AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yeah. Impossible to narrow down. We need to look into Abigail’s life, work, friends, everything.”
Ella took one last look around Abigail’s apartment to try and see the world through her eyes. What was her drive, her passion? What did she strive for? What reason would someone have for wanting this woman dead?
She brushed past Abigail’s lone chair, dislodging her laptop from the position the now-deceased girl had left it. Ella cursed her inelegance for the second time this morning, went to readjust the device but thought better of it. Handle as little as possible. That was the golden rule of crime scene navigation.
But Ella couldn’t help it. A person’s online viewing habits revealed a lot more than they realized. Ella nudged the mouse pad, heard the laptop rev up. The screen illuminated.
Strict privacy laws meant Ella wasn’t allowed to scour through victims’ electronic devices until she had full clearance, but she couldn’t pull her gaze away from the bright white page shining through the screen, almost begging her to inspect it.
She saw a thumbnail of a suited-up guy, aviators covering the top half of his face, designer beard trimmed to obsessive levels. The man had been airbrushed to near plasticity, but what alarmed her the most was the title of video that the thumbnail linked to.
The Problem With Women Today.
Ella peered closer, took in the rest of the video titles.
Modern Women: Are They Asking For It?
Obedience And Enslavement: Why It’s Important.
“Jesus Christ,” Ella said. Abigail Cartwright didn’t seem the type to consume such misogynistic materials, but she had a sudden thought that maybe she wasn’t consuming it for pleasure. Maybe she stumbled upon this so-called alpha male podcast out of curiosity, but as Ella took in the channel’s description, a more nefarious idea popped into her head.
Iowa’s number one Red Pill podcast, Alpha By Design exposes ugly truths about modern dating.
Ella scrolled up to the most recent video, uploaded less than seven hours ago. The title made Ella’s fists clench into two solid balls, and if she could have reached through the screen and grabbed this host by the neck, she would have.
“Ripley,” Ella called. Her partnerpeered around the door.
“What?”
“Come here a second,” Ella said, “and tell me I’m not going crazy.”
The podcast’s most recent video was entitledThe Davenport Monster: The Hero We Need?
Rose petals. Anti-female podcasts. Victims that may or may not be connected.
Ripley said, “Come on, we need to get to the precinct fast.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Ella said as she sat at her desk and watched Alpha By Design’s most recent video. The host’s nasal voice was like a knife to Ella’s eardrums, and she couldn’t help but think that his smug face would make a great substitute for a punching bag.
The host’s name was Richard Hunter. A self-described alpha male who dazzled his hundred-thousand-plus audience with misogynistic truths and hate-filled rants three times a week judging by his upload regularity. She hit the pause button.
“I want to kill this guy,” Ripley said. “Abigail was listening to this garbage?”
“Apparently.”
“Why?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. Could have been curiosity, could have been hate-watching. I mean, she seems like a conventional girl, so maybe she actually agrees with some of this crap.”
Ripley paced wall to wall in the tiny office, eyes locked on her phone. “Dark,I’ma conventional girl and I’d rip this guy’s arms off if I met him. Ain’t no woman listening to this for fun.” Ripley’s phone rang. She excused herself and left the room.
Ella went back to the podcast, wondering how this fit into the jigsaw puzzle that was Abigail’s death, if it did at all. Their second victim, Katherine Parkinson, had been a vocal feminist – the kind of woman that Richard Hunter opposed. Were these topics so widespread that the general public were consuming them on a regular basis, or was there some connection here? She replayed the video, now thirteen minutes into a forty-minute rant about the so-called Davenport Monster.
Look, it’s a tragedy what happened to these girls, but this is reality calling. If you challenge the patriarchy, you can expect consequences. This Katherine girl, what did she expect? That we’d all just side with her? She started a war, and she lost, so why should we care? I’m not saying she deserved this, but she should know men are stronger, smarter, more capable. There’s a reason men waded through trenches and women stayed back at camp making parachutes, and I doubt Katherine would even have done that. The Davenport Monster is just doing what we all wish we could do. Taking out these low-status cat moms to make room for women that society has use for.
Ella hit pause again. She couldn’t listen to much more of this stuff because it was giving her a headache and it didn’t give much of an insight into Abigail’s life. Maybe she listened to anti-women podcasts. So what? Judging by the floods of comments, so did thousands of other people. She scrolled to the end of the video and watched the last thirty seconds. Richard Hunter was still speaking into his microphone, his dead-pan expression barely changing throughout the entire video. He was like a machine, churning out controversial soundbites that no doubt appealed to his army of inexperienced followers.
