I Am Death

Fifteen

Taking extra care not to damage her recently manicured pale-pink fingernails, Grace Hamilton opened the FedEx package. Inside, she found a standard, brown paper legal-size envelope addressed to the Mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Bailey. Across the front, in large red letters, were the words URGENT — PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL.

She reached for the FedEx wrapper and checked the sender’s name on the back. Tyler Jordan.

Grace frowned at it. It wasn’t a name she recognized. The address was local, somewhere in Victoria Park, Central LA. Despite having a fantastic memory for names and addresses, she couldn’t remember seeing it before either. The space for the sender’s contact number had been left blank — typical.

She pulled her chair closer to her computer desk and called up the application that allowed her to go into Mayor Bailey’s contacts book. After typing in her password, she entered the family name ‘Jordan’ and clicked ‘Search’. She got three matches, none of them were Tyler. None of them from Los Angeles. She tried ‘Tyler Jordan’ as a double-barreled name, first with a hyphen, then without.

Nothing.

Grace didn’t find that strange at all. It wasn’t unusual for members of the public to mark their mail ‘urgent’, or ‘for your eyes only’, or ‘private and confidential’, in the hope that it would reach the mayor’s desk unopened. But that rarely happened.

Mayor Bailey received hundreds of letters from members of the public every month, but it was Grace’s job to make sure that he didn’t waste his valuable time reading the sort of rubbish that got sent in on a daily basis.

Whoever Tyler Jordan was, it didn’t look like he, or she for that matter as Tyler could be male or female, was known to Mayor Bailey. That fact alone already placed the envelope in the ‘not so urgent’ stack, but elections were just around the corner and Grace couldn’t afford to ignore something potentially important.

She called up an Internet map application and entered the address on the back of the envelope. What she got was a boarded-up grocery store on an empty concrete lot.

Strange, she thought, but that only served to heighten her curiosity.

Grace knew that, before reaching her desk, every single postal item had already been thoroughly scanned by security for harmful chemicals and explosives, so it wasn’t like she was taking a health risk. But x-ray machines and other security devices couldn’t read any internal text, or make out any included images.

In the two and a half years she’d been working for Mayor Bailey, she’d seen obscene drawings, threatening letters, hate mail, pornographic pictures of people offering themselves to him (female and male), conspiracy theory plots... the list was almost endless.

Anything deemed remotely threatening was passed on to the Secret Service. Anything viewed as indecent or obnoxious went straight into the shredder by her desk.

Grace stared at the envelope in her hands for a short while, then at the ‘not so urgent’ mail pile on her desk. She pursed her lips.

‘Oh, what the hell,’ she said seconds later as she slid open the envelope. One more crazy letter or silly picture wouldn’t really make a difference to her. If there was one thing that Grace Hamilton was not it was prudish.

What she got was a second envelope. This one was crispy white, similar to the ones sent with wedding invitations. On the front of it someone had typed the words — DO NOT IGNORE THIS.

Now Grace was really intrigued.

She checked the back of the new envelope. No sender’s name or address. Not that she really expected to find any.

She bit the right side of her bottom lip, considering.

A couple of seconds later, her decision was made. She reached for the sword-shaped letter opener on her desk, tore open the top of the envelope and tilted it so its contents could slide out.

The first item to drop on to Grace’s desk was a white piece of paper that had been folded in half. Something had clearly been written inside. She could make out the outlines of the letters.

The second item was a Polaroid photograph.

It slid on to her desk face down.

Grace paused, amused by the irony of it all. One more decision to make — what to look at first, the picture or the folded piece of paper?

In her head, she eeny meeny miny moed between the two items.

The picture won.

She reached for it and turned it over.

Her heart skipped a beat.

‘Oh, sweet Jesus!’