Gray Night by Gregory Colt

if I were you. You keep cool and don’t harass anyone who doesn’t deserve it. Don’t lose your temper and make a bad situation worse, you hear?”
     “Yes sir,” he said, pausing for a moment. “What is it you hope to do out here, Mr. Knight?”
     “Find Ruby. You feel like a walk right now?” I asked.
     “Yeah,” he said standing. “Where we going?”
     
    * * * *
     
     The rest of the album fascinated me. Most were of Adrian and Nick taken in various towns and villages. Several had a young woman in them. She looked about their age. You would have thought maybe they were all in the Peace Corps, or student volunteers, or on holiday, the way they smiled and laughed and took crazy pictures around the city or hiking in the countryside. And one photo of all three of them trying to ride an elephant and failing. I laughed out loud at that one. It felt good to laugh.
     It was difficult picturing Adrian as innocent. Both boys had the same devilish grin, usually while doing something mean to the girl in the photos. When I flipped past the first couple of pages that all changed.
     No more smiles, no more laughing, no more picturesque landscapes with the pretty girl. In their place was carnage. Villages burnt to the ground, mass graves, buildings on fire, old women screaming and crying. I only saw the girl in one other picture. It looked like she was working as a nurse in a makeshift refugee camp during a thunderstorm. Adrian and Nick were loading supplies onto a truck along with several armed men in fatigues and the girl was screaming at them.
     There was more. Black and white aerial recon, roads with convoys marked, pictures of compounds, jungle forts, and mines. The photos gave way to newspaper clippings. The oldest going back to May 1997.
     It was a church. Or what I assume was a church. The building had been blasted from the inside out and people were carrying burned and broken bodies outside where they waited in rows for burial. An excerpt in English stated the Gray family, who had built it several years before, were the intended targets and were found among the deceased.
    Another, from years later, had a black and white photo on the cover of bodies littering the ground on the banks of a stream flowing through a village.
     Most of the articles were in a language I didn’t know. Especially the older ones that appeared to cover events of the Second Congo War until around 2003. From then on more and more were articles from international papers and magazines. Most were in English and covered subjects from weapons trafficking to black market antiquities to international criminal court hearings over events the world over. Dozens of unrelated stories in an order I could not figure out. Like an article on hundreds of millions of dollars missing in the financial records of over half a dozen central African governments after the war ended was right beneath a short story on one of the last battles before the ceasefire. Something about a mining compound ravaged by fire but no one had taken credit for the attack.
     On and on the articles went. Theft, trafficking, battles, assassinations, serial killers, manhunts, Interpol statistics and briefings, warlords brought to trial, it was a mess all the way to the end.
     I slid the album over and picked up the small pile of papers lying beneath it in the drawer.
     More recent photos and articles. One in color of a woman getting a certificate or degree of some kind. Looked like the young girl in the other photos, but older. Several of the newspaper articles were local stories on missing children found or neighborhoods reclaiming their street. It never mentioned him by name, but given the focus on local crime, and the handful of wanted posters crossed out, I knew those were about Nick Roarke. An interesting fellow this Roarke. Savior of children and neighborhoods and keeper of a disturbing album from the past.
     An album that did nothing to give me any clarity on who Adrian