Page 85 of Booked for Murder

“It’s so gratifying to see your education was not wasted on you.”

I grinned at that. Eating breakfast in a fast food parking lot amused me, although it also annoyed me, not that going into the restaurant would have made things any better. Most didn’t realistically provide the space needed for a wheelchair, and the last thing I needed was having Bradley carrying me around in public. Somebody might recognize him, start taking pictures, and any hope of privacy would go up in smoke. “How are we going to go about trying to figure out who is behind these killings? While Godrin’s murder is fairly fresh, there’s just not a lot to go on.”

Bradley grunted, stabbed another piece of his sausage, and bit into it. In a way, the manifestation of his temper amused me. However, it also worried me, as his display indicated there might be something else tripping his trigger.

Rather than ask, I waited for one of them to decide to answer me.

Bradley’s mother sighed. “We’re going to go all the way back to the beginning, get all of the information we know about the first killing, and see where we can get with that. So far, Senator Godrin’s killing is the perfect murder. Nobody has any idea who did it, and they don’t even have a viable suspect. They put your friend Mickey on the suspect list despite his documented phobia. Ridiculous, if you ask me. They’re looking at all the known staff at the library, because that’s all they have to go on. The murder happened on the stairs into the library, so as such, a librarian must have done it. The only librarian who could have done it was several blocks away far outside of her known attack range. They did look into you, but the street cameras show you being a hefty distance away and also capture your general confusion about the murder scene on tape, with you never approaching the library. They can’t book you for murder. They’re out for a scapegoat at this point in time.”

“And the only scapegoats they have are librarians?”

“You know an investigation is not going well when they’re targeting people utterly incapable of committing the crime. They don’t know what they’re doing at this point.” Bradley’s mother stabbed her pancake. “To be fair, we don’t, either. We’re going to be relying on a lot of interviews and information gathering to try to piece together the motive on this one. Finding out the motivation behind the killings is our best bet for finding the killers. I think we need to focus on learning if this is the act of a group or a serial killer. I’m leaning towards a group because I’ve never heard of a single person having all of the talents required to pull the killings off.”

I considered the situation, which, on the surface, surrounded the documents that would completely turn the United States upside down—and transform people with my abilities into slaves likely destined to die on some battlefield. No matter how the Hampton family tried to dress up my for life contract, the new legislation would remove all the benefits to having signed the contract and turn me into someone who lived only because I’d been purchased for a purpose.

Going into the contract with my eyes wide open helped to a certain degree, but then I thought of Daniel, who might have signed to escape something worse, not necessarily because he wanted to be the living property of someone else.

As the killings all seemed to be political in nature, there was something we could do without needing any form of private investigator license. “We’re going to have to look at a lot of political documentation, aren’t we? To figure out who might be behind this. Was the document currently going through debate even around during the first killing?”

“In its earliest form, yes. It was introduced to the House of Representatives two months prior to the first killing.”

“Wait. The House?” One thing had stood out to me: all the victims were senators. “But it’s a Senate proposal.”

“Not precisely. The original version of it was concocted by Representative Kennedys of Alabama. Kennedys was unable to get the needed number of votes, so it died in the House. That’s when a group of senators picked up the idea, made it their own, and went overboard with it. The variant proposed by Kennedys left a lot to be desired, but it wasn’t quite the human rights violation the second version became.”

“Do we have a copy of the first one? That was rejected by the House?” I asked.

“We do. Representative Kennedys sent it to me when I asked for a copy. I claimed to be working on a research project involving dead bills. To cover my tracks, I made a bunch of similar requests of other bill authors who proposed failed legislation in the same time period,” Bradley’s mother replied. “While he’s less-than-ideal as a person, he also recognizes when he made a mistake. He’s a pleasant enough man for a politician.”

I had to give the woman credit; her method of hiding her activities made a great deal of sense. Making use of similar tricks might help in our investigations, too—especially if we didn’t want people aware of what we were looking for.

I’d never realized quite how complicated investigating anything could be.

Then it occurred to me Bradley’s mother had gone straight to the source for a copy of the failed proposal. “He’s not dead?”

“No. He has not had any problems involving his safety following his proposal.”

How odd. “Yet everyone involved with the second version is dead?”

“Yes.”

I frowned, poking at my pancakes with my fork. “Am I the only one who thinks that’s odd?”

“No, you’re not. It’s odd.”

“Your thoughts, Bradley?”

“I think this is a stinking pile of shit.”

Bradley’s mother snorted. I considered our situation, right down to eating in Bradley’s new family car, a practical vehicle that could handle carrying my folding wheelchair and offered me leg room even in the back seat. Surreal didn’t quite cover the situation. “Yeah, that it is. So why did Representative Kennedys avoid any problems with his version of the bill? If it’s what inspired the human rights violation that got six people killed for writing it, why is he walking and they aren’t?”

“Well, the first version of the bill was only twenty pages of restrictions for those with inconvenient or dangerous abilities and expansions of for life contracts. It did include a draft element for those with the right abilities. The updated version is a lot harsher. So while Kennedys took a hit to his general reputation for proposing the bill in the first place, it died in the House without much of a fight. His willingness to withdraw the bill and allow it to die helped his cause, I think. Few know about the bill because it was one of those quiet sessions nobody paid much attention to—and it died young. Had it moved forward to full debate, it would be a different story. It didn’t even make the news.” Bradley’s mother closed her container and returned it to the bag. “On the surface, it looks like a dead lead, but I think we might learn something from looking into this specific proposal, why it was written, and who supported Kennedys. There might be something there.” She hesitated, and then she shrugged. “It could also be yet another red herring.”

“We haven’t been looking into this long enough for there to be any red herrings yet,” I muttered.

“They’re coming. They’re just lurking right under the surface, waiting to annoy us—or worse, lead us astray.”

Considering the police hadn’t had any luck finding the killer, I expected we’d find a lot of red herrings and nothing of substance. I kept quiet, no matter how much I doubted we’d learn anything of use or bring the killer to justice.