by Aiden Bates
They’d disappeared from the internet altogether. Just like Wells had—only, there wasn’t even a telltale Myspace profile to dig up out of the archives this time. In the time since his report on the string of wild Omega heats cropping up throughout the northeast, Peter Preston, our best lead, had turned into a ghost. I could still find all of his pieces leading up to the that article. He’d taken on big mining corporations who’d laid off workers without severance or notice. Local government officials who’d been caught trying to rig their reelections. School board members siphoning money from senior class funds, and nursing homes that had been found out for abusing their elderly patients.
But after the birth control article…nothing. He hadn’t published anything since then. If the spool of dread that was coiling in my stomach had anything to say about it, he probably wouldn’t be publishing anything else at all.
Which meant I needed to give up my journalist search and shift my attentions to the publications themselves. The NYC gossip rag was still up and running, though their interviews with the Broadway Omega who’d been affected by the pills had disappeared—as had all of the social profiles of the Omega himself. In a flash of genius, I Googled the paper’s name and searched for news articles instead of the regular search terms—and bingo.
The paper had recently been acquired by a larger media company. A quick search in the same vein for the Omega’s theater company revealed that they’d just been amalgamated into a larger one—which gave me just enough of a hunch to run with. The conspiracy magazine that had published its own piece on spoiled pills had been purchased as well—then immediately shut down. Even Preston’s small-town Pennsylvania paper was now running under new ownership. The town was lauding the buy-out as a great victory for their little local news publisher—but of course it was. The paper was the only one reporting on it—at the behest of their shiny new leadership, no doubt.
“How’s it going?” Harper came up behind me, placing a hand on my shoulder and a mug of steaming hot tea next to my keyboard. “You’ve been in here for…a while.”
“I know, I know. Sorry.” I checked the names of the other papers that had reported on the Omega heat incidents, typing each into the search bars of fresh tabs, one by one. “This is a lot murkier than it should be. Taking a while.”
“Something fishy going on, then?”
I nodded, not glancing away from my screen. “Like a dockside market on fresh catch day.”
Nick squeezed my shoulder gently. “You should call it a night, Nick. Get some rest. You must be exhausted right now. We can start fresh tomorrow.”
I lowered my eyes to the clock on my computer—four in the morning. “Already is tomorrow. But look here—”
I tabbed into each of my new search results, going to the publication’s official page and scrolling down to the copyright information. Every link led me to a larger media company—several of them to the same ones that had just bought out the papers who’d reported on the pills. “Anyone who’s reported the story straight has been purchased within the last three months by one of these bigger companies. Same people who own all the other papers who didn’t report the birth control as the cause.”
“Huh. And the journalists?”
I shook my head. “Scrubbed from all social media—if they ever existed in the first place. Our boy Peter Preston has vanished too. That exposé on the pills was the last thing he wrote.”
“Fuck.” Harper’s grip tightened as the reality of what I’d just told him sank in. “So we’re looking at a cover-up, then.”
I nodded grimly, finally looking up at him with sympathy in my eyes. “It, ah…it gets worse, actually.”
Harper took in a sharp breath, then sighed. “Okay. Let’s hear it.”
“Joshua’s stories. All the way back to his college days.” I typed the name Joshua King into a fresh tab, which turned up his social media profiles, but nothing else. “They’re gone.”
“What?” Harper blinked frantically, leaning over me to get a better look at the results. “He used to have hundreds of bylines out there, though. Longreads, guest posts on blogs, Twitter threads…”
I drew my lips into a thin line as I clicked on Josh’s twitter account. The contents of his page only deepened the heavy tension that had formed around us.
“He’s gone,” I said softly, seeing the empty gray circle where Josh’s profile picture had once been.
“Account suspended. Twitter suspends accounts which violate the Twitter Rules.” Harper read the words on the page with a sneer. “They’ve banned him? For what—doing his damn job?”
“Someone must have reported him. Or, well, several someones. Either that, or…”
“Or they had access to someone powerful enough to shut him down completely, no questions asked.”
“This is big, Harper.” I spun round in my chair to face him, taking his hands in mine. “Bigger than either of us. To go to all this trouble…”
“Those bastards.” Harper’s lip trembled for a second, then he yanked his hands away from mine, forming them into fists and eyeing my drywall like he was ready to throw a punch straight through it. “Those fucking cowards! It wasn’t enough to kill him—wasn’t enough to steal him away from me! From us!”
“Harper, I’m so sorry—”
“No.” Harper shook his head, clenching his jaw. I could see the fury rising and falling in his chest, arching against his ribcage and threatening to burst out of it completely. “No, these people are the ones who are going to be sorry. Whoever they are, wherever they’re hiding—”
“But we don’t know who they are,” I said softly. “We don’t know—”
“We will.” Harper nodded, slowly at first, then with more vigor. “We’re going to track those fuckers down, haul them out into the streets, make them fucking pay for what they did to him—for what they did to you—Ugh!”
Harper let out a roar of frustration, turning to my wall with his fist raised. I leapt up out of my chair, throwing my body against his before he could put a hole in my office. My fingers closed around the fist, caressing his knuckles as I lowered it for him.
“Punching shit isn’t going to help anything right now, hon.”
Harper didn’t look so sure of that. “Would make me feel better, though.”
“Yeah? Then head to the twenty-four-hour gym down the road if you have to. I get it, okay? You need to blow off steam. But—”
My heart crumpled in on itself as I saw the pain dance through Harper’s eyes. In the corner of one, a tear was forming. He blinked, shaking it loose from his lower lashes until it ran down his face, hot and alone.
I wrapped my arms around him, pulling him close and kissing it away. Harper’s body heaved beneath my hug, a snarl ripping through him in the place of a sob.
“They’ve deleted him from existence, Nick. Every piece of work he’s ever done…every hour he spent chasing down informants, writing up reports…”
“I know, honey. I know.” I smoothed my hand down Harper’s neck, doing my best to comfort him—but there was no comfort to be had in any of this. No consolation. Just malice and anger and grief, every ounce of which I could feel tearing through Harper’s body as I tried to calm him down.
“Even the stupid shit. Even—” Harper’s voice broke, his breaths coming up ragged and raw. “The personal interest stories. The cutesy feel-good columns. That fucking dog show he covered—what the fuck did they have against a goddamn dog show?”
“They wanted him gone.” I felt every heavy beat of Harper’s heart resonating in my own. “They wanted him gone, and they got their wish. But, Harper…this only proves that what we’re doing is just as important as we thought it was, doesn’t it? That what Josh was digging into…it’s bigger and twistier and more sinister than anyone ever could have imagined.”
“Big enough to kill over,” Harper agreed, his fingers curling against my sides as he buried his face in my hair. “Big enough to erase someone’s whole career over, just to shut h
im up for good.”
“So it’s like you said. We get these fuckers. We show them who they’re dealing with.”
Harper let out a hot, exhausted breath against my ear. “We have to now. We’ve got no choice.”
“We’re going to figure this out,” I promised him. “Together.”
“Together,” Harper echoed. “Together.”
But even as I held him in the dim light of my office, I couldn’t help but feel in over my head. Whoever had killed Josh, squashed these stories and wiped him off the face of the internet…we weren’t going up against some small-time conspiracy anymore. This was huge, and the people behind it were more powerful than I could even fathom.
Josh deserved justice. I deserved justice.
But justice didn’t come cheap, and for the first time since Harper and I had set out on this investigation, I was beginning to feel like we might’ve bitten off more than we could chew.
23
Harper
We were in over our fucking heads.
I left Nick sleeping in his bed, his body exhausted from his long night of no sleep and his mental energy spent. He was always so damn peaceful looking when he was asleep like that. Completely broken. Utterly wrecked. I’d only ever caught him sleeping like that after the night we’d fucked—a point of pride for me. At least, it had been.
But now, Nick’s handsome, serene face and gorgeous, splayed-out body told a different story. One of rising up against the odds, struggling to beat them—and losing. Hard. I knew I shouldn’t have let him stay up all night on my account like that. Not with a baby on the way and all the other stress of our investigation piling up on him like that. What Nick needed was rest. Lots of it. A vacation in the Bahamas, maybe. Colorful little paper umbrellas poking out of the glass of a virgin mai tai and nothing but white sand, warm sun, and salty surf to take up the meat of his days. This investigation—it was the last thing Nick needed on his plate in his current state.
I cursed at myself as I slipped out of his bedroom. He’d held me all night long, until the wild animal of my anger had finally stopped thrashing away inside my chest for long enough to let me slip off to sleep as well. I was a bastard for dragging him into all this. Even more of one for letting an already-stressed, pregnant Omega do my dirty work.
Nick might have insisted on being my digital eyes and ears for the remainder of the investigation, but as I changed into a clean shirt and pulled on a fresh pair of jeans, I knew that I was going to need more backup on this than just a handsome computer nerd if we wanted to make any more progress here. Everything we had uncovered so far had only created more questions—and even in all my years of experience as a PI, the elements of this mystery that were still unanswered for us were more depressing than I’d ever come across before.
What had happened to the journalists who’d reported on the botched pills on the East Coast? Who had penned the other reports on the Omega heat spree—and why did it look so much like those articles hadn’t even been attributed to real people? Who had been pulling the strings behind all those publication buy-outs, and what were they really trying to hide by doing it? There was Adrian Wells to worry about too—how had he been able to put all of the materials spread out across the living room together? What ties did he have to the people who’d killed Josh, and why was he so sure they were coming for him, too?
The only real question that last night had answered for me was the most depressing of all. Why had Josh’s entire digital footprint been deleted? That was easy. Disgusting, but clear as day.
These people were sending a message. A threat that would hang over the head of any other journalist who even thought about touching the birth control story.
Stick your nose in this and we’ll delete you—first online, then in real life, too.
It was a red thread of truth that I took up in my fist as I shut myself in Nick’s office, picking my way across the files and papers still scattered throughout the living room on my way there. If these people had gotten to Josh, there was a good chance they’d gotten to Peter Preston, too. The only other notable journalist who’d dared to touch the case might as well have drawn a bulls-eye over his chest for his troubles. And if I wanted to track him down, I was going to need more than Nick’s social media skills to do it.
“Harper? What’s up?” My brother Kaleb’s voice was gruff and stern as it echoed in my ear through the speaker on my phone. “Haven’t even gotten my coffee in yet—and I’ve got a whole mess of paperwork to get through after. This had better be important.”
“It is,” I assured him, pacing the floor of Josh’s office. “You’ve got access to all the DC police files still, right? Online databases, connections through the East Coast, buddies in neighboring jurisdictions…”
Kaleb grunted in annoyance. “I do. Should I bother asking what you need them for?”
“Josh’s death. I, ah…I might’ve dug into it a bit.”
“Of course you did.” Kaleb didn’t sound impressed.
“It’s fucked, Kaleb. The more I look into this, the more I get the sense that this is something big and bad and out of control. I…” I sighed. “I might be in some trouble here. The circumstances surrounding Josh’s murder…they’re getting stickier, dirtier, murkier with every lead I follow.”
Another grunt. “And you want me to do something about it.”
“I want your help,” I corrected him. “If you can give it to me. It’s not for my sake, Kaleb. It’s for Josh’s.”
There was a long, pregnant pause, then a sigh. “Why don’t you take this all to the local police? This is out of my hands, Harper. Just because I’m in uniform up here in DC doesn’t mean I get to get my fingers dirty with a Fort Greene murder case. My own brother’s or otherwise. Take it up with Ansel Thomas. Bet he’s aching for a few breaks in this thing.”
“Not a good idea.”
“No?”
I cringed, biting down on the knuckle of my index finger. I knew how what I was about to say sounded—which was exactly why I’d called Kaleb in the first place.
“The police here…I don’t reckon they’re gonna be of much help to me on this thing right now.”
Kaleb laughed, sharp and bitter. “You think they’re involved?”
“I think they’ve been given some level of encouragement to remain disinterested. Police chief here has been giving off some weird vibes.”
Another laugh, just as brutally drenched in disbelief. “So you’re not going to the police because of…bad vibes. What have you been smoking down there, Harper? You sound like you’ve indulged in a little too much Fort Greene green, if you catch my drift.”
“No weed involved, Kaleb. Scout’s honor. But this whole situation sure is stinking of a cover-up. And now…” I pinched the bridge of my nose, hating the way this all sounded. Especially where my jarhead of a brother was concerned. “There’s someone else involved. A major player with either a whole lot of money or a whole lot of friends in high places. Maybe both.”
“Right. And what exactly do you want me to do about it? I’m not pulling your leg here, Harper—this is genuinely out of my hands.”
“Don’t s’pose you could come down this way?” I threw out the Hail Mary with my eyes clenched shut tight. “Wouldn’t mind a little backup. Another King on this case—someone who knows how to watch my back and carry a gun.”
“Harper…You know what you’re asking here, don’t you?”
“Wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need it. Badly. Believe me.”
“I…Fuck, Harper. You know I would if I could.” Despite his annoyance, there was a tinge of genuine care in Kaleb’s voice. “Last thing I want to do is take off time for another funeral—but I’ve already spent all the holiday days I had saved up. Still trying to play catch-up from the stuff that I had to set aside for our last trip to Fort Greene’s cemetery.”
“Yeah…yeah, I figured. Just thought it was worth the ask.”
“Look—Dad trusted Ernesto Alvarez enough to sell the b
usiness off to him. Why not see if he can throw you a bone or two? The man’s always liked you.”
A small smile fought its way onto my lips. “Better than he ever liked you, anyway.”
“Yeah, well, you know how Ernesto is about cops. He wouldn’t turn you down, though. If anything, he’d probably thank you. One more reason to shake his fist at the failings of the Fort Greene PD.”
“You sure you can’t squeeze out a few more vacation days?” I slumped down into Josh’s computer chair, spinning it back and forth. “This started out as a family matter. Would feel a hell of a lot better if we could keep it one.”
Another long silence. “I’ll try, Harper. But my paperwork here is already piled high enough that if I breathe the wrong way, it’s gonna fall over and crush me to death. You called Rusty yet? Might be able to catch him between fights or somethin’.”
I groaned. “After his spiel at Josh’s funeral? ‘Fucking due process, man.’ He’s not going to want to get involved.”
“He was grieving, Harper. We all were.” Kaleb scoffed. “Still are, for that matter. You know how us King boys are.”
“Emotionally crippled for life.” I let out a tired, sarcastic laugh. “Yeah. I get it. Thanks for considering it, though. Means…well, not a lot, but it means somethin’ at least.”
“It’s all I’ve got right now, Harper. You know I want Josh’s murderer brought to justice as much as you do.”
“Yeah, it’s just…” I grimaced. “Okay. How ‘bout this then. I’ve got two names for you. Adrian Wells—he’s caught up in this somehow. He’s got access to money and more intel on Josh’s last story than anyone ought to have.”
“That birth control thing?”
“Bingo was his name-o. The man’s afraid for his life. Probably going to skip the country—if he hasn’t already. Think you can scare up any info on him? All my leads on the guy have been bled dry.”
