by Roxie Noir
“A lot of weird shit has happened already today,” Ellie said, crossing her arms in front of her.
“Fair,” he said, and plopped down onto the couch, rearranging a throw pillow that said follow your dreams in script.
Ellie turned to do the same.
Then she saw the wall, and sucked in a breath.
At the top was a giant question mark, connected with red strings to cards with his parents on them, his brothers, himself. Below that was a network of red webbing, like some spider had gone utterly mad connecting maps, newspaper printouts, pictures, and index cards.
He’s a serial killer, she thought. This is definitely the kind of weird shit that crazy people do.
She stood and stared.
“I’m a visual thinker,” Garrett said, still sitting behind her.
“I see that,” Ellie said.
And a serial killer? she half-wondered.
“I think someone’s after my family,” he said.
“Why?” Ellie asked.
“Family members keep getting attacked,” he said. “My parents were killed, then my oldest brother had to fight off this mining company—”
“No, I mean why is someone after your family?” Ellie asked.
Garrett cracked the knuckles on one hand.
“There’s a rare genetic anomaly,” he said. “My mom had it, and my brothers both have it.”
“Do you?”
“No,” he said. “I think that’s why I’ve escaped so far.”
“What’s the anomaly?” Ellie asked. “And why is someone after you for it?”
He cracked the fingers on his other hand.
“That’s not really important,” he said.
Ellie sat on the couch, kicked her shoes off, and pulled her feet up under her.
“If someone’s trying to kill people over it, I’d say it’s pretty fucking important,” she said. “What is it? You don’t get cancer or something?”
“Not quite,” he said.
“Are you a mutant? Can you shoot laser beams from your eyes?”
“Closer,” Garrett said.
Ellie rolled her eyes and tossed a throw pillow at him. He batted it out of the air.
“Anyway,” he said. “Sixteen years ago, my parents died under possibly-suspicious circumstances.”
Ellie listened as his voice went quiet and serious.
He still misses them, she thought.
From his parents he moved onto his oldest brother, Seth. He’d fought against a mining company that wanted to kick him out of their home and destroy their land — leaving him and Zach, the youngest brother, destitute.
Garrett stood and reached up to an index card that said QUARCOM, tapping it with a finger.
“Remember that,” he said.
His younger brother, Zach, had made headlines when he’d been kidnapped by a bioengineering corporation. MutaGen, the company, had placed all the blame on one rogue employee, and that guy was in jail. The company itself had settled with Zach for an undisclosed amount.
“Well, it was two-point-five million,” Garrett said.
Ellie whistled. Garrett shrugged.
“I think they donated some and put the rest into savings,” he said. “He’s still working as an engineer, and so is his wife. Girlfriend. Fiancée?”
“Wait,” said Ellie. “He told you how much he got but not whether he’s married?”
“Not exactly,” Garrett said.
“Did they elope?” she asked, frowning.
Garrett didn’t say anything.
“You don’t know?” Ellie asked.
“I don’t talk to them all that often,” Garrett said. He ran a hand through his dark hair.
“Do you talk to them ever?” she asked.
No answer.
“When was the last time you talked to your brothers?” she asked.
“I send postcards sometimes,” he said. “They know I’m alive.”
“How long?” Ellie demanded.
“A while,” he said.
“How long?”
“A long time, okay?” he asked, his voice going rough. “I haven’t talked to my brothers in a long time. Can I move on?”
Ellie laced her fingers together in her lap.
“Sorry,” she said.
Garrett pointed up again.
“Both Quarcom and MutaGen have lots of investors, board members, that kind of thing. But if you wade through it all, it turns out that slightly over half of each company is owned by other shell companies.”
Ellie saw where this was going.
“And they’re owned by...”
“Other shell companies, who are owned by other shell companies, but if you untangle those threads long enough, they all come back to one name.”
He pointed at an index card she hadn’t even noticed before: BTVS.
“What does that stand for?” she asked.
“No idea,” Garrett admitted. “They’re registered in the Dutch Antilles, which is an offshore tax shelter, so it’s hard to get information about them, no matter what I try.”
Ellie leaned back and chewed on one thumbnail.
“They must have an entity in the US somewhere,” she said.
“Sure, in Delaware,” he said. “Filed by one Mrs. Lena Walsh, who’s a very nice notary public in Charleston, South Carolina.”
“So it’s her?” Ellie asked.
Garrett just shook his head.
“It’s part of what she does for a living,” he said. “Registers offshore business in the US. Her name’s on the paperwork, but the actual owners get to stay anonymous. Those documents are sealed.”
Ellie frowned.
“I think I killed an entire forest with all the paperwork I had to file when I incorporated,” she said. “There’s none of that here?”
“Maybe in the Antilles,” Garrett said. “Things work differently for billion-dollar companies, or holding corporations, or whatever BTVS even is. I mean, when I owned a business, I had stress dreams about the IRS for a month every year, but I doubt these guys do. I think they pay people to have stress dreams for them.”
“You own a business?” Ellie asked, looking around.
Subletting a place in Grand Junction for a couple of months didn’t really seem like business owner behavior.
“Not anymore,” Garrett said.
“What happened?”
Please don’t say “I quit to become a crazy person with a murder wall,” she thought.
“I sold it,” he said. “You ever heard of SnapGram?”
“Is that one of those photo apps for phones?” Ellie asked.
“Yeah, you can draw on a picture and show your friends,” he said, and shrugged.
Ellie stared for a moment, her eyes narrowing.
“Wait,” she said. “You made SnapGram?”
Garrett nodded.
“I thought that was that other guy? The one who writes a lot of editorials about tech and does TED talks and says ‘disrupt’ a lot?”
“You just described everyone in the tech world,” Garrett said.
“But you know who I mean.”
“Max and I were partners,” he said. “I taught myself to code in my early twenties, because I was traveling a lot, and had shitty jobs, and wanted to not have shitty jobs anymore.”
“And... you met Max?”
“We were bartenders together in Reno for a couple of weeks. I coded the first version, he helped me fix my crappy code — he actually went to college — we released it. Soon, it was popular, he was talking to investors, and I got to quit being a bartender. It kind of exploded after that.”
“And Max got all the glory?” she said.
Garrett crossed his arms and leaned against the wall, smiling.
“We split the money,” he said. “He got to have his face everywhere, which I never wanted. I didn’t even move to California with him.”
Ellie just stared. She didn’t know how much SnapGram had sold for, but she knew the number had a l
ot of zeros after it.
“I’m hiking my rates,” she said.
“That’s fair,” he said.
Ellie looked at the wall again, trying to take it all in at once.
This is at least a day of reading, she thought. And that’s just to wrap my head around it all.
“That’s the overview,” Garrett said, his voice quiet. “You can read over everything. But I think whoever’s behind BTVS is also behind your office getting smashed up.”
“You know what that means, right?” Ellie asked.
She felt the familiar thump of adrenaline that she got when she worked on a case she could really sink her teeth into.
“What?” asked Garrett.
“Means you’re close,” she said.
5. Garrett
Something caught in Ellie’s voice. Garrett looked down at her, her brown eyes flicking over the slew of information on the wall, concentrating.
She’s having a good time, he realized.
“So you’re still on the case?” he asked, trying to make his voice sound light.
If she’s not, I’m fucked, because now she knows nearly everything, he thought.
He’d never told anyone the full story before. At first it was just because he knew how crazy it sounded.
The story did start with, “My mom and brothers can turn into eagles whenever they want,” and from there went to “I think someone is trying to get me.” It wasn’t the kind of thing sane people said or did.
“Yeah,” she said, and looked at him. “Those fuckers broke into my office and left me a note about what I should and shouldn’t do. Now I’m pissed.”
Despite himself, Garrett grinned.
“That reminds me,” Ellie said. “Do you know a blonde lady who dresses like she runs Liberace’s ranch?”
“Does what?”
“Wears a lot of rhinestones and cowboy hats,” Ellie said.
“I don’t think so.”
“She wanted me to follow you,” Ellie said, and told him about the cowgirl who’d claimed to be his ex-wife. As she did, Garrett started pacing back and forth in the living room.
“Shit,” he muttered. “The other day, I was getting a burrito at Loco Taco and there was this woman in there, and she wasn’t dressed like that, but I could have sworn I’d seen her before but I didn’t know where. But then I thought I was just being paranoid.”
Ellie looked at him, opened her mouth, and then closed it, looking at the floor.
“I don’t have an ex-wife,” Garrett clarified. “And definitely not a current wife. I haven’t even had a girlfriend in a couple years.”
Sure, tell the hot detective your relationship problems, he thought sarcastically. Women go nuts for that kind of thing.
“You ever heard the name James Wilson?” Ellie asked.
“Was he a president?”
Ellie laughed.
“That’s who she told me you were. I’d almost convinced myself that it was a picture of someone who looked a lot like you, but with all this...”
She waved one hand at the wall and at Garrett. Then she snapped her fingers.
“The camera,” she said. “Do you have a computer?”
“Do I have a computer?” Garrett said, teasing her. “How do you think I found all this? I didn’t even leave my apartment.”
Suddenly, Ellie laughed, then stood from the couch.
“Now it makes sense,” she said.
“It does?” he asked. “Which part?”
“The part where you asked for my help,” she said. “None of the stuff you’re looking for about your parents has even seen a computer. It’s all paper. Your weakness.”
“There are worse weaknesses to have,” he said, and led her to the dining room.
There were three monitors arranged on the table, all hooked into one laptop.
“I feel like I’m ready to blast into space,” Ellie said.
Garrett logged her in, and minutes later, she was scrolling through the footage from her security camera, totally concentrated on the task at hand.
He stood behind her, one hand on the table, leaning over her. Her hair smelled light and spicy, like honeysuckle and pepper or something. Garrett took a deep breath of it, trying very hard not to seem like he was smelling her.
“Here it is,” Ellie said, and tapped the screen with one finger.
The video played, and a blond woman walked into Ellie’s office.
“Can you change the angle on this?” Garrett asked.
“There’s only one camera,” Ellie said.
“Can you zoom in?”
She did, and the woman’s face got blurry.
“Sharpen that.”
“This isn’t a TV show,” Ellie said, starting to sound annoyed. “I can’t make it better than what the camera actually recorded.”
She zoomed back out.
“Is that the woman at the burrito store or not?” she asked.
Garrett stared. The women sat, handed over a photo to Ellie.
“I think so,” he said at last. “Did you get her name?”
“She said it was Marlene Robinson,” said Ellie. “Anything?”
Garrett just shrugged, and Ellie scrubbed forward over hours of stillness in her office until suddenly, there was movement again, and she hit play.
Garrett held his breath, leaning forward so far that his chest bumped the back of Ellie’s head.
The glass of her office door shattered inward and a crowbar appeared, then disappeared, knocking glass from the edges. A hand appeared and opened the door from the inside, and two men wearing black clothes and black face masks appeared.
“Shit,” Ellie muttered.
They conferred for a moment by her door, and then methodically began destroying the office, kicking over plants and chairs, tearing cables from her computer. One of them went at the desk with a crowbar, hacking at the locked drawer and then finally prying it open.
“I guess it wasn’t an axe,” Ellie said, her voice quiet.
Garrett put a hand on her shoulder, without thinking. He could feel her warmth through her shirt, and she suddenly felt small and delicate, almost breakable.
The men on the tape left the note in the drawer, took the computer, kicked over her chair, and left. The whole thing had lasted two minutes.
Ellie sighed and put her face in her hands, and Garrett’s stomach knotted. A wave of anger rushed over him, and he glared at the video.
I’ll kill whoever did this to her, he thought.
“Sorry,” Ellie said. “It’s just — God, I worked really hard.”
She took a deep breath, and Garrett crouched next to her, his arm draped around Ellie.
“And just watching someone destroy it in two minutes,” she said, shrugging.
“We’re gonna find them, and make them pay,” Garrett whispered.
And I’m going to fucking kill them for making you cry, he thought.
Ellie didn’t say anything, and Garrett took a deep breath, forcing himself to calm down.
“When I told you I was bringing trouble, I didn’t think there would be this much of it,” he said.
That got a smile out of her.
“I thought you were just trying to sound cool,” she said. “Maybe I should have believed you.”
“And if you had, would you have turned me down?” Garrett asked.
Kneeling on the floor, he was still almost as tall as she was, sitting in the chair, his arm around her. Ellie sniffled a little, smiling and still crying at the same time.
“If I were smart I would have,” she said.
“I don’t believe you for a second,” Garrett teased.
“You don’t even know me,” Ellie said, but she was smiling.
“I know you well enough to know that trouble is like catnip to you,” he said. “The second you saw that note you were out for blood.”
“That’s not true,” Ellie protested.
“So you’re here because of some other reason, then?” Garrett s
aid.
She frowned. Garrett grinned at her, and after a moment, her frown softened.
“I’m not giving into terrorists,” she said. “I’m in the middle of all this trouble because I have to be, not because I want to be.”
Garrett just raised his eyebrows.
“Catnip,” he said.
Ellie sighed.
“It’s not true,” she said. “I’m a perfectly reasonable person who weighs risks and rewards carefully and chooses the best course of action.”
Garrett opened his mouth, but Ellie put one finger on his lips.
Fire jolted down his spine, and Garrett nearly fell over.
“Don’t say anything,” she told him. “Just give me everything you have.”
Garrett swallowed, and she took her finger off his lips.
Everything in his entire body was screaming at him to lean forward and just kiss her on that perfect, full mouth. He could barely breathe, thinking about it.
Then Ellie broke the spell, her eyes flicking back to his computer screen.
“Perfectly reasonable,” Garrett said, and stood.
For hours, Ellie sifted through everything that Garrett had: piles and piles of documents, business licenses, surveillance tapes, even courtroom testimony. She didn’t ask how he’d gotten any of it, and Garrett didn’t volunteer.
He suspected that she knew some of it hadn’t been precisely legal.
He microwaved frozen burritos and they ate quietly, Ellie on the floor of the living room, surrounded by paper and Garrett’s spare laptop. He had two spares, actually.
“Okay,” she finally said, and stood. It was almost three in the afternoon, and she stretched, reaching up and then touching her toes.
Garrett watched, fascinated. He was at the kitchen counter, maps spread in front of him.
She didn’t mind when I touched her earlier, he thought. I could offer her a back rub, and then we could get on the couch and I could...
He blinked and looked at the counter again.
What are you, fifteen? He thought. A back rub? Come on.
“Okay what?” Garrett asked.
She picked up two pieces of paper and walked over to where he was sitting. They were both barefoot, and she leaned on the counter, smiling like she’d cracked a code.
“The owners of a business registered in a foreign company aren’t actually secret when a company is registered in the United States,” she said.
