The Darkness of Ivy

by Jessica King

  “Doctor?” Ivy asked.

  “I just wanted to say,” the doctor said, “that the dress Aline was wearing might have just saved her life, in case anyone wanted to know that. I don’t know who decided on that, but for what it’s worth, it helped. The bullet went through, but without the dress, it would have hit an artery that usually would mean she loses the arm or bleeds out.”

  “What do you mean?” Ivy asked.

  The doctor’s brows furrowed in confusion. “The entire dress was lined with a very thin layer of Kevlar. I assumed that was your doing.”

  Ivy turned to Emily, who shook her head, a shocked, airy laugh issuing from her lips. “I knew she had a long visit with Julio, but—” She pressed her hand to her forehead. “She told me she wasn’t scared. But she tried to make a bulletproof flapper dress.”

  “That is …” Vince said, running out of words.

  “Quite possibly the most Aline thing that’s ever happened,” Emily said, who finally sat down, dropping into a plastic armchair. “I need to go to bed,” she mumbled.

  Ivy turned to Vince. “And with that, I think we have someone to go question,” she said.

  Vince stood, shrugging on his jacket.

  +++

  Monday, February 26, 2017, 7:12 a.m.

  Joyce felt odd questioning an FBI special agent. She’d worked with agents before, and they’d always treated her as an equal, but there was a little voice in her head that she’d maintained from watching crime mystery shows since she was young that told her she was not the one in charge in this situation.

  She told the voice to shut up and sat across from Agent Shea with a straight spine.

  “Agent, we have strong reason to believe that someone with the access to technology that you have and the expertise in your area of focus is helping with this whole Kingsmen witch-hunter plot,” Joyce said.

  “And you think that I’m part of this,” Agent Shea said, his hands relaxed on the table in front of him. On his ring finger sat a plain black wedding ring. The stretchy kind that weightlifters wore to avoid bending the metal.

  “You pointed a gun at our target,” Joyce said. Upon closer inspection, she also noticed a slight glimmer on his nails—silver sparkles. In some places, the sparkles strayed onto his skin or didn’t cover the nail entirely, the work of a little girl practicing on nails much larger than her own, an easier target for wobbly hands.

  “I pointed a gun at the woman who shouldn’t have been onstage. The whole flow of events seemed off. Usually the awards weren’t brought onstage until the winner had been announced. They’d been doing it that way all night,” he said. “I thought something was up with that, and I was worried the woman might try some sort of murder-suicide thing onstage.”

  “Agent, that woman was another target of the Kingsmen. She volunteered as a distraction to the killer.”

  The agent’s eyes didn’t move.

  “You don’t seem surprised by that,” Joyce said, now noticing dog-paw scratches on his arms and a superhero Band-Aid wrapped around his pinky.

  The agent pressed his fingertips into the table, making his hands raise up like spiders about to run. “Why would I be surprised by anything? Clearly no one told me anything about the operation, and by how fast you took me down, it’s obvious you all thought I had something to do with it from the beginning.” He ran a hand across his short hair. “I don’t know why, but the fact that no one told me about that woman being part of some plan of yours—no that doesn’t surprise me.” He swallowed. “And the fact that you all put a citizen in danger like that—what if the shooter had gotten off two shots? What if she made a weird move and I had shot her?”

  Joyce remained silent, suddenly feeling as though she were the one being held for questioning. She kept her chin high.

  “Look, I’m not saying it’s a horrible plan. I get that the other woman might have wanted to prove a point, and she would be the perfect distraction to someone who thought they’d killed her. Fine, let’s take the danger out of it and say that that’s fine to do.” He gave her a look that said it was absolutely not fine to do. “What’s really not fine is not telling me. I was sent here by the FBI to help you.” He shook his head. “Do you realize that if you had spent even a little more time tackling me to the ground, you might have missed catching your shooter altogether?”

  “You were a suspect with a gun,” Joyce said, growing annoyed by Shea’s lecturing. “And then you pointed that gun at two targets of our killer. We were doing what any law enforcement officers would have.”

  “Why did you consider me a suspect?” Shea asked. “Was I suspect before I showed up?”

  “We interviewed your ex-girlfriend, Reaghan Knox,” Joyce said. “She claimed that she wished missed Rousseau no physical harm, but it’s clear to see that those two are considered rivals in the Hollywood sphere right now. Not to mention the fact that Reaghan finds her witchcraft practices to be casting a dark connotation over actors and actresses as a whole, particularly herself. And when you show up the next day—the ex of another suspect and an agent with the exact access and skills clearly being offered by someone in law enforcement to the Kingsmen, it was kind of a perfect fit.”

  “Except that I haven’t talked to Reaghan in several years, and I’m not a corrupt agent,” Shea said, clearly coaching his face to remain neutral. “Say what you’d like about my pulling a gun on the stage, but I was doing everything in my power to ensure that Miss Rousseau didn’t end up with a bullet in her body, and she still did.” His jaw locked; he was clearly in disbelief.

  “Would you give us voluntary access to your personal records to affirm that you have had no contact with Miss Knox and that you haven’t been leaking any information? This will include a search of your home property for burner phones, a search of your professional and private computers and phones, and inquiry into your data.”

  “Knock yourself out,” Agent Shea said. “I have absolutely nothing to hide from you.”

  Joyce nodded and walked out as the agent sighed into his hands behind her.

  +++

  Monday, February 26, 2017, 8:33 a.m.

  Jeremiah Ethan was quiet. He had simply asked for a lawyer after his arrest, and then had apparently refused to open his mouth the entire ride to the police department, which was probably the best move he could have made, Ivy thought. He sat without moving, his eyes trained on the floor, his fingers laced together, and his wrists in cuffs.

  “I’m going to your house now, and we’re going to get into your computers. Is there anything you’d rather tell me about now before we have to get a lawyer involved?” she asked.

  Jeremiah said nothing.

  “I got word from the Dolby tech guys that someone broke through their firewalls and had access to their security cameras. And that someone helped Oliver break into the Bluetooth of a Dolby speaker.” Jeremiah looked at her in a way that affirmed her suspicion that one didn’t “break into” Bluetooth. She ignored her blunder and shifted her weight over to one hip, happy to be back in her work clothes instead of a flapper dress. “Would you care to comment on that?”

  “Smart guy,” Jeremiah said before turning his gaze to the wall.

  She moved to stand in front of him, and he pretended to see right through her stomach to the wall beyond. She squatted so he’d have to look her in the eyes, and when she did, he didn’t look away. She searched for any sense of remorse but couldn’t find any.

  “Where should I take the dog?” Ivy asked.

  “Next door neighbor’ll take care of him,” Jeremiah said. He shifted his gaze again now, clearly done with their conversation.

  “All right then,” Ivy said. She stood, wiping her sweating hands on her slacks.

  On her way out, Joyce caught her. “Couldn’t find anything on Shea, so we let him leave. He seemed pretty sincere to me. Like, he’s genuinely offended we suspected him of foul play,” she said. “But, then again, we’re in L.A. We’re surrounded by actors.”

  “Do you
think there might be more?” Ivy asked.

  Joyce shook her head. “Don’t know. We did a pretty thorough sweep of his house and technology, but it was fast, considering we were having to answer to his director. Something just felt off to me, but it might have been the fact that we didn’t tell him anything about the investigation, so he didn’t know. He seemed pretty adamant that the reason he pulled the gun was because he thought Jennings was in the wrong place and he was suspicious.”

  “Which makes sense,” Ivy conceded. She released a long breath through her nose. She didn’t regret the choice of not telling him, but it did provide him with the perfect alibi if he needed it.

  Joyce pressed her lips together. “His explanations just all match up so well that I wouldn’t consider him a suspect. But I wouldn’t necessarily rule him out, if that makes sense.”

  “It does,” Ivy said. “But there are a lot of other people who could fit that role, too. We’ll just have to keep our eyes peeled for now. And maybe we’ll find something at Jeremiah’s, who knows.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Monday, February 26, 2017, 10:41 a.m.

  Ivy and Ivan could hear the dog barking as they approached the trailer. The old, baked grass crunched beneath their feet, and Ivy squinted against the sun. Vince had peeled off to knock on the neighbor’s door who went into the house first and emerged with the dog. Tyler was much more docile if there appeared to be bacon in the pocket of his handler.

  “You’re an all right guy, aren’t you, Tyler?” the neighbor asked the dog, who only sniffed the man’s pocket, his slobbery, panting breaths were his only response.

  The neighbor gave them a curt nod and left, not mentioning the fact that they were police and they were investigating his next-door neighbor’s home.

  “The computers are back here,” Ivy said, leading Ivan into the messy bedroom. Ivan dropped into the chair in front of the desk, turning on all the monitors and pulling out a series of devices from his bag.

  “It’ll be a few minutes,” he said, typing in a series of commands. Ivy wandered the room again, now spending the time to open the books beside the bed, to shake out the pages of Shakespeare and thumb through the beaten paperbacks.

  “There’s nothing in the pages,” Ivy said. “I would have expected him to be using the books as hiding spots more than I would expect the guy to read Shakespeare.”

  Ivan shrugged without turning around to face her. “Maybe he’s some sort of super genius that crafts complicated code and enjoys Shakespeare as a wind-down before bed?”

  “A super genius that believes witches are out to get us all?” Ivy asked.

  “Fair.” Ivan picked up the empty cereal boxes guaranteeing afternoon sugar crashes and opened them. They’d been cut down the seams, with long strings of random letters, numbers, and symbols written out on the cardboard inside. He whispered the passwords to himself as he typed them.

  “How did you know to look there?” Ivy asked, remembering kicking them aside the last time she’d come to the house.

  “I do the same type of stuff when I want a written record of my passcodes,” he said. He pointed to the boxes laying across his lap. “Five computers, five boxes,” he said.

  Ivy considered him with a skeptical eye. “What do you use instead of cereal boxes?”

  Ivan shook his head. “It’s a secret. That’s kind of the point.” Ivan fell silent again, which Ivy took to mean that he needed to focus now.

  Each screen had turned blue with a series of different color text running across them. He began making his way through a sea of files and downloads and behind-the-scenes codes. It was all Greek to her.

  She wandered into the living space, where Vince was staring at the plethora of posters and papers that covered the back wall.

  “Interesting décor,” Ivy said.

  “Why would anyone use old parking tickets and beer can boxes to cover their walls?” Vince asked. “I get the posters, but trash seems weird.” He crossed his arms, trying to make connections between the different pieces as if the wall was some sort of puzzle.

  Ivy walked up to the mishmash of a wallpaper. Movie posters were taped to cereal boxes and old calendar pages and mail promos offering a first month free of some weight loss supplement. It reminded Ivy of the patchwork of carpets at the house of The Protection of the Female Goddess. Ivy looked for repetitions of words or phrases. Maybe he was hiding some sort of password or clue here as well.

  Some of the pieces were held together with simple clear tape. Other pieces connected with duct tape covered in cartoon characters or a fake caution tape design. And where there might have been small spaces between the pieces, sticky notes were taped—old phone numbers and grocery lists and reminders. But above all, the strangest thing was that the entirety of it bowed outward, as though none of it were attached to the wall until it reached the other end.

  She pulled off a few sticky notes, letting them flutter to the ground like neon snowflakes. Beneath, she could see a few stray marks; Jeremiah had taken a Sharpie to the wall.

  She moved to the end of the wall, where the patchwork was secured with thick layers of duct tape. Some pieces curled back at the edges, dirt making them too weak to hold onto the wall as if the end had been placed and replaced over and over again, and he’d simply added new strips of tape when necessary. Tugging at the tape until it came free, she pulled the makeshift wallpaper sheet across the room like a barn door.

  “What the—” Vince said as she at the revealed the massive tangle of lines and words beneath.

  A giant web diagram was scrawled out across the wall. A list of the women in each line took up one piece of wall. Beside each woman was the name of their killer and if the killer had been caught. If not, there was just “Anon.” Ivy’s eyes instantly searched for her mother. Next to her name: “2002, Anon. Age = 40s +?” It was something Ivy had known, but seeing no identification made her weave her fingers together with anxiety.

  Jeremiah had been overseas when her mother had been murdered, and there were only two active killers, if they were right about her counting as an “active” Kingsmen. Her account, which would likely expire in a few hours considering the fact that Amrita Patel was not dead by her hand, and Oliver Corbyn’s, who was far too young to have killed her mother fifteen years ago. Unless he had been some sort of ten-year-old killer, but that seemed unlikely.

  “Why is he trying to figure out who killed the women?” Vince asked, pointing to a list that showed when a new killer had been recruited. Most of the names were listed as “Anon 1, Anon 2,” and so on, with one of the witches, one of the burner numbers, and the word “Failed” trailing behind.

  “These must have been the people who were recruited but never killed,” Ivy said, though some of them had tallies and names and multiple phone numbers spreading out like fingers from their anonymous names.

  None of the writing on the wall was larger or smaller or in any different colors. And because he’d used permanent markers, there were messy places where things were crossed out and rewritten. “Why couldn’t he color coordinate for us?” Ivy wondered aloud.

  She came to a note that had been circled, though. Who is the King? Next to the question were a plethora of phone numbers and the phrase “Claims to have been doing this for nearly forty years.” From the bubble was an arrow to the name “Lee Patterson.” A quick call to the office confirmed that Lee Patterson had been charged with the murder of a woman in Tennessee nearly five years ago, a card with a strange thumbprint design found on her stomach, presumably over her womb.

  Along the arrow connecting the two, Jeremiah had written direct contact.

  “So, he wasn’t recruited through the site, but by whoever’s running this whole thing?” Vince asked.

  There was another line of direct contact pointing from The King. It simply said Police? with the words facial rec beneath.

  “Guess we got that right,” Vince mumbled. “Even if it’s not Shea.”

  “I had no idea it
was this…big,” Ivy said, biting her lip. A network of killers. Recruits. Corrupt law enforcement. A King. Her head spun. “Even if we catch every person ever even recruited by the site,” Ivy said, pointing to the impossible list of “Anons,” “none of them will know who the King is. This is all operated by anonymous numbers, at least anonymous from his end. The website recruits entirely independently from the King.”

  Vince blew out a breath. “Smart.”

  “Yeah,” Ivy said. “Even Jeremiah wasn’t a direct recruit—from this, it looks like he’s never seen the person’s face, doesn’t even know his name.”

  “But why is he concerned about that?” Vince asked.

  Ivy shrugged. “Money, maybe? Find out who the guy is, that could be one heck of a blackmailing piece. Especially if the King’s never seen Jeremiah. He’d never be able to find him,” she said, turning puzzle pieces around in her mind until they fit together.

  “And then what?” Vince said. “Take over as the King?”

  “No,” Ivy said slowly, her brow scrunching. “Keep going, I bet. The King might be the head honcho, but who’s running all the recruitment, writing the blogs, and keeping this thing actually going? Jeremiah. Those blog posts were signed as J and E—those are his initials. I bet he’s just trying to make it look like more than one person is blogging. If their numbers are lacking, maybe they’re trying to make it look like there are more people at the top than there really are.”

  Vince nodded along with her words. “So, if the King doesn’t want to stop what’s happening with the witches, and he doesn’t want to have all his plans revealed and to police who might be able to track him down and go to jail for, you know, hunting down fake witches …”

  “Then Jeremiah has an endless source of blackmail and money,” Ivy said.

  “We’re going to need the site to find the King,” Vince said.

  “So, we let Jeremiah run it from the cell we’re putting him in?” Vince asked, jerking a thumb over his shoulder back in the direction of the department. “Don’t you think he’d try to tip off the King, make him get him out or something?”