It meant being farther from the debate stage, but our goal was to get close to Todd in the swarm of the crowd, not to get front-row seats to the debates.
Still, I watched with fascination as the debate began, starting with Professor Dunne, who laid out the arguments, legal and constitutional, for the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
The buzzer dinged and Thurman countered that the amendment had been illegally ratified since it expanded the electorate beyond the intent of the founders that men would represent their households with their vote, and that it violated states’ rights to make their own voting laws.
The buzzer dinged again and Thurman started in on his first argument, which was every bit as dumb as his rebuttal. I tuned him out, looking around and wondering if anyone was really buying his shit, then got depressed when I saw some of the men nodding along in agreement.
By the time the twenty-minute debate was up I’d pretty much lost faith in my gender, to say nothing of humanity as a whole, and I only half listened as the moderator announced the next debate, “Feminism as Misandry.”
Again the debate participants — an undergraduate student from a local community college and a guy in his thirties running for Congress — entered through the doors at the front of the room.
I looked at my phone and wondered where Todd was in the lineup, then realized they were probably saving him for last since he was a headliner.
My thoughts turned to my mom, as they had been more and more often. We were risking everything to get justice for June, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. But who had tried to get justice for my mom? Who — beyond my gramps and gran — had even looked for her?
I’d been stuck in the loss of her. But that had been all about me. Since Maeve’s kidnapping, I hadn’t been able to stop thinking about my mom and what it had been like for her.
I held tightly to Maeve’s hand, like that might keep her from slipping away, because no matter how I looked at it, that had been happening around Blackwell Falls for a long, long time: countless women disappearing into an unreachable void.
I didn’t know how to make it stop, didn’t even know all the players behind the sex trafficking operation.
But I knew about Ethan Todd, knew he was involved somehow, and that was a good fucking place to start.
I was pulled from my thoughts as applause erupted around me. The second debate had ended, and from the look on the Congressional hopeful’s face, I was willing to bet he’d had his ass handed to him by the undergraduate student.
Boo-fucking-hoo.
They exited the stage and the moderator took to one of the podiums.
I experimented getting close to the last two debaters, holding tight to Maeve’s hand and edging closer to their position as they wound their way through the crowd toward the doors. I had my knife — we all did — but we’d need to get close to Todd to make it matter.
Bram and Remy followed, catching my drift, but no one seemed to notice. We were just part of the crowd, a bunch of people with nothing better to do on a Saturday than to pile into the overcrowded convention hall and watch two people engage in a battle that seemed more like showmanship than skill.
“And now, I’m sure the moment you’ve all been waiting for,” the moderator said from the podium. “To say we were disappointed to hear one of our next debaters wouldn’t be joining us this year would be an understatement. He’s a man who really needs no introduction, so let’s just bring him in, shall we?”
The crowd cheered, the applause deafening. I looked around and caught the handful of people who weren’t clapping, theirexpressions stony. They were people like us, people who saw through Ethan Todd’s bullshit, people who were desperate for everyone else to see through it too.
The doors opened to our left and a beefy guy in a black jacket marked with the words SECURITY entered the room. He was followed by two more guys just like him, and I recognized the jackets as convention security.
Todd had lost his body man in Anton and clearly hadn’t replaced him yet, which meant he was forced to use convention security instead.
That might be good for us. I doubted the guys hired to secure this circle jerk of a convention were skilled. Unfortunately, there were a lot of them: three in front, pushing through the crowd, one on either side of a smaller figure who was obviously Todd, three more at his back.
Fuck.
Rent-a-cops might not be skilled, but the sheer number of them surrounding Todd made it almost impossible to even see him, let alone reach him.
Maeve looked up at me, her expression frantic as the entourage pushed toward us through the crowd.
Bram shoved a couple people aside, trying to get closer to them, but I could already see that it was a lost cause. There was too much security — a crazy amount of security really — for any of us to get close enough to take him out.
Todd’s security wasright there, close enough to touch, but Todd was insulated by their bodies.
For a split second, I thought they were going to stop right in front of us. There was a halting of their forward motion, a hitch in their step. I caught a flash of Todd’s face — a flash of his suit jacket and tie— through the bodies of the security guards.
Then he was gone, the backs of the security guards at his flank all that was visible as Todd took the stage to thunderous applause.
Maeve pulled me toward the doors, clearly in a hurry to get out of there, and I wondered if the situation was triggering for her, if she would have nightmares again after seeing Todd, after being so close to him for the first time since Romania.
