Missing and Endangered

by J. A. Jance

  They were all married or widowed or divorced. He was divorced, but if asked, he claimed to be a lifelong bachelor, because he didn’t want to be cornered into mentioning the specific reasons behind his very rancorous divorce. Some of his neighbors were snowbirds who were half-time Arizona residents and half-time somewhere else. They all wore their home state’s sports teams’ colors and drove cars with out-of-state license plates. If asked, Gerard claimed he came from Tornado Alley—without specifying where—because he hated tornadoes. He didn’t mention his years of teaching school in Oklahoma City because someone might have looked into the history of just why Gerard Paine had left the Sooner State with his tail between his legs.

  So his fifty-five-plus neighbors lived their lives during daylight hours, while he inhabited the night shift. While they did their Google searches with Safari or DuckDuckGo or Firefox, Gerard was a denizen of Tor and the dark web. If his neighbors were good, Gerard was evil.

  His two-bedroom condo had once belonged to his mother. Bernice Paine, a social butterfly and a killer at bridge, had maintained an open-door policy with round-the-clock guests and out-of-town visitors. Once she passed away and Gerard moved in to take her place, that open door slammed shut. Other than delivery people, no one came or went from his door—absolutely no one—and even the folks from UPS and FedEx never ventured any farther than his front porch.

  Gerard Paine was a recluse, and he liked it that way. Obviously, he had enough money. Every two years he leased a new Lexus that he barely drove, but as far as anyone could tell, those biyearly new cars were his only extravagance. He didn’t travel. He was not a cruiser. He was an odd duck, enough so that people were more than happy to leave him alone.

  Had anyone ventured inside his home, they would have been astonished and probably more than a bit puzzled by the sheer amount of computer equipment scattered throughout. The kitchen and master bedroom were relatively free of electronics, but every other available space in the house was covered with either computers, scanners, or printers. The walls were filled with outsize monitors and screens. For Gerard the overwhelming tech presence made perfect sense because, as far as he was concerned, that’s where he lived his life—in those computers and on those screens.

  There were plenty of people outside the immediate neighborhood who knew of his computer presence. Some thought they knew him, or at least a version of him. For Beth Rankin in Flagstaff, he was Ronald Cameron of Washington, D.C. For Teresa Talbot in Fort Wayne, Indiana, he was Carl Draper, an IT guy from San Diego, California. For Samantha Toon of Billings, Montana, he was Leonard Cooper, a cybersecurity expert from Tampa, Florida. He was all of those and many more. What he really did for a living—his real life’s work—was to run one of the most successful porn sites on the planet.

  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 naïve, 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 stil
l 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.

  On the computer’s screen side, there were two pulsing lights—a green one that didn’t move and a red one that did, with the moving one gradually closing the distance between the two. No wonder Betsy had gone quiet. Obviously, she’d somehow lost her phone during the course of the day and was now using her computer to locate it.

  Then, after close to half an hour of steady movement, it stopped, with the red dot almost on top of the green one. As the computer was placed on the ground, the face of the person carrying it appeared on the screen for only the briefest of moments. That one glimpse sent a shock wave through Gerard Paine’s body as he realized that the person who’d been carrying and operating Betsy’s computer wasn’t her at all. It was someone else entirely—Betsy’s roommate, Jennifer Brady.

  For the next several minutes, Gerard waited and watched in stunned silence. Then another alarm sounded behind him as Betsy’s phone came to life. Turning to that monitor, he saw droplets of water lingering on the face of the phone, as though the device had been left out in the rain—or maybe in the snow. And once again it was that other face, Jennifer Ann Brady’s, peering back at him.

  Gerard watched with some concern as Jennifer manipulated the phone. First she searched through the letter C in Betsy’s contacts list. Gerard had no doubt that she was searching for the name Ron Cameron. When she came up crickets on that, she began scrolling though Betsy’s phone history as well. And then, suddenly, the phone went dark—totally and completely dark—and it didn’t come back on. Moments after that the computer switched off as well.

  For the first time since he’d been doing this, Gerard Paine was concerned. He didn’t know where Beth was, but Jennifer Ann Brady, the interfering daughter of a small-town sheriff from Hicksville, Arizona, was now nosing around in his business. Gerard was sure it was due to Jennifer’s unwanted influence that Betsy from Pike had rebelled. He’d been close to done with Betsy, but he was sure she would have been good for at least a few more provocative photos. He had invested a lot of time and effort in bringing her along, and those missing photos would make for a dip in Gerard’s bottom line. It was a loss that Jennifer Brady was destined to pay for, one way or the other.

  But first he turned his attention to wreaking a bit of revenge on Betsy herself. Maybe she thought that by simply ignoring him she’d be immune, but that wasn’t true. He knew all about her prudish parents. She’d spent hours on the phone bewailing her relationship with both of them, especially her mother. With a certain amount of glee, Gerard set about sending Kenneth and Madeline Rankin a care package. He’d been surprised to find no listing for Betsy’s parents in her contacts list, and there was nothing in her e-mail or texting history to indicate they had any online presence. As a result there was no way to gift them with a digital copy of their daughter’s nude photo album. That meant he would be forced to send them hard copies of the photos by snail mail.

  He used latex gloves to put together an envelope containing glossy eight-by-ten copies of their daughter’s degrading see-all poses as well as a printed note that said, “Please enjoy your daughter’s first photo shoot. I think she has quite a career ahead of her.” Next Gerard set to work locating a physical address for Kenneth and Madeline Rankin, and that took time. Once he’d done so and addressed the envelope, he applied self-adhering stamps, making sure they weren’t enough to cover the cost of postage. That was his finishing touch. With no return address given, Betsy’s parents would be forced to visit the post office and cough up cash to cover postage due. Not only was he sending the Rankin family an emotional time bomb, they would have to fork out extra money for the privilege of seeing it. That struck him as an appropriate way to add insult to the injury. Gerard had no doubt Madeline and Kenneth’s world would be shattered. The only thing that bothered him was that there was no way he’d be able to witness it.

  After dropping the letter in a drive-up collection box, Gerard returned home to do a deep dive into the life and times of Jennifer Ann Brady. He used information gleaned from Betsy’s computer to locate some of the basics—like Jenny’s home address on High Lonesome Road near Bisbee, for example. His clone of Betsy’s computer gave him ready access to Jennifer’s Facebook postings, which turned out to be a revelation. In addition to her mother, the cop, the girl had a stepfather named Butch Dixon. She had both a younger brother and a younger sister. She was a star member of NAU’s rodeo team. Her prizewinning barrel-racing horse was named Maggie. Her best pal on the rodeo team was a guy named Nick Saunders. The two of them often volunteered their time with a horse-therapy program for special-needs kids at the Lazy 8, the ranch where they both boarded their horses and where they put in lots of practice time. Bingo! Knowing about Jenny’s home away from home was just what the doctor ordered.

  Gerard’s use of the dark web allowed him to be in touch with a network of equally dark people—the kinds of folks who’d do almost anything for a price, including a murder-for-hire guy in Vegas who was willing to undertake the task of removing Jennifer Ann Brady from the planet. The death of the daughter of a small-town sheriff would likely cause quite a stir, but Gerard had absolute faith in technology and in the identity-shielding software and hardware he’d purchased at great expense. Jenny would get what she deserved, while at the same time Gerard would deal a death blow to Beth Rankin’s very soul, and that was all to the good.

  Gerard Paine had often heard the saying that “justice delayed is justice denied,” and he felt the same should hold true for revenge. He wanted his to be swift and totally devoid of mercy.

  Chapter 29

  The first inkling Beth had that she was not alone was when the icy-wet nose of a panting dog hit her square on the face and jarred her awake. When she fled Conover Hall, she’d run off across campus with no sense of direction—of where she was going or why. Like a wounded animal, she had simply wanted to hide herself away, somewhere out of sight where no one could find her. When she’d seen a delivery truck backed up to a loading dock next to the North Heating and Cooling Plant with no one around and with a door gaping open behind it, she’d darted into that.

  No people had been visible as she threaded her way past the mountains of rumbling machinery that struggled to supply steam heat to winterbound classrooms and office buildings. She made it as far as the back of the building. There, in an isolated corner, she found a worn cushion from a poolside chaise, probably stowed in that spot so someone working the long, lonely night-shift hours could grab an impromptu nap shielded from a supervisor’s watchful eyes.

  Not surprisingly, the heating plant was warm enough. Beth had stripped off her jacket and used that as a pillow while she lay there contemplating the wreckage of her young life. Ron had stripped everything from her, not only her clothing but everything else, too—her pride, her future, her education. There was no way she could go back to class and face her professors or her fellow students. She’d been shamed beyond redemption. And now, for the first time, she wondered if maybe her mother had been right after all when she’d insisted that access to cell phones was the source of all evil.

  In the course of the late afternoon, Beth had heard people coming and going—talking, laughing, chatting, joking—in the unconcerned way workers do when they believe they have a job site a
ll to themselves. She worried that someone might venture to the back of the enormous plant and find her, but no one did. At some point in the evening, the lights had mostly switched off.

  Beth had no food or water with her, but she was neither hungry nor thirsty. In her despair she’d been wondering how long it would take to starve to death when she’d fallen asleep. She was fully awake now, and the powerful beam of a flashlight briefly blinded her.

  “Back, Hooch,” a male voice ordered, evidently speaking to the dog. And then, in a more concerned tone, he added, “Ma’am, ma’am. Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

  I’m hurt, Beth thought, but not in the way you think.

  “I’m okay,” she mumbled aloud.

  Nonetheless an EMT showed up and checked her vitals. While he did his examination, several uniformed officers milled in the background. They’d all come looking for her as part of an organized search party, but Beth couldn’t help wondering how many of them had seen the photos. How many of them had seen her naked?

  “How did you find me?” she asked.

  “I believe your roommate is the one who called it in,” someone replied. “She was worried about you and went looking for your phone.”

  Someone handed Beth a bottle of water and a granola bar. She still wasn’t hungry, but the water tasted good. Eventually someone helped her to her feet and then walked along beside her, holding her arm as if she were ill. It turns out she wasn’t ill so much as she was sick at heart. As they led her through the massive building, Beth’s soul recoiled at the idea that there might be reporters waiting outside, to say nothing of television cameras. Once her image was posted on a news broadcast somewhere, how long would it take for someone to search the Internet and locate all those other images as well?

  She hesitated, wanting to turn back, just as a woman wearing an FBI Windbreaker walked up to meet them. Introducing herself as Special Agent Adele Norris, she handed Beth a small blanket.