Nun But The Brave (A Giulia Driscoll Mystery Book 3) (8 page)

Sixteen

Giulia joined Sidney in the main office. “The deadbeat dad sting worked?”

Zane paced the length of the narrow wood floor. “Textbook, Ms. D. Eight of us showed up to play poker. Jack and beer flowed. Ridiculous amounts of money changed hands. When I won a big pot, which may or may not have had something to do with counting cards, I offered to buy pizza. I called the cops who were waiting to pounce, then I told the guys thirty minutes to food. At minute twenty-eight, I went to the bathroom. At minute thirty-one, the doorbell rang. I yelled through the bathroom door to our deadbeat dad to take the money out of my winnings. One of his buddies let loose a nasty laugh and somebody must have elbowed him, because he got quiet too fast. Next thing I heard was a whole lot of yelling and cursing. The card table got knocked over. A couple of quarters rolled under the bathroom door. The rest of the poker gang ran out the back and I came back into the living room. The guys had taken some of the money and our handcuffed deadbeat dad was getting his rights read to him. I took my winnings, of which I knew the exact amount. The cops dragged him away and I returned home to sleep the sleep of the conqueror.” He finally stopped for breath in front of Giulia. “Ms. D., I love my job.”

Sidney applauded. Giulia sketched an actor’s bow. “Zane, that was epic. Now go write it up so his wife and four children get every cent he owes them.”

She went back to her desk and called Diane for the make, model, and license plate of Joanne’s car.

“It’s missing too,” Diane said. “At least the cops in Penn Hills still haven’t found it.”

“One more thing. Did Joanne ever talk to you about Doomsday Preppers?”

Diane said after a moment, “I forgot about that. Her first long-term guy after college was a major Prepper. He got Jo hooked on it for a while. When they split, she still talked about going off grid sometimes. You know, if she could save enough money or hit it big enough at the casino to get herself set up. She tried to talk me into going in on it with her, but I have no patience with that end of the world stuff.” The sound of car horns cut her off. “Quit shoving mascara on your eyelashes at rush hour, idiot! Sorry, Ms. Driscoll. Nobody knows how to drive anymore. So, yeah, doomsdayers. If the bombs drop, I’m driving to Ground Zero. No reason to hang around without indoor plumbing and limeades from Sonic, that’s what I say.” More horns, but Diane kept on topic. “The last time Joanne got dumped, she swore she was going to find a decent guy if she had to register on every dating site around.”

“By any chance, would you have her logins?”

“Nope. She kept parts of her sex life to herself. I’m pulling into my work parking lot now. Give me a few minutes and I’ll send you every username I know she rotated through. Can’t help you with passwords, though.”

When Diane hung up, Giulia called Frank. “Oh, good, I didn’t wake you. Could you log in to your database and check on an abandoned car? My client’s sister said the police never located it.” She gave him the license plate number.

Frank’s tired voice said, “I love your unexpected romantic requests. Just a sec.”

She heard him typing and the chime of a finished search. “It’s in one of the Pittsburgh impound lots. Found three weeks ago behind a grade school.”

“Rats.”

Frank laughed. “Such language.”

She made a face at the phone. “Thank you and go to bed.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The email from Diane arrived as she growled at the phone, “Don’t call me ma’am.”

Without preamble, it listed seven similar usernames and a corresponding list of dating sites with the largest TV advertising presence.

Giulia wilted. Not for the first time, she wished cloning technology existed, because this case needed two or three Giulias. But wait…She pulled the stacks of Joanne’s bills toward her. Right. She knew which three sites to search. Not so intimidating after all. She closed the email for now and continued with her planned research.

This time from the box of Joanne’s papers Giulia took every single receipt and sorted them based on information from Chef Eddie and Cat Lady Marjorie. In a short time, she had a definite trail. Army-Navy stores. The water purifier. Camping gear that didn’t require batteries or electricity. In addition to the heirloom seeds, disease-resistant wheat and barley. A book on substituting honey for sugar in recipes. Another on the spiritual connection of twins. A third about surgically separated conjoined twins.

She stood and straightened her back. Nine thirty. Time for tea. Since little Zlatan was forcing her to curb her caffeine intake, she’d been driven to herbal tea. So far every flavor was a penance, albeit a much different penance than the ones she’d received after confession in her convent days. Perspective was everything now that she didn’t have to scrub the convent kitchen with a toothbrush because she’d neglected one of the many sets of daily prayers.

She sipped the next flavor in her sampler: mango ginger.

Not worth taking a second sip. Her whole body longed for another tall French roast with cinnamon syrup.

Sidney and Zane were both typing when she took the cup to the bathroom sink to dump its contents.

“Which tea failed today?” Sidney said.

“Mango ginger.” Giulia came to the bathroom door, drying the cup. “This child owes me so much coffee.”

Zane laughed. “My sister said the same thing for both her pregnancies, but for her it was cheeseburgers.”

Giulia swallowed. The thought of lovely chargrilled red meat wasn’t so lovely at this hour of the morning. “May I hijack both of you for a few minutes?”

“I’m almost finished with the deadbeat dad report,” Zane said. “Do you want me to stop?”

“No. That comes first. Sidney, could you look up news stories involving twins? Go back a year from February and grab everything. I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for.”

Giulia dived into the Doomsday Prepper site. Once past the first flabbergasted moments, she studied the site like a lesson. The model standing next to the gigantic water filtration tank like it was a game show prize made her giggle. She screencapped one of the lists of dried and canned foods to hoard. She and Frank hadn’t gotten around to stocking their cellar in case of a crazy winter storm.

She couldn’t decide which page was the most extreme. How to survive a volcano, with the first piece of advice: “Move away.” Tactical discussion points, with a link to “tactical bacon” which was an actual product available for purchase on Amazon. She appreciated the sales trick of the glamorous model posing in tactical bug out wear.

But then there was the Tactical Scarf tutorial. Bug out bags—knapsacks or duffel bags with essential supplies for when the bombs drop and you have to get to your bunker in a hurry. First aid, energy food, water purifier tablets…the list could apply to an extended hike in an area without cell phone reception. Conscientious Preppers made a bug out bag for their dog too, though none of the bags offered for purchase were intended for yappy little dogs.

Next, the advice to buy several hundred sandbags to keep both water and bullets out. An article explaining why not to dress the whole family in camouflage when you live in the ’burbs: If your family looks like the only prepared family on the block, your neighbors will reenact the Electromagnetic Pulse version of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.” Apparently EMP and limited nuclear war were duking it out for the most likely way humanity would destroy itself.

When she clicked the “Unique Survival Tools” page, she knew she had a clear winner.

“Trivia, guys: Do you know the four ways tampons can be used as a survival tool for the zombie apocalypse?”

Silence. Even the typing stopped. Then Zane’s voice with a hitch in it: “Is this a test?”

Sidney said, “Stop a bloody nose.”

Giulia said, “Really? How? Oh, wait.”

“One of Olivier’s brothers referees high school soccer. In one girls’ game two of the players clocked heads and they both got bloody noses. Their coaches each took a tampon from their first-aid kits and the girls stuck them up the bleeding nostril.”

Zane’s voice got very small. “I feel the need for a mental health day.”

Still at her desk, Giulia said, “You knew the risks when you took a job in an office with two women.”

Typing resumed. Giulia checked her notes and the connection fell into place. When Joanne started to change in February and on through March, the advice on the Prepper site about how to survive the coming doom matched it all. Acquire self-sufficiency, sharpen your hunting and cooking skills, join a tight-knit community, and be part of a chosen group.

“It’s a cult.” Giulia blew out a breath. She knew cults. “This isn’t good.”

Zane knocked on the doorframe. “Report finished and ready for your stamp of approval. Please tell me you need help with something other than feminine hygiene quizzes.”

Seventeen

Giulia squashed the temptation to list the four tampon survival tricks she’d read a few pages earlier. “I need your expertise. I have a hunch about a local Doomsday Prepper group, but there’s no footprint on the web. I don’t have anything else to go on.”

Zane rubbed his hands together. “Simon says: Hack!”

“What?”

“
Underdog
, Ms. D. The old cartoons from the sixties. Simon Bar Sinister is Underdog’s nemesis. We’ve been watching the shows after gaming nights and they’re awesome.”

“Whatever works. Thanks.”

Sidney said from her desk, “I’ve got nothing significant. Do you want me to put the Workers’ Comp investigation on hold and keep going?”

“No. Now that Zane’s saving my bacon on the Prepper search, I’ll take over the twin hunt.”

“Emailing you what I came up with so far. I stopped at Memorial Day.”

Giulia opened the Word doc. So much for her expectations of quirky or feel-good stories about twins. Didn’t newspapers need filler anymore? How could Buzzfeed let her down like this?

But at Christmas, Buzzfeed came through with a heartwarming story about separated at birth twins reconnecting at a
Messiah
sing-along. Then a lot more nothing until she adjusted the search parameters and found a college research call for adult twins back in September.

A rabbit trail at last. She opened parallel search windows and ran identical searches on both names. A cartload of results filled the windows: the research abstract. Articles on the psychological makeup of twins. Twitter posts from both men in the article. Reunion photos on Instagram. A burgeoning side research trail on a mythology Giulia was unfamiliar with. She bookmarked the trail as Zane knocked on her doorframe.

“I found something, but it’s from
The Scoop
.”

Giulia groaned. “That show is punishment for sins I don’t remember committing.” She typed in the show’s web address. “What day?”

“Two months ago today. I’ll keep looking. Will there be foul language?”

Sidney laughed at the same time Giulia said, “How long have you been working here?”

“Good point.” Zane retreated.

For this episode,
The Scoop
pre-empted its usual histrionic opening. First a compilation of atomic bomb explosions followed by footage of destroyed Hiroshima. Then lingering shots of ebola victims. As the crowning touch, the Twin Towers collapsing on 9/11.

“Kanning,” Giulia said to her monitor, “you are a festering sore on the cable TV landscape.”

Ken Kanning’s mellifluous voice crushed her muttered invective.

“Disaster! Doom! The end of civilization as we know it! Scoopers, today we’re introducing you to the
Alice in Wonderland
world of Doomsday Preppers.”

A shot of Kanning’s back, his head of brown hair with its perfect off-center wave bobbing as he walked into a massive department store. The camera bobbed in the opposite direction as his cameraman followed.

“Doomsday Preppers are convinced the world as we know it will end at any given moment. The Bomb. An Electromagnetic Pulse frying every circuit on the planet. The Plague.” He stopped in front of an outdoor kayak display and affected shock. “The end of the world as we know it, indeed, Scoopers. Any one of those scenarios would mean no more of
The Scoop
.”

An older couple passed him without bothering to glance at either him or the camera. A twenty-something woman stopped, looked, and snapped a picture of Kanning with her cell phone.

Kanning continued. “Because
The Scoop
is dedicated to giving our viewers everything they need to know, we’re heading into the Pittsburgh REI to price out what you’ll need to survive the inevitable apocalypse.”

He headed straight for the camping section. As he held up price tags on tents, sleeping bags, cooking gear, and more, a ticker ran across the bottom of the screen with a running total.

“Your kids won’t need their college funds when civilization collapses,” Kanning said after completing his fantasy survival list. “It’s a good thing, because otherwise you’ll have to take out a second mortgage to make sure your bunker is zombie-proof.”

The show cut to the sidewalk in front of a gun store as the owner refused to let the camera inside. The ticker added prices for guns and ammunition as Kanning advised his audience to buy a few hundred sand bags to barricade their fortified house against floodwaters and bullets from hostile neighbors. Giulia made a face at the screen at the knowledge she and
The Scoop
used the same research sites.

“What’s that you say? Storage is a problem for that many sand bags? Use your garage. Cars will be obsolete once gasoline can’t be pumped because the electrical grid has failed. And if you haven’t found that special person to share the scorched earth with—” An inset appeared next to Kanning’s face. “There’s always the Doomsday Prepper dating sites.” He mimicked the iconic
Home Alone
mirror scene.

The last segment began with Kanning walking along a tall hedge made of ivy and something deep green with berries.

“We’re in the woods near Beaver Falls,” he whispered. “We don’t know who owns this property, but we’ll find out. The Keystone State’s very own homegrown Doomsday Prepper compound may lurk behind this hedge, or it may be nothing more than a family’s private campground. But true Scoopers know no one builds a fence like this unless they have something to hide.”

His finger pointed to a brown spot in the deep green leaves. He reached in with both hands and created a hole. The camera lens closed in on the hedge. A spider scuttled away to the right. The lens entered the improvised opening. The image blurred, refocused, and Giulia saw people.

Off to the far right, a man chopped wood. In the center, a woman worked a spinning wheel. Behind her, two people weeded a garden. Giulia reached for her mouse to enlarge the video. The picture went black. Then leaves and twigs slapped the lens followed by the sounds of multiple rounds being chambered into shotguns.

Kanning’s face returned in Serious Reporter Mode. “We apologize for this abrupt ending to our search, Scoopers. Four bullies grabbed us and smashed our camera lens, but not the camera. They claimed we were on private property and chased us all the way out to the road. They may think we’re intimidated, but they don’t know
The Scoop
. We won’t rest until we learn what’s really happening in those woods.”

Giulia paused the video. Was that a whole pound of pancake makeup on Kanning’s sculpted cheekbone? Why yes it was, plastered on top of a massive bruise. She tried not to smile as she rewound the video to the quick shot of the people on the inside of the hedge. One of the women in the garden resembled Joanne Philbey, but she was thinner than the photos Giulia had seen and a complex tattoo decorated her left arm.

“Zane? Sidney? Did either of you ever use a dating website?”