“Listen, Gav, I have something I need to ask you—”
He stops digging, wipes his hands on his coat. “Sure, Domi. Anything—”
“You said you have some people who’d be interested in that stuff I sent you? The footage about the young woman who was killed?”
“Absolutely,” he tells me. “Mika Bronstein, he’s a producer for Buy, Fuck, Sell America at CNN. He was very interested—still is. In fact, he texted me about a week ago saying I’m an asshole for teasing him with celebrity gossip, then holding out—”
“I want you to release it,” I tell him, not sure if this is the right thing to do even as I’m asking.
“Why?” he asks, scraping at the dirt again for his Playboys. “All of this bullshit is finally behind you. Why do anything? Leave well enough alone. Let it go—”
“I’ve been drinking too much,” I tell him. “I can’t sleep because I think of her—”
“The redhead?”
“No. The woman I found,” I tell him. “I wake up in the middle of the night and think her body’s on the floor beside my bed. Just down there, and I’m paralyzed thinking about her, not even questioning why her body would be there, just certain, absolutely certain, that if I looked over the edge of my bed I’d see her covered in ants—”
“You sound like you need another Simka in your life—”
“I want justice for her,” I tell him.
After dinner, we linger around the kitchen table with beer and wine, hunks of my aunt’s honey-wheat brown bread and sharp cheese. It’s started to snow—icy flurries that clatter against the kitchen windows. We talk until well past midnight, my aunt still awake in the other room, working on her cross-stitch, listening to Emil Viklický’s piano cover of “A Love Supreme.” Kelly’s gone to bed hours ago, and soon Gavril says he’s heading upstairs to join her.
“One last thing,” I say as he’s rinsing out our glasses in the sink. “When you release that footage, I need you to tell your producer friend that you received it from a man called Mook—”
11, 19—
CNN International breaks the story, but within a few minutes other networks have picked up the footage—I’m watching on my aunt’s television, drinking milk and brandy. BBC Europe, CT24 from Prague, Sky News, Al Jazeera—nearly every channel I flip through shows uncensored video of the murder stream, of Waverly screaming that Hannah’s no more holy than roadkill, of Timothy stabbing her twenty-four times. American officials say the evidence is being authenticated, that President Meecham has been briefed and is evaluating the situation. Waverly’s file photo flashes on-screen. Hannah on a constant loop, zoom shots of Hannah’s genitals, her breasts—zoom shots of her dying face, talking heads discussing whether or not her face expresses orgasm, whether or not her rape and murder were on some level consensual. A remix set to hip-hop of Waverly’s autotuned voice, singing, “You’re looking at nothing more holy than roadkill is holy.” Numb with shock that Hannah’s murder is going viral, that I did this to her. Hannah’s life’s exposed—pictures and vids from high school boyfriends, intimate after-prom footage sold to the streams, big paydays for Hannah Massey sex tapes, producers begging on-air for newsworthy footage. Naked. Sex tapes. Homemade. Beach vacations, headshots, ex-boyfriend spy cam footage. Interviews with Hannah’s extended family in Ohio, the same people who’d filed the insurance claim I’d investigated—they’ve already signed off for Hannah to appear on Crime Scene Superstar, already thrilled to see she’s scoring high in the pre-rankings, already discussing what they’ll do with the prize money if she wins.
I swig the rest of the bottle of brandy, then stumble outside in the vast lawn, the alcohol lifting me but I collapse. A light snow. The grass is frozen, prickly. I can smell the earth and wonder how many millions of worms writhe just below the surface, wriggling toward the sky to feast on me if I should die. I lie facedown for hours—What have I done to you? What have I done? Beyond shivering, beyond freezing. My aunt finds me unresponsive but awake—I remember staring into the white sky. What have I done to you? I don’t remember my aunt moving me inside, submerging me in a warm bath. I don’t remember the EMT’s visiting me, I don’t remember anything.
12, 12—
Gav calls.
“Turn on the television,” he says.
Eleven at night, drunk on rum—I turn on the living room television to reruns of Takeshi’s Castle Revival, Japanese women running an obstacle course, their voices dubbed over in Czech. Snow’s fallen heavily the past few days, shrouding the fields. My aunt’s in the barn, the barn lights the only brightness for miles and miles.
“What am I looking for?” I ask Gav, but flip through the news channels and see what he’s guiding me to: “Breaking News. Shootout in Alabama.”
“I’m going to ping my mom,” he says. “Someone should be there with you—”
Helicopter shots of a sprawling farmhouse and acres of fields. Two barns, one of them on fire. A dead body’s in the yard.
“Authorities have ID’d the victim as Cormac Waverly, 36, an Alabama state trooper. At this time, Cormac Waverly is believed to have been one of the assailants in the Theodore Waverly death stream—”
“Dominic, are you all right?” my aunt asks, hurrying inside—she thinks I may have had another episode, a drunken fit or something. She’s relieved to find me sitting on the edge of the couch, even if I do have a drink in my hand. I set the drink down.
“I’m fine,” I tell her. “They found him, it looks like. Waverly. There’s a shootout—”
She takes off her hat and gloves and after a few minutes leaves to brew us tea—a strong Earl Grey that reminds me of Albion, of our first night together. I wonder if she’s there in Alabama.
Cycling the same helicopter shots: circling the compound, black smoke churning from one of the barns, the body sprawled in the lawn just outside the house. The farm is Gregor Waverly’s. Diagrams of the compound, illustrations of the barn fire. The fire started earlier in the day, during the first wave of the assault, when members of Birmingham SWAT established a perimeter. There was an exchange of gunfire. A grenade explosion ignited the barn.
Nearing one thirty in the morning, my aunt makes Cream of Wheat with brown sugar and butter and brews a pot of coffee. The networks recycle the Hannah Massey footage, flashing Waverly’s capsule bio. Footage detailing Waverly’s relationship with President Meecham, extending far back to her earliest days in politics. Talking heads fill in the narrative of the morning’s events—an FBI task force working with private researching firm the Kucenic Group built a case against Theodore Waverly and the Waverly family of Birmingham, Alabama, following the release of the Hannah Massey murder stream.
The Kucenic Group—my old boss appears on television, his white hair and beard growing in wild tangles and braids, looking much more like an avenging prophet than the leader of a private research firm.
“We recognized initial footage as evidence linked to an unsolved case related to the Pittsburgh City-Archive and pursued this lead jointly with representatives of the FBI—”
I wonder what changed—what gave Kucenic courage enough after he’d already abandoned me, after he was so willing to let Hannah Massey slip through the cracks? Maybe the FBI recognized the footage of Hannah’s body, maybe they traced it back to his case file and demanded answers. Maybe the FBI showed up at his door with a bigger stick than Waverly.