Chapter 2
Outside the coffee shop, the rain eased up a little.
She looked around the place for the umpteenth time.
In the sixty minutes she’d allotted for the mystery whistleblower meeting that didn’t happen, quite a few customers had cycled through.
Some grabbed a cup to go, others stopped to sit for a while.
None of them seemed to pay the slightest bit of attention to a middle-aged woman with a laptop.
So why did she still feel that prickle between her shoulder blades?
After sending the photo of the death threat to her journalist friend in Milwaukee, they’d texted back and forth a few times. June Cassidy was fifteen years younger, but she’d been through a few things. She’d asked if KT needed help.
KT was scared, yes, but she still wasn’t sure if she wasn’t simply being paranoid.
Aside from an ill-considered and mercifully brief marriage whose only positive outcome was her daughter, Eleanor, KT had been essentially on her own since college.
She’d done a pretty good job of taking care of herself and Eleanor so far, thank you very much.
And that’s exactly why she told her friend June that she was handling it.
June had asked her to share her phone’s location, just in case. Which wasn’t weakness, KT thought, just an overabundance of caution. So she’d done that.
The truth was, KT had more than her share of enemies in tech.
Just in the United States, the sector was valued somewhere between fifteen and twenty trillion dollars.
Which meant that a bad earnings call or product review or funding round could drop company valuations, and personal fortunes, by hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
KT’s aggressive reporting had caused many such drops.
Most people killed over money had died for far less.
Not to mention the fact that the men running these companies—and they were almost always men—tended to be emotionally stunted assholes who were prone to a wide variety of bad behavior.
Taken as a group, tech founders had a long record of being willing to do pretty much anything to expand their empires and increase their net worth.
Another problem, along with wondering whether to call the police, was that the letter had given her exactly zero indication of which investigation she was supposed to stop. None of the stories she had in the hopper seemed to connect to a reason someone might want her dead.
The Microsoft CEO profile was basically three thousand words of cotton candy she’d pre-sold to The Wall Street Journal.
She had a litigation follow-up to her July piece about a hardware startup that had gone bust because the battery in their signature product had a tendency to explode, but she wasn’t breaking any new ground there.
She was doing preliminary reporting on several stories, including one about a social company that had basically been bought for parts, and another on OpenAI’s big spend on data centers, plus a dozen other ideas on her tickler list that she’d barely started thinking about.
It was true that you never knew where a story might take you, but as far as she could tell, none of these seemed likely to result in a scoop that would be worth killing over.
She’d barely even considered the whistleblower who’d failed to show for today’s meeting.
A successful journalist was a magnet for unsolicited and anonymous tipsters.
Mostly they were offering a thousand varieties of useless crap.
But there were enough gold nuggets in the steaming pile to make it worth sorting through occasionally.
Of the latest batch, the format of the recording the whistleblower had sent was sufficiently unusual to get her interest. Except Ellie had clomped downstairs demanding her dinner before KT had a chance to listen to it.
The only story that didn’t fit that same pattern was a tip she’d gotten about something called Gun Club.
She’d asked around for a few months, called every source she had, but came up with nothing.
Which in itself was a little strange, because tech was awash in strange drugs, biohacking fads, and bizarre political ideas, not to mention actual orgies at some of the fringier conferences.
There had to be at least a few tech bros who’d discovered the joys of firearms.
In fact, the lack of response was interesting enough that, for the last few months, whenever she was working another story, she’d drop in a question at the end of the interview: Have you ever heard of something called Gun Club?
The funny thing was, aside from a straight no, the most common answer was: Is that like Fight Club?
Making it evident that her interview subjects knew even less about it than she did.
But recently, she’d had three guys clam up and look very guilty about something, which, to KT’s well-honed reportorial senses, was a signal to dig deeper.
But because of her current workload, she hadn’t had time to start.
Currently, that story was going exactly nowhere.
Anyway, even if she did know what story to step away from, she couldn’t help hearing the growly, critical voice of her very first editor, Jim Higgins, who had burrowed deeply inside her reporter’s psyche. What kind of journalist would let some crank scare her off a story?
A live journalist, she told herself. With a daughter, safe from harm. But still. It rankled.
Her watch pinged with a new reminder that, with the current traffic, she should leave now to pick up Ellie.
She scanned behind her again. Nobody in the coffee shop was paying the slightest attention to her.
She turned to look through the glass door, flecked with droplets of wind-driven rain.
She didn’t see anyone out there, standing in the wet.
She didn’t see the gray car, either. Somehow, though, the prickle between her shoulder blades had gotten worse.
It didn’t matter. It was time to go. Ellie needed her. And frankly, KT needed Ellie in the passenger seat beside her, chattering blithely about whatever teenage drama had happened at school that day.
She told herself that the letter writer would surely give her more than six hours before he did something. Wouldn’t he?
She pushed open the door and headed for her car.
—
The rain came down around her, rattling on the skin of her orange jacket. She wished she’d bought a black coat like everyone else. And a black car, or gray or white or beige. Anything but orange, her favorite color. It stood out like an emergency beacon, visible for blocks.
Confidence had always been her strength.
That and her willingness to stand out. When she’d started on the police beat, she was the only woman in a man’s game.
She’d moved to finance, again the only woman journalist of any prominence.
Then tech—more of the same. She had to be tougher, louder, more visible than the men.
Some called her a bitch, a ball-breaker.
She didn’t care. She wore orange jewelry, had orange frames for her glasses.
Orange was more than her favorite color, it was a trademark. A reminder to be bold.
Well, she wasn’t feeling so bold now.
Her orange Honda was on Western Avenue, toward the end of the next block.
She kept turning her head, not wanting anyone to walk up behind her.
It wasn’t easy in the stiff hood. She had to turn her shoulders, too, so walking was a little awkward.
She’d never been a physical person. Still, she had her keys spiked out from her fist, her laptop bag on the opposite shoulder so she could shrug it off and run if somebody grabbed the strap.
She wished she’d taken some real self-defense classes.
Too late now. Tomorrow, she’d sign up. And start jogging, swear to God.
Western Ave was busy, traffic headed north to Belltown and south toward Pike Place Market, a tourist trap even in November.
The cars were all moving, though. She crossed Lenora Street and kept walking.
Less than a block to go. She hated the hood, it made her feel blind on three sides.
And the drumbeat of raindrops blocked out all sound.
She shucked it back. Her glasses spattered with droplets, her face and neck damp.
Her hair would be a ruin. Eleanor would be merciless.
Now the rain was rolling down her forehead and into her eyes.
She swiped it away, head turning. Behind her she could hear the low rumble of a big engine.
Over her shoulder she saw a weird-looking pickup truck rolling slow.
That wasn’t good. She came to her Honda and stepped into the street at the back bumper with her keys out.
Then she saw the gray hatchback. It was parked two cars past hers, at a hydrant.
There was a man inside. He opened the door, swung his legs out into the street, and began to rise to his feet.
He wore a Red Sox cap and a face mask with a fanged clown printed on it.
He was staring at her, eyes awash with some emotion she couldn’t decode. He carried a gun in one hand.
Dear God, she was going to die. Ellie, what would happen to Ellie?
Behind her, the truck’s engine revved and it surged up alongside her, angling forward toward her Honda.
Then it came to a quick stop, trapping her and her car behind the pickup’s hood.
They weren’t going to kill her, she thought, they were going to kidnap her.
Take her somewhere and do something to her. She turned to run.
A man got out of the truck. He was tall and broad-shouldered in a plain black backpacker’s raincoat. He didn’t look at her, but at the gunman in the clown mask.
“Hey.” The tall man strode forward. His hands were empty. His voice cut clearly through the sound of the rain. “Hey, you in the mask. I’m talking to you.”
The gunman’s attention shifted. His eyes widened when he saw the man walking toward him.
“You don’t want to pull the trigger,” the tall man said, a car-length away and closing. “Trust me, if you shoot somebody, it’ll screw up your whole life. I should know, I’ve killed a whole bunch of people.”
The gunman flinched and backed up into the vee of the hatchback’s open door, lurching slightly as his calves hit the bottom of the doorframe. KT saw he was wearing ratty old sneakers with duct tape wrapping one toe box.
The pistol was pointed squarely at the tall man now. Still, he kept moving closer, kept talking to the man in the mask. “Give me the gun, buddy. This doesn’t have to go bad. What would your mom say if you killed someone? Or your sister? Or your grandmother?”
The gunman blinked rapidly below the brim of the Red Sox cap. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. The gun began to drift off target. The tall man slowed, closing in. His face was kind, sympathetic. “It’s okay, buddy. Whatever’s going on, I can help.”
The gunman’s legs collapsed and he fell into the driver’s seat, pulling his legs in after him. The tall man reached for the slamming door but had to snatch his hand back to keep his fingers from getting smashed. The hatchback was still running. The gunman jammed it into gear and hit the gas.
The tall man jumped back to avoid getting knocked over. The gray hatchback leapt into traffic, lurched into the oncoming lane followed by a chorus of horns, and vanished into the rain. The tall man watched him go.
Startled into motion, KT pulled open her own door, thinking that she needed to get away from this whole thing, but the angled truck effectively blocked her into the parking spot.
The tall man turned back toward her and walked around the hood of his truck. “Are you all right? Sorry that didn’t go exactly as planned.”
She still had her keys spiked in her fist. “What were you going to do?”
“Take away his gun.” He gave her a wolfish grin, his eyes lit up like he was having fun. “Put him on the ground and call the cops.”
She didn’t understand. “You’re not with the police? Who the hell are you?”
“Sorry,” he said again, extending his hand. “My name’s Peter Ash. June Cassidy’s friend? She asked me to stop by. I was in the neighborhood.”