Page 60 of Shrapnel

Squaring up his shoulders, he knocked with confidence.

Then sighed in relief when it was Elijah who opened the door.

“Oh, Owen. Come on in.”

He had never been to the apartment before and wasn’t sure if he was disappointed at the bland, uninspired décor or if he was grateful that no severed limbs were hanging from the ceiling.

Elijah led him across the cream-colored carpet to the kitchen table. Set up for two, he hopped up onto one of the tall stools and slapped his paperwork down on the cheap table.

“Want a drink?” Elijah asked as he gestured to the fridge. When Owen said no, he joined him at the table. “What brings you by?”

Owen glanced around the small apartment, looking for a sign that Jamie was home. The silence was confirmation the gunman wasn’t. “I um…I brought some of the stuff you asked for.”

Elijah reached for the papers, taking his time to look over the printouts. “The employee records for Satex?”

“Yeah. As we thought, there’s nothing there. Everything seems to be above board and none of their employees have any red flags. A few have priors—mostly things like DUI and a couple of arrests for Marijuana possession. One guy was busted for having amini-gunin his garage. But nothing violent and no relation to White Sand Mesa.”

Elijah exhaled sharply. “What about the chemists?”

“Right,” Owen reached over and yanked out a page from the back. “This is a list of all the chemists, doctors, and anyone else I could think of who would have the educational background to create the inhalant. They’re clean, too.”

It wasn’t what Elijah wanted to hear. He tapped his fingers on the table as he perused the information Owen brought. While Elijah was distracted, he let his mind wander, looking around the small kitchen. At first, he thought it was idle curiosity, but he slowly realized he was looking for any hints of Jamie.

The thing was any of it could be Jamie. Owen didn’t know much about him. He knew he couldn’t handle his liquor, that he wrote nightmare inducing fanfiction, and that he grew up in the South. Jamie liked to joke, but his laughter was a smokescreen to hide what he was really feeling.

A box of cereal was sitting on the counter. Rather than opened at the top, it was upside down with its bottom flaps opened. Owen didn’t know why, but he just knew that it was Jamie who had burrowed into the box to get to the prize. He would bet his last paycheck that Jamie specifically bought the cereal just because it had a prize in it.

“What about the cameras?”

Owen shrugged, stuffing his hands in his hoodie pocket. “The only good footage we have is from the gas station with the homeless guys. Thanks for the warning about that by the way, I’m officially fucking traumatized.”

Elijah winced. “I’m sorry, I forgot that…. that people aren’t used to that.”

They sat in silence for a moment before Owen spoke again. “The rest of the footage is garbage.”

“Is it corrupted or…?”

“There are a thousand ways a video can be corrupted—technical glitches, codec issues, bad sectors in the storage drive, or malware in the system. Hell, even the guy who transfers the video from the camera to drive can jack it up.”

Elijah nodded like he understood.

“That being said…having a camera ateverycrime scene malfunction? I call bullshit. It’s got to be interference. Either our killer has a jammer or he’s using a virus.”

“A jammer?”

“Yeah,” Owen stood up in his chair and leaned across the wobbly table, flicking through the pages until he got to the one he wanted. He slid it out and put it on top of the stack. “They’re not legal but, you know, neither is murder so… I have some buddies on the questionably legal side of the net, they were able to hook me up with a guy who sells them.”

Elijah looked suitably impressed. “You didn’t tell me about this…”

“Despite my handsome baby-faced good looks, I am actually an adult, so no I didn’t.” Owen shot him a look that Elijah didn’t notice. “Which is just as well. It was a bust. He’s only sold a few—mostly to some Sovereign Citizen racist, bible-thumping dickwads who live in bunkers in the desert.”

They thought that living off the grid would keep them safe from the government. It might. But not from Owen. He enjoyed fucking with their security grid. A quick virus has their security alarms going off every time someone went to the outhouse.

Owen was good with computers and he was petty.Sue him.

“So the jammer is a bust?”

“Probably,” Owen admitted. “Unless the cameras are all on the same circuit, and the killer knows what they are, they wouldn’t be overly effective. A virus would be much better. And before you ask, I’m working on it.”