Free Kingdom of Heroes by Jay Phillips

was something he was missing, and it was probably something simple, something he was completely overlooking.
    She continued reading. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything I was and everything I wasn’t, but I will not be a pawn again, never again. I love you.-Adam.” She stopped reading. “And there’s a line at the bottom of the page that says ‘They’re not the family you deserve.’”
    When she read the final sentence, he heard her heartbeat speed up, ever so slightly, again. “And what‘s different about that last line?” he asked.
    “It doesn’t seem to be in the same hand writing, almost as if someone else wrote that part later.”
    “My thoughts exactly,” he said in return, all the while knowing she was keeping something from him.
    She placed the note back on the desk. “I have to call The Agent,” she said, pulling a phone from her pocket. “He has to know.” She stopped for a second. “And Fire, I have to call her, so she can tell her sister.” She sighed. “Goddamn this shit.” She pressed a button on the phone, put it to her ear, and walked out of the room into the hallway.
    The Detective heard her yell at someone to get back in their room before she had them arrested. Oh well, he thought, what she lacked in tact, she made up for in beauty. He looked at the body and the gun in its hand. He fought through the smell, lowering himself as close to the body as he could get. He touched the cold hand holding the gun. Gun powder residue covered the hand and most of the fingers. Adam Rogers had fired at least one shot from the gun he held, that much The Detective knew for sure.
    But there remained something else, something he was still missing. He looked at the computer on the desk. It was still on; it was silently waiting in stand-by mode. A computer mouse sat a foot from the head. He pushed it, bringing up a screen filled with icons and options. They all seemed rather run of the mill, but one seemed to catch his attention. He clicked on the file marked “Security Cam.”
    The screen split into four equal parts, showing four separate angles of the tiny room. The Detective saw himself from four different directions while standing over the body and looking at the computer screen. He looked up and around. Tiny cameras lenses stared at him from the walls, one camera on each of them. A thought occurred to him: maybe this thing had been recording the whole time.
    He looked on the screen for a rewind button. He found it, clicked it, and watched as a set of date options came up. He typed in the date for five days ago.
    “Well, that was easier than I expected it to be,” Ice said as she walked back into the room. “He seemed sort of shocked, but not really. You know what I me---what are you doing?” she asked, pushing herself next to him so she could see the monitor.
    “Watch this,” he said, pointing at the screen. “I think he had the security cameras running all this time.”
    The Detective clicked the play button, and they watched an alive Adam Rogers walking through his apartment. The Detective clicked the fast forward button, going past the mundane parts of the dead twenty-five year old’s former life.
    “Slow down,” Ice snapped, as the recording showed Adam sitting at the desk.
    The two of them watched as he sat down and put a gun, the same gun currently in his corpse’s hand, in his lap, and then placed pen to paper, writing out the note they’d found. After finishing the note, he placed his hands on the monitor, with his eyes closed, for almost ten seconds. He then pulled the gun up, put it to his head, and pulled the trigger, spraying blood and pieces of his brain across the room.
    Ice shook her head slowly. “Goddamn you, Adam.” She turned and looked at The Detective. “I was really hoping he hadn’t done this to himself. I was hoping there had been something else.”
    “There is, look,” The Detective said, pointing at the top-right display. “He didn’t land on the