Carlyle didn’tsmilesmile, but one corner of his lean mouth curved up, which was enough for Gideon.“Understood.”For a moment that almost permanent at-attention faded, and he seemed to deflate.
“What’s wrong?”Gideon asked.
“This place is… not what I expected,” he murmured, and before he could elaborate, Gideon’s extension rang.
Hoping it was Kathy Novacek about the file, Gideon nodded at his new charge.“Go get set up, then order us some takeout—ask Kylie what she wants and how everybody else is for food.It’s not a unit rule, but it’s always nice to ask, and also to label leftovers for public consumption if there are any.There’s a Sharpie in the drawer with the forks.Let me take this.Talk in half an hour.”
Carlyle nodded, looking relieved to have some concrete directions, and made his quick and silent way toward the SCIF.
With Pointy Teeth
“BUT HE’Sa stockbroker,” Joey said for what felt like the fifth time.
Joey didn’t so muchhearHarding and Chadwick’s collective breaths as feel them in his bones.Dammit.He wasn’t going to be able to keep this job, this sense of safety, these nice people who would coddle him through orientation and feed him, if he kept being stupid about things.
But Chester Schumer was obviously a stockbroker.Everything on the screen Gideon had brought up indicated… well, boring white-guy vibes.Joey knew not all white guys were boring—his father being a slithering, venomous, carnivorous example—but this guy?
“He’s a stockbroker with a history of legally screwing anyone who invests with him,” Gideon corrected.“I know you don’t have behavior analysis training, but one of the things we’ve learned is that ‘boring white guys,’ as you put it, can be chameleons.Looklike respectable businessmen,are actuallyraving lunatic sociopaths or toxic narcissists.Or both.They mask well, and, you know, people who look like me and Harding get away with a lot.”
Joey blinked… and assimilated.As somebody who’d been aware he waspassingfor a white man, because his skin color was a pale dusky clay instead of a dark ochre, he’d been peripherally aware of this.He’d just never heard a white guysaythat.Apparently part of analyzing behavior was actually voicing what much of the world refused to acknowledge to get to the truth of things.
“A raving lunatic sociopath?”he asked, considering the idea for the first time.
“Or a toxic narcissist,” Harding reminded him dryly.“Witness certain politicians we’re all painfully aware of.Theylooklike milquetoast with a Maalox chaser, but the way they think, their ability to coldly abusemillionsof people for their own political gain, to dismiss the deaths and suffering they cause, that’s sociopathic, narcissistic behavior.The only difference between them and literally millions of people behind bars is the bank account they were born to and the color of their skin.”
“And they think bigger,” Chadwick muttered bitterly.“The only difference between those people and this guy is this guy’s decompensating before they do.”
“Decompensating?”Joey asked, fascinated.This explainedso muchabout those orders he’d defied.Who would do that?Order a village razed, order the people to evacuate or die, just because they wanted to access the lake the people had lived on for years.For that matter, it explained so much about his own heritage, how his father could seduce and abandon his mother, how the Europeans could befriend and abandon the natives of the land, marginalizing them to tiny plots of inferior land while scrubbing the resources of the other lands bare.
What could stop swarms of human locusts?
“Spinning out,” Chadwick told him, pulling him back to the convo with a yank.“Making mistakes.Kathy did a pretty comprehensive background here.If we look at it, we’ll see that these three people—Connie Norway, Craig Baugh, and his wife, Angie—all went missing in a span of a year.The couple made the news, although the suit they were about to file against our Chester Schumer did not.Connie was young, liked to party.She didn’t even rate a bump in the newspaper, because misogyny sucks, butshewas linked to a watering hole for the people in Schumer’s company.By all reports, Schumer liked to hit on her, and she liked to tell him no.Does being rejected automatically mean he killed her?No.Does filing a suit against your stockbroker because he benefited from a trade that sucked away your retirement mean you have to worry about said stockbroker wreaking revenge?I hope not.But it’s building a pattern.People who make Schumer’s life inconvenient don’t do well.That was three years ago.The year after that it was this guy—” He pointed to an equally bland white guy.“—who stole clients from Schumer because they followed Schumer’s trades closely and didn’t like what he was doing.By now Schumer’s company has a low-level buzz going.Not enough to fire him—he’s makingthemmoney—but enough for a sort of… vague warning when people asked for a recommendation.”
“He starts making less money,” Joey deduced, and Chadwick lit up.He likes it when people follow his brain.
“He does indeed.He’s got a big brick of property in New Jersey and a really nice house, and suddenly his mortgage is not guaranteed.”Gideon pointed to a bullet-pointed list, complete with chart.“If you see here, suddenly he’shustlingfor new investors.He’s wining, dining, the whole sixty-nine yards.And he gets them.He can be charming when he tries.He gets awhackof them.But at this point, I don’t think he knowshowto make money unless he’s fucking people over.It’s like a compulsion with him.”
Gideon pointed to three other faces on the board.
“Boom, boom, boom,” he said.
“Three of his new investors who are now broke and pissed off disappear,” Joey followed, excited now.This was a new kind of hunt, he realized.A new chase.This wasn’t tracking somebody through underbrush or scouting terrain.This was putting a bunch of disparate clues together to form a path.
A pattern of behavior.
Oh wow.He got it now.Got what Chadwick and Harding and whoever this Kathy Novacek woman was that Gideon couldn’t shut up about alldid.Too bad the prey was so… ew.Boring.
“Exactly,” Harding said.“In the space of four or so months.So he’s escalating.And he’s not being as careful.”
“And then….”Joey frowned at the screen.“It’s… they’re all the waitress,” he said.
“Noticed that, did you,” Harding commended.“Yeah.Blond, in their twenties.Four of them, spread across all the counties touching the Pine Barrens.”
Joey turned toward him, frowning.“Wait—is that what that area is?”He motioned toward the map, circling the big blank spot.“Isn’t that where the Jersey Devil is supposed to live?”
Chadwick snorted.“If the Jersey Devil is this guy, then sure.But seriously”—he sobered—“all we’ve got is conjecture.The odd word dropped by the odd witness.An escalating pattern.First he killed the woman who rejected him.Then he killed the couple that dared to call him out at work, and then he just kept doing both.But those last four disappearances were only since December.That’s what we mean by decompensating.”
“He can’t keep up this pace,” Joey said, nodding.“A murder like the ones he’s doing—luring his prey, executing the murder, hiding the body, covering his tracks—that’s a lot of work.It’s exhausting.You do too much of that, you make mistakes.”
