by A. C. Fuller
The drone was right above her as well, and was descending slowly on the scene. She looked back at Rich Dog’s body, wondering whether it was the "clue" the note had referred to.
"Bird," Mia said, "can you handle this? I have an idea."
Without waiting for a response, Mia took off through the crowd. She didn't know for sure if the note from Green Lake was referring to the dead body, but the drone was the only thing that connected them.
The crowd had grown in the couple minutes she'd been at the front. By the time she made it to the edge, the whole area was surrounded by police cars.
The officers tried to disperse the onlookers as Mia scanned the outer edge of the crowd. She walked quickly, glancing up at the balconies above her every few seconds and tracking the drone out of the corner of her eye. Many of the balconies held people, some holding glasses of wine, most craning their necks or staring down at phones, trying to figure out what was going on below.
As far as she could tell, none held a remote control for a drone.
After a lap around the crowd, she retraced her steps, walking in the opposite direction. The drone had moved a little lower, and seemed still be right over the spot she'd left Bird and the body. She pulled out her phone and texted Bird.
Mia: Anything new?
Bird: Police have moved us back, about twenty feet. He definitely jumped. A dozen people saw it. Sent photos to Alex. Still no idea what's going on. Wait…
Mia stared down at her phone, then shot glances around the crowd.
Another text arrived.
Bird: There's a note on the body. Police are reading it now.
Mia waited. Thirty seconds. A minute.
She was about to try to wedge her way to the front of the crowd when she noticed the drone moving toward her, about fifty feet up. It was flying away from the body. She followed it with her eyes, across the crowd, then traced a line at street level in the direction the drone was heading.
That's when she saw him.
Thirty yards away, a man whose face looked familiar stood on the edge of a narrow alley. He was about fifty, with light brown skin, black hair specked with grey, and large rectangular glasses. At first, he'd appeared to be just another guy, tapping on his phone. But it wasn't a phone. It was a remote control.
She walked toward the man, losing sight of him for a moment as a group shoved in front of her. When he came back into view, she snapped a few photos from about forty feet away.
Her phone chirped with a new text.
Bird: Got this photo of the note as police read it.
The image was grainy and Mia assumed it was because Bird had taken it from far away, then zoomed in. A white thumb was in the corner, but it was clearly a notecard like the one Gabriela had pulled out of Green Lake half an hour earlier.
Mia read the note.
THERE WILL BE BONES. BUT NOT THOSE OF D.B. COOPER. RETURN TO GREEN LAKE.
Bird: I'm totally stuck in this crowd. Get back to Green Lake.
When Mia looked up from her phone, the drone was gone and the man was sprinting down the alley, away from the crowd, drone tucked under his arm. Mia bolted down the alley, but lost sight of him when he reached the street and turned left. By the time she made it out of the alley, he was peeling away on a black and red motorcycle.
Mia jogged up the block, hailed a taxi, and hopped in. "Green Lake. As fast as you can."
Back on her phone, she studied the photos. She'd taken ten in just a few seconds, and all but two were blurry or had been blocked by someone in the crowd. But one showed clearly that he'd been holding the remote control, and the other was a decent shot of his face.
And the more she stared at it, the more she thought she recognized him.
She group-texted the photo of his face to Alex, Bird, and a couple other senior staff at The Barker.
Mia: Is this who I think it is?
By the time the taxi left downtown Seattle and crossed into the residential neighborhoods near Green Lake, her phone was dinging repeatedly.
Alex: I recognize him.
Bird: He looks like...what was his name?
Alex: Isn't that the guy from the triple murder?
Mia had already been searching Google Images on her phone and, by the time Alex's second text arrived, she'd already confirmed the man's identity.
Mia: It's Kamal Nassar. Something strange is going on. Almost at Green Lake. Call the police.
Mia had no idea what was going on, but doubted it was a coincidence that Nassar had been flying a drone over the scene.
In the 1990s, Kamal Nassar had become a cautionary tale in journalism circles. Born in Egypt, Nassar had moved to Seattle in the late 1980s to pursue a PhD at The University of Washington, studying communications. He'd been a good student, on schedule to get his PhD at the age of twenty-seven, younger than most.
Then, in 1993, a rare triple murder took place in Bellevue, a rich suburb of Seattle. The victims were three teenaged girls, all white.
The shooter had been spotted by two witnesses, both of whom described a man with light brown skin and black hair, of average height and weight. Within twenty-four hours, Nassar was the lead suspect. Why? No one knew for sure.
Nassar had been in the area that night, and didn't have an alibi. Plus, police had found a bit of graffiti on the wall of an alley, just down from where the bodies were found. Roughly translated from the Egyptian Arabic, it meant: Death to Infidels.
Police had leaked a story about an anonymous tip that started their focus on Nassar, but they often did that when they didn't want to reveal methods. Most likely, they'd focused on Nassar because of his father, who was an Egyptian TV commentator known for his anti-western views. Tensions were already high in 1993, due to the attempted World Trade Center bombing, and it was likely that Nassar's name had been on a watch list of some kind.
When the papers and local TV heard that Nassar was the lead suspect, they went nuts. A racially-charged killing—with possible terrorist implications—had happened in Seattle, and the public devoured the story. Reporters staked out Nassar's home and swarmed the UW campus. Within a day, CNN, NBC, and even an Egyptian film crew were trying to get interviews with his peers at UW. People spat on him on the street, racist graffiti appeared on his office door, and, for his own safety, UW placed him on temporary paid leave.
By the end of the week, every person in the country knew Kamal Nassar's face. To most, it was the face of terror.
Problem was, Nassar wasn't a terrorist. At least that's what the police concluded after ten days. As it turned out, one of the murdered girls had a crazy ex-boyfriend. They'd broken up a month earlier and he'd been planning a Romeo and Juliet thing, but got cold feet after killing her and her two girlfriends. He'd killed himself in his bedroom ten days later, confessing to the whole thing in a note.
Police announced that the case was closed after matching the gun he'd used to kill himself with the gun that had killed the three girls. Nassar was cleared in a short note released to the papers.
Some people might have easily come back from such a public shaming. But Nassar quickly learned that terrorist killings run on page A1, retractions and apologies on page A32.
When the real killer was discovered, the news covered it for a couple cycles, then moved on. There wouldn't be a trial, and there were no unanswered questions. Just a tragic case of a "troubled youth."
Of course, UW invited Nassar back with open arms, but he decided to take the rest of the semester off to deal with the aftershocks. One semester turned into two, then into a year, then into forever. Nassar never returned to school.
Instead, he started a newsletter, and eventually a blog, about how criminal suspects are treated in the media. He railed against sensationalism, false reporting, and the way a rabid media and bloodthirsty public fed off each other and destroyed reputations. He even self-published a couple books on the subject. Every few years, he would pop up on a public access TV show, talking about his issues but, for the most part, he'd been
forgotten.
The Uber slowed behind a line of about six TV vans, which Mia assumed were now broadcasting live. During the ride, the suicide note had been tweeted out and shared a hundred thousand times. She weaved past dozens of reporters and hundreds of onlookers, trying to shove her way across the path to the edge of the lake.
The sun was gone and the night had grown chilly. Mia scanned the crowd, looking for action, for movement, but nothing was happening. Just hundreds, possibly even thousands, of people, staring at the lake, staring at their phones, talking quietly. Everyone was waiting for something to happen.
About ten yards away, Mia heard a voice she recognized—Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor. But he wasn't there. Someone was live-streaming CNN on their phone, projecting the sound through a large bluetooth speaker.
"As of now," Anderson said, "we have no information as to how—or whether—the apparent suicide at Pike Place Market is connected to the letter received by the Seattle media a week ago today or to the note found in Green Lake about an hour ago. It certainly seems to be, but CNN has not independently confirmed that at this time. Wait...CNN is now receiving confirmation that the body found at Pike Place Market is that of Richard Doggson of Q13 Fox News out of Seattle. Doggson, I'm being told, was a beloved local news anchor and former player for the Seattle Seahawks. And I'm also being told...I'm being told that there is a live broadcast occurring right now from someone claiming to be the man who sent the note. We'll see if we can get you more on that..."
Mia tuned him out and let her eyes move slowly across the crowd. The scene was surreal. The sky was almost black, so the street lamps lining the path around Green Lake had come on, the only other light coming from the cell phones shining into people's faces as they scrolled Twitter and Facebook for clues.
But nothing was happening.
Mia pulled out her phone and scrolled through Twitter. #GreenLakeBones was trending, and everyone seemed to be talking about a new video that was related to the case. Then she saw his name. Kamal Nassar. Then photos of him, notes about his background. Then she saw the video everyone was talking about. It was just a few seconds, a clip. She pressed play and leaned in so her eyes were just a few inches from the screen.
The shot was Nassar's head, a closeup against a plain black background. He had large wrinkles under his eyes and his hair was more mussed than when she’d seen him at Pike Place Market.
"One journalist is dead already," he said. "One more will die if all local and national networks do not cease broadcasting by nine p.m. Pacific time. I am—"
The clip ended and Mia scrolled until she found a link. She clicked and it led to MediaMistakes.Net, one of Nassar's sites. On the homepage, a video stream began playing after a few seconds of buffering. Again, it was Nassar. The clip she'd just watched had clearly been pulled from the livestream.
Nassar spoke in a deep voice, like a tired old professor, with only a slight trace of the Egyptian accent of his youth. "In America, innocents are routinely executed by the media. Not their bodies, but their privacy, their reputations, their dignity. And it's not just those with skin the same color as mine, though these days we are quick to be targeted. I've been talking about this in public for over twenty years, and it's only gotten worse.
"Three weeks ago, Richard Doggson referred to me in an offhand comment on the five o'clock news. When discussing a tragic double murder of two teenaged girls that took place in downtown Seattle, he said, 'The killing has echoes of the 1993 triple murder in Bellevue, the Kamal Nassar incident.' Even after twenty-five years, he couldn't get the facts straight.
"Today, I take vengeance. Not just for myself, but for all others whose lives have been ruined by the false stories and outright lies perpetuated by a ravenous press only out for profit."
The feed went black. Mia shook her phone, then held it above her head, trying to get a signal while walking away from the lake.
The video restarted suddenly as she neared the street.
"There are bones in Green Lake, but not those of D.B. Cooper. I used his name to get your attention. The bones you will find are those of Benny Doggson, the twelve-year-old son of your beloved Rich Dog. Why did I kill Benny? It was the only way I could convince Richard to jump. I told him I would spare his second son if he jumped. I am a man of my word. Theo Doggson will be released when this is over. And, despite the fact that his body is being scraped off the sidewalk right now, you will hear from Rich Dog again.
"By nine p.m., which is thirty minutes from now, every news station in the country must go black, or the body of another journalist will emerge."
The screen went black and Mia scrolled down the page, where she saw another live feed plus a bunch of clips. She desperately wanted to find out who the other journalist was. She clicked on one of the clips at random, and, right away, the air left her chest.
It was a shot of Green Lake, from high above, zooming in on the boat, on Gabriela Verduna. It was a shot from the drone, but the sound was coming from the voice of Nassar.
"Look at this. Your disgusting reporters fly from story to story, looking for the next body, the next scandal, the next human being to turn into a villain. And when he turns out not to be a villain, you issue a quiet retraction and move on. Look at her, a woman raised with dignity by her parents, water soaking her thousand-dollar pantsuit, splashing around for the bones of a guy who stole $200,000 forty years ago. By the way, did you know that you only call him D.B. Cooper because a journalist made a mistake and it stuck?"
The clip ended. Mia was about to go to the next one when she heard the drone coming from the east.
Before thinking about what she was doing, she took off, shoving through the mass of people now blocking the street. By the time she made it to the edge of the crowd, she was in a full sprint toward the faint buzzing.
As she ran, the drone passed overhead and she refreshed the page on her phone. The livestream was no longer loading, but, as she scrolled down, she saw at least a dozen more videos, some of which she recognized from the thumbnails: a shot from above the crowd at Pike Place Market. A shot of Richard Doggson, standing on the balcony of the building. One of a black boy of eleven or twelve—probably Doggson's son.
She dialed Alex, who picked up after one ring. "Mia, what's going on? Where are you?"
"I'm back at Green Lake. What are they saying on TV?"
"That Nassar has issued an ultimatum. All the news networks go black at nine p.m. or he kills his hostage?"
"Who is it?"
"You didn't hear yet? Oh, hell."
"Alex, what?"
"It's Wendy Chen."
The phone dropped from Mia's ear. Wendy Chen was an old friend. In fact, Mia had gotten her a job blogging for The Barker four years earlier. She'd since moved on to The Stranger, Seattle's legendary free weekly newspaper, where she was a senior editor.
"Mia, are you there?" Alex shouted.
"Barely," Mia managed to say, pulling the phone away from her face and looking at the time. It was 8:40. "What else are they reporting?”
"They say that Wendy disappeared this morning on her way to work, and they have confirmed that Nassar has her. Took her this morning, just after taking Doggson's kids."
"Are they going off air? He will kill her. Are they going to do it?"
"They don't know. CNN and Fox News have both announced that their owners are on a conference call with the FBI. That was just a few minutes ago. Bird also got it from a source in the Seattle PD that they're already at Nassar's apartment and there's no sign of him."
"Text me every two minutes until nine o'clock, okay?"
"Fine, but what are you going to do?"
Mia didn't reply because she was already stowing her phone in the back pocket of her jeans and scanning the streets, which were illuminated by neighborhood street lamps.
She figured that Nassar was still controlling the drone, which meant that he was somewhere in the area. When she'd first seen the drone, she hadn't noticed him. But then again, tha
t didn't mean much as he could have been anywhere within a few blocks. At Pike Place Market, he'd had to get closer to the scene because of all the buildings.
But now he was broadcasting live, and the sound quality, plus the unmoving black background, made her think he was either in an apartment or a vehicle. If he was in an apartment, she had no chance of finding him. A car was more likely, and, if he had hostages, a van was most likely.
She took off down Chapin Place, ran for a block, then turned left twice, sprinting back toward the lake on Sunnyside. She repeated this on Second Avenue, Latona Avenue, all the way to Fifth Avenue.
Nothing.
She reversed course, traversing the same streets and studying cars, vans, and apartment windows as she ran.
It was hopeless, and she didn't even know what she was looking for.
She checked the clock on her phone. 8:58 p.m. She was out of breath and out of time.
Either the networks would go black in two minutes, or Wendy would be killed. She walked slowly along East Green Lake Avenue as she opened her CNN App. After a minute of buffering, Anderson Cooper appeared on her screen.
"At the request of the FBI, CNN has decided to suspend programming. This decision was not made lightly, and it was made in conjunction with the owners of the other major news networks, as well as the chairman of ABC, NBC, and Fox, who will compel their affiliates to suspend local programming. This is an unprecedented event in American history, and one we take part in reluctantly. But the life of a colleague, Wendy Chen, is at stake. And, possibly that of a young boy, the son of 'Rich Dog' Doggson. I assure, you, we will—"
The feed went black. It was nine o'clock.
Mia still heard the drone. Following the sound with her eyes to the center of the lake, she saw it hovering just about fifty feet off the water. The crowd had tripled in size while she was away. Thousands of people now surrounded the lake, watching as three small police boats searched the water.
