I glance at Dad; he doesn’t look away, though I get the impression he wants to. “I’m kind of a captive audience right now,” I snap. “Let’s just get this over with.”
“Good.” Lowell opens up a laptop that’s sitting on her desk and frowns, concentrating on the screen for a moment. She clicks a couple of times, apparently finds whatever she’s looking for, and then spins the thing around so I can see the display. It’s footage from a security camera of some description, dark and blurry. It’s hard to make much out at first, but it looks like there’s snow on the ground. Lowell reaches over and hits the play button, and the still image comes to life. There’s no sound. I see a dark figure walking quickly down an abandoned street, alone, and my heart feels like it’s swelling in my chest. It’s Lexi. I can tell by the huge, sloppily knitted scarf she has wound around her neck—she spent three months trying to finish that thing before winter arrived, and then refused to leave it at home once it was done.
I suddenly know what I’m watching. I know what I’m being shown, and I do not want to see it. I lean forward in my seat, reaching for the laptop, to turn it away, to close the damn thing, to just make it stop, but then Alexis freezes on the screen. She just stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk, her focus fixed on something or someone I can’t see. A second later, I do see what she’s looking at: a long stream of motorcycles burn down the road—three, five, eight—I don’t know how many of them. Half the actual road is cut off on the screen, so it could be thirty for all I know. Alexis stands and watches them pass, the strange sight of so many men on their bikes, ripping through the center of Seattle obviously enough to stop her in her tracks.
“What the hell is this?” I whisper.
Dad just shakes his head. “Keep watching, sweetheart.”
The bikers disappear. Alexis remains still a moment longer, dark hair flying about her face, being teased at by a silent wind. She steps up to the side of the curb looks up and down, as though she’s going to cross over. However, before she can take another step, a dark figure, a man, runs out of the side street behind her and falls to his knees, reaching out a hand to my sister. He clearly frightens her; she visibly jumps, and skitters backward away from the person.
Alexis pauses, as though trying to decide what to do, and then she rushes forward, bending toward the man on the ground, unwinding that hideous scarf from around her neck.
“She was helping someone?” I ask. I don’t take my eyes off the screen, and neither Lowell nor my father respond. I’m supposed to see for myself. I’m scared though. I’m a coward. I don’t want to see her get hurt, no matter how badly she’s hurt me.
The two people on the screen are talking, that much is clear, and it’s incredibly frustrating that I don’t know what’s being said. I squint at the laptop, even though there’s no way in hell I’m going to be able to lip read what’s coming out of their mouths. The quality of the image is so poor and pixelated that I can’t make out their actual facial features. Alexis offers out a hand, but the man on the ground recoils backward. Confusing. He was reaching for her only a second ago, but now he seems scared. He starts scrambling away from her, arms and legs working against the snow on the ground, trying to put some space between them. And then his fear suddenly makes more sense. He’s not trying to get away from Alexis. He’s trying to get away from the group of men that are approaching her from behind.
I count eight of them.
“Oh my god.” I cover my mouth with my hands, half considering covering my eyes, too. Alexis never turns around. She never knows the men are behind her. The tallest of all of them, broad in the shoulders with a pronounced limp, is the first to reach my sister. He clamps a hand over her mouth and physically lifts her off the ground. Her legs kick out desperately, but the guy doesn’t put her down. Another one of the men grabs hold of the person still lying in the snow and tries to wrestle him up, but he doesn’t succeed. Instead, he takes him by the arm and then drags him back into the same alleyway he appeared from. The other men follow. My sister is carried out of shot and into the darkness by the tall guy with a limp.
And she is gone.
Lowell reaches forward and snaps the laptop closed. “The man you saw in that footage, the one she encountered first? That was Judge Ryan Conahue. His body was found under a pile of trash the morning after this happened. A restaurateur took out his garbage at 5:30 a.m. and got a bit of a fright. Conahue had been stabbed once in the chest, directly in his heart. He’d bled out into the snow.”
She produces another file from a drawer in her desk and tosses an image down—a silver-haired man in his late fifties, early sixties, eyes clouded over and staring straight up toward the sky, blue lips slightly parted. There is, indeed, a wound in his chest—the obvious source of the copious amounts of blood that have stained his great coat and turned the dirty snow around him bright red.