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?&............