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whatever

Leah’s built her gaming cave under her loft bed, so as soon as we’re in her room, I lean against the ladder while she sits on a pile of plushies and points at the screen.

“See?” she says. “You catch the shadow Pokémon, and then you have to purify them.”

I pull a pair of paper clips out of my jacket pocket and set about unbending them. I figured I’d have to use them either way, considering that Warren Hanover never lets the office key out of his sight, but I’d hoped Alyssa would at least stand guard to make sure her dad didn’t come home while I worked. Guess not.

“I thought you couldn’t take Pokémon that belong to someone else,” I say.

“This game is different.”

“Huh.”

I never talked about Leah with my therapists—not the trauma therapists I was sent to after Dad’s trial, not the court-mandated ones like Dr. Reich and Dr. Lý after my aggravated battery charge. It always felt too easy to point my finger at her and then myself. See, I didn’t want to say, I’m not like that anymore, I swear. It’d be pathetic. Beneath me to resort to that for a crumb of neurotypical validation.

But even though we have the same diagnosis, there’s no solidarity here. She’s just Alyssa’s little sister.

So I don’t feel too bad about this.

I use the hard edge of the ladder to bend the end of the makeshift lockpick into shape, then slip my wallet out of my jacket pocket. “Hey, Leah. Can you do me a favor?”

Leah says, “I’m playing my game.”

“You don’t even have to get up.”

“No.”

“I’ll pay you.”

That gets her attention. “How much?”

I make a show of pulling every bill out of my wallet and folding them into a neat bankroll. “Two hundred bucks. If Alyssa asks, I was hanging out with you the entire time she was doing dishes.”

With the jaunty battle music of her game playing in the background, Leah eyes me suspiciously. Probably doing the math in her head. That’s got to be at least a couple video games.

She sticks out her hand for the money.

“Pleasure doing business with you,” I say, and place the bankroll right in her palm before walking out of her room.

Warren Hanover’s office sits in a place of honor at the far end of the second floor, overlooking the Navy Yard neighborhood with all its identical rowhouses on the long, dark street. Down the stairs, I hear Alyssa scrubbing browned Alfredo sauce out of a pan as I kneel by the door, adjusting the strategic bends in my paper clips. This is a better lock than the cheap shit on the basement liquor cabinet, but the pins give up eventually, as they always do, and I’m in.

I’m not sure what I’m expecting, walking into Warren Hanover’s office. I step onto the plush carpet and ease the door halfway shut behind me—not all the way, though, because I don’t know this lock. The office has the potential to be classy. A handsome mahogany-and-navy color scheme. A big, expensive desk dominating the floor space with display cabinets all along the back wall, full of framed photographs from Warren’s time on the force. Complete with a nice view of the neighborhood beyond the window. It should be nice.

But in reality, it’s a complete wreck. A wedding portrait sits on the floor, leaning crookedly against the wall. Three liquor glasses sprawl between piles of papers, one with some amber liquid still in it. (Everyone I know has a drinking problem; my father tends to have that effect on people.) A stack of printed-out emails balances on top of an ancient laptop.

Jesus. This is a disaster.

I grab a handful of items from the desk, leafing through them with a barely suppressed sneer: Credit card offers. Mortgage statements. A half-finished, handwritten letter to his ex-wife. A laminated newspaper article: BODY FOUND IN POTOMAC RIVER: ANOTHER VICTIM OF THE DC RIPPER? Another: POLICE CHIEF WARREN HANOVER STEPS DOWN. A list of all of Dad’s identified victims, with the ones that died during Warren’s time in office highlighted.

Yeah, to be fair, if I were Alyssa, I wouldn’t want to go in here, either. Warren Hanover sitting in this room is the modern equivalent of a self-flagellating medieval monk—not exactly something anyone should have to put up with.

I pop open a desk drawer. There’s sooo much shit. Messages on official government letterheads, signed by politicians with their own Wikipedia pages, plus a copy of Leah’s Individual Education Plan, which is none of my business. I close that one and open the one underneath.

Court documents.

Labeled with the dates for Dad’s trial.

I can taste my heart in the back of my throat. This is exactly what I’m looking for. Proof that Warren Hanover’s nemesis was finally taken down, and his self-inflicted punishment for not being the one who did it.