“Aaaaand let’s not forget that how serious stealing evidence is,” Scepter reminding them all bluntly. “We can all rag on him later, but this isn’t lifting a candybar out of a supermarket.”
“So he overcompensated,” Bang remarked off-handedly. “You rock, Bo.”
Scepter, annoyed, sighed more than a little theatrically. “Just to bring you pricks up to speed, a pedophilia case was swept under the carpet, and Bo stole files to keep it alive. Not only did he go against orders of the SFPD to drop it, he has put himself squarely in the sights of whomever gave the order.”
“You don’t think they are in the SFPD, do you?” Mirrorball asked.
“Who knows? Even if they aren’t, they still have the ability to boss the police around and get away with it. Somebody called somebody and poof! There goes the investigation,” Orbis replied. “I can’t even show probable cause, must less make an arrest, without evidence.”
“Any way you could arrest ‘em all and then we tell Vagabond?” Paine asked.
Orbis glared at him, annoyed.
“There is evidence,” Scepter replied. “There is that photo, plus the others you have.”
“Which would vanish as soon as I turned them in,” Orbis replied. “Even if I dumped them on a newspaper, everybody would just deny everything. Somebody would call or lean on somebody and it would never be reported. And say it actually made it to trial. Can you honestly see Vagabond on a witness stand?”
“Like he could hold it together for a trial,” Bang said, seeing where it was going. “Any jury will see he’s a raving lunatic and think he made it all up.”
“And starting an investigation on the photos I have is iffy. The photo of Vagabond is twenty years old,” ROM added. “Nobody looks exactly like an age-progressed photo.”
“We are sure that photo is of Vagabond, right?” Paine asked.
ROM glared at him. “You think I made this shit up?”
“No,” Paine said, well aware how dangerous it was to question ROM on her abilities. “Maybe that photo really is the Metz kid. We don’t know, not really, if the Metz kid is Vagabond. I’ve seen some pretty good look-alikes in my time.”
“Oh, Gawd, not square one again,” Bang muttered.
Orbis looked at the photo. “Let’s just assume that it is. For now. With the all the confessions and shit destroyed, and the informant dead, there is no way the SFPD, or even the FBI, could start up a credible investigation,” Orbis sighed. “And even if they could, that takes months or even years before anything gets in front of a jury.”
“So we either do nothing,” Paine summed up, “Or unleash the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse.”
“And sell tickets,” Bang added. He hadn’t budged from letting all hell break loose. And wasn’t going to. Always the most confrontational of them all, everyone knew when Bang dug in his heels. This was the man the man that held a press conference to tell his family to “suck his throbbing, fat, gay cock” after they cut him off when he came out of the closet. A true Punk, unapologetic, and defiant, Bang sailed headlong into everything he did…and did not like being beholden to anyone else. The sooner Vagabond was out of his life, however it was done, the better.
“Correction,” ROM said, annoyed, “’Or unleash the fifth horseman of the Apocalypse on Tug-of-War.”
Bang set his jaw. “Right, right…”
“I suppose we couldn’t first extract a promise for him not to kill—“ Tug-of-War began, and then shut up when six pairs of eyes turned to him, ridiculously wide. “…just putting it out there. Jeez…”
“Oh, shit.” The others looked up at the expletive. It was Mirrorball. While the debate raged, he had wandered off and set himself up in front of Scepter’s computer.
“Whatcha looking for, babe?” Bang asked, draping his arms on Mirrorball’s shoulders.
“The photo of this child. It looks familiar.”
Bang blinked. “It does? You’ve seen it before?”
“No, no, no” Mirrorball said hastily. “The style of bed the boy is on. I’ve seen it before.”
Bang picked up the photo. They were so focused on the child they didn’t pay any attention to the background. Not that there was much of one. Just the headboard of a bed. A rather elaborate one, carved, stained a rich, warm chocolate brown. Victorian, maybe. Some lace was hanging down off the side. A canopy bed? “You know the bed? You been on it?”
“So not the time!”
“OK, OK. What’s the deal with the bed?”
“Is it that bed?”
Now the others were curious and huddled around Mirrorball, his face eerily blue from the glow of the computer screen.
Bang looked at the photo on the screen, then the photo, then back again. He scowled. “Um. Yeah. Could be, actually. Where’s the bed?”
Mirrorball stared straight ahead at the screen. “In the Lincoln Bedroom.”
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