by Ryan Schow
“People in this country are so spoiled with their freedoms and their selective views of life, they have no idea the atrocities still occurring in other countries. So when you break a story like the one in Somalia, you get significant pushback. But you also come to realize people will steer certain less flowery stories away from the Pulitzer in order to maintain the status quo.”
“Which is?”
“That the bad things that happen in this world have no place on our doorstep, or in front of our faces. The soft belly of American society makes me want to puke.”
“What I have for you isn’t a flowery PG-13 story, William.”
“I sense that, Halden—if I may call you that…”
“You may.”
“And this is why I’m suddenly intrigued. Which is rather arresting since I’m never intrigued by anything this early in the morning. Not before my first cup of coffee, and most days not even before my second.”
“What if I told you there is a group of elite businessmen, CEOs, philanthropists and politicians who hold pedophile parties for their friends, the very people who have the means, the position and the motivation to hide their crimes?”
“I’d tell you that’s a story as old as time,” William said, yawning.
“And if I gave you names, times, the location of the events, along with firsthand knowledge of underage children being prostituted to the wealthy elite? Men and women who are easily thirty, forty, and even fifty years older than the kids they’re entertaining?”
“First, that’s gross,” William said, new life in his voice. “And second, I’m all ears. So long as this isn’t some giant conspiracy theory, because I haven’t had enough sleep to deal—”
“What are you doing later on this afternoon?”
“Clearing my schedule,” he said. “If you’d like to pick the time and place—”
“Before you say yes,” Halden interrupted again, “I need you to know this could be dangerous.”
“Things like this are always dangerous. But I didn’t take this job to camp out at my desk copying stories off the wire, or perusing blogs for real stories by real investigative journalists.”
“Good,” he said.
Halden gave him a time and place, insisting on the utmost discretion.
A few hours later, the two of them met at a faraway deli, making small talk over fifteen-dollar sandwiches and five-dollar sodas, and then Halden laid out the details of his evening at Marcus’s home. He provided names, descriptions of the kids, the exact location of the event. When William pressed for more intricate details, really anything else Halden could remember, it was with the promise that everything he wanted to be off the record would indeed be “off the record.”
To drive this point home, William said, “You’ll be afforded the same protections as those who come forward under The Whistleblower Protection Act. I don’t want you to worry.”
“Do you remember Jeffrey Epstein?”
“That’s like asking if I remember Oprah Winfrey, or Stephen Spielberg. Of course I know about Epstein. Who can forget that human stain?”
“I think this is the next Epstein-related service, except the handlers are smarter, more insulated. And the girls and boys being provided? I think they’re protected.”
“By whom?” he asked.
“You can start with those names I gave you,” Halden said, pointing to his list.
“Of course,” William said, sipping the last of his soda.
The warmth of the sun felt good on his body, but the unburdening of himself was what truly lifted the weight from his shoulders. But not all the weight. He really didn’t think William knew the peril he was facing.
“Have you ever had your life threatened, Mr. Kim?” Halden asked, thinking his own life had never truly been in jeopardy, but that something like this—if it blew back on him—could very well cost him everything.
“Only a dozen times. The last threat I received was so unoriginal, I told the caller that the guy before him threatened me the exact same way and that maybe he should be more creative if he wanted me to take him seriously, which I said I didn’t. Shockingly, nothing ever came of it.”
With a smile, but solemn in his heart, Halden said, “I admire your courage.”
“I appreciate you coming forward. I’ll keep your name off my lips and out of my notes. These perverted fools don’t know the power of the press, but as sure as we’re sitting here now, they’re going to!”
They concluded their long lunch with a handshake and best wishes, then Halden returned home, where he spent the rest of the day with Kaylee. They talked about her college choices, the upcoming weekend, how much she missed her mother. He and Kaylee didn’t engage in deep talks that often—mostly because she didn’t seem interested—but on the occasion that she did open up and stay inside the conversation, they’d cover the entire spectrum of things, events and emotions. In exchanges such as these, Kaylee would invariably funnel her way down to one question, the same question every time: “Why did Mom leave us?”
“The mysteries of life and death sometimes confound even the smartest and most devout of souls,” he answered this time.
“Even you?” she asked, eyes shimmering.
He took her hand, wiped his own eyes with his free hand, and said, “Even me, sweetheart. Even me.”
Chapter Four
ATLAS HARGROVE
Atlas Hargrove was never given a plea bargain. His court-appointed attorney suspected the DA, and presumably the judge, wanted to make a point of having a jury trial. No one wanted vigilantes in their cities. Vigilante cops were worse. His lawyer told him he shouldn’t enter a guilty plea, even though Atlas planned on doing just that. Eventually, he caved, yielding full control to the man. So after two miserable years of courtrooms, legal posturing, and a jail cell, Atlas Hargrove sat before his assigned judge waiting for her to read the jury’s decision.
She stared at the slip of paper the jury foreman handed her with eyes as dead as his own. Atlas knew the drill. Three first-degree murder charges. Since the governor had put a moratorium on executions, Atlas wouldn’t see the death penalty, but he wouldn’t see the minimum twenty-five-year-per-count sentencing either. The prosecutor had called for three life sentences with no possibility of parole. So yeah, he’d known what was coming. Jade had as well.
By some miracle, his wife stuck by him through all of this. To the layman, this would speak to the decency of her character, of her devotion. He knew otherwise. He felt the difference. He felt it when she sat behind him in court, and when she visited him behind bars. Now he was feeling her again, this time as she began to pull away.
Across the courtroom, the families of his victims awaited their day of justice. Even though their hatred for him felt like a constantly twisting knife, the three boys he’d killed were their children, their flesh and blood—souls who’d once dreamed of something bigger than the violent ending Atlas had given them. He also felt the two bullet holes in his back—one round delivered by Officer Lucas Petty, the other by former officer Julie Holloway.
Petty was present for some of the hearing, but Julie Holloway had found her way into an early grave last year. The PTSD was too much. Atlas heard she’d turned to alcohol, and then to drugs to numb the pain. Then, one night, she was killed in a head-on collision. When he heard she’d left two young boys and a devastated husband behind, Atlas had cried for the loss. That was the only time he’d shed a tear since he’d been brought back to life in the operating room two years ago.
The second the judge read the jury’s decision, the impossible weight he’d carried for so long lifted. The sentence should have rocked him. It didn’t. Turning, he looked at Jade. She just sat there, stone-faced and unshakable. Whatever she’d felt before that day was gone, every last emotion burned out of her through exhaustion, resentment, revulsion. He turned back around, faced the judge. His mind was still on Jade, and Alabama.
Last night during visitation, when he’d asked Jade if she despised h
im, she’d simply blinked and said, “Of course not,” but without one iota of sentiment. She wasn’t even pretending not to lie anymore.
“Do you blame me?” he asked. He was referring to Alabama.
“No one found her,” Jade said, her eyes clearing very little. “That means you probably couldn’t have done any more than anyone else did.”
“I just wonder how different our lives would be today if she’d never been taken.”
“You’ll have the next three lives to wonder that,” she said before standing up. Then, leaning forward to hang up the visitation phone they were conversing on, she left him with a final statement. “Good luck tomorrow.” He imagined luck would play no part in his sentencing. In that moment, Jade looked unmoved, her eyes completely vacant. He wondered if his sentencing would provide her with the relief she needed, if her life would be better when all of this was behind her.
Now that the mystery of his sentencing was gone, what he wondered most, what he wanted to ask but dared not ask right then, was if she was going to give up on Alabama. One look in her eyes and he’d imagined the Belarusian beauty was going to put their daughter in the rearview mirror, the same as it seemed she was doing with him. If she wanted to close out this chapter of her life, he didn’t blame her.
“Before we adjourn this court, Mr. Hargrove, do you have any last words?” the judge asked, bringing Atlas back around. The judge was a bulldog of a woman, completely unsympathetic to him, not that he blamed her. “Perhaps you could offer an apology, or an admission of remorse for the families of the men whose lives you took?”
“I would like that, your honor,” Atlas said, clearing his throat.
She offered him a curt nod and he stood up. The look was pinched and offensive, just like everything about her demeanor.
He turned to the families of the deceased. “As many of you know, I have a child of my own. Her name is Alabama. She went missing six years ago now. She will be turning fifteen shortly, if she’s even still alive.”
He refused to look at Jade, but in his peripheral vision, he saw her hand come to her mouth. She lowered her head with sadness.
“Much of what I’ve done since the day she was taken has been a reaction, or a baseline response to my own grief. To lose a child is very much a life sentence in itself. But we’re not sentenced to prison as much as we sentence ourselves to a prison of our own making. We wonder what went wrong. We ask what we did to deserve this. We wonder if we could have changed the outcome simply by doing just one or two things different. I realize this is your day of justice, as well as mine to serve it, but I want you to know that I will be grieving not for you but with you.”
“That’s not what I was thinking when I said you’d have a chance to make amends to those families you victimized,” the judge interrupted.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, turning to her with apologetic eyes.
“Proceed, please,” she said.
“As I stand before you today, as I imagine what you’ll be thinking in the years ahead, what difficulties you will have to face, I think not of you but of the children your miserable shit kids killed and how their families will be suffering because of your failings as parents.”
A cacophony of noise erupted and the judge slammed her gavel, each strike sounding like a gunshot in the courtroom. He raised his voice to counter the noise.
“Your dead, disgusting children killed seven innocent souls and I’m going to prison for life? This isn’t justice, this is a miscarriage of justice!”
“Sit down and shut up, Mr. Hargrove!” the judge roared over the noise. “Bailiff!”
The judge was half out of her seat, really testing the resilience of her gavel. As she banged that wooden hammer over and over again, it became apparent she wasn’t trying to calm the standing, screaming, outraged masses of mourners as much as she was unleashing her own anger. He would not be deterred, though, for he pushed his voice as loud as it would go, making himself heard before he said good-bye to his life, his wife, his freedom, the possibility of ever finding Alabama.
“Those are the ONLY kids who will be missed!” he exploded. “Not your rotten spawn. They’ll be in hell with the devil, bathing in the vomit and diarrhea of sinners like you, like them, like all the people who kill innocent children!”
“Bailiff, I want him out of my sight, NOW!” the judge screamed, still whacking her gavel.
“I’m not sorry I shot those maggots!” Atlas roared, shrugging off his lawyer’s grabbing hands. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have shot them sooner!”
He dodged the approaching bailiff, shoving his lawyer off his seat. Atlas’s face blistered with rage. He’d gone over the edge again. There was no coming back.
“Hell, I’d shoot them again if it meant saving the lives of the good children your crackhead kids killed! I don’t owe you recompense! I don’t owe you an apology!” he screamed, dodging the bailiff. “You owe an apology to those families you destroyed by having those filthy ingrates in the first place!”
The bailiff managed to get ahold of his forearm; Atlas reacted out of instinct. He grabbed the big man’s hand and twisted it into a joint lock. This put immense pressure on the bailiff’s wrist and elbow. Atlas drove the groaning man to his knees.
He was good at what he did, and what he was doing, but he was acting not out of spite as much as self-defense. A second bailiff went for his pistol, making Atlas wonder if he was about to be shot for the third time in his life.
“Get that man in cuffs!” the judge screamed hoarsely, fully out of her seat now, maybe even standing on her tippy-toes.
Atlas shoved the restrained bailiff aside and jumped up on the defense team’s table. Below him, across the aisle, half the families of the dead men were physically holding the other half back. Women and children were crying, bystanders were cursing at him and Jade was frantically searching for the nearest exit.
“You had better get down on your knees and PRAY FOR WHAT YOU’VE DONE TO THIS WORLD! For you have soiled the good people of GOD with your offspring, and you will pay the ultimate price! They’ll all pay the price!”
The bailiff now had his gun out and was aiming it at Atlas, but the look in his eyes said he didn’t have the stones to pull the trigger.
“You think I’ve learned something being sentenced to life in prison? You gave me a reprieve from this life! So go into the sunset and lick your wounds, and—”
The older, bigger brother of the Mustang’s dead driver managed to break through the bodies holding him back. He charged Atlas.
“Come get some, son!” Atlas screamed.
One of the bailiffs and a Good Samaritan managed to yank Atlas off the table, slamming him down on his back on the ground. The brother struck him with a few pointed kicks he knew were coming. He deserved them. The assailant was quickly restrained by the second bailiff.
“This is a perversion of justice!” Atlas screamed at the judge as he was yanked to his feet and dragged out of the courtroom. “You’re a cog in a wheel that stopped working a long time ago. Justice was already served. It was served in blood TWO YEARS AGO!”
Once he was in the hallway, the bailiffs softened him up with a few strategic jabs to the solar plexus and floating ribs. Gasping for air, weakened by the shots, he fell silent until he could breathe again. Even then, he took short ragged breaths, for they kept hitting him, violently but discreetly, all the way to his destination.
This wasn’t his finest hour, and he hadn’t done anyone any good by saying the hateful things he had. He was an emotional man, though, a grieving father, a child of God who knew justice despite the law or the jury who had heaped their bitter judgments upon him.
Asa he sat in his cell recovering, he brooded over his current situation. He’d expected a lot of things, but he never thought he’d call NorCal State Prison his home. San Quentin, Pelican Bay or Folsom State Prison, yes. But not the privatized Supermax facility.
NorCal was barely a year old, not yet at full capacity from what he hea
rd, but it was teeming with serial killers and psychopaths like him. Being a former cop, he didn’t expect to serve out one life sentence, let alone three. He’d be lucky to survive a month.
Curling into a ball, wrapping his arms around his shins, Atlas was fixated on one thought, a singular belief that left him paralyzed with fear. He was a lamb about to be shoved into a lion’s den.
Chapter Five
HALDEN BARNES
The following morning, Halden opened the Philadelphia Tribune and saw two very disturbing stories. First, he read about the killer ex-cop in California sentenced to three consecutive life sentences. But then he opened the paper all the way and froze. Looking back at him was a small picture of investigative journalist William Kim. He was dead.
“Oh, dear God,” he whispered.
According to local sources, William had gotten a flat tire on the far-right lane of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge. The investigative reporter had set up flares as a warning, then called for a tow. According to the timeline, this had all happened after they’d had lunch. Witnesses said the westbound traffic wasn’t that heavy, so cars were moving quickly and he wasn’t in danger. Ten minutes after the flat tire, a Good Samaritan stopped to help him out. Instead of fixing the flat, this unidentified person put a bullet through Kim’s head, lifted his dead body up over his shoulders and tossed him into traffic.
William hit the windshield of a Toyota Avalon and was pitched into traffic, where he was then run over by a big rig. The driver of the eighteen-wheeler locked the brakes, huge plumes of smoke lifting off the tires. Unbeknownst to the driver, the body was caught in the back wheels. He dragged the dead journalist over thirty feet of asphalt before his torso split in two and the separate pieces of him skidded to a bloody stop in traffic.
The fourteen-car pileup that followed provided the perfect distraction for the Samaritan’s escape. He left his stolen car on the side of the road, abandoned and without prints, fibers or a single stray hair to be found.
