Jake left, rage and adrenaline coursing through him. Of the astonishing things he’d just said to a complete stranger in his place of business, approximately 100 percent had been unplanned, though he’d certainly had all the relevant facts at his disposal for days. Pickens’s moral failings, along with those of his fraternity brothers, had been delineated in no fewer than four articles in the Duke student paper, complete with the names and classes of all involved. The sticky situation with his client’s nineteen-year-old daughter (legal, but gross) had played out over Facebook, courtesy of the girl and her mother, and the DUIs had come right up in a basic internet search. (They really ought to have been expunged, somehow, Jake thought. Maybe he wasn’t all that good an attorney.)
He hadn’t planned to speak of Evan Parker’s death at all, let alone as anything but an accidentally self-administered overdose, and as for the legal jeopardy Pickens might face as a result of crimes his client had theoretically committed in Vermont, he knew he was on shaky ground. Personally, Jake had no idea what would happen if he walked into the local Rutland police station with his concerns about a five-year-old drug overdose, but he had to assume that it wouldn’t be taken all that seriously, and it was highly unlikely that the state of Vermont would send investigators to West Rutland, let alone to Athens, Georgia. He strongly suspected, moreover, that Arthur Pickens had little to fear from an official investigation, and his client not much more, but it had been satisfying beyond belief to utter the words “Yankee prison” in that office, and the fury he’d felt back there only seemed to be coalescing with every step he took.
He was actually stunned by what had just happened between himself and Pickens, and sort of grateful that he hadn’t had the chance to consider and temper his response before he’d reacted. It wasn’t as if he’d been especially optimistic when he’d entered the lawyer’s office, but he hadn’t expected to be blocked before he could even get his first question out. He thought he’d feel the guy out, maybe suggest that he was interested in hiring an attorney, and when asked for details about his complaint he would describe TalentedTom’s activities and work his way around to revealing the name Rose Parker. Then, if Pickens declined to give him a means of contacting his client, he would leave, perhaps with some form of the message he’d managed to deliver, albeit not at quite so high a pitch. For months, he now realized, ever since that day in the car to the Seattle airport where he’d read the first of those terrifying dispatches, he’d been in a defensive posture, bracing for the next communication while hoping, against all logic, that it would never come. That had taken a lot out of him and now, for the first time, he was feeling the sheer rage he’d managed to accrue over that same period, the deep resentment against this person who felt it her business and her right to harry and persecute him, just because he’d found a story and crafted it into a fine and compelling narrative, precisely as writers had always done! There had been something about that guy, though, with his red face and his dyed hair and his shelf of law books and his preemptive stonewall. Something that grabbed Jake by the throat and made him speak in a language he might have learned from TalentedTom herself. No, these people were not going to fuck with him any longer. Or if they did, he was going to fuck with them right back.
By now he had turned onto West Hancock Street and was drawing closer to the address he’d first discovered at the Rutland Free Library. Only a little over a week had passed since he’d naturally dismissed that Rose Parker of Athens, Georgia, as irrelevant to the unfolding saga of Evan Parker and his avenging angel. Now the address, an apartment complex called Athena Gardens on Dearing Street, was his best remaining hope of finding a connection to wherever she was now, not that he was naïve enough to expect a forwarding address or any connection at all to a current resident. In a university town like Athens, the passage of six years meant a complete turnover of the undergraduates in the town’s many apartment complexes, but he supposed it might still be possible to find someone who recalled this particular person: a description, a memory, anything that might bring him closer to finding her.
