Eli grinned. “Speaking of your better half, how’s the reconciliation coming along? I’d ask her myself, but she hasn’t been in the greatest mood since we found Freddie Lansing hanging from a rafter in that old barn.”
“Thing like that’ll ruin a person’s day, all right,” Dan observed. He was being cagey; the gleam in his eyes told Eli that much.
“You don’t want to talk about it. Fair enough.”
“You could always ask Melba.”
“Not without getting my lips torn off, I can’t.”
Dan gave his thunderous laugh. “My woman’s got fire in her, and that’s the God’s truth.”
“You love her.” It was a statement, not a question.
And Brynne played on the edge of Eli’s mind, like a wildcat circling just beyond the reach of the firelight.
“Hell, yes,” Dan said. “Worst mistake I ever made was choosing the Bureau over her and our kids. I had my head stuck square up my ass.”
“Why did you choose the Bureau?” Eli pressed, knowing he was on private ground, but wanting to know badly enough to risk it.
“I was stupid, that’s why,” Dan told him. There was no trace of his usual humor in his eyes or his facial expression. “Thought I was a hotshot. I was going to prove I could make a real difference. Run with the big dogs, and take down my share of the sons of bitches who think it’s their God-given right to trample anybody who gets in their way. Kidnappers. I had a real justice boner for them—the ones that stole children and did the rotten things they do to them. I wanted to be their own special boogeyman.”
He felt silent. Looked away for a long moment.
Then he said. “I still feel that way. I’ve got two daughters, Eli, and if anybody tried to hurt either of them—”
“I know,” Eli said quietly. “What changed your mind, made you take up private security?”
“Turns out, the Bureau was all stocked up on superheroes. They wanted paper pushers, mostly. Computer guys. It wasn’t one damn bit exciting—in fact, all it did was make me regret leaving Melba and our kids even more than I already did.”
“So now you hack your way through jungles and tangle with drug cartels? For the excitement?”
“Hell, no,” Dan answered. “I did it for the money. Now I’ve got enough put aside to give my lady and the girls everything they could possibly want. I’m ready to retire—at least from the kind of work I’ve been doing for the last few years. Ready to get married to Melba again, maybe father a couple more kids.”
“Melba isn’t buying that scenario?”
Dan sighed. “She told me what I could do with my ‘blood’ money,” he said. “She doesn’t want to get pregnant, either.” He leaned forward, his face earnest. “Just tell me one thing, Bro. What the devil do women want?”
Eli laughed. It was a raw sound, revealing more than he would have liked. “Whatever we don’t happen to be offering at the time, I guess,” he said. A long pause followed, then Eli tapped his fingers on the surface of his cluttered desk. “Tell me what Freddie Lansing’s been up to out there in cyberspace.”
Dan took a fairly thick sheaf of papers from his briefcase and pushed them across the desk to Eli.
“Read. We’ll talk when you’re done,” he said.
Eli took a bracing sip of coffee and read.
As he scanned out the printouts of Freddie’s emails and random posts on various websites, he felt a combination of pity, disgust and horror.
Freddie hadn’t been just bad, he’d been downright evil.
Like most incels—or “nice guys” as many social misfits called themselves—Freddie had had no interpersonal skills whatsoever.
He’d pursued random women—and sometimes girls—all over the web. He’d invited complete strangers to move in with him, to live in his boyhood room, going so far as to list extensive requirements: virgins only, no vegans, no religious or political types, no one taller than five-five or weighing more than a hundred and thirty pounds.
And those were only the beginning of his delusional demands.
He would accept certain races—how noble of him—but absolutely refused others. His prospective wife/woman would cook him three meals a day, keep his clothes clean, know how to cut his hair and follow his orders without question.
Eli’s stomach turned; he took a chance and swallowed more coffee in hopes of keeping his vending-machine lunch down.
Dan must have read the revulsion in his face. “Wait till you see his profile pictures,” he said. “You’re not going to be happy.”
Eli flipped through the pages and found the photos Freddie had used as bait.
He was stunned to see his own much-younger face looking back at him.
He spat a raspy curse.
Then he sat back in his chair and closed his eyes, fighting down a rage the likes of which he’d never experienced before.
That monster had used his face—his face—to troll social media for victims, some of them mere children.
“I took them all down, Eli,” Dan said, his voice a low rumble, like thunder rolling in over the plains. “The pictures, I mean. And from what I could figure out, nobody took the bait—except Tiffany Ulbridge.”
Eli murmured a word he wouldn’t have said aloud.
“It’s all there, in those printouts,” Dan went on. “When Tiffany got here and met up with Freddie—the real Freddie—she was thoroughly pissed off. She’d been catfished, come a very long way to hook up with you in your early twenties. My guess is, she told him off, and he, being your typical nice-guy, wasn’t about to finish last—so he shot her.”
Eli nodded, turned the pages of profile photos facedown on the desktop and finished reading Freddie’s posts.
He’d gone into the blackest fury imaginable, splattered the dark web with vile insults directed at Tiffany but striking, like shrapnel, at all women.
No, he hadn’t confessed to killing her.
But he had wished her dead, her and every other woman who had ever rejected him.
There must have been hundreds of them.
“So you definitely think Freddie murdered Tiffany Ulbridge?” Eli asked, weary to the marrow of his bones.
It was at times like this that he wished he’d chosen another line of work, one that didn’t involve battling the absolute scum of the earth. He’d have made a good carpenter, for instance. He was halfway decent at training horses, though he lacked Cord’s almost supernatural talent. Hell, at the moment, he would have gladly flipped burgers or tended bar.