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TWENTY-FIVE
Talon
The rental carsped down the country road, frequent potholes jarring Dess and me in the backseat. It was obvious not many people drove down this way, which made sense if the Maliks had set up some kind of torture home out here.
As soon as Dess had come rushing back to report on her conversations with the Hunter and her brother, Blaze had identified the only Eckleberry Lane remotely in the vicinity. From there, it’d taken a matter of minutes for him to skim through satellite footage and identify a house just off it with a footprint and roof that appeared to match the Maliks’ photograph.
With the threat to Garrison in mind and the knowledge that Dess’s brother could alert the rest of the family to her likely arrival, we’d jumped into the car without much preamble—though of course we’d paused long enough to grab some necessary equipment. Dess and I were quickly and efficiently loading up the assortment of guns we might need to bring to bear. I had my usual knife strapped to my hip, and I knew Dess had at least a couple of blades concealed on her body.
If our brother-at-arms was hidden away on that property, there was no way in hell we weren’t bringing him back, no matter how many bodies we had to drop along the way.
Julius jerked on the wheel and swerved around a turn, and Dess swayed with the movement. My hand instinctively rose to her back, but she continued loading one of the semi-automatics, hardly even seeming to notice the movements of the car or her own body. She was so far in her own head that I wondered if any of us could really get through to her.
Garrison was usually the one who could break her hard exterior, even if sometimes he did it by heckling her until he got a rise. I had no idea what to say. Out of all of us, I was the worst choice as an emotional support guide. I barely knew how to feel my own emotions, as few of them as I noticed having at all.
“I’m going to kill all of them,” she murmured as she set the last gun atop the pile between our seats. She paused for a second, her hands flexing, and reached for one of the earlier ones to give it a brisk cleaning.
“We’ll kill them together,” I replied firmly. It shouldn’t need to be said that I’d have her back—that all three of us would. These people were worth nothing to me after what they’d done to our crew and to her. Seeing them dead would bring me a shitload of satisfaction.
That emotion I’d definitely feel when it came.
Blaze let out a triumphant sound in the front passenger seat where he’d still been hammering away on his laptop. Both of our heads jerked in his direction.
“I’ve got it. Fucking finally!” he crowed, and swiveled for a second to catch our eyes. “It was the parents, not the kids. That’s what threw me for so long.”
“The parents what?” Julius said gruffly. “Why don’t you back up a bit for those of us who weren’t code-breaking alongside you.”
Blaze blinked at him as if it hadn’t occurred to him that we couldn’t read what was going on in that restless brain of his and then launched into an energetic explanation. “The code in the documents the Maliks have in Damien’s office and their secret basement room. I suspected they had something to do with the murdered kids, and I was right. But I was expecting the symbols to match up with the kids’ names, and that was a dead end. I finally realized there’s a parent named for each date instead.”
Dess leaned forward in her seat, the weapons momentarily forgotten. “What do you mean?”
Blaze held out his laptop so we could see it from the backseat. He zoomed in on part of one of the parchments and ran his finger along a line of data that still looked like scribbles to me. “The part on the right is a full date. This one is May 27th, 2019. The name next to it is Harvey Little. He’s the father of one of the kids in those pictures that I found a police report on.”
I frowned. “Why would they have listed one of the parents when it’s the kids who were murdered?”
“I’m not sure,” Blaze said. “I have the computer automatically translating the rest of the entries now. I’ll look up the other names and see what I can make of them.”
We waited in tense silence while he tapped away, the rumble of the car’s engine filling the cramped space. Dess didn’t tear her eyes away from the back of Blaze’s head. He sucked a breath slowly through his teeth, tapped some more, and then let out a thoughtful noise.
“What?” Julius prodded.
“I’m finding a bit of a common theme,” Blaze said. “Some of these people appear to be ordinary citizens, but at least half of them so far have had criminal records. Significant ones. Armed robbery, extortion, multiple counts of assault, that kind of thing.”
“Oh,” Dess said, that single syllable so pained that my gaze shot straight to her. She’d turned to stare out the window now, her face pinched with tension, her jaw tight.
I wished I could peek past her guarded expression into her head, but she made it so difficult to see anything that she didn’t want to show us. It’d been obvious before that she was unsettled by all the information we’d been uncovering related to the Maliks, though. The fact that she was withdrawing even more meant she was under increasing strain.
The only way she knew to survive was by hiding herself.
Finally, she glanced at the rest of us again. “That’s the missing piece. The motive. They’re killing the children of criminals. I’d be willing to bet that even the ones you didn’t turn up a record for, the Maliks found out they were involved in some illegal stuff. I guess, in their eyes, murdering their kids must be some kind of punishment or revenge, or balancing the scales—an eye for an eye…” She shuddered. “Or maybe they think the kids will turn out the same as their parents and that it’s better to cut it off at the root. I could believe it from the way they’ve talked.”
Blaze let out a low whistle. “That’s fucking psychotic.”
“It’s sick,” Dess spat out. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “They’re sick.”
And they were her family by blood. The more we learned about them, the more this had to hurt her. The cuts from this revelation, I realized, would go deep and never completely fade. She’d witnessed and dealt out a lot of violence in her time, but clearly nothing on this level.
Maybe the household had done her a disservice in more ways than one by sending her after businessmen and politicians rather than criminals. She wasn’t totally prepared for how depraved the worst of society could get.
