Missing and Endangered (Joanna Brady #19)(65)
Once upon a time, he’d been an elementary-school music teacher, but then the world of coding had come along. His school district wanted to move with the times, and they’d paid for him to go back to school and study computer science. In the process they created a new computer-science instructor who, as it turned out, was also a computer-science monster.
Once news about his after-school dalliances with various students came to light, the school district let him go, doing so quietly in hopes of avoiding unwanted publicity, to say nothing of unwanted lawsuits. But then his wife found out about it. Once her accusations surfaced in public divorce proceedings, the jig had been up all around—and the lawsuits had returned with a vengeance.
Legal maneuvering had kept him out of jail but it was no wonder he was living quietly in Tucson and keeping himself out of the limelight in every way possible.
These days, at any one time, he had ten or more women on the hook to a greater or lesser degree. The younger they were and the more na?ve, the easier they were to manipulate. He lied to them and cheated on them with impunity while at the same time demanding complete loyalty and absolute obedience on their part. And if they balked in any way—if they so much as hinted about stepping out of line—he dropped the hammer on them. By the time Gerard finished, most of them were too humiliated to even think about coming forward and speaking with the authorities. Had they attempted to do so, he was quite sure that his dark web–based identity was safely beyond reach.
When he first encountered Elizabeth Rankin the previous September, she was so incredibly unsophisticated that she could just as well have been gift-wrapped and dropped into his lap straight out of the fifties. In his opinion the name Elizabeth was a bit too highfalutin for a girl like that, and Beth went too far in the other direction. “Sweet Betsy from Pike” was a song he’d enjoyed teaching to his former elementary-school students. As far as Gerard was concerned, the name Betsy seemed to have just the right ring to it.
Until last night he’d had no idea that name was so offensive to his now-testy little victim, but it was, and when she’d suddenly turned on him in such a venomous fashion, that was it. Gerard Paine didn’t nickel/dime around. He wasn’t one of those people who would turn the other cheek or hang in long enough for a snake to strike at him twice. He didn’t give Betsy a chance to come begging him to forgive her, not that he would have anyway. Instead, within a matter of hours, he dropped the bomb.
After all, he finally had the photos—ones it had taken months to wheedle out of her. And with the keylogger he’d installed on both her phone and her computer, he knew everything there was to know about Beth Rankin’s online activities. He had access to her contacts list, and that was the first place he sent the album of nude photos—to everyone listed there. And then he sent the album to his own mailing list as well. His customer base of dues-paying members were happy to send him money as long as, from time to time, he sent them suitably explicit material to be enjoyed and savored in the privacy of their own homes.
The night before, he’d been a little surprised at the way Betsy had blown up at him, but it was time. She was supposedly very smart as far as things like chemistry and physics were concerned, but on a personal basis she was boring as hell, and he was happy to be rid of her.
Once Gerard finished with one of his many victims and turned his pack of pet jackals loose on them, he always savored the aftermath. Some of the girls reacted with helpless fury, while others vowed revenge. But the ones he enjoyed the very most were the ones who cried out their grief to friends and relations. He savored the ones who pleaded for him to take them back or who tried to gain direct access to him in hopes of forcing him to pull their damning images from the site. Not that he ever did. Once he had those photos in his possession, they belonged to him and to the world.
It had taken until five o’clock in the morning before he’d had everything in place to eviscerate Beth Rankin. Once he had done so, he went to bed and to sleep, expecting to spend this evening enjoying whatever radioactive fallout would be forthcoming. He fully imagined she would be one of the begging ones. Much to his astonishment, however, when evening came around, there was nothing from Beth—not a single word, not on her phone and not on her computer. If she was sharing her despair over what had happened, she wasn’t doing it by text or e-mail, and her absolute silence on the subject was baffling. Never before, not once, had one of his victims gone completely quiet on him. He wanted a reaction—that was his reward. In this case he got nothing.
Gerard could see on his monitors that responses to the posted photos were still coming in on both her computer and to her phone. Between texts and e-mails, there were more than three hundred new notifications, but only one of those had actually been opened and read—a text from one of Beth’s fellow students at NAU. After that she’d evidently lost interest and quit looking.
Gerard had other urgent pieces of business that required his attention, including several of those other members of what he liked to call his “Ladies of the Night.” He had to maintain certain levels of cybersurveillance on each of them and supply the necessary doses of attention and input, but between times he kept switching back to Betsy. Hours passed, but whenever he checked, there was still nothing. Then, a little after nine, an alarm alerted him to the fact that Beth’s computer had just flashed on. The problem is, it had come on with the Find My Phone app activated.
Gerard immediately switched to the computer’s onboard camera. With that feed going to a separate monitor, he was able to use two screens to view whatever function the computer was currently performing as well as the face of the person operating the keyboard. Gerard fully expected to see Betsy’s anguished face in one of them, but he didn’t. Instead he saw what appeared to be a close-up of some kind of material—a jacket, perhaps. And rather than being stationary on a desk or a tabletop, the computer seemed to be moving—first down a corridor and then outside into the dark, where there were occasional flashes of light from streetlamps.