A brief sentence explained the evolution of his taken name. How his love of classic techno and rap had spawned the screen identity P-KAJR, behind which he’d anonymously become one of the most notorious trolls of the Web. Assuming the persona of a thirteen-year-old polymath, he’d become legendary for baiting the most even-tempered of bloggers into raging email flameouts, rife with misspellings, often concluding with impotent physical threats. Emails that would soon be posted on high-traffic sites devoted to the given blogger’s area of expertise. When his identity was revealed, by his own design, he announced via podcast that he was assuming the phonetic of his screen identity as his legal name. Cager was born.
There was more, of course. Analysis of his disassociation from the family business dovetailed with standard biographical boilerplate about how the Afronzos had come through Ellis Island, name intact, found their way improbably to Carolina coal country, remained there, name still intact, becoming, after years of sweat and toil, a bootstrap American success story that blossomed when Cager’s grandfather took out patents on a number of drills and saws that eventually proved especially useful in African gold mines. Cager’s father, P.K.A. Senior, had taken the modest Afronzo family fortune and acquired a variety of assets related to the production of industrial solvents used to lubricate the hardware in those same mines before making a lateral move that involved purchasing a small chain of Eastern European vitamin and wellness stores, motivated primarily by the fact that they held the patent on an herbal sleep aid of tremendous popularity throughout the Balkan states that he, an insomniac himself, had found tremendously effective while traveling in that part of the world on a pleasure junket with Israeli government officials he was hoping would subsidize the construction of a new solvent plant in the industrial zone of northern Haifa. The deal was completed, but Afronzo International exports of drilling solvents to various Mediterranean oil-producing states were never as profitable as hoped. An unhappy fact that was offset when, after three years of bureaucracy in action, the herbal sleep remedy received FDA approval for over-the-counter sale in the United States, and almost immediately became the top-selling cure for insomnia.
It was the enormous profits from this windfall that allowed Afronzo to launch a hostile takeover attempt against the much larger New Day Pharmaceuticals, an attempt that was doomed from the outset but destined to cost NDP vast treasure, an inevitability that forced the NDP board into a merger, ceding control, and top billing, to the charismatic and populist Afronzo Senior. Affable and folksy, his soft Carolina country accent provided him with an impressive Americana aura, more than offsetting his difficult-to-pronounce name. A cult-of-personality business figure before the advent of SLP; Dreamer had put him on an equal media footing with Gates, Trump, Murdoch, and Redstone.
The last Wikiparagraph relating to Cager’s family ended with a blue-tinted mention of Dreamer, linking to what was, at the time, the fourth longest Wikipedia entry, trailing Christianity, Islam, and, at the top, SL Prion.
The entry proper on Afronzo Junior went a bit further, mentioning a well documented public spat between father and son (link to a cellphone-quality YouTube video of the two men screaming obscenities at each other backstage of a humanitarian awards dinner at which Senior was the guest of honor), excerpting a magazine profile wherein Junior had opened up about the distance between the two (“It sucks not liking your dad. But sometimes people just don’t like each other. Me and my dad, we don’t like each other. I can live with that. It seems like it’s most everybody else who has a problem with it.”), and summing with the theory (again flagged as requiring a proper source and footnote) that Junior’s personal wealth was, in fact, not his at all. That whatever resources that became his when he came of age had been rapidly sucked away by the massive multivenue club he’d had built, assorted legal defenses and settlements, and a wholesale investment in funds that had been bulwarked all but entirely by shares in several Icelandic banks.
This snapshot of the wealthy scion of an international pharmaceuticals conglomerate was all Park had time to learn of the man. Looked up and printed in a small break during another day spent wrangling the baby and his wife. Immersing himself in the constantly replenishing swirl of tasks that engulfed a household with both a baby and someone fatally ill. Exhausted before he began the first load of laundry, not certain he could keep his feet through the day, he was repeatedly shocked to look up and see another hour had passed.
During that short break in the office, he looked at the pages he’d printed and thought about Dreamer and the bodies at the gold farm.
Captain Bartolome had told him to stay off it. Captain Bartolome had told him that murder wasn’t his beat. For a code of behavior to mean anything, Park knew you had to adhere to it. By accepting the job of police officer, he had accepted the terms upon which that job had been offered. And he followed orders. To do otherwise was to betray a trust.
So he did not lie to himself as he opened his laptop, plugging the flash drive with his reports into a USB slot; he did not tell himself that what he was doing was excusable. Scrolling through months of his records until he found a notation and phone number he was looking for, he did not say to himself, No, murder is not my beat, but Dreamer is. And I am investigating a possible Dreamer connection. There was no need to lie to himself about what he was doing. He was ignoring orders and doing what he thought was best. So he placed a call, asked a few questions, bartered a deal, hung up, sent a text, and waited. When his phone chimed a moment later, he flicked to his inbox and read the reply to his message.
from bnie:omfg so koolwhen/where?
It was hours before Francine would arrive. He pictured the traffic at that time, estimated how long it would take to get to West Hollywood and make the swap, special k for opium, texted back.
midnightdenizone
7
LOOKING AT THE BODIES, IT WAS EASY ENOUGH TO SEE WHAT had happened. Someone who was familiar to the dead men had been admitted. He, and, this being a crime that involved multiple bodies, none of them wearing a wedding ring, the murderer was most assuredly a he, entered, carrying an easily concealable automatic weapon that fired standard NATO 5.56 × 45 ammunition. At least one of the cartridge casings on the floor showed the telltale scratches left when an already poor weapon is converted to full automatic. Forced to venture a guess, I’d have said he used one of Olympic Arms’s nearly infinite variations on the AR-15. An LTF with the stock removed seemed about right.
Whatever easily procurable piece of mass-produced, consumer-grade ironmongery he had concealed upon his person, once inside he engaged in conversation. Had a soda. A Mountain Dew. His conversation was with a young Korean American who may have been a fan of the Black Panther comic book character or may simply have had a taste for very expensive designer T-shirts with superhero motifs. Regardless, the conversation between the two turned argumentative, sufficiently hostile that the other young, pasty Asian men in the room made a conscious effort to turn their backs and focus on their computer monitors. Which was the pose they were all essentially frozen in when the man who had entered so genially lost his shit and pulled his weapon from his backpack or messenger bag and sprayed the room. Putting several rounds in the Korean American’s face while shooting the others in the back.