It’d be best if he found somebody else to spend time with, and that made Cindy wonder if there actually was anybody. She’d never suspected anything, but where else could he have been spending his time lately?
Why hadn’t she wondered that before?
She went to the office and turned on his computer. He had a password, but she knew it. He never worried about her snooping in his e-mail, because he had her under an iron grip. She would never have had the courage to do a damned thing he didn’t want her to do.
She fired up his Gmail account . . . and there it was. A dozen e-mails to somebody named Deb Stewart. She clicked through each one and realized they’d been having an affair for some time now. One of them had a photo of Deb, just her face. She was really pretty, with beautiful green eyes and a smile that was full of promises.
Cindy didn’t feel betrayed or angry. The only thing she felt was pity for the other woman. She thought about e-mailing her to warn her about Tony, but she selfishly realized if Tony ever found out, he’d have just one more reason to come back to some unfinished business with her.
Deb smiled from the monitor . . . and then it hit her. She’d seen this girl somewhere before. She stared at the photo but nothing came to her.
She almost forgot about it, but with no other pressing business on a dreary Saturday, she decided to Google Deb Stewart.
“Ohmygod . . .”
Cindy was stunned to see that Tony’s new flame was the girl who’d claimed the million dollar prize in the state lottery recently. Now she remembered seeing her on the news.
“What?”
She stared at the news story, confused. From the e-mails, she could see that Tony and Deb had been together some time prior to her claiming the lottery winning. What were the chances he picked her?
“He had to have known somehow . . .”
But she couldn’t figure out how. Maybe they met somewhere and Deb mentioned winning the lottery? She shook her head. Doesn’t seem very likely.
Just then there was a knock on the door.
* * *
Dr. Rusty Moore stood there, his head lowered slightly. Cindy hadn’t seen him for several weeks but she didn’t remember the stoop in his posture, nor the sadness on his face.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” he said. “But we need to talk.”
She hesitated only for a moment. Although she was convinced the Manipulator had never met her in person, she still had tried to think of anybody she knew who might have been a suspect. Dr. Moore was near the top of the list due to his knowledge of DarkNet.
That’s just silly, though, she knew.
“Of course. Come in, Doctor.”
“Please call me Rusty. We’re not in your studio anymore.”
“Sure.”
“Been a hard summer for you.”
What could she say to that? Of course it had been a hard summer.
“What can I do for you, Rusty?”
“I want to show you something, if I may.”
She didn’t answer, not knowing what he was talking about. Finally she shrugged.
“On your computer, please.”
She led him to the office and he slid into her chair. She just stood behind him.
“Do you have some tape? Opaque? Like masking tape or something like that?”
She found a roll of green duct tape. Rusty cut off two pieces and used them to cover the camera on the PC. Then he went into Settings and disabled the microphone.
“I think he probably was watching you.”
“What?”
“Even if he wasn’t, best to be safe.”
For the first time, Cindy wondered if the old man really knew what he was doing after all. How could the Manipulator have used her web cam? That didn’t make any sense.
Once everything was secure, Rusty clicked open the Tor software and found his way to DarkNet. Specifically, he went to the Assassin’s website.
“He closed down. I always just get that error now saying the website is gone.”
“He may have shut it down, but the Internet has a long memory. It’s impossible to get rid of things once they’ve appeared.”
Cindy watched as the professor’s fingers sailed across the keyboard. She had no idea what he was doing.
“Most regular Internet sites are stored at www.archive.org and if you want, you can go back and look at old sites there, long after they’re gone. With the dark side, it’s a little harder but still possible.”
After a few more minutes, the monitor showed Cindy the familiar site. She stared at it, wondering how she could have fallen victim to the Manipulator’s scam in the first place. It had cost everything important to her, and now looking back she had no clue how she could have allowed it all to happen.
“There it is . . .”
“Don’t beat yourself up, Cindy. You’ve done that enough. You need to pay attention now.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Can you get another chair and sit beside me?”
Cindy brought a kitchen chair into the office and sat down.
Rusty clicked into the site and found the chat room.
“He’s not there anymore.”
“I know. It’s not him I want.”
Two more clicks and he launched the view from the camera that had been broadcasting Avril when she’d been kidnapped. The image was frozen but Cindy could see her daughter strapped to the cot.
“Oh, God. No, don’t make me watch it. I’ve seen it all.”
“No, you haven’t. That’s the point. You haven’t seen it all.”
Cindy shook her head slowly and put her hands on her cheeks. Every image was burned into her memory. She’d had nightmares for the past month and was trying to forget the transmissions, not relive them.
She shut her eyes and tried to think of a way to get rid of Rusty.
“The thing is,” he said, “when he didn’t want you to see something, he stopped transmitting the feed on DarkNet.”
“Yes, there were lots of times he had it shut down.”
“But, the camera was still going and he was still recording. He just didn’t let it get to you.”
She shrugged. “So?”
“He knew his way around DarkNet, but so do I. At the top of the Internet Explorer menu, he clicked View and then Source.
“Here’s the HTML of his site.”
The monitor was filled with nonsense. Cindy couldn’t figure out what it was or why she should care.
“I read through this and realized something.”
He pressed F5 at the top of the keyboard.
“This function key gets past the normal view and lets us into the actual recordings, not just what was transmitted.”
She looked and saw controls show up at the bottom of the image that looked like those on a VCR. She recognized play, pause, stop, fast forward, and replay.
Rusty hit fast forward, then pressed it two more times and the image zoomed faster each time. She watched as time zipped by on the clock at the bottom of the screen. When it got to the two hour mark, he slowed the replay down and then slowed it again until it was running at normal speed.
“This is where he ended the transmission, but we can see what he was doing after that.”
Cindy moved closer to the monitor as the Manipulator entered the field of vision of the camera.
“Don’t worry, Avril,” she heard him say. “It’s all going to be okay.”
Cindy froze, not believing what she was hearing. “Oh, God. It can’t be . . .”
Then the kidnapper turned and she could see his face. First the voice and now his cheeks and eyes in profile. She knew without a doubt: the Manipulator was Tony McKay.
Chapter 26
September 4
Cindy barely slept a wink. She still couldn’t believe Tony had murdered their child. As much as she had wanted to know what had happened to Avril, this was beyond her comprehension. How could she have allowed this monster into her life?
After Rusty
Moore had left her, she sat on her couch in the living room and just stared into nothingness.
She remembered. For the first time in the month since Avril’s death, she remembered the love she shared with her little girl. Avril had been her Mini Me, and they cherished each other.
Cindy hadn’t touched Avril’s room since the kidnapping. She’d left the blankets scattered haphazardly on the bed, a few toys on the floor, a chess game partly completed, and Juicy sitting on the window sill, patiently waiting for her owner to return to her.
The house was silent, not a whisper, not a trickle of laughter, not a creak as Avril walked to the bathroom at night. Cindy never felt so alone. She felt overwhelming guilt for never realizing just how monstrous Tony could be. She’d always known he treated her like a bag of garbage, but she always took the hits and muzzled the pain, knowing as long as she was the target of his rage, Avril was safe. She was so wrong.
Cindy sat in the living room, staring at the television, but not bothering to turn it on. She didn’t want any distractions. She needed to decide what to do.
The obvious choice was to phone Suzanne McDermott and tell her that Tony was the killer.
She stared at the phone but didn’t pick it up.
Would the police believe her? The video wasn’t perfect and only somebody who knew Tony as well as she did would recognize him without a doubt. Maybe they’d think she was trying to frame him?
She almost smiled. Almost. She knew Suzanne would believe her. Cindy trusted the detective. But the others might not see things the same way.
Hovering at the back of her mind, though, was another reason not to call the cops.
She wanted revenge.
Pure and simple, she wanted to kill the fucking bastard and if the police knew it was him, they’d get to him before her.
Cindy stretched her arms and went to the kitchen to pour herself a glass of wine. She wasn’t panicking into doing something stupid. She’d seen enough mystery movies to know she’d likely only get one chance at Tony. If she didn’t get him with that one chance, whenever it arrived, he’d get her instead.
The windows and doors were all locked, but she wanted to be sure, so she checked every one. The locks were changed and she suspected there was still a cop somewhere nearby, so she thought she was as safe as she could be.
The problem was that he knew where she was, but she had no clue where he was.
Fortunately, he wasn’t aware that she knew the truth about him. There was no reason for him to come after her.
Well, no reason except I threw his ass out. He won’t like that, no sir.
She finished her wine. It was only ten o’clock, but she felt dead tired. She wanted to go to sleep and dream about Avril.
* * *
The next morning, after eating a bagel with cream cheese, she phoned Maria Delgado and asked her to come over. Maria jumped at the chance and was there by mid-morning.
Maria looked as beautiful as ever, with her long brown hair impeccably arranged. She smiled and hugged Cindy and the two talked about the weather as Cindy arranged a coffee for herself.
Cindy led Maria to the backyard, and they sat at the faded picnic table that was smack in the middle of the yard.
“I don’t know how to say it, so I’m just going to blurt it out. Tony killed Avril.”
Maria didn’t seem to understand for a moment, just stared at Cindy as if she were speaking a different language. Finally she said, “How could you know that? Did the police tell you that?”
“No.”
She told her friend about how Doctor Moore had shown her the raw footage from when Avril was held captive and how Tony had made his own mistake, showing part of his face toward the camera.
“It was him, Maria. No doubt about it. Avril recognized him and I did, too.”
“Oh, my God . . . you told me he abused you, but I never imagined . . . how could he?”
Cindy stared down at her coffee, a new wave of guilt rushing through her. She forced herself not to cry. She had no doubt Maria was reliving the same terrible nightmare that Cindy had run through her mind over and over.
“We can’t dwell on the past.”
“No,” said Maria. “Of course, you’re right, and I’ll be here for you. You now have a future without him.”
Cindy just pursed her lips and stared at her.
Maria looked around and then moved closer to Cindy.
“Have you told the police?”
Cindy just shook her head.
“Jesus, girl, what are you doing? You’ve got to!”
“No,” said Cindy. “I need to do this myself.”
Cindy had never seen Maria look so indecisive, and she knew that whatever Maria said next could change their friendship forever. She pleaded in her mind for the choice to be to help, not to hinder, but she didn’t say anything more. Maria needed to make whatever decision she needed to, and nothing else Cindy said would do any good at all. If anything, she might push Maria away.
“Okay,” Maria finally said. “I’m in. What do we do?”
Cindy gave her friend a long hug, feeling like maybe she wasn’t completely alone after all.
“We need to find him and . . . well, I’m not sure after that. I know we need to avenge Avril, but—”
“One step at a time. How would we find him? You haven’t heard from him since you booted him out, right?”
“No, but I have a feeling I know where he might be.”
Cindy showed Maria the e-mails she’d found that Tony had sent back and forth to Deb Stewart. At first Maria was dismayed to see them and she put her hand on Cindy’s shoulder to show support for her, but that wasn’t needed. Cindy was fine. Cindy was more than fine.
“I bet he’s at her house.”
“And you’ve found out where that is?”
“Didn’t even need DarkNet for that one. She’s listed in www.411.com.”
Cindy typed in Deb’s name and the listing came up. It was an address in Renton, a suburb of Seattle. Neither woman really knew the area.
When Cindy pulled up a photo of her, Maria stared and said, “She looks familiar somehow, but I can’t place her.”
Cindy clicked to a news story from a couple of weeks earlier, showing Deb Stewart accepting a million dollar payout from the lottery corporation.
“What?”
Cindy nodded. “Same reaction I had. How’d he get hooked up with somebody who just won that much money? They started e-mailing not long after Avril was kidnapped.”
They both just stared at the computer screen for a moment before Maria said, “I suppose that doesn’t matter. We don’t care about her, only him.”
“Yes, but it’s hard to ignore a coincidence like that.”
“Coincidence my ass. He must have known she’d won and that’s why he’s with her.”
Cindy shrugged. “Maybe. Anyhow, let’s go.”
* * *
They arrived at Deb Stewart’s home and parked a few doors away, not wanting Tony to know they were there. She knew from checking her address that she lived in the basement apartment of the house. There were windows into the apartment, but it was quiet and dark there.
Are you in there? Cindy asked to herself. Part of her wanted to just march in and beat the bastard’s brains in, but another part remembered the beatings he’d given her for many years. Fear rolled through her and pressed her resolve, almost making her want to turn around. Maybe if she left him alone, he’d lose interest in her, too.
Maybe.
She doubted that. She might be free of him for now, but his ego was damaged after she threw him out. He wouldn’t live with that for long. It was only a matter of time before he came back to teach her a lesson.
There were no lights on, but it was barely after noon, so that wasn’t unusual. There was an older model Ford in the driveway but no sign of Tony’s car.
“Looks like she might be home alone,” Cindy said. There was no sign of movement in the house at all.
“Gi
ves us a chance to talk to her, find out what the hell she’s doing with him.”
Cindy shrugged. She didn’t really care why she’d gotten hooked up with Tony.
The two women walked slowly to the side of the house and then checked to be sure nobody was watching them as they continued around the back.
The backyard was small. She didn’t know who lived in the top of the house, but it seemed just as empty as Deb’s apartment.
Good.
Cindy leaned against a window, cupping her hands to block out the sunlight so she could get a better view. She was looking into a bedroom. The bed was neatly made and the furnishings were sparse.
They moved to another window on the other side. A small kitchen, also empty and quiet.
“Let’s see if she’s home,” said Cindy.
Maria agreed and they went back to the front of the house. There were two door bells, both with little tags of paper with printed names. Cindy pressed the one labelled, “D. Stewart.”
After a moment of no response, she pressed it again, longer this time.
Nothing.
“Do we leave?” asked Maria.
Cindy stared at the door bell and shook her head. “We came all this way to find out what’s going on. Let’s go find out.”
They walked to the backyard again and Cindy picked up a section of two by four that had been tossed against the side fence. She hurried back to the bedroom window and used it like a slow battering ram, hitting the glass over and over, harder each time. After a few hits, the glass shattered. She used the wood to knock out the remaining pieces and then leaned through the window. Nothing.
She looked at Maria. “I’ll try to be fast.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I don’t have to do anything, but I’m not letting you go in there alone.”
Cindy smiled and then carefully climbed in the window. She jumped on to the bed and then stepped to the floor. Maria followed her.
The bedroom smelled like lavender. It was small but neat. There was a dresser with three drawers, a closet with the door shut, a folding chair, and a desk that held a few papers. They glanced around the room, and then Cindy nodded her head in the direction of the living room. Neither seemed to want to say a word, still not absolutely sure they were alone in the apartment.
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