I Am Chosen

"Crazy idea, but it just might work"

"There's no way in hell you can go back to your place," Hollis had said shortly after they left the Coolidge Estate.

And no matter how much she had argued, Kacey had eventually been forced to concede that the old man had a point. It was obvious after Hanson had attacked Kacey at her apartment that Crowe (or whatever it was that now kind of passed as Crowe) knew where Kacey lived. Besides, there was a lot of work to be done, and time was of the essence. Too much precious time had already been wasted. Too many lives had been lost.

And so it was that Kacey found herself at Hollis' home, a little craftsman style house at the end of a cul-de-sac on Osbourne Road.

Hollis had insisted that Kacey use his study. Much to Kacey's amazement, the fossil actually owned a computer. It was old, but it was a Mac, and so Kacey was able to download her pictures of the asylum records from her phone and enlarge them on his monitor. While she did this Hollis sat at his dining room table studying the genealogy charts.

Something Kacey had noticed immediately when she had entered the house were family pictures - there were a handful inside the study. In these pictures Hollis was younger, probably by about five or so years at least, and he was standing with an attractive dark haired woman and a girl who appeared to be around thirteen, although in some of the pictures she appeared younger. Was Hollis divorced, or had something happened to his family? She had never asked... had actually just assumed he was a lonely, bitter old man.

The man in question entered the study in a T shirt and sweats, eyes puffy and red, holding two glasses with a dark liquid and a few ice cubes inside. He set one glass down on the desk and plopped into a chair opposite Kacey, far enough to the side that he could see her past the monitor.

Kacey lifted the glass, smelled it, and scrunched her face. She held it toward him and said "What is this, and will it kill me?"

"Drink it," Hollis said flatly.

Kacey sighed, shrugged and took a sip. Liquid fire slid down her throat. She shook her head and blinked rapidly as she sat the glass back down on the desk.

"All of the names in the charts are ancestral matches for our victims," Hollis said. "I found something else as well," he continued. "Copy of a settlement, made up by the Westco board of directors. It was folded up in between some of the pages. Dated 1930."

"Settlement for what?" Kacey asked.

Hollis took a sip of his drink and said "Injury sustained in the line of work. All the directors signed it. The recipient was Booker Finn."

Kacey sat back, eyes searching the ceiling as she thought back to what the old geezer Eustis had told them-Booker was the shooter in 1930, and... "After the shootings Booker said Westco paid him to do it. What if that paper is the evidence he was talking about- Westco called it a settlement but it was really blood money... which Westco later covered up."

"I think you're right," Hollis said. "And the names, the Westco board of directors... theirs are the family trees in the charts. They were all ancestors of our current victims. Coolidge himself was one of the Westco descendants."

"I'll be damned," Kacey said. "And Coolidge stole the records."

"Actually I'd bet one of his ancestors did, sometime after the asylum shootings, while all the records were just sitting there."

Kacey nodded absently, then said "Anything in the charts connecting Finn to Declan?"

"Only Coolidge is connected to Declan, far as I can tell."

Kacey shook her head. "It's still not adding up. If the motive was revenge for what Westco did to Finn, how does Declan figure into this? Why would he care?"