Chapter 168

Charles was waiting inside the apartment when I got home. David was busy on his laptop beside him.

Charles jumped up and rushed to meet us at the door. “Please tell me you found something,” he said. “My stock is diving like crazy. It’s costing us millions to be continuously embroiled in this supposed scandal. I’ve been getting phone calls from my family, but I have no reassurances to offer anyone.”

“We got the test results,” I said. “There were definitely traces of tranquilizers in both our systems. The same type. So, whoever did it to one of us did it to both of us.”

“And is there any way that anyone could say you did that to yourselves?” he asked.

A horrified zip of electricity ramped through my brain. I hadn’t thought about that.

“They can try,” Theo said, “but they’re not going to have much success. As part of my job, I know at least a little about what’s out there. And this isn’t the sort of tranquilizer that one can just pick up at the pharmacy. This one requires a doctor’s prescription. And it’s on the list of controlled substances. So anybody dealing it is going to be treated as a drug dealer.”

“That doesn’t mean that we can’t get it,” I protested.

He grinned at me. “For most people, that might be an issue, but not for you. You have to remember that the government is paying for your protection through both David and me. This means that in order for you to have gone out and gotten drugs, I would have had to have failed at my job. And then the city would have failed. There’s a whole set of checks and balances there, and that makes it extremely difficult for you to go out and find a dealer to get illicit drugs.”

“If you’re sure,” I said hesitantly.

“Those drugs are also difficult to come by if you don’t have a medical license. The odds of you being able to get them and then drug me with them are astronomical. Besides, we drugged ourselves, then posed ourselves like that so that we’d get caught and slandered on the internet and in the news?”

“I guess that’s pretty far-fetched,” Charles agreed.

“And we have to get drug tested on a regular basis for work,” David added. “It’s not that doing this to yourselves is completely impossible. It’s just that it’s highly improbable.”

“Given that you’ve just created such a huge stir within the social order,” Theo continued, “it’s far more likely that somebody drugged us. I think if you’re trying to sell your side of the story to just about anybody. That’s the story that they’re going to believe first.”

He shrugged. “Anyway, it’s as good as we’re gonna get until we can prove who did this to us.”

“Without iron-clad proof, you could say just about anything on the planet is subjective,” I countered, playing the devil’s advocate.

“And how many times do you catch the murderer holding the murder weapon over the body and spilling the words, “I did it,” on camera?” Theo threw back. “Iron-clad proof is hard to come by.”

“I think I need some time to process all of this,” I said.

I shot Charles a meaningful look so he would understand I wanted to go into the other room and work on the dark web.

He leaned in, kissing my forehead. “Why don’t you go take a rest? The guards and I will stay out here and keep working on trying to find a way to the bottom of this. There’s got to be some other proof condemning Anthony. If we can get enough instances where he has spread lies…”

He stopped himself, making a sour face, and then continued. “…or at least if we can catch him spreading stories before he has the whole truth. If you want to assume that he’s innocent,” he said sarcastically. “Then I think we can convince people that, at the very least, Anthony is guilty of negligence.”

“And if we prove that, then we show it’s likely that you’re innocent of any wrongdoing, and therefore, by association, I’m not either. But the first thing we need to do is get you out of the media and report the fact that you are the victim, not a liability or dishonest.”

Charles rubbed tiredly at his face. “Actually, I think I’ll let the guards work on Anthony Bellweather, and I’m going to start making business phone calls for the press release. Do you mind if I interrupt your rest when we’re ready for you to make a public statement?”

I nodded. “As long as you can give me about fifteen minutes to make myself presentable.”

I turned and headed into the bedroom, shutting and locking the door behind me. I dug out my secret laptop, opened it up, and sat down, determined to get to the bottom of this fiasco.

I wanted to see what the dark web had to say about everything. So that’s the first place that I went. The message boards there would report this. What I found was a mix of support that brought tears to my eyes with people calling me their hero, and positively sure that this had to be a smear campaign just because I told the truth about the elected officials and the abusive supervisors. There were, of course, a handful of people voicing their dissent, saying that they knew I was corrupt and such.

But I tried very hard not to let such opinions bother me. After all, it didn’t matter what I reported. I wasn’t going to please everyone all the time. A reporter has to be ready for critical views of themselves.

When I found a thread that was likely looking, I logged on to that one. It was a thread where somebody made a comment, “How could you trust anything written by Anthony Bellweather?”

I posted to the thread, asking people who had been wronged by Anthony to come forward and let me know that I needed to get to the bottom of this.

Within minutes, my computer binged with a reply. Someone wrote in and asked if that meant that everything they’d read about me this morning was a setup and if I was confirming it.

I typed back that I was going to be making a public statement soon. And to wait for it. But in the meantime, I needed to know who out there had been the victim of a vendetta in the press led by Anthony Bellweather.

Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long for responses to come pouring in. My stomach fluttered with excitement. If I compiled these and posted them on the black web the same way that I had posted about the other corruption, it would be more than enough to get the ball rolling and expose Anthony Bellweather and possibly even spook someone if they were behind him, pulling the strings.

I sorted all of the stories into folders, victim after victim coming forward and talking about how an article by Anthony Bellweather had ruined one part of their life or another, costing them jobs, family members, relationships, you name it.

I was in the midst of sitting on the bed trying to put back together pieces of myself that had crumbled into disappointment as my journalism idol burned before my eyes when someone knocked on the door. I snapped the laptop shut and shoved it under the pillow, rumpling my hair on the way to the door so that it would look like I had been lying down and resting.

When I opened it, it was just Charles. He came in and shut the door behind him. “You’re going to go live in 45 minutes via an online interview. You’ll be broadcast on every station controlled by Rafe Media, and simultaneously, all of my press outlets will run a story on their website and post it on their social media. In forty-five minutes, this is all going to blow up.”

He smoothed the hand across my hair and leaned over, kissing my ear. “In the meantime, how about I help take your mind off of things so that when you get there, you’re relaxed?”