No one returned her calls. The clock ticked.
Was he back? Was it possible? She needed to file this story. She wanted to get it out there bad. Technically, she couldn’t until she verified the information from her anonymous source. But this deep throat hadn’t let her down yet. What his agenda was she did not know, but his information had been 100 percent solid to date.
A kind of desperation rose inside her. The kind that had always preceded her need for a fix. She hadn’t felt this kind of twitchy desperation in years, and it only fueled the maelstrom that had exploded inside her body and her brain with the mention of the crucifix. The hair. She seated herself at her desk, bit her lip.
Foot jiggling, she opened her Twitter account. Twitter was where she routinely plugged her personal crime blog—theWinston Files. Her private blog was where she piqued and provoked and raised questions that she couldn’t under the auspices of theCity Sun. One day she hoped to put podcasts up. She was planning to do a true crime series, like that famous podcastSerial. It was a very, very fine line she treaded on her blog, by newspapers’ standards, but so far theSunbrass had let her have at it, because it was sensational. Because it had brought readers directly to theSun. And part of the ailingCity Sun’s mandate was to salvage itself and grow readership by going more trashy, sensationalist. Other journalists now followed Merry’s Twitter and blog accounts—reporters from respected radio and television news shows. She was getting to be a fucking independent social media crime star in her own right. A long way from her life in foster care and on the streets.Thiswas what she had to prove to the world.Thiswas her agenda. She’d once had to sell herself, her body. For the crystal meth.
Do you reject Satan, father of sin and prince of darkness?
It was after the rape that she’d started to come right. It was like a final wake-up call. Pastor Markus at Harbor House had helped steer her onto course and had picked her up when she’d fallen off the wagon. Missing kids, abused females, addicts, sex workers—yeah, she had stories and things to prove. Now she sold other people’s misfortune instead of her own. She rubbed it all into mainstream society’s face. It was her fuck-you back at the world, and the fresher and more salacious the stories she could find, the better, and it was paying her bills.
But still, she hesitated ...
Do you reject Satan, father of sin and prince of darkness? Say it! Say, I do!
She swallowed, steeled her jaw, and started typing out her tweet:
#CEMETERYGIRL Duneagle student Gracie Marie Drummond, 16, raped @Cemetery has died.
Merry paused. Sweat prickled above her lip. She added:
Circumcised. Crucifix cut into face. Lock of hair taken.
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to block out the disjointed snippets of memory this information was flaring through her brain. She remembered his eyes—had seen them through the slit of a ski mask. And those words. He’d said those words, a blade pressed to her throat as he’d kneed her into the ground. And she’d woken up in weeds and garbage at the bottom of a ravine with a red crucifix on her forehead, bleeding. In terrible pain. No pants. A missing lock of hair from the center of her hairline.
Rage, fear whammed through her. She opened her eyes, sucked her breath in deep, and stabbedENTER.
The tweet went live.
She started typing up a blog post.
CHAPTER 12
The new thin-screen television mounted on the wall in Zach Raddison’s office was tuned to the local twenty-four-hour news channel. Zach’s office adjoined the mayor’s, and he kept an eye on the news as he directed the guys with the special Sunday delivery of the mayor’s new desk.
TheCity Sunhad this morning run a shocking front-page article about a violent attack on a Jane Doe in the Ross Bay Cemetery, and the reporter—that pugnacious little Merry Winston—had dragged the mayor’s office into it already by mentioning Killion and crime stats, and by mentioning missing UVic student Annelise Janssen. It was tabloid trash, sensationalist scare-mongering at best, but Zach knew firsthand what a powerful tool that kind of fear-mongering garbage could be. He’d used Merry Winston himself during the campaign—quietly feeding her information that would hurt their opposition.
But now this was happening on Killion’s watch.Thatwas a problem.
Plus there’d been a police incident at the Johnson Street Wharf this morning, slowing city traffic to a snarl—a woman’s body had been found in the Gorge. This news in particular worried Zach. He told himself it couldn’t beher. It wasn’t possible. Still, he was on edge as he followed the breaking story.
“Over there, near the window,” he instructed the men hefting the desk.
Mayor-elect Jack Killion would be sworn in as the lead lawmaker of the city in just two days, and as Killion’s successful election campaign manager, Zach had now been hired on as Killion’s “special advisor,” a right-hand man whose key objective was to keep the Killion brand going and growing. It was a cut-to-order position for him and would evolve over time.
They called his father—Jim Raddison of Raddison Industries—the King Maker, and Zach was the King Maker’s son. He’d tasted his first big win with Killion now. He’d gotten his hands dirty in the campaign trenches, and he’d loved every minute of it. He was twenty-eight years old, and he’d helped put a man in office.
He would be a king maker himself.
“No, no, angle it more to the left, for the light,” Zach instructed. The delivery guys inched the desk a little more to the left.
The ousted incumbent was a woman—Patty Markham—and it had showed in her office decor. Zach was remedying this. He wanted to depict Killion as a man’s kind of man. A powerhouse. A business leader and innovator who did not mince his words.
The paint job had been completed and the new images hung—sleek black-and-white photographs of Victoria’s architecture dating from the eighteen hundreds to images of buildings currently under construction, including Ray Norton-Wells’s big waterfront development. The works had been shot by a top photographer, and they depicted power. The past and the future. Control. Growth. Jobs. That, and Killion’s tough-on-crime approach, had been what eked them into this office door. They now had four years to prove themselves and to better the results next time around, because Killion had set his sights way higher than the mayor’s office. He had his eye on provincial, then federal political balls, and Zach planned on going with him all the way.
ABREAKING NEWSbanner flashed suddenly across the bottom of the television screen. The show cut to the anchor in the studio. Zach stilled, pulse quickening.
“A warning: the following information is graphic, and it might be upsetting to our sensitive viewers,” she said. “The young victim of last night’s brutal sexual assault in Ross Bay Cemetery has died from her injuries. She’s been identified as sixteen-year-old Gracie Marie Drummond, a Fairfield resident and student of Duneagle Secondary.”
