Chapter 257

Cody Bowman.

That was the name of the man behind the attempted bombing at the Elm Hotel. He was sixty-eight years old, a man who had lived his entire life in poverty. Born in the backcountry mountains of Texas, he had grown up like many young men in small towns with no way to make a living—haunted by the urge to escape the place and stirred by patriotism, he wrote his name on a recruitment ad just before his high school graduation.

It was the height of the Vietnam War. After only a few weeks of military training, he was sent straight to the battlefield. During his five years of service, he committed shameful acts he could never boast about, but on the whole he was considered a capable soldier—at least until the day he nearly died from shrapnel hurled by an enemy grenade.

Badly injured, he returned to America, married his high school sweetheart, and moved to Baggers City. He raised three children, working any job he could get—postal clerk, night security guard, janitor—never turning anything down despite the miserable pay. But he was a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and his mounting stress found its outlet in violence toward his wife.

Unable to endure it anymore, his wife demanded a divorce. She took two of their children with her, leaving behind only the eldest, the one who most resembled his father. That son, abandoned by his mother, never overcame the wound. He spun out of control, constantly caught up in violent incidents, living as though his life were always dangling on a tightrope. And, as if fate had already foretold it, he met an early death.

The man who killed Cody Bowman’s son was a congressman’s nephew. His claim that he had not intended to kill was accepted; he received a mere three-year sentence and was paroled after only one year for good behavior.

Crushed by grief and rage, Cody turned to alcohol. His neighbors, pitying him, urged him to join addiction recovery meetings. Unexpectedly, he attended faithfully and began to change—because he wanted out of the wreckage of his life.

Through steady participation, he realized his alcoholism was bound to the unresolved trauma of comrades lost in Vietnam and the son he had buried far too early. So he began not only addiction recovery, but also group sessions for mourning and loss. The circle of those who had overcome grief—the so-called “Those Who Overcame.”

“That Cody Bowman tried to commit a terror attack... Well, I can believe it,” Anna said, remembering the cranky, ill-tempered man.

“Every time I saw him, I thought: I should never become someone like that. Someone who flaunts their grief violently, who can’t empathize with anyone else’s feelings, yet insists they’re the most miserable person in the world. People like that are the ones who end up on the news.”

That world of yours is terrifying—but fascinating, came Daniel’s voice through the speakerphone.

Anna burst out laughing.

“That’s Baggers City for you. The strangest, most horrifying things happen here.”

Yeah. Way too strange. I still can’t believe the story about genetic manipulation creating a new kind of humanity called alphas. Honestly, I’d sooner believe aliens were hiding their identity and living among us than that.

Listening to his voice, Anna laughed again—thinking about how long it had been since she had truly laughed in conversation with someone else.

She had dialed the number saved on the prepaid phone Baekgyeong left behind and gotten through to Daniel, Baekgyeong’s assistant. Anna told him everything she had gone through, leaving nothing out: Baekgyeong and Lewis becoming alphas, the business with Isaac. She didn’t say outright that Siron had become an omega, but she did tell him in detail that Siron had something the alphas desperately needed.

Of course, at first Daniel didn’t believe her. He even treated her like a crazy woman. But after cross-checking it with information he had indirectly gathered from his own contact with Baekgyeong, he began to accept at least part of what she was saying.

I traced the IP address of the account that logged in recently with Kelly Welch’s ID. It wasn’t hard.

The night before, Anna had asked Daniel whether anything useful could be dug up from the chat messages Kelly Welch had sent.

“You can get an IP address just from knowing the ID?”

If the chat runs on a peer-to-peer system, it’s easy to grab IP info. By the way, Anna, don’t ever use PeopleBook Messenger again. Its security is garbage. If whoever kidnapped Kelly Welch noticed those chats, then your IP probably got exposed too.

Anna suddenly thought of Jackson Cliff. When she had shown him Kelly’s photo and asked if he had seen her, he had asked a peculiar question.

“How did she reach out for help? Phone call? Cell phone message?”

Why would Jackson—who wasn’t even police—be curious about what method a missing person used to make contact? Anna had found the question strange. Without even realizing it, she lied. In truth, Kelly had contacted her through PeopleBook Messenger, but she told him it had been a phone call.

Maybe he was just offering advice. Don’t get paranoid, she told herself, pushing the faint spark of suspicion to the back of her mind. Then she asked Daniel:

“What can you really find out from an IP?”

Daniel answered calmly.

It’s not as amazing as people think. Basically which city it was accessed from, what type of IP it is, and which internet service provider was used. From Kelly Welch’s IP, I learned it was accessed in Baggers City, Hellsota State. It’s a static IP, registered as a corporate line, and the ISP is AC&T.

“That’s not exactly groundbreaking.”

It would be if you had a warrant. You’re police, right? Give the provider the IP and they’ll hand over subscriber details. You’d know in no time exactly where she sent her ‘Please help me, I’m trapped’ message from.

“That’s impossible. Like I told you, my hands are tied. So let’s move to the next step. You’ll just have to hack AC&T, the ISP.”

Daniel gave a derisive snort.

No way. Impossible. Their security’s tighter than a national defense facility.

“When Baekgyeong was kidnapped, you hacked the airline’s Wi-Fi provider.”

That was a tiny mid-tier company with fewer than thirty employees. AC&T is a whole different beast—a telecom giant with defense contracts. Anna, I’m serious. If you don’t think you can solve this, hand the case over to another cop. Or give the data to Kelly’s family. Otherwise...”

Daniel trailed off, hesitating. After a long pause, he continued in a cautious, uncertain voice.

Otherwise, buy ransomware tools off the dark web.

On a quiet weekend morning, Malcolm Knox had left for work and still hadn’t returned even past noon. The endless wait was suffocatingly dull. During that time, Baekgyeong changed out the bottled water and cleaned the soiled pee pads for the chihuahua that liked everything spotless. Not by choice—this clever little mutt had been following him around, demanding chores.

It didn’t feel like he was holding the dog as leverage to blackmail its owner, but as though he’d been hired to care for a decrepit old thing.

“Shut up already. No walk!”

The elderly chihuahua barked at him insistently, standing beneath the leash hung by the front door. Trying to ransack the house in the warden’s absence for anything useful, Baekgyeong groaned at the racket and made his way into the most tucked-away room on the first floor.

The children’s belongings—left behind after they moved out—had been piled there. Baekgyeong pulled down every box from the shelves, turning one upside down on the bed. The name “David” was scrawled on it.

“You know, dumping stuff on the bed? Nobody would like that. Dust, hair, everything.”

“So what. Americans wear shoes on the bed.”

“That’s true... but still. Anyway, I doubt we’ll find Gezar’s interview materials in here.”

“You never know. We might find something interesting about Malcolm.”

The box Baekgyeong had dumped out was full of odds and ends: Bible camp participation slips, Christmas cards, dried watercolor paints, middle school dance photos, a worn Bible, spare car keys. The Knox family didn’t seem to have much talent for throwing things away.

“They had three kids, right?”

“Yeah. Eldest a daughter, the other two sons,” Siron replied flatly.

Another box of David’s held a stash of family photos. One, taken in 1999, showed the Knox couple still young, their eldest daughter in her mid-twenties, and two boys in their teens.

The daughter had her mother’s Asian features; the two younger sons were clearly the children of Malcolm, mixed-race with Black heritage. Siron shoved David’s things back into the box. He checked the rest of the boxes pulled from the shelves, but they were just more junk he would have tossed out himself—everything except maybe the photographs.

“Maybe we should stop? If Malcolm sees this mess—”

Before Siron could finish, Baekgyeong upended a new box onto the bed. This one he had dragged out from beneath it, covered in dust.