BY FIVE THAT EVENING, Conklin and I were back at our desks in the squad room. Conklin clicked around the Internet, researching Atkinson and Vetter - and I couldn’t stop turning the pages of their novel.
I was hooked.
The drawings were stark black and white. The figures had huge eyes, and called to mind the manga style of violent borderline pornography imported from Japan. The dialogue was edgy, all-American slang punctuated by Latin sayings. And the story was actually crazy but somehow compelling.
In this book, “Pidge” was both the brains and the muscle. “Hawk” was the dreamer. They were depicted as righteous avengers, their mission to save America from what they viewed as an obscene fantasy world for the very rich. They referred to this American “piggishness” as 7th Heaven and described it as a never-ending spiral of gluttony, gratification, and waste. The Pidge-Hawk solution was to kill the rich and the greedier wannabes, to show them what real consumption was - consumption by fire.
Pidge and Hawk dressed all in black: T-shirts, jeans, riding boots, and sleek black leather waist jackets with logos of their name-birds front and back. Sparks flew from their fingertips. And their motto was “Aut vincere aut mori.
Either conquer or die.
Hawk - the boy, not the character - had done both.
My guess? They never expected any of their victims to live long enough to give away their pseudonyms.
The motives and the methods the killers used were clearly drawn in their book, but it was all disguised as make-believe. And that was making me crazy with anger. Eight real people had died because of this arrogant nonsense, and we had virtually no evidence to prove that the real-life Hawk and Pidge were their killers.
I flipped the book to the back cover, scanned the rave reviews from social critics and the high-profile bloggers. I said to Rich, “The sickest part yet? This book has been picked up by Bright Line.
Hmmm?” Rich muttered, still tapping his keyboard.
Bright Line is an indie studio,” I said. “One of the best. They’re turning this screed into a movie.
Brett Atkinson,” Rich said, “is a junior at Stanford U, majoring in English lit. Hans Vetter also goes to Stanford. He’s in the computer department. These creeps both live at home, only two blocks apart in Mountain View, a couple of miles from Stanford.
Rich turned his computer monitor around, saying, “Check out Brett Atkinson’s yearbook photo.
Brett Atkinson was Hawk, the boy Connor Campion had shot, the handsome, blond-haired boy with patrician features we’d seen in the hospital just before he died.
And now,” Rich said, “meet Pidge.
Hans Vetter was a good-looking tough, an illustrator, computer sciences major, now polishing his extracurricular activities as a serial killer.
We will get warrants,” I croaked. I cleared my throat and said, “I don’t care who I have to beg.
Rich looked as serious as I’d ever seen him.
Absolutely. No mistakes allowed.
Aut vincere aut mori,” I said.
Rich smiled, reached over the desk, and bopped my fist. I called Jacobi, and he called Chief Tracchio, who called a judge, who reportedly said, “You want an arrest warrant based on a comic book
I barely slept that night, and in the morning Rich and I went to the judge’s chambers with 7th Heaven, the crime scene photos of the Malones, the Meachams, and the Jablonskys, and the morgue photos of the Chus. I brought Connor Campion’s statement that the boys who’d come to his house with a gun and fishing line had said their names were Hawk and Pidge, and I showed the judge their yearbook photos, captioned with their real names.
By ten a.m. we had signed warrants and all the manpower we’d need.
