Meeting with Killers

Three or four years ago, I read and reread a short family history my grandmother had written. I did it for Tyler, my nephew, who was getting married and possibly “starting a family” as well—it seemed a good thing to do to haul out the manuscript my grandmother had typed in faint ink on now-browning paper on her portable typewriter in the 1970’s. That’s the official explanation. The fact that the book could be long on sentiment and light on the pocket book had nothing to do with it.

 

So I read the document, which I wish my grandmother had written a decade earlier. When speaking with her even at the end of her life, she was organized and lucid. The memoir, at least to me, seemed less so—a conversation she could manage, writing and organizing a book was a bit more difficult.

 

Or was it I who couldn’t organize all the cousins and aunts who appeared briefly, disappeared, and then came back again?

 

And was it my grandmother who had given special emphasis to her grandfather—her mother’s father? Oddly enough, I don’t remember much about my great grandmother, Julia Pickard Herrick. Even her photo seems a bit off-putting….

 

Nothing about this woman suggests ease, comfort, softness. Still, it was all to be expected, because you don’t, you really don’t, want to mess with her mother, my great-great grandmother.

 

This lady, Hannah Wilson Pickard, lived with her daughter and her young granddaughters, one of whom would be my grandmother. She was living with the family because her husband had run off to find gold after the Civil War. That was the story, which barely covered a truth that no one knew or wanted to confront.

 

Guys went off to find gold in the 1800’s—true. They did it for a variety of reasons, not the least of which might have been that they wanted to have a good couple of whiskies and a cigar at the end of the day. Sit around the campfire—yuk it up with the boys. You know—something other than coming home to, well, Hannah….

 

So they went out west, which Hannah's husband, Nicholas Coleman Pickard, did as well. But the peak of the “gold fever”came before be Civil War, not after. (That’s why they’re called the “49’ers” and not the “66’ers”) They also tended to go to where the gold was supposed to be—California and not Kansas, which is where Pickard ended up. He died, in fact, not sitting beside the campfire under a sky blazing with stars but in a bed in Kansas, at his daughter’s home.

 

My grandmother, in private moments, let it slip: Pickard had deserted his family. At the time he left, his sixth child must still have been in grade school.

 

But his family of six kids, apparently, was down to five: his son John had joined the Union cause in the Civil War and had died a prisoner in Libby Prison in Virginia. Somehow Pickard got word, somehow he got to Richmond to see his son. And he did see him, though he didn’t recognize him: the room was dark, and the face was covered in mercurochrome.

 

My grandmother was a writer, at the typewriter and away from it as well. The story she told was dramatic—the dark, gloomy room, the cots crammed together, the cries of “MOTHER!” that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere that hung in the fetid, dank air.

 

My grandfather saw a black man—what he probably would have called a Negro if not a nigger—stir clumsily in his bed, fix his gaze on Pickard, extend his palsied hand, and shout “FATHER!”

 

And then he fell back dead!

 

It’s about all we know about Pickard, other than that he was a doctor, and apparently still practicing up until three years before his death in 1991. He was also, according to his obituary, an upstanding Christian, at least when he wasn’t deserting his family.

 

Pickard obsessed me, because I was about to do something of the same. I was leaving home, too—a marriage of 42 years and the dream (ever receding) of living a contented, reasonably comfortable old age with my husband. I was about to do something just as rash, it seemed, as my great-great grandfather had done. And I could only hope that somehow he had done it better—or at least more carefully—than I.

 

I left my husband on the first day of August, 2024. Today, in fact, is the last day of July, 2025. It’s been a year, and I’ve done it badly.

 

The thing about grief is that you always do it badly. I was lucky with my parents and their deaths—they were old and ready to go, their deaths were peaceful, and there was no chasm between us, nothing that needed to be cleaned up, amended or said / unsaid. The suicide of a man I saw as a son was far more difficult. And the murder of a marriage, which was what it felt like at the time I was leaving, was horrifying.  

 

I had no idea what I was doing at the time, and I still don’t. I don’t know because, after 42 years, my identity had fused, somehow, with my husband’s. This probably shouldn’t happen—it does sound sick, doesn’t it—but guess what? It does, whether you like it or not, and what sort of marriage would you have, really, if it didn’t happen?

 

Anyway, I found myself walking down the stairs with my cello strung over my back (easier to carry that way) and my left hand carrying my passport, the deed to my apartment, and my will. My right hand was for swatting away tears. I only had two blocks to walk—no Kansas for me. 

 

I thought about Pickard—my ancestor who had made just the same trip as I, though it was utterly different. I hoped—somehow—that he had known what he was doing. I hoped, at least, that he knew more about what he was doing than I knew what I was doing. I hoped that he was rational and strong, moving purposefully through his life, confidently gazing to the future and never, never looking back.

 

I was irritated with Pickard, too, and not because he had deserted the family. I wanted the story, dammit, and I felt I deserved it. I didn’t want, as I imagined I was doing, to sit with Pickard on that damn train riding back from Libby Prison to that other prison that was his home in Lena, Illinois, with Hannah. Pickard’s son was several cars away, in steerage or wherever they put the coffins with the dead. Pickard is sitting motionless, his face turned to the window but seeing nothing. Nor does he speak, as the endless miles unfold before us.

 

What had driven this man from his home?

 

What was driving me?

 

But there were other questions as well. And other ancestors, one of whom had burned witches in Salem, Massachusetts over a century earlier. My family is typical in that most of it comes from Norwegian settlers who took the second boat over to the plains in the 1840’s. They settled down and raised corn and made money—normal people doing normal stuff. But if you climb artfully and selectively in the family tree, you can get to some very odd branches indeed.

 

So one twig of the family tree is either illustrious or infamous. And the Herrick (my grandmother’s family name) who sent the witch to her death had apologized, making the perfectly sensible observation that he had been misled, badly, by none other than the devil.

 

I scoff at this and think to myself that it isn’t too much of a difference, really, to believe either in witches or in a devil who makes you believe in witches (and kill them). I have this funny belief that it wasn’t the devil who had been stalking the streets of Salem, 1692-1693, seeking whom he may devour. The devil had done nothing to ensnare the minds of the gullible. The had succumbed to their own prejudice, dammit, and should own up to it.

 

Still, there it was. I have an ancestor burning witches in Salem and a great-great grandfather sitting on a train with his dead son a couple railcars away, and I myself am in San Juan, Puerto Rico, going down a staircase with a cello on my back and my will in my hand. 

 

And I am hoping like hell that they know more about what they’re doing than I do, because if they don’t, well, we’re all fucked. We’re not, of course, but that’s how it feels. I really want someone in the family to be doing their life better than I.

 

At the very least, I want to know what in the hell they’re all doing. I want to know what they had for breakfast, what they read in the paper, and what they thought about things. I want the details, which I can do on a computer simply by clicking on the links. But real reality is different from artificial reality—I can’t click on Pickard and have him tell his story. I can’t check out his reality against my best guess of what his reality was. I think Pickard left his family because his favorite son had gone to war, spurred on by his mother. They were staunch northerners, and undoubtedly abolitionists, since they had no economic stake in slavery. Easy to be morally correct when there are no cotton fields to be picking. The women in Pickard's life had backbone--they were never afraid to take a stand and send their husbands out to fight for it. Hannah had sent her son away proudly, but did her husband share the zeal? She gloried in the sacrifice, perhaps, of giving her child to a righteous cause. But he was the guy sitting on the train, unable to see the wheat growing in the fields through the train window. He was back in Libby Prison, and would never be released.

 

Pickard and his ancestor, Herrick the Witch Burner, had lived in epochal, dramatic times, and I was living in epochal times, too. They had left no record of their thoughts, their anger, their love. They were as wordless, and as unrevealing as their portraits. 

 

Well, I was having none of that.

 

We have a president who is violating the constitution with impunity and turning a perfectly good country into a madhouse. Things are every bit as bad as they have ever been, and I leave it to you or the historians to figure it out: which particular time period (Salem 1692 / Libby Prison 1862 / United States 2025) is the most fraught. We are five or six generations into the American Experiment, and it’s all falling apart on my watch. I should be out protesting in the streets, but if I can’t do that (the streets of San Juan are not full of protests, today) I can at least tell you what I’m doing. I can at least tell you that I know, I really know.  And I care, I really care.

 

So if Herrick and Pickard are resting quietly in the tomb of history, well I am not. I’m gonna tell you what I did today, as the country slithers quicker towards its demise. 

 

Yes, I’m going to tell you what I did today.

 

I was meeting with killers.      

 

  

 

Yeah?

Well, it’s Monday morning, which should be enough for anyone to wake up to. But today, and for the next three and a half years, I’m waking to Monday morning with Donald Trump. It’s like getting a bomb thrown onto your migraine headache.

 

I’m also waking up to the fact that I’ve completely missed the boat. I think we all have, because we walk around in our heads, those of us who follow the news and are horrified. The situation in Gaza is horrific. The war in Ukraine is unending. The descent of our country into fascism is undeniable and terrible.

 

Can I do anything about all this? The obvious, and perhaps correct, answer is no. So why am I worrying about all this? Nobody else is—so screw it, right?

 

For a couple of weeks, now, we’ve been obsessed with the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Wrong—they’ve been obsessed. I read about Epstein and immediately assumed that he and Trump were just the same—they cared about two things: sex and power.

 

That meant, in fact, that they only cared about ONE thing—their own personal gratification. That’s probably true for most of us, but most of us can’t be whole without other people. A husband or wife, a family, a church group, friends and acquaintances.

 

Trump has all of this and none of this. His “family” consists of whatever Eastern-European woman Trump is married to at the time, plus three or four children who can’t stand each other. His “friends” are the people doing him favors, or hoping to get favors in return. His “church” group is a bunch of Christian Evangelicals who wait for the occasional White House “prayer breakfast,” which means that each pastor has to outdo him or herself in assuring us that God is beaming with happiness, knowing that America is being led by Donald Trump.

 

It's all about Trump, in short.

 

And Trump is all about sex and power. He’s putting every Hispanic he can find into Alligator Alcatraz not out of principle or even hatred—it’s just expedient to do it. He’s imposing tariffs not because he believes they’ll stimulate economic development but because he wants more money sloshing around the Treasury Department, where he has removed the watchdog that monitors the agency. He has no foreign policy because—well, who cares?

 

It's all about sex and power, remember?

 

It was utterly clear to us (the professional Trump haters) that Trump had matched, if not exceeded, Epstein’s depravity. But we assumed that sex for Trump was like sex for us: wonderful and at times healing, but never the end-all / be-all for all things. We have other stuff to do.

 

Sex and power—remember?

 

So why is Trump president? Does he have any deep-seated beliefs about the United States and its position in the world? Or did he, perhaps, fuck the wrong person? Not just (note that “just”) a twelve or thirteen-year-old, but someone who had her own agenda, or rather was using her body to accomplish someone else’s agenda.

 

In 2016 the Steele dossier came out, with its allegations that Trump had engaged in golden showers with prostitutes on the bed that Obama and Michelle had used on their trip to Moscow. Trump derided the report (that we’ve all forgotten about until Trump brings it up again) and I had dismissed it. Nobody is stupid enough to do that in Moscow—right? 

 

Wrong.

 

Now I think it’s possible, and if the golden showers or the mattress or the prostitutes didn’t happen, it was something else equally, or more likely more, sordid. A book came out stating that Trump had gotten noticed by the KGB when he bought a couple of hundred TV sets for a great price from an outlet that served predominantly a Russian clientele.

 

Ridiculous, I said. That shit doesn’t happen.

 

Nobody wants to say what this is, because nobody wants to admit it. 

 

The Russians won. 

 

They understood what we do not. They know that for most guys, it’s about—what was it again?—sex and power. 

 

It took decades but they did it. They invented nothing, but they used whatever they could and ran with it. The United States produced the first oral contraceptive, which was so important that it became known simply as “the pill.” Now, everybody could fuck without consequences. Since the consequences were a lifetime of responsibility for another human being, as well as a couple of decades of hard labor feeding, housing, and educating the child, the pill was a big deal. The Russians had nothing to do with it, but they saw the split it created in American society, just as they saw the divisiveness of the abortion issue. 

 

Education became a battle ground, too. Nobody was sending their kids to a private school in the 60’s except for the rich on the East and West coasts and the Catholics. Homeschooling was unheard of, and unimaginable. Who would want to supervise kids “learning” at home that the earth was only 6000 years old, or that the Biblical flood was historical reality? There was a perfectly good school teaching the truth down the road.

 

Religion went from being a tepid social affair that despite being utterly toothless was seen as too dangerous to talk about. Still, we all did it in the 50’s and early 60’s. Now, not having a religion is perfectly acceptable for about a third of us.

 

There were changes in media and media consumption as well. Whatever the differences between Walter Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley / Frank Reynolds seem trifling to us today. All four of those guys were old white men who saw the world essentially the same. None of them would have dared to suggest that the events of January 6, 2021, were anything but an attempted coup.

 

There was a lot of trust, then. My mother sent us all out to play shortly after breakfast on summer mornings, and all she cared about was getting a little peace and making sure we didn’t slam the door on the way out. So we disappeared for eight hours and that was fine. If we needed anything, there would always be someone around to help. Now, of course, all strangers are potential or maybe even likely pedophiles.

 

Things fell apart, in short, and in some cases that was good. A lot of that shit should have fallen apart, or was going to anyway. But a lot of time, there wasn’t anything to take its place, or what did was inferior. The loveless marriages of the 50’s and early 60’s endured, since getting a divorce was socially unacceptable. Now we have a generation of “latchkey” kids who have grown up in single-parent homes—often poorer and less stable than traditional homes. 

 

I can go on and on, but you get the point. The Russians didn’t start the fire, but they certainly stoked the flames. And it must have been a cheap investment to take a healthy interest in a young, ambitious, morally bankrupt and yet indefatigable man like Donald Trump. America was an open society, and the Russians cast a broad net. All they needed was the right guy, and to be in the right place when he came along.

 

And they needed, as well, to keep their strongest weapon safe. They needed to stay cynical, and to make sure everybody else became cynical, too. They had to keep telling us, and themselves, that the dream of a democratic, pluralistic, diverse society was…well, a dream. It could never be a reality.

 

They had to believe that, in the end, it comes down to…

 

…what was it again?

 

Right—sex and power. 

 

And what is power (since we all know what sex is)?

 

Money, of course.

 

They were right: money IS power. But not all power is money, and there are some things that money cannot buy. Trust, loyalty, honor is unaffected by money. But if you can convince people that a man’s worth is measured by his bank account, and that anything a person may do to grow that account is fair game, then you have a perfectly lovely situation. 

 

So they strung Trump along, and why not? He might have been being led by the nose, but there were plenty of Russian oligarchs needing a gaudy apartment on 5^th Avenue during the day, and plenty of Eastern European models of indeterminate age to heat up the nights. Of course the Russians told him that Red Square would soon host a Trump Tower. They also told him that a great nation—like the US or Russia—could never be successfully ruled by a democracy. A strong hand was needed. 

 

They kept their eyes on the main thing: sex and power. One of the countless young, ambitious, unscrupulous men they were grooming would step up and be the leader that Moscow wanted. 

 

They must have been astounded by Trump, since a cynical eye is barely required to see that Trump is a complete fraud. In fact, he’s gone beyond fraud to being a parody. In the last year alone, he’s launched a cryptocurrency, a bunch of playing cards that are NFTs, cheap watches and tennis shoes at inflated prices, and of course the never-to-be-forgotten Trump Bible. He has grifted off of everything, and still does. It’s cheap, really, to buy a United States president. You can, for example, simply give him a jet, and let him figure out how to retrofit it into Air Force One. Or you can just give Trump’s son-in-law a couple billion bucks and tell him to go outside and play in Saudi Arabia.

 

And the rest of us, who actually care about the damn country?

 

We’re inconsequential, since…have I mentioned this before?

 

Sex and power.

 

It didn’t take much for Trump to get elected. And in fact, it was his sheer “unelectability” that was his success. He has a genius for pissing people off, but also for making them afraid, and making them angry. The fear and the anger was all that it took.

 

We liberals believed that if we just explained to the American people that maybe a guy selling a Naugahyde bible was not a good man, that a man running a fake university had no interest in education, or that a man who staged a coup had no respect for the rule of law.

 

Everything we hated about Trump they loved.

 

We went down like a preacher’s daughter, to use an old tired phrase. American democracy lasted less than six months.

 

And so I sit in a room, every morning, which has three or four Trump supporters and a retired KGB officer by the name of Dmitri. I sit in the room and I hear the message. But I no longer eat breakfast with members of the group, nor do I even hold hands in a circle and say the serenity prayer, which is the only truly non-denominational thing about AA.

 

I limit—often severely—my contact with Christians and conservatives, which at this point are the same thing. I smile and stay silent. In fact, smiling and staying silent are the only two things I can give my group, or my world as I know it. That’s what happens when you live in a world with only…

 

…sex and power.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

Wholly in the Hole

Well, let’s see…

 

There’s the rule of law, the United States Constitution, due process, the concept of a civilian armed forces, bombing a foreign country without provocation, the separation of powers, birthright citizenship and the threat to remove US citizenship from Trump’s perceived enemies and imprison them in a concentration camp in the Everglades….

 

And then there’s sex!

 

Well, I had it wrong, all these years. I was focusing on the stupid stuff and ignoring the big, crucial issue, which is that children everywhere in the world are in imminent danger of being seized and sold into sexual slavery and torture at the hands of a very small, very rich gang of people…OK, let’s called them moguls.

 

Yup, this is what caused millions of index fingers to press the lever down over Trump’s name in the voting booth. They said it was about his handling of the economy, though the tariff idea didn’t excite them. They said it was about Mexican gang members giving Fentanyl to Sunday school children, instead of migrants picking lettuce, which is what they do. They said it was about cutting fraud in big government, as the unheralded flash floods swept away hundreds of Christian girls in Texas. 

 

They knew all along that Trump was a fraud. 

 

I have sat on two park benches with two Trump supporters. True, they were both alcoholics, but well into recovery. But the alcoholism was about the only thing they shared. Victor was a millionaire living in Puerto Rico to take advantage of the tax breaks. He was a man of insight, and I listened carefully to what he had to say in meetings. He was so insightful, in fact, that I considered asking him to be my sponsor. In AA, that’s a big deal.

 

SJ was a mother of teenage / young adult children. She had lived as the submissive wife in a Pentecostal sect—her husband had been the leader. She was living with her father, on Social Security and Medicare / Medicaid, working as a day care teacher / attendant. She completely dismissed Project 2025 as something Trump would never do—even though she also said Trump was a liar.

 

Oh, Victor also said that as well.

 

They knew he was a fraud, they knew he was a liar.

 

But that wasn’t important.

 

He hated the same people they hated—that was the important point.

 

He hated the elites, which is whom they hated. The second point? They hated the elites because he had told them to hate the elites. 

 

The elites—who are they?

 

ME!

 

It’s true, or possibly true. Granted, I don’t feel “elite,” by which I mean I spend a fair amount of time wondering which is more important today—getting my cat’s sinuses repaired or my air conditioning healed. Or the other way around. I don’t know, just as I don’t know how to pay for both, or possibly even one.

 

“Elite,” in short, doesn’t take the bus past the Salvation Army on his way to an AA meeting every morning. Elite doesn’t have holes in his tennis shoes and wet feet (also smelly socks, for which I apologized in The Poet’s Passage). Elite doesn’t wonder when the bus system in Puerto Rico will finally start charging fares.

 

By definition, I am not elite.

 

But wait!

 

I sit in a calm, poetic space and bind books according to traditional practices. The books have subdued, subtle covers, and I listen to Orlando di Lasso (a Renaissance composer) as I make my books.

 

OK—so now it’s looking bad. It’s looking as if I’ve been elite all these years without knowing it. I thought I was just lucky, and wasn’t grateful enough to appreciate it.

 

Wrong again.

 

And I was wrong about the Trump supporters, too. I thought they were good people who had been lied to. Scott Tucker and Laura Ingraham give me hives, of course, but I get why people listen to them.

 

But Scott and Laura had nothing to do with shaping the opinions of the Trump supporters, any more than the cheerleaders are actually moving the ball over the goal post (or whatever it is). 

 

I could do the Asimov quote that crops up on Facebook from time to time. Hey, let’s do it!

 

 

Oh.

 

Is that all?

 

Nah—I don’t think so. I think anti-intellectualism is only part of it. I think the American psyche—if there is such a thing—has a big chip on its shoulder. If the Pacific Ocean hadn’t gotten in the way, dammit, there’s no telling how far the American West would have expanded, so desperate were we to get away from our neighbors. We’ve never been able to live with one another—half of the early colonists moved to Canada rather than join their rag-tailed compatriots in the Revolutionary War.

 

Wait—that’s not it either.

 

I think it’s more about a way of looking at life, and that way of looking at life has nothing to do with riches or experience or education. For all his billions, there’s no poorer man than Donald Trump. When his “friends” pick up Trump’s calls, it’s fear, not love, that motivates them. I may take the bus, but little kids stroll past me at the Passage and ask, “what are you doing?”

 

“I’m making a notebook.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Lady told me to do it.”

 

Lady, busy painting houses, raises her hand and waves.

 

“Why?

 

“Because she wanted a notebook.”

 

The parents may have some questions, of course, but they’re more than happy to let their child watch somebody do something as insane as trying to make a book. Some of them even buy the notebooks, and then we’re all happy.

 

We liberals live in this world—a world where you may have to take the bus but you get to make stuff and talk to kids. 

 

I’m now going to say what I’ve been thinking.

 

We embrace life.

 

We don’t fear life, or get angry because somebody else’s is better or easier. We bind books and smile at kids. We’re OK with the prairie, the wide vibrant sky, the fields that stretch into the next state and beyond.

 

We don’t need the rabbit hole (or prairie dog burrows).

 

But if you do…

 

If by any chance you’re a Trump voter stumbling onto a different blog…

 

And if the warm sun and cooling breezes of the open prairie are really too threatening to you….

 

And if you really, really need the musty darkness of the rabbit hole….

 

Then here is John Mark Dougan, the ex-Palm Beach cop who has the 700 CDs on Epstein and friends doing bad shit to poor innocent girls.

 

Enjoy—I guess!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Down the Hole Gently

The Uber pulled up, which meant that American democracy—or at least what I thought I should do about it—had to wait. Jeanne had to wait as well, since getting a 68-year-old body and three shopping bags and 15 lbs of cat litter into a grey Ford Explorer took all my attention.

 

When I got home, it all looked too crazy even to contemplate.

 

Let me put it all in a list form--rungs on the ladder, perhaps, of this particular rabbit hole. You can see where you sign off.

 

1.    There’s a law enforcement guy named John Mark Dougan, who worked for the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office (PBSO) from 2002 to 2009

2.    During that time, he alleged that the Sheriff’s Office was corrupt, as well as engaging in violent treatment of minorities. He set up a couple of websites to expose the problem and considered himself a whistleblower

3.    Dougan left the PBSO and went to work in a police department in Maine, where he faced charges of sexual harassment (which he denies, claiming to be a victim of the Deep State)

4.    Dougan is a geek who sets up fake websites

 

We good so far?

 

5.    One day in 2010, a fellow PBSO detective named Joseph Recarey called Dougan. Recarey had been the lead investigator in the Epstein case of 2005, and had a trove of 700 or so CDs as well as documents, all of which was highly incriminating against highly influential people behaving badly

6.    Recarey, according to Dougan (who cannot back up the claim), gave him the CDs / documents because he feared they would be destroyed by corrupt people in the PBSO

7.    Recarey died at the age of 50 in 2018. According to the Palm Beach Daily News, he was deeply loved and respected

 

Still hanging in there?

 

8.    Dougan put all the 700 CDs of all the big boys behaving badly onto one drive, and there it was when the FBI raided his home in 2016 

9.     The FBI was investigating Dougan for cybercrimes and computer fraud—Dougan had set up a fake website and had published personal information about his coworkers

10.Dougan said the FBI had seized his hard drive, but that he had retained a copy

11. In 2019, after Epstein had died, the Times of London reported that MI6 (a branch of British intelligence) had learned of salacious material that Dougan had had on his hard drive. This led to Prince Andrew’s subsequent retirement from his official duties as a member of the royalty

 

Right—the air is getting a little thin….

 

12. Dougan made his way to Moscow in 2016, where he became a Russian operative spreading disinformation via 150 fake websites. The New York Times reports that he essentially took over the “Internet Research Agency” or whatever it was called that operated from St. Petersburg during the 2016 campaign 

13.Dougan, realizing that he was sitting on top of a mountain of information that seriously powerful people and institutions did not want him to have, feared for his life. He showed portions of seven tapes / CDs to a journalist named Ron Chapesiuk

14.Dougan also sends another copy of the hard drive to a “friend” in the south of Russia.

 

Lastly, here are the final paragraphs from The Spider, by Barry Levine:

 

 

Right—it’s Epstein’s, not Charlotte’s web….