chapter thirty-eight

Jo’s car wasn’t in the driveway when I arrived home forty-five minutes later. But my phone pinged before I’d turned off the engine.

The caller wasn’t Jo. I stared at my mother’s face without picking up, listening as she left me a message. My junkie father was in the hospital again. No surprise there. They don’t parole a prisoner on compassionate leave unless he’s pretty much circling the drain. He wanted to see me. I deleted the message and went inside the house.

I turned my glove phone to vibrate and sank down into the butter-soft cushions of Jo’s white leather couch with a bottle of Kirin Lime and a bowl of blue corn chips and salsa. I started to watch Lee’s vlog, searching for a flesh-out of his connection to Britney Devonshire and the Baby Mine Clinic, Sandy Rose, or any reference to Fuentes and the file number AI333-1110.

According to the time-code, the diary stretched back ten years, but it was sporadic with big gaps in some years. Lee had compartmentalized the vlog into discreet sections—like his life. At a later date I’d watch the whole vlog frame by frame, but the answers I needed now were most likely sown in the last few entries before his death. I fast-forwarded towards the end.

As the image skidded ahead towards the present, the office in Lee’s vlog maintained the same bland background, but computer format changed with the years. I whirred through earlier entries lacking the holographic function with its 3D form, stopping once more in 2041 to let the vlog play in real time. His image now floated before me like a digital ghost.

Lee had grown out his hair long enough that it brushed the collarbone beneath his unbuttoned shirt. The dark circles under his eyes were pronounced. He carried himself differently from the guy glimpsed at the beginning as well, shoulders curving inward toward his core.

Denver was right. It was depressing stuff. He yammered on about his gambling addiction, money problems, and arguments with his wife and the alienated son.

Just when I was beginning to think the entire vlog was nothing but an endless litany of complaints, the scientist made another entry. Two weeks before his fatal crash.

“I can’t believe it,” he’d wailed. “How could this happen? All I ever wanted was to help people.” He paused, knuckles white as he grasped his left hand with his right.“Sure, I hoped my name would be up there with the giants one day. When I earned it. Was that so terrible? I made one little mistake and the next thing I know, things have gotten completely out of hand. Now they’ve gone and paroled that asshole. Oh, my God. What have I done?”

I paused the vlog and took a deep pull on the bottle of Kirin.

Harvey Pink was paroled September 18^th of this year. The timing fit. I sat up straighter, leaning in toward the digital image as I hit play again.

Lee’s voice sounded like his throat had been scraped raw. “I have to put it right. For my son, if not for me. I should have put a stop to things a lot sooner.”

The last entry was short. “Fuentes is dead,” Lee said, his face expressionless. “There’s no way out. They’ll come for me next.” He paused.

Fuentes again. I stopped the vlog. It was the same Fuentes Lee had said was a dead man right before Lee himself died in the crash. But the time-code pushed this reference three weeks earlier. Who the hell was this Fuentes? I rewound and let it play through this time.

“Fuentes is dead. There’s no way out. They’ll come for me next. Then Piedmont. It will end like it began.” Lee’s image vanished.

“What the . . .?” Thinking I’d heard it wrong, I rewound and played that last bit back. No mistake. Piedmont.

I rechecked the date. No mistake. How the hell had my name dropped into Lee’s world over a week before I’d first shown up at the door to his home in the Palisades?

I sat there motionless, mind racing, staring at the empty blue screen as the vlog went to white noise.