The Match (Wilde, #2)(82)

“Come outside,” Chris said. “Like I said, we need to talk.”

Wilde hung up and turned to Matthew and Sutton.

Matthew said, “Who was that?”

“I’m going into the front yard. Lock all the doors. Both of you go upstairs. Watch us from your bedroom window. If anything happens to me, call 911, your mother, and Oren Carmichael. In that order. Then hide.”

Sutton asked, “Who is he?”

“I don’t know. Bolt the door behind me.”

Chris was scrawny and pale with thinning blond hair. He didn’t so much pace as stomp as though putting out small brush fires. He stopped when Wilde approached.

“What do you want?” Wilde asked.

Chris smiled. “Been a while since I did that.”

He waited for Wilde to ask, Did what? When Wilde didn’t, he continued.

“I used to drop bombs on people’s lives. I don’t mean literally. Well, maybe I do. I would reveal the worst secrets to unsuspecting, trusting people. I told one woman at her bachelorette party that her fiancé had posted a revenge porn video of her online. I told a husband with two sons that his wife had faked her third pregnancy to keep him from leaving her. Stuff like that. I thought they had the right to know. A secret revealed was a secret destroyed. I thought I was doing good.”

He stopped and looked at Wilde.

“I know you have a lot of questions, so let me just get to it. I know enough about you to know that you’re an outsider. You live on your own. You understand bucking the system. I would pretend this is all a hypothetical to protect myself, but there really isn’t time. I have to trust you. But a quick reminder before I start: You saw how easily I traced you down. That’s not a threat. That’s a gentle warning, if you foolishly decide to go after me. You live off the grid in part out of fear of being found. Take your fears and raise them to the tenth power in my case. There are many who want me behind bars or dead. I don’t want you for an enemy. You don’t want me for one either.”

“What do you want?” Wilde asked.

“Have you ever heard of an online organization called Boomerang?”

The name was not entirely unfamiliar. “Not really.”

“It’s a like-minded group of some of the best hackers on the planet.”

“I assume you’re a member.”

“I was,” Chris said, “the leader.”

Chris waited again for Wilde to react. To move it along, Wilde said, “Okay.”

“Boomerang’s purpose was to find online trolls and harassers, awful ones, the worst of the worst—and both stop and punish them.”

“You were vigilantes,” Wilde said.

Chris tilted his head back and forth. “I look at it more like we were trying to maintain order on lawless land. Our system of justice hasn’t caught up to the internet yet. The online world is still the Wild West. There are no laws, no rules, just chaos and despair. So we, a group of serious and ethical people, tried to bring some degree of law and order. Our hope was that laws and norms would eventually catch up and make us obsolete.”

“Okay,” Wilde said, “now that you’ve justified your vigilantism, what does it have to do with me?”

“You don’t know?”

“Pretend I don’t.”

“It would help if you participated here, Wilde. I’m putting myself out here.”

Wilde remembered the message sent to DogLufegnev: Got you, McAndrews. You’re going to pay. “I’m guessing that your group stumbled across Henry McAndrews. He was a serial online bully, albeit for hire.”

“We did, yes.”

“Did you kill him?”

“Kill? My God, no. We never killed anyone. It never worked like that. Citizens—victims really—applied to Boomerang for help. Online. We have a website. If you wanted our help, you filled out forms—name, contact, how you were bullied, all the details. It’s a fairly extensive process. That’s on purpose. If someone hurt you to the point that you needed Boomerang to intercede, you should be willing to spend a few hours filling out an application. If, on the other hand, you gave up on the application, then your case wasn’t serious enough to deserve our attention.”

Chris stopped again. Wilde said, “Makes sense,” again to keep it moving.

“The final applications were then divided amongst our members, where we each culled through them. Most were rejected. Only the most deserving got our full attention. Are you starting to put it together, Wilde?”

“Peter Bennett,” Wilde said.

“Precisely. We got an application about the onslaught of bullying and harassment he’d been facing. I don’t know if he filled it out or someone close to him, like his sister, or a devoted fan or someone posing as him.”

“Did the application come to you directly?” Wilde asked.

“No. Panther handled it.”

“Panther?”

“Everyone in Boomerang was anonymous. So we all had animal aliases.”

Wilde remembered the name on the “Got you, McAndrews” post: PantherStrike88.

“Panther, Polar Bear, Giraffe, Kitten, Alpaca, and Lion. None of us knew the identities of the others. We had very strict security protocols in place. At the time, I only knew her as Panther. I didn’t know her real name or even her gender. Anyway, Panther got the Bennett case. She then chose to present it to the group. There are six of us—five have to be on board in order to mete out retribution.”