by Jamel Cato
The ghosts gathered around me, each one reaching out a translucent hand that could not actually touch my shoulder. One of them began singing an old Negro spiritual. Even though they were from different epochs, they all knew the words.
Chapter 28
I had showered and shaved by the time four officers from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department banged on my hotel room door the next morning.
They took me to a Police building near Vanessa’s house in Grier Heights for questioning. The location and participation of two homicide detectives left no doubt what the questions would involve. Three attorneys were waiting there to protect me. Two had been dispatched by the Charlotte office of Mitchell’s law firm and the third, to my surprise, was Bobby Hollenbeck.
Our group was shown into a concrete walled questioning room where everything was painted dark grey. I was surprised again when I saw Detective Fahrbach in the room chatting quietly with an Assistant District Attorney.
When everyone was settled, the ADA, a fortysomething brunette named Lacy Gallant, said, “Mr. Tiptree, I have to say you’re the most well defended POI I’ve seen in a long time, especially in the Providence District. An hour with these three probably costs more than my mortgage.”
“Dr. Tiptree,” one of my lawyers said. The young blonde could not have been more than five years out of law school.
“Excuse me?” Lacy asked with disdain.
“Our client has a doctorate from Stanford. We would kindly appreciate it if you would address him by his title.”
I had endured enough of these questioning sessions to know that statement was meant to remind the people on the other side of the table that I was not a typical suspect.
“Mr. Tiptree,” Lacy said, emphasizing the first word, “these officers have some questions for you. At this point, they are only conducting an investigation and you are merely a person of interest. I’m here because you decided to lawyer up. Depending on your answers, that may change. You have the floor, Chuck.”
“Where were you last night at nine thirty?” one of the homicide detectives asked me without the courtesy of addressing me by name, much less my title.
“I was having a meeting with my client over in Hillside Country Club,” I said in an unperturbed voice. “I’m sure the security cameras in the house and at the development’s front gate must have me on it.”
My statements, and the assurance in my voice, discomfited the law enforcement professionals.
“Who is your client and what kind of services were you allegedly providing?” Detective Chuck asked, priming his pen on his notepad.
“My client is Patricia Hollenbeck and I was—”
“Dr. Tiptree’s services are not relevant here,” Bobby Hollenbeck said.
“We disagree,” Lacy said. “Answer the question.”
“I was taking measurements for a Phase III field test of a proprietary device operating in the Hollenbeck residence.”
“At nine thirty at night?” Chuck asked.
“The device only functions in the evening,” I said.
“What kind of device is this?”
“One that is protected by a Non-Disclosure Agreement which prevents Dr. Tiptree from providing any further details,” Bobby said.
“Are you here representing EnviroTech or Mr. Tiptree?” Lacy asked him, demonstrating that she was just as capable of throwing curveballs.
“I’m representing Dr. Tiptree,” Bobby answered. “I filed an entry of appearance at the courthouse first thing this morning.”
“Do you normally take criminal cases?” Lacy asked, clearly aware the answer was no.
“Let’s try to stay on track,” Stephen Wagner, my third attorney, said. Wagner was in his early fifties and fabulously turned out in a tailored dark suit and a haircut that was an artwork of haberdashery. He was also in a wheelchair.
“Why don’t the security cameras showing you arriving?” Detective Fahrbach suddenly asked.
“Pardon me?” I responded.
“The cameras at Hillside show you leaving the leaving the development at ten thirteen but there’s no corresponding clip showing you arriving at the gate.”
“Maybe you should look again,” I said. “Or talk to the guard.”
“Right,” Fahrbach said.
“You’re a little far outside your jurisdiction, Detective,” Wagner said. “This matter is firmly within the jurisdiction of the CMPD. Dr. Tiptree would be within his rights to ask you to leave if there is no interdepartmental MOU between Davidson and Charlotte specifically regarding this matter.”
“There will be plenty of time to review security recording during discovery,” Lacy said.
“That’s unlikely,” Wagner said with confidence.
“Oh?” Lacy asked.
Wagner slid a manila folder across the table to her.
Without opening the folder, Lacy said, “Why don’t you save us some time, Steve. I figured there was a reason they sent you here instead of another bubbly young associate in a low cut blouse.”
My blonde attorney, whose blouse was very low cut, huffed.
“That folder contains a copy of CMPD’s data sharing agreement with the company that makes the cloud security cameras in Vanessa Henderson’s home. Section four thirty-eight gives the Police the right to request the video footage that will show the events which led to Miss Henderson’s unfortunate death and the perpetrator who carried out those events. There are also affidavits from Miss Henderson’s neighbors confirming they saw this perpetrator fleeing Miss Henderson’s home at the approximate time of her death. Finally, there’s a consultant’s report from Dr. Ira Feldberg, an expert witness frequently retained by the District Attorney’s office, giving his expert opinion, backed up with diagrams, that the shooter was at least four inches shorter than Dr. Tiptree, who, as we’ve already established, was elsewhere at the time of the victim’s death.”
“Where did Ira get enough data to write a report?” Lacy asked.
Wagner smiled. “Always good to see you, Lacy.”
After the Police released me, I confronted Bobby in the parking lot. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here as a last favor to Vanessa, who deserved better than you.”
“It sounds like you’re here as a favor to Kit Harrington.”
He handed me a sheet of paper and walked away.
The paper was a printout of an email from Vanessa to Bobby. The email informed Bobby that I had discovered all the dirty laundry behind something she referred to as the Sheridan Hills Deal. The message claimed Vanessa had convinced me to keep quiet about it if Bobby was there for me when I needed a lawyer. The email was timestamped at exactly midnight two days earlier.
I took the paper to my car and called someone who made all her sensitive emails have a false timestamp of exactly midnight.
“I’m assuming you’re a free man,” Marianna said when she answered the call.
“I am. I was calling to thank you for motivating Bobby Hollenbeck to help ensure I stayed that way.”
“It’s the least I could do. I’ve given all my sisters copies of the journal. We had heard bits and pieces of the story, but we never knew the entire thing. I’ve read it four times. It’s so moving.”
A few days earlier, I had sent her an electronic copy of the personal journal that the original Medusa, Marianna’s ancestor, had kept. The journal detailed the true story of her love affair with Branus and the origin of the Sisters of Ceto, the secret order of Medusa’s blood descendants who undermine the business interests of wealthy merchants across the world.
“What is the Sheridan Hills Deal?” I asked her.
Chapter 29
Keith Bullard, the gate guard at Hillside who always gave me such a hard time, was enjoying a bowl of cold cereal in the kitchenette of his apartment when I stepped out from an alcove and shoved a tiny sliver of a hellfire coal into his mouth. The sliver wasn’t big enough to kill him, but it would cause excruciating pain as it burned his tongue,
throat and lungs.
I smashed duct tape over his mouth so no one would hear his screams.
I grabbed his right hand, stopped it from flailing at his burning mouth, then stapled it to the table with a fifteen-gauge nail gun. I did the same to his left hand.
He squeezed his eyes shut against the agony and issued a muffled cry.
I kicked the chair out from under him and then fractured his ribs on both sides with brutal swings of the baseball bat he kept in his coat closet. I poured salt on the bleeding wounds in his hands. I spat on him.
The washable cotton shoe covers that prevented my Gucci loafers from leaving footprints in his carpet made nary a sound as I crept away.
When Bullard had pushed my rental car from the gateway of Hillside Country Club, I couldn’t help but notice how clean and well maintained his boots were.
He would miss them in prison.
Chapter 30
I sat on the ledge of a cliff that was four hundred feet above Lincoln Drive in Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Gorge. I came to this isolated spot when I wanted to clear my mind. On that day, it was clouded by thoughts of my inability to see my own deceased loved ones on the Astral Plane. Was this some universal restriction like the rules that bound Gaia or a psychological defense mechanism I had subconsciously erected to protect myself from the emotional trauma of such encounters? I didn’t know. Perhaps I didn’t know anything.
Eve materialized beside me in a physical form that was somewhere between the middle-aged matron and the young vixen. It seemed a comfortable skin and I wondered if this is how she had actually looked when she was alive.
“I know you come here to be alone,” she said. “I won’t stay long.”
I said nothing.
“Vanessa came to see me. She asked me to remind you that the last chapter of the story of her life had been written before she was born, not when you walked into the lobby of Bobby’s office. That’s why Esmerelda’s book has a fixed number of pages. She wanted you to know that she was so glad you had walked in. She said she knew that wouldn’t be enough to stop you from hunting down the people who took her life, so she also asked me to remind you of the time you took her to that restaurant in Chestnut Hill. The server gave you bad service and even worse attitude. You didn’t leave a tip to punish him, but she slipped a hundred dollars under the bill fold when you weren’t looking. She did that to leave him nowhere to look but the mirror. The next time he felt the urge to treat customers like trash, he couldn’t blame it on the last customers he had served. When life treats you like trash, be the hundred dollar bill, not the server. And stop pretending you don’t know why Darlene never moved back to Virginia. It’s okay.”
I used the back of my hand to wipe away a tear that had ignored my brain’s order to display masculine stoicism.
Eve and I watched the traffic in silence for a while. Then she said, “I saw the flight you booked. I was surprised that you hadn’t asked me to book it, but then I thought about why.” She turned to me and instinctively reached out for my chin even though she couldn’t physically touch me.
I faced her as if she could.
“Preston, if you’re going to California to do what I think you’re going to do, I want you to know I can’t work with you any longer. It won’t bring her back. I help you because you help others. That’s the true reason I haven’t moved on. A part of me is scared I’ll move on and it’ll be like that Kirk Douglass quote where you die and ask the first person you see ‘Is this Heaven?’ and they go, “Heaven? You just came from there.’ Don’t make me the butt of that joke. I’ll know as soon as I see you.”
Then she puffed away, leaving me to make my choice.
Chapter 31
After my plane landed in San Francisco, I took an Uber across the Bay into Oakland, where I paid cash to an unlicensed gypsy cab for a circuitous ride to a shuttered pier at the Seaport. An encrypted GPS beacon guided me through a maze of secret doorways to a rusting shipping container.
When I reset the deadbolt lock on the door, the clang echoed off the container’s metallic walls.
Kit Harrington, EnviroTech’s CEO, was strapped to a chair, groaning and dripping blood onto the plastic tarp spread beneath him. His battered face was well illuminated by a pair of three-hundred-watt stage lamps.
Marcus “Two G” Burrows stood in a shadowed rear corner with a paisley bandana concealing his face and identity.
My original plan had been to torture Kit until he divulged the shutdown codes for the North Carolina wave receiver and admitted regret for ordering Keith Bullard to murder me. I was going to ruin him by sending hard evidence of his crimes to the Tammy Balzano Task Force and two Assistant DA’s that Mitchell was friendly with.
But then he had Bullard kill Vanessa.
I donned gloves and a hooded rain smock, then picked up the automatic pistol Marcus had left on the ground for me.
Kit’s eyes went wide and he desperately mumbled behind the duct tape covering his mouth.
I fired nine point blank shots, emptying the cartridge.
Each bullet transformed into a glowing winged insect which buzzed away from the target’s body. They congregated and circled near the ceiling like a tribe of supernatural fireflies.
Undeterred, I snatched up the scissors Marcus had used to cut the tape binding our captive. I thrust the pointed end at Kit’s face, but the steel evaporated into black smoke upon contact with his skin.
I spun, lifted a metal folding chair with both hands, then slammed it down onto the murderer’s head. The chair disintegrated into harmless dust on impact.
I clenched my fists and the muscles of my neck in frustration.
Kit trembled with fear and urinated, soiling his expensive slacks.
Marcus had snapped into a defensive crouch. He had a gun in each hand and confusion in his eyes.
“I thought you said you didn’t interfere!” I screamed into the air. “What about your goddamn rules!”
My words echoed back at me.
A section of the floor swirled into a funnel of mineral debris, which then coalesced into a towering arachnid. The top of its head grazed the eight foot ceiling. It had six bulbous eyes, ten legs and a long tubular body covered in scales with alternating surfaces of stone, grass, wood, soil and water.
Peering down at me, it telepathically said, “I have made no such claim, Earth Eater.”
Marcus began shooting at the creature.
His bullets simply transformed into the substance of the surface they struck, doing no apparent damage.
One of the creature’s legs streaked toward Marcus at blinding speed and sprayed his face with a mist.
The leg had already returned to its original position by the time I yelled, “Wait!”
Marcus collapsed to the ground.
“Your ally is unharmed,” Kulara said inside my head.
After visually confirming that Marcus was still breathing, I looked up at the spider-like intruder. “Why are you stopping me from doing what I came here to do?”
Her antennae twitched. “If you send this Earth Eater to the fiery depths, the humans who enforce human rules will place you in one of your storage facilities for rulebreakers. You will be unable to stop Jaaru from devouring the minds of this dying world.”
“They won’t know.”
“The Earth Eater who delivered you to this artificial shore would have betrayed you.”
“Would have?”
“He whispers only to the floor of the sea now.”
“You read his mind before sending him there?”
“Yes, I joined with him.”
“You don’t belong here.”
“I had a similar thought when Naaru set your broken body at my feet and asked me to heal you.”
I had no insolent comeback for that.
She circled me, passing into the darkness beyond the lamp light. “The Xantu would have become the dominant species on Wruvia if I had not intervened. They were already using their unique thumbs to bu
ild tools and weapons when I granted the Wru power over their minds—and the minds of all other species. Do you know why I did this?”
“I don’t know,” I said, turning to keep her in front of me. “And right now, I don’t care.”
“I did it because I had seen those thumbs before, knew their destructive power. If I wanted to know what my future held under the stewardship of a species whose first invention was a weapon, I only needed to look across the Plane of Ashok at Gaia. Earth Eaters were already consuming her with their overpopulation.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
She raised her voice to a frightening boom. “So you will know that I am a force of nature, not just a mother of it.”
I backed away in fear, clutching at my ears.
She spoke to my mind in a softer tone. “We seek the same end, though for different reasons.”
I glared down at Kit. “The only thing I’m seeking is revenge.”
Five thin strands of fiber separated from the tape binding the mastermind to the chair. The strands briefly fluttered behind his head, as if caught in a gentle breeze. Then they went rigid and penetrated the back of his skull, emerging from his forehead covered in bits of brain matter.
Kit’s eyes bulged and he emitted a muffled scream.
The bullets-cum-insects that had been hovering at the ceiling swarmed down and darted into his ears, making him convulse and scream even harder.
“He is currently experiencing the maximum amount of pain your species can endure,” Kulara announced calmly.
Kit’s chair fell over from his convulsions.
“Do you wish me to destroy his mate so he will experience the same mourning that consumes you, Earth Eater? It can be done in the blink of a palp.”
The blood streaming from Kit’s eyes made me recall Vanessa’s plea and Eve’s warning.
“No,” I said. “Don’t do that. Please stop. Please stop before you kill him.”
