“You know about those rumors…,” Pete began.
Ron stopped him cold. “The mysterious underworld hit man? I don’t want to hear about it. It’s an urban myth, like the fuckin’ Yeti. Everyone claims to ‘know somebody who knows somebody who knows who he is’, but it’s total bullshit. To even mention it is beneath you. If the other guys heard you talking about it you’d embarrass us both. Now, can we do something productive? Like go to lunch? I’ll drive, you buy.”
Ron grabbed his coat from the back of his chair and headed out.
Pete shrugged on his jacket and grabbed up his phone. He’d listened to Kelly’s message four or five times, wondering why she was lying. After spending years interrogating perps and witnesses, he had a very refined bullshit-detector. The question was not only why she lied, but what part of the message, if any, was the truth?
He considered returning her call, but that might lead to a confrontation, which would only serve to inflame an already fragile co-existence. Besides, he had other things on his mind and didn’t want to be distracted from trying to figure out if/how the Moretti deaths fit together.
He knew if he could connect the dots there would be a revelatory payoff in the end.
83
(David’s Journal)
This won’t be an ordinary entry because the circumstances of this contract were anything but ordinary.
The target was a young woman named Hope Miller. A stunning brunette who was a senior at Kentucky Wesleyan University in Owensboro, Kentucky. KWU is a Methodist college with less than eight hundred students.
Hope was raised in Edgewood, Kentucky; one of the wealthiest cities in the state. Her father, Calvin Miller, owned a large commercial real estate company and sat on the Governor’s council of economic growth. Her mother was the “lay leader” at the local Methodist Church, “serving as a role model of Christian faith in daily life” (according to Google). Hope was an only child and was doted on by her parents. She wanted for nothing and her success in life was destined. Head cheerleader, student body president, prom queen… they were all a given.
She chose Kentucky Wesleyan, partly due to her mother’s urging and partly because she cherished the idea of being an orca in a tiny pond. It didn’t take long for Hope to establish herself as one of the shining stars on campus, favored by her professors and longed for by all the males in school.
It turned out that Hope wasn’t quite what she appeared to be; she had a deep-seated yearning to break out of the small-town, pampered-rich-girl persona. She craved a walk on the wild side, and soon found a like-minded partner in Larson Hobbes.
I didn’t need to look far to find background information about Hobbes. His story dominated the news last year, after he shot and killed twenty-three students (and two teachers) at a Daviess County middle school. He spared the state the cost of a lengthy incarceration when he used his final bullet on himself.
Unlike many mass murderers, Hobbes didn’t post nihilistic diatribes on social media or leave behind notebooks packed with satanic drawings, swastikas, or horrific “to do” lists. Authorities never found a reason why Larson Hobbes targeted that specific school. They did the usual round of exhaustive interviews with Hobbes’ friends (of which there were very few), former teachers, his grandmother (who raised him) and, of course, Hope Miller.
The news outlets loved her. Beautiful, wealthy, from a solid Christian family. Her tale of getting caught up in Larson Hobbes’ web was straight out of a paperback romance novel. According to her, Larson exuded an irresistible magnetism and she fell victim to his outré charm (the press fell all over themselves equating him with Charles Manson).
Hope swore she knew absolutely nothing about Hobbes’ plans to go on a killing spree. After hours of questioning, the police affirmed her story. She was an innocent who had no information and no involvement in the incident. If anything, she was a victim as well, and she received hundreds of sympathetic letters of encouragement (and several dozen marriage proposals).
The ‘Middle School Massacre’ soon faded from the news cycle, as did Hope Miller. She was finally able to get back to a somewhat normal life at KWU.
When Benedetto contacted me with this contract, I was intrigued. I vaguely remembered the name Hope Miller, and certainly recalled her face, because she reminded me of Jess. Same hair, same slim build and same winning smile. That was one of the reasons my initial reaction was to pass on this job. There was no way I could bring myself to do harm to my daughter’s doppelganger.
That was until I found out what Hope Miller had done… or worse, what she was about to do.
A phone rang. Kelly was shaken by the sound and momentarily confused, and then realized she hadn’t programmed her old ring tone into her new cell phone. She glanced down at the screen and saw Pete’s handsome, chiseled face. She felt a twinge of irritation at being disturbed while she was in the middle of reading her father’s journal, but she shook that off. She still hadn’t spoken to Pete and he deserved better. But not right now. She let the call go to voicemail, then got up to refresh her wine glass.
After an uneventful day at the clinic, she’d come straight home, pulled together a meal of leftovers, and sat down to do something she’d put off… to read the remainder of her father’s journal.
The entry about Hope Miller was his penultimate entry. Despite everything she’d been through in the past few weeks, she continued to have an extremely difficult time wrapping her head around the revelation of her father’s past. Even after killing two people herself, none of it seemed real.
She owed it to her father to finish reading what he’d left behind. After all, it was meant for her. Even though the tales of death sickened her, there was an undeniable fascination to the stories.
Kelly had decided that after she’d read this last entry, she’d destroy the journal. She couldn’t run the risk that these admissions of guilt could end up in the wrong hands, which were anyone’s other than hers.
Pete was still at the station. Not because he had anything meaningful to do, but because at nine-thirty on a Tuesday night he had no place else to go. He’d finished his shift an hour earlier, and the thought of going out to dinner alone was too depressing. He knew if he went home he’d distractedly watch TV, finish off the bottle of Cutty Sark that still had a good four inches left, and stare at his cell phone.
Instead, he sat at his desk, drank a cup of scalded coffee and absent-mindedly picked at a stale egg sandwich from the vending machine. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the Moretti binder one more time, and the David Harper murder book had revealed nothing new after a dozen reads.
He contemplated his current situation. An Inspector on the rise, he was well liked by his commanding officers, his closure record put him in the top ten percent across the city, and, most importantly, he hadn’t made any enemies in the department. Getting on the bad side of the brass was the quickest route to a transfer to the outer precincts, which was only one step removed from becoming a citizen and working private security at Oracle Park.
The personal side of his life was much more complicated. He didn’t know where he stood with Kelly. They’d always enjoyed an open and honest exchange of ideas and dealt with relationship issues by discussing them. There was never any rancor or sulking. They never parted angrily. They’d talked long into the night about a future together, but never made any specific plans. Pete had always assumed they’d settle down together.
He no longer made such assumptions.
He grabbed the Moretti binder, more out of habit than desire. This case was going to taunt him until he was satisfied he’d answered all the nagging questions. Who was the mysterious brunette? Was Tommy alone when he ODed? Was the overdose a suicide, an accident, or had it been administered by someone else? And the big question was, did Moretti’s death have anything to do with the deaths of the rest of his family and/or the murder of David Harper?
As he flipped open the binder, his phone rang. He smiled, assuming it was Kelly, but instead
the call screen announced that it was Victoria from the forensics lab. Strange. Pete didn’t have any cases that were waiting on forensics.
Victoria explained that Inspector Yee had suggested she follow up with his contact at the Oakland PD regarding the death of Angelo Moretti, in the event that something out of the ordinary arose.
She did, and it had.
They’d run tests on Angelo’s last meal of spicy garlic chicken. The results showed a very high concentration of shrimp stock in the food. Oakland PD followed up with the restaurant, and the manager adamantly stated that they never used shrimp stock when preparing non-shellfish dishes. Which meant that either someone in the kitchen accidently screwed up…
“Or someone intentionally put it into the food,” Pete said. “And the only reason to do that would be to trigger an allergic reaction.”
Victoria agreed “One other thing. Angelo attempted to inject himself with an EpiPen, but it was out of serum. Chances are he’d already used it once and forgot to replace it, but if you want to go all conspiracy theory, someone replaced his EpiPen with one that was empty.”
“In which case, we’re looking at a homicide,” Pete said.
He thanked Victoria for the update, and leaned back in his chair. First thing in the morning he’d take a drive to Oakland and personally check in with the officer in charge of the investigation.
Now, he was going home to take on that bottle of Cutty.
84
(David’s Journal)
Benedetto presented me with evidence that strongly indicated Hope was behind the Middle School Massacre. While she obviously wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger, she’d driven Larson Hobbes to commit the deed. Charles Manson was embodied in their relationship, but in the form of Hope Miller.
She’d kept a notebook (a scan of which Benedetto had obtained), allegedly written in her hand, outlining the details of the shooting; a roadmap for Hobbes to follow. After the killings, Hope celebrated in prose the deaths of twenty-five people. The notebook was rife with years of built-up anger and hatred. If the notebook was authentic, Hope Miller was a bad seed. A female Damian Thorn. A shiny apple on the outside, rotten to the core on the inside.
That wasn’t the worst of it. In the notebook she bragged about her newest “recruit” (her word, not mine). Travis Balinger fit the mold of Larson Hobbes: low IQ, low esteem, and malleable as warm clay. She listed three potential targets: two elementary schools and a daycare facility. The question was, “why?”
Benedetto’s tech wiz dug deep to find the reason, but came up empty. Hope never had a bad day in her life. No humiliating experiences. No grudges against teachers. So again, why target schools? And why young children? The answer lay amidst the increasingly incoherent ramblings in the notebook. The younger the victim, the greater the social outrage and the societal pain.
I asked the obvious questions: who found the notebook? Why wasn’t it turned over to the police? Had it been authenticated? Benedetto provided the answers: Hope’s roommate found it, copied it and returned it. The roommate was a rawboned girl named Claire Hemphill, who hailed from a rural town in eastern Kentucky. She was a devout Christian who always had a smile on her face and a bible passage on her lips. She and Hope made an odd pair, but maybe that’s why they got along so well.
When Claire found the notebook, it scared her half to death. After she copied it, she immediately took leave from school and showed the notebook to her parents. They in turn gave it to a local reporter who’d written several stories about the original Middle School Massacre. The reporter made a digital copy of the notebook, then presented the hard copy to his editor. And that’s where the story essentially died.
From what Benedetto could piece together, the editor had a private conversation with the Lt. Governor. If this notebook was authentic, it would send tremors throughout the state, because Cal Miller had a lot of influence around the Capitol, not to mention having made very generous contributions to the Governor’s re-election campaign. The Lt. Governor allegedly contacted the local FBI field office, and they deemed the notebook a fake, written by Ms Hemphill in a perverse attempt to take the haughty Hope Miller down a few pegs. (Despite this conclusion, the Lt. Governor covered his backside by personally contacting the targeted schools mentioned in the notebook and advising them to beef up their security.)
The notebook was officially discredited and after that, no one in law enforcement or the media would touch it. It was destined to be filed along with countless other sensitive documents that ‘never existed’.
The reporter, however, had other ideas. Since he’d covered the tragic shooting, he was familiar with the parents of the victims. One father had been extremely outspoken regarding the dearth of answers in the aftermath of the massacre. The reporter took the digitized notebook to him.
The father believed in the notebook’s authenticity. He knew he wasn’t going to get any traction with the press, so he took matters into his own hands. He happened to work for a large liquor distributer, and a few of the upper management types had “connections”, so he went to them for help.
Phone calls were made, contacts were established, and the father was finally put in touch with a person who “knew of a guy”. The request arrived on Benedetto’s desk, along with a digital copy of the notebook. If the things in the notebook were true, there was no telling when Travis Balinger might be walking into an elementary school with an AK47 and creating more terrifying headlines.
I agreed to fly to Kentucky to observe Hope Miller for a few days. I trusted my instincts. If she showed no signs whatsoever of psychopathic tendencies, I’d come home. If, on the other hand, I felt she was the epitome of evil that the notebook indicated, I’d take the contract.
I spent a week in Owensboro. After observing Hope for two days and getting a sense of her schedule and rhythms, I stepped up my surveillance. She went for a sixty-minute run every morning at 5am through a densely wooded area that bordered the University. On day three, I entered her room and hid a tiny video camera in a light fixture.
Another few days went by. I watched and listened, but Hope showed no hints of being unbalanced. In fact, I was impressed by how diligently she studied and how generous she was with her time and money. She was quick to pay for things ranging from pizzas for her study group to a few cases of beer for an upcoming coed softball game.
I may have been biased, because seeing her in real time I was again struck by how much she reminded me of Jessica. I had to push those thoughts out of my mind and evaluate Hope for herself, but I found it difficult not to give her the benefit of the doubt.
By day seven I was ready to come home. Hope may have been a murderous puppeteer, but nothing I saw convinced me of that. I declined the job. If I was wrong, it would be the biggest mistake of my life. But if I was right, and Hope was being set up by Claire Hemphill, then I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I killed this intelligent young woman who had such a wonderful future ahead of her.
Kelly’s heart was pumping fast. She feared she knew where this was going. If her suspicions were right, she couldn’t begin to imagine how it affected her father. How he could go on and pretend that nothing happened. She had to keep reading…
Benedetto took my decision in stride, completely understanding my reasoning. He had no emotional investment in the contracts. He appeared to get no satisfaction from the results. I believe he saw it as some kind of civic duty or public service.
Weeks went by and all was quiet. I read the news every day from Kentucky, and there were no incidents. I’d made the right decision about Hope, and thought about how close I came to snuffing out the life of someone else’s daughter.
Then one morning I got a call from Benedetto to turn on CNN. They were reporting on a deadly shooting at an elementary school in western Kentucky. Eighteen children were dead and seven were injured. The shooter took his own life before the police could do it for him. I was stunned. It wasn’t one of the schools on the list from the notebook, but it
had all the earmarks of the Middle School Massacre. What had I done? Or rather, what could I have stopped?
Later that day the shooter’s identity was shared with the public: Khalid Nozari. It was immediately labeled an act of terrorism and the cry for revenge echoed from Frankfort, Kentucky, to Washington, DC. The fact that Nozari was American-born and had no ties with any terrorist groups didn’t matter. People didn’t care about the facts. They needed an enemy, and here was one that was tailor-made.
The perfect scapegoat.
Hope Miller had chosen well. I know it was her doing. My theory is that she got word, maybe from her father, that someone was trying to frame her with a ridiculous account that she was behind the Middle School Massacre. Hope laughed it off, but in reality what she’d done was shift gears. Travis Balinger was now a liability, and the schools on her list were too hot to attack. So Hope picked up a new recruit, a Muslim no less, and accomplished her goal: a public outrage, the likes of which almost equaled that of 911.
It turned out I wasn’t the only one who came to the conclusion that this tragedy was the work of Hope Miller. Two days later, while on her morning run, she was shot and killed. There were no witnesses and the assailant was never caught. Her death made big news in Kentucky, but the rest of the country didn’t have the time or interest to mourn the murder of a college coed. They were too busy focusing on the escalating rhetoric coming out of Washington about how America wouldn’t sit by idly while terrorists came onto our soil and slaughtered our children. There was even talk about bombing strategic targets in the Middle East.
Gideon Page 33
