AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Justin DeVeere was nineteen but already in his junior year at Columbia, where he studied art, but was not much of a student. He could paint or sculpt or assemble whatever he liked and so overawe his professors that they would hand him As merely for showing up. He was, people said, a prodigy. He was, people said, a young Picasso or Rothko. He was on the verge of becoming the Next Big Thing in the art world.
Justin DeVeere was brilliant and utterly devoid of a moral center. Extremely talented, sociopathic, and maladjusted. A loner, an outsider, a predator awaiting the right prey.
Those were not the things Justin’s enemies said, it was what he knew about himself. Justin had taken IQ tests—152, which made him smarter than 99.9 percent of humanity. He had also taken the so-called psychopath test and was unmistakably a member of that manipulative, ruthless, often charming tribe. A brilliant psychopath. A talented psychopath. A young monster.
That was how Justin DeVeere saw himself, how he knew himself to be: a brilliant, talented monster.
But he was no monster to look at, and he was quite aware of that as well. Justin always managed to look the part of the young artist, dressing in skintight black jeans and a series of T-shirts on which he silk-screened bits of text in cuneiform or Sanskrit alphabets. Only he knew that the messages were either some version of “F— You” or a sexual reference.
He was not big, not as big as he’d have liked anyway, just five-nine, white with straight black hair worn loose, down to his shoulders, pale gray eyes, and, as another artist had once said while attempting unsuccessfully to seduce Justin, the face of God’s cruelest angel.
Justin’s partner-for-now, Erin O’Day, was twenty-eight, mother of a nine-year-old she had shipped off to the very best schools in Switzerland at age five and had not seen since. Justin was not supposed to know this about her, but he did—Justin was not a respecter of privacy. Erin was beautiful, sophisticated, fashionable, and sexy, but Justin had never had a problem attracting beautiful women and girls. What made Erin O’Day special was that she was the heir to a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine at three hundred million dollars.
Sexy women, Justin could find any day. Three hundred million dollars? That was quite rare.
Erin was part of New York society, moving effortlessly through glittering events, including the endless charity balls where she promoted young Justin. It was at one of these balls that she met Professor Martin Darby, who had been drinking and talking more than he should have. He had told her about tracking the Anomalous Space Objects and hinted that his work was top secret.
It never ceased to amaze Justin just what Erin could get away with merely by being blond, beautiful, and poured into a dress with a plunging neckline, all of course enhanced by the kind of jewelry and fashion that screamed “money.” According to Erin, the professor had lost his wife and was clearly lonely for female companionship. And—again according to Erin—he didn’t get anything beyond some drinks and a dance or two.
Erin had had no real notion of what to do with the information, but Justin did. Justin had a friend who had a friend who was a serious hacker, and for just five hundred dollars of Erin’s money, Justin gained access to Martin Darby’s computer and learned the secrets of the Anomalous Space Objects.
Justin stood now gazing thoughtfully at the field, tilting his head, making slight adjusting motions with his hands, imagining a murder scene. Playing the part, pretending to actually think he should have killed the two because he knew full well it would turn Erin on. Erin had never known a person who could say I wonder if I should have killed them and mean it. It was viscerally exciting to her. It made her heart run mad, and sent chills of fear tingling up her spine.
Yes, Justin knew Erin O’Day and how to play her. And he remained faithful to her because while there were plenty of beautiful women in the art world, and fewer who were both beautiful and rich, he had met only one who was also excited by the darkness Justin knew lay at his core.
“We’re in the middle of nowhere,” Erin said. She was irritable, not being a fan of cramped, chilly tractor cabins. “Our names are on flights from New York to Des Moines. We’ve left a trail.”
“Speaking of trails,” Justin said, “you wrote down their license plate number?”
Erin opened her phone, swiped a few times, and held up a dark photo of an Illinois plate, fuzzy from a distance but readable.
Justin stirred restlessly, stamping his feet to warm himself while still self-consciously gazing at the dark cornfield. “I was just picturing how it would look, you know, when the sun came up, when they were found: blood splatters all over the cornstalks. I’d arrange the bodies so that . . .” He paused to consider, eyes narrow, hand drawing shapes in the air. “I’d make them strip naked first, just leave on one or two random bits—a sock, a scarf, something enigmatic that made it appear to be a clue, then bang, bang—” He mimed firing a handgun.
“No one would ever be able to make sense of it, but there’d be fifty conspiracy theories online in a week,” Erin said. Then, adopting a more mature tone, she added, “But that’s not why we’re here.”
“Anywhere I am, I’m there for art,” Justin said, smirking to take the edge off his pomposity, and inwardly rolling his eyes at his own BS. “Come on, let’s see if they left us anything. Can you go get me the black light from my bag?”
“In these shoes?”
With a sigh, Justin fetched the bag, unzipped it, pointed his phone light into the bag, and withdrew a battery-powered wand that shone black (more purple than black) light into the hole he’d widened.
“Hah! Here’s a chip right here.” He held up a thin, sharp-edged fragment no more than an inch and a half long and a quarter of an inch thick.
“Is that enough?”
“Who knows?” Justin asked. “I guess we’ll find out. If it isn’t, we’ll track the license plates.”
“What do we do with it? Crush it and snort it?”
“In the PBA they were just exposed to the radiation. But I think that’s the slow and inefficient way,” Justin said. He frowned. “The bigger question is, where is the team of scientists who were supposed to be here? I was expecting helicopters and big trucks. So, who were those two, how did they get here, what did they take away, and what do they intend to do with it?”
“That’s four questions.”
Justin checked an app. “There’s an early flight to LaGuardia, tomorrow morning. We can make it, easy.”
“Or we can make it right here,” Erin said with a leer.
“What, here?” he asked, faux innocent.
