap. So no, I don’t personally give a damn about Teague’s sex life, but being in the closet like that makes him vulnerable. Unlike Ecker, he played it safe by getting married and living up to the image, at least as far as I can tell, but… I don’t know. Something bugs me about him.”

  She nudged his thigh with her foot. “You always have good instincts.”

  “Eh, sometimes.”

  “You knew what was up with me, when it counted,” she added softly.

  A lump caught in his throat, and he nodded, trying not to let his eyes tear up. She got up, ruffled his hair, and went to the kitchen.

  Her rape had happened nearly six years ago, just before her sixteenth birthday and only a few years after the deaths of their parents. She had been twelve when they died, and went into free fall, her grades tanking mostly because she was always running out at night to party. Benjamin had not been ready to be the parent of a grief-stricken tween, and he admitted in retrospect he did a bad job of it at first, clouded by his own grief and anger. An introvert and geek, it had not even occurred to him that his sister would be doing drugs and having sex at that tender age. It was like a bad episode of Law & Order: SVU, and he was the oblivious parent who had no idea their kid ever got up to those kinds of things. But she did, and he had no idea.

  Or, more accurately, he had no idea how bad things had gotten. Grounding her was useless, and he did not have the money at the time to get her a therapist, so mainly he just tried his best to be there for her when he wasn’t in class. She was hostile about it and sometimes ran away for days at a time, causing Benjamin to spiral into sheer panic until she called to yell at him to stop crowding her. He honestly thought that at some point she would just decide not to come home, and he had nightmares about it, but he also had a degree to finish a
nd then another degree to start, and while their parents’ life insurance paid off the mortgage, it did not stretch far enough to pay the bills.

  Then, after a couple of years of that cycle wearing him down into a nub of numbed-out misery, Rachel came home one night bloody and beaten and in tears.

  It had taken him a few hours to get the truth out of her, but it turned out she had been being groomed for months by a much older man. He had offered to make her his kept woman or some shit—Benjamin was too incoherent with rage to parse the details—but when Rachel demanded to go home to her brother, the guy had lost it. She suffered a beating and she was raped—Benjamin at least had the wherewithal not to ask if it was her first time—before the guy pushed her out of his car in an alleyway.

  The guy, it turned out, was Senator Les Lamarque.

  Benjamin wanted her to go to the cops, but she refused. It was, ironically, the most important fight of their lives, and Benjamin hated that sometimes. But in the end, they had cried all over each other and begged forgiveness and then sworn a mutual pact of devotion.

  Which left Benjamin to deal with Les Lamarque.

  It had taken him months to figure out what, exactly, to do, and in the end it was sort of Rachel’s idea. She had refused to go to the cops or go public, and they both knew with her current school record and recent history of misbehavior that she would be pilloried by the press and the justice system if she tried, despite being the victim of statutory rape and battery. But one day while they were out at the mall she stopped cold, looking across the walkway, pale and shaken. She had seen another girl she used to hang out with who was way too poor to be wearing the designer clothes and expensive jewelry she had on.

  “He’s doing it again. I bet he does it a lot,” she said, tears streaming down her face. “I never thought of that before. How many girls did he rape before me? How many more is he going to chew up and spit out?”

  Benjamin didn’t have the heart to tell her what they both knew was true. Instead he offered some mumbling kind of emotional support, slinging his arm over her shoulders. She pushed him away with a dark expression.

  “What he’s doing is illegal, Benji. It’s wrong!”

  He sighed. “I know, but you didn’t want to go to the cops, so—”

  She poked him in the chest. “It wouldn’t have stopped him. He needs to be stopped. He needs to be caught fucking some underage girl, like, on camera.”

  He frowned. “You want me to hire a private investigator?”

  She shook her head. “Can’t you do something that can’t get traced back to us?”

  And just like that, the whole concept of MudzNewz spiraled out in Benjamin’s mind like a living thing, right there in the damn food court. He hated website design, but all he needed was a simple, clean site that was untraceable and then do some hacking on the back end. He was no stranger to the dark web, because like most comp-sci geeks he was too curious for his own good, and in the end it helped him a lot. A combination of hacking financials, asking for leads, and even tracking down the senator’s movements via public cameras had gotten an investigation opened with the FBI, and from then on, the senator’s days were numbered. He was not actually caught in flagrante the way Rachel wanted, but he had been caught keeping another fifteen-year-old girl in an apartment and buying her expensive gifts. Then several other girls came forward saying he had done the same to them, threatening their lives if they ever spoke up about it once he “broke up” with them.

  Rachel was ecstatic and Benjamin was hooked. He thought of how proud his mother, the investigative journalist, would have been of them. He thought about how many other foul politicians were ruining people’s lives and misrepresenting themselves to the public. He thought about how little work it really took for him to keep the site going.

  And so he did.

  Chapter Four

  THE POLITICAL dinner and rally was as excruciating as expected. Several issues on the platform were hot topics, and every news team for two hundred miles had descended.

  Even Frank ended up being corralled for mini-interviews no less than four times, and he was grateful that the campaign manager, Camila López, had coached him beforehand on what to say, because otherwise his main comment would have been “back the fuck off.” Afterward even Nancy looked like she had been beaten up by microphone-wielding news trolls as she poured doubles for herself, Frank, and her closest staff.

  “Better you than me.” He toasted his sister. She gave him a growl and a frown, then slammed her drink. They were in a hotel suite, because the rally was more than two hours from home and it just made more sense after drinking and being up late for everyone to crash there and leave for the next round in the morning. Frank would be heading home, as he was scheduled for a twelve-hour shift with LifeFlight the next afternoon. Everyone else would just move on to the next town, the next rally. The rallies were fairly small, given that the election was ten months away, but Paulie was not holding back and Nancy was pushing to make sure she held her lead.

  They had a long way to go.

  “Get used to it. We’ve got months of this, and you better believe you’re in for a penny, in for a pound.” She smacked her lips like a big cat on the hunt.

  Frank turned to Nancy’s personal assistant, Todd. “When we were kids, she also dressed me up in pinafores and made me play ‘tea time.’”

  Todd nodded, obviously commiserating, and Nancy threw a paper clip at them. Frank caught it and threw it back, and the Great Paper Clip War was starting in earnest when Camila yelped. “Dios mío!”

  Everyone stopped and looked at her. She waved them over to her laptop. On the screen, a prominent photo of Frank was topped by the screaming headline, “Pretty Boy Pilot Saves Sister’s Campaign!”

  “That fucker. I hate that guy!” Nancy stalked off, kicking a trash can.

  Todd tried to say that the article wasn’t that bad, but Nancy just glared at him. “I don’t care. MudzNewz is a muckraking asshole. Sure, he gives me half-decent press this week, but that doesn’t make up for that damn ‘exposé’ about my vacation home tax write-off in Costa Rica during my last election.”

  “Ohhhh, I wondered why you sold it. That place was gorgeous.” Frank sipped his drink, fondly remembering a few of the men who had given him “tours” when he had visited his sister’s house there.

  “Now you know. I nearly lost my seat, and people keep bringing it up. It wasn’t even my fault, and we fired that accountant, but we’re still fucking recovering from it.”

  Frank shrugged. “Buy him off.”

  “Christ, you sound like Father.”

  Frank cringed but did not withdraw the comment. Todd shook his head, though.

  “Better people have tried. He accepts the bribe, documents it, then outs it. CNN picks it up, and careers are destroyed overnight. No one likes MudzNewz, but you can’t fight him. He’s completely fan supported, doesn’t even accept advertising. There’s no back door.”

  “Who is he?” Frank asked, and everyone shrugged.

  “Some college kid, probably. He claims to be a hacker, and he’s second only to WikiLeaks in ‘procuring’ classified documents. Even the government has tried to shut him down, but his servers are offshore and his signal can’t be traced. You know he’s good when the CIA made a blanket offer to hire him if he just stopped publishing. It’s hard to believe he’s only been on the scene for four years.”

  “Where’d he come from?” Frank refilled his glass and sat back down.

  Camila rubbed her face without smudging even a trace of her makeup. “Five years ago, he didn’t exist. Then his site appeared out of literal nowhere—no one can trace it; he’s bouncing off servers all over the world—and it seemed like his one goal in life was to take down Senator Les Lamarque.”

  “Wait, that guy who was caught doing cocaine with a hooker?” Frank squinted, trying to remember the details.

  Camila’s face went murderous. “Not a hooker. A fifteen-year-old girl who had been trafficked over from
Venezuela.”

  Frank nodded then, remembering it clearly. Lamarque was doing time for that, especially after all his underworld connections became clear. Frank pondered that in the silence that followed. “You’re saying MudzNewz had something to do with it?”

  “No, we’re saying that MudzNewz was the whole reason he got caught. Look, Lamarque was a senator, in the big leagues, offices in Washington and two residences and everything,” Nancy said. “There were rumors, of course there were. But he was paying off some big players to keep his exploits undercover.”

  Camila picked up the story. “Didn’t last long once MudzNewz got a hold of him. Literally, the website popped up claiming that Lamarque was a pedophile and drug addict, and thirty-seven days later Lamarque is being busted by the FBI.”

  “That’s… that’s awfully precise of you.” Frank frowned at her, and Todd rolled his eyes.

  “Thirty-seven days, Frank!” Nancy yelled, then slammed another drink. “Who takes down a senator in thirty-seven days?”

  “I’m telling you, it freaked everyone out.” Camila shook her head, eyes wide. “It was a good cause, but no one felt safe. We all hoped he would shut up shop once Lamarque went down, but he didn’t. He just kept going.”

  “Roland. Ecker. Navarro.”

  Frank recognized each of those names, although not in much detail. They had all been the subject of career-ruining scandals, and Frank remembered Representative Ecker only because he had ended up outed when his payments to the twink who was blackmailing him were discovered.

  “If MudzNewz is that hot for a scandal, can’t someone feed him anything on Paulie? For fuck’s sake, we all know Paulie is as queer as a three-dollar bill.”