by Joshua Corin
The man wore a pinstripe suit. He looked like the banker who loved to tell women in bars that he was a banker. “The phrase ‘one bad apple spoils the bunch’ isn’t just a piece of folk rhetoric. And let’s do the arithmetic. One percent of one billion is still one million people. That’s one million people out there who want nothing more than to annihilate us.”
“And in what way, Professor, does that justify what happened this morning in Atlanta?”
“I’m not trying to justify what happened, ma’am. I think it’s an unconscionable loss of life. But I do believe that it was a comprehensible reaction to an egregious series of circumstances. If these Islamofascists are steadfast in their—”
“That is a repulsive word and you know it.”
“If they are steadfast in their—I’d appreciate not being interrupted, thank you—if they are steadfast in their belief that the violence they commit is a representation of their God, then attacks like the one today in Atlanta may be seen by some to be an effective way of showing them the high cost of that violence. They are willing to sacrifice themselves, but are they willing to endanger the lives of their brothers and sisters?”
At this the woman nearly leapt from her seat. “The vast majority of victims in these crimes have always been Muslim!”
“I’m reminded,” he said, undeterred, “of the Cold War. I’m reminded of Korea and Cuba and Vietnam. The emotional toll of these conflicts helped thaw the ice between the United States and the USSR. Maybe today’s attack, while unconscionable, will lead to better days ahead. Wouldn’t you trade the lives of a few hundred for the peace and security of all our lives?”
This was when the well-coifed anchor interrupted the lively debate with news out of Michigan.
Michigan? Who cares? Sara was about to click off the TV when the footage from Masjir Ahmed-Salaam in Dearborn filled the screen.
More burning rubble.
More photographs of victims.
Six dead. Many more in critical condition.
The remote fell from Sara’s grip and dangled off the edge of the bed.
More than a hundred people attacked in Atlanta. More than a hundred people attacked in Dearborn.
And she had 5,223,366 people she could rouse into action.
Malik couldn’t return soon enough with his phone. Sara had a lot to say.
Chapter 15
Sure, Xana had promised to remain on the sidelines, ostensibly for her own good, but when Detective Konquist’s number showed up on her phone, what was she supposed to do? Let it go to voicemail? Maybe he was calling to let her know that her apartment had been burgled. And when he asked to meet in person at the Starbucks down the block from the hospital, how could she have said no? Perhaps he just wanted to discuss old times over an ice-cold beverage on this hot, hot day.
After they got their drinks, they retreated to a table. They set their coffees down. The table wobbled. They sat in their chairs. The chairs wobbled, too.
“So,” Konquist said. He looked worse for wear, and slightly lost, but then again, he always did.
“Where’s your partner?”
“Hmm? Oh. I don’t know. Food poisoning? Something like that.”
“You’re not sure?”
Konquist shrugged. “It’s been a busy morning.”
“How can I help you, Detective?”
“First, let me tell you, it’s complicated. That’s actually why I thought of you. Complicated problem needs a complicated person. What are you doing here by the hospital? You friends with any of the victims?”
“You know me, Detective.” Xana sipped her coffee. “I don’t have friends.”
She’d first met Detective Konquist—and his partner—a little while back when she’d found her name on a hit list, as one does. They had worked together and closed the case with minimal casualties.
Even if one of those casualties had been Em.
“It’s like this,” the detective said. “We know the mosque was attacked by a military drone. We’ve got eyewitness testimony. We’ve even got a guy who was taking a selfie at the time who happened to capture a blurred image of the drone flying behind him. Well, I mean, not lurking right behind him. It was in the sky. You know what I mean. That picture, by the way, hasn’t been released to the public, so if you could keep from telling all those friends you don’t have, that would be swell.”
“How blurry is the picture? Can you identify the make or model of the aircraft?”
“See, I knew you’d ask the right questions. You always ask the right questions. Me, I ask a hundred questions and ten of them will be on target. I never could’ve been a ballplayer with a batting average like that, but I get the job done.”
“Detective, as it turns out, I do have one friend. And she’s the reason, to answer your question, that I’m here near the hospital. This hospital. But I haven’t been allowed to see her because of the quarantine. And she’s dying. So before you continue, I want to put all my cards on the table.”
“Are you sure? It’s a rickety table.”
“You need me to do something for you? I’ll do it. But I’m going to need you to get me in that hospital so I can say goodbye to my friend.”
Konquist considered her request, frowned, and fiddled with the plastic top of his coffee cup. “Don’t you want to hear what I need first? You might say no.”
“I won’t say no.”
“Then here I am getting flustered about nothing. I’ll just lay it out there. I need you to go up to the Stone Mountain municipal center and see if their military drone is missing.”
“The city of Stone Mountain has its own military drone?”
“Yes. Unless it’s gone missing. In which case no.”
“Um?”
“Yeah, okay, it’s like this.” Konquist scratched absently at the unbalanced table, causing it to bounce. “I got a nephew. His name’s Buzz. Good kid. Turns out I’m his idol. What’s a guy gonna do. Five, six years ago, Buzz becomes a cop. In Stone Mountain. And the next time I see him is at this barbecue, and he comes up to me and he’s all excited to tell me what it’s like on the job and how proud he’s going to make me and maybe he’s had a few too many beers and he says to me, ‘You’ll never believe what we’ve got in a shed.’ And by we, he means the police department, and by shed, he means hangar, because according to him, five or six years before he got there, the city acquired a Predator drone from the Pentagon as part of what’s-it-called.”
“The 1033 Program?”
Konquist nodded.
Xana winced.
The 1033 Program was a charity of sorts set up in the late 1990s by the Defense Department as a way of finding a home for the excess of machine guns and body armor and armored vehicles that had accumulated. The primary recipients of this largesse were the nation’s police departments. This controversial program had been discontinued under the Obama administration, but apparently not all the equipment had been regathered.
But a drone?
Sure, police departments had begun to use drones for emergency surveillance, much to the consternation of Fourth Amendment advocates, but the drones they used were only slightly more sophisticated than the unmanned aerial vehicles now sold at hobby stores.
The kind of drone that could launch a missile?
There was no way the Pentagon had given that to local law enforcement.
Right?
“You believe him?” she asked.
“If you’re asking me if I’ve seen the thing myself, heck no. But then what happens this morning and I get to wonder. And yes, even though the image is blurry, the drone used this morning was probably a Predator drone. But hey, there’s probably no connection. From what I hear, your ex-pals at the FBI are convinced the perpetrators are a militia of white supremacists called the First Americans.”
“Yeah, I know them.�
��
“I’m not saying the FBI is wrong. I’m saying the First Americans or whoever had to get their drone from somewhere. I’m saying that, for peace of mind at least, I want to make sure they didn’t get it from a shed in the backyard of city hall!”
“And you don’t want to ask him yourself because…?”
Konquist chuckled to himself. “Put yourself in my shoes. What if I’m wrong? This is my nephew. I go down there asking questions about stuff I shouldn’t know about and I’m wrong and the blowback will be huge. They’ll never let him live it down. I go down there asking questions at all, and you think they’re going to open up to me? Big-city detective? No, it needs to be a neutral party. Someone who will know the right questions to ask. Someone I can trust.”
Xana shook the ice in her cup and then swallowed a few cubes. They didn’t taste nearly enough like coffee. And why the hesitation anyway? She’d already said yes, hadn’t she? Why wasn’t she already on her feet and out the door and on her way to Stone Mountain? The sooner she put this to bed, the sooner she could be back here and Konquist could get her into the hospital and she could get to Hayley before it was too late.
And it wasn’t as if the investigation, if that was even the correct word, would take very long because even if they did have a military-class drone—and that was a giant if—there was no way someone, be it a white supremacist or a white-water rafter, could have walked off with it without the police chief immediately notifying the proper authorities.
Unless the police were in on it.
No. Ha. No. Absurd.
Right?
Absolutely.
Their conversation over and their coffee long gone, the two of them deposited their empty cups in the requisite bin. The coffee shop had been cool bordering on cold. The air outside was hot bordering on spongy. It was a test of physics that a storm front wasn’t gathering on the glassy threshold between the two environments.
“You going to be okay?” Konquist asked.
“Are you worried about my safety or are you worried I might fuck this up?”
“If you don’t fuck up, then I won’t have to worry about your safety.”
Xana smirked. “I like you, Detective. You pretend like you’re a dimwit, but you know what’s going on.”
“It used to be pretend,” he replied. “Then I got old and—what’s the phrase?—really grew into the part. Call me if you need me.”
Chapter 16
Xana rambled into the Stone Mountain municipal center’s parking lot.
She had been here once before.
Back in 1998, the body of a young woman named Terri Sorkin had been found three miles into the Appalachian Trail up in the North Georgia Mountains. Her plan, according to her friends, had been to hike the trail all the way to Maine and document her journey with the Nikon camera her parents had just given her for her eighteenth birthday. In every picture of Terri Sorkin, from when she was a newborn till when she graduated from high school, she was smiling. By all accounts a sincerely happy person. Smiling in every picture.
Every picture but the last ones, taken by the crime scene photographers up on the trail. Her assailant had cut away her sweatshirt and used its strips as binding for her wrists and for her mouth. Her jeans and underwear had been found not too far away in a pocket of shrubs. She had been stabbed repeatedly in the gut with a serrated knife. There also was evidence of sexual trauma, although no semen.
Because the Appalachian Trail was maintained by the National Park Service, the case fell under federal jurisdiction, and that meant Xanadu Marx, special agent extraordinaire.
She had been a very functional dysfunctional drunk, back in those days.
The line that drew Xana in 1998 from the Appalachian Trail to Stone Mountain was hardly a straight one, but they rarely were. Terri Sorkin’s family didn’t live in Stone Mountain. They were city folk. None of her friends lived in Stone Mountain. No, what finally connected the murder in the North Georgia Mountains to this somnolent burgh had been—
“Well, damn,” rumbled a thunderous voice. “I heard you were dead.”
Xana snapped out of her reminiscence and noticed Chief Scheer standing, arms crossed, right by her car door. Which was more embarrassing—that he had been watching her sit there in the Rambler like an idle fool or that she hadn’t noticed he had been watching her sit there in the Rambler like an idle fool? It wasn’t as if Chief Scheer were stealthy. The man was a refrigerator. Dark skin, light eyes, and always, always, always dipping tobacco.
And sure enough, as Xana turned off her engine and got out of her car, Chief Scheer spat a wad of the stuff into a tiny Dixie cup.
“You like loitering in parking lots, Chief?”
“You know what they say, you never know what you might find if you stick around long enough.”
Something fluttered in Xana’s belly. She was genuinely nervous. She was not the person she had been in 1998. But then Chief Scheer opened his arms and crushed her bones in a hug and her nervous fluttering diminished, at least a little, at least for now.
“I heard about what happened. Rehab and all that. Oh, don’t look at me like that, Marx. We do get the news here in Bumblefuck. You here for a job? You can have mine if you want it, but you’ll have to kill me first.”
“Is that all it will take?”
“That’s it.”
“Then I guess I’ll wait a few years for that shit you’re chewing to make your tongue rot away and I’ll move right in.”
“Let he who is without sin,” replied Chief Scheer, “cast the first stone.”
Then he spat some more into his cup.
And Xana lit a cigarette.
And Scheer loudly laughed.
And Xana showed him some American Sign Language.
“But seriously,” he said, “I’m sorry. When I heard about it, I prayed for you. I surely did. So tell me what you’re doing out here in my neck of the woods.”
On the drive here, Xana had sifted through the possible ways she might pursue this investigation. She hadn’t even considered the fact that she might know anyone here on the force. 1998 had been a long time ago and…
And the painful truth of it was that until she’d noticed him outside her car five minutes ago, she had completely forgotten that Chief Scheer even existed.
She who prided herself on her rock-solid mind.
Alcohol had eroded craters in that rock. She quite literally didn’t know what she didn’t know. Maybe that had been the real source of her nervousness. It wasn’t enough that she was a different person now. How confident was she that she could even identify the person she used to be, what she’d said, who she’d pissed off?
She knew she’d put the Terri Sorkin case to bed here in Stone Mountain; she knew now, vaguely, that Ronald Scheer had allowed her to do her job without any of the interference or territoriality that sometimes cropped up from local law enforcement.
How old had he been then? Mid-forties? He didn’t look much older than that now. Yes, there was a dab of gray in his eyebrows, but no middle-age paunch or late-age curl of the back. Perhaps there was something revitalizing in that filth he chewed. Or perhaps time simply was kind to kind people.
No.
That wasn’t true at all.
What had finally tied the city of Stone Mountain to Terri Sorkin were the size-twelve boot prints found near her body and the heavy traces of quartz monzonite found in those boot prints, and before long Xana was knocking on the door of an elementary school teacher named Shane Bell who lived in a one-bedroom apartment just off Fourth Street and who happened to have hidden underneath his mattress the very same knife he had used to murder Terri Sorkin, along with a handful of her hair.
“So why are you really here, Marx? Looking for a tour of the mountain?”
“Oh, could you, Chief? That would be swell. Because I�
��m a huge fan of the Confederacy, as I’m sure you are, and can’t wait to hear more about the world’s largest sculpture of Robert E. Lee.”
Chief Scheer smirked at her insouciance. “A couple things. It’s not a sculpture. It’s a bas-relief. It’s carved into the side of the mountain. There’s a difference. And it’s not just Robert E. Lee up there. It’s also Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis.”
“Be still my heart.”
“Now, now. We’re proud of our place in history.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” replied Xana. “I bet you go to bed each night praising the Lord for allowing you to patrol one of the birthplaces of the KKK.”
“The irony isn’t lost, I got to tell you. But enough squirreling away from my question. Why are you here? No, wait, let me guess. It’s got something to do with that mosque.”
“What makes you say that, Chief?”
“The brain I was born with.”
Xana nodded, glad it was Ronald Scheer she was dealing with and not some stranger whose trustworthiness would be questionable. Still, she decided to maintain at least a modicum of vagueness about her mission. What was a little mystery between good-humored acquaintances?
“So are you going to let me stand out here in the heat with my cancer sticks, Chief, or are you going to show me around? I’d heard Southern hospitality was on the decline.”
Chief Scheer chuckled at that—each of his chuckles sounding like an exploding bomb—and led her through the automatic doors and into the mercifully chilled municipal building. They spent the next few minutes engaged in a nickel tour of the various departments that comprised the Stone Mountain government. On their way, they passed the mayor, who was emerging from the men’s room. He was a handsome man, maybe thirty-five years old, and he came bearing a breath aflame with spearmint.
“Mr. Mayor, this is Ms. Marx. She’s a good friend of the department.”
“Well, then, any friend of yours is a friend of mine.” The mayor held out a wet hand, which Xana had no choice but to shake. “You have yourself a blessed day.”
