Speak No Evil

“I’m tired,” Carina said. “What guys?”

“Bondage and Scout,” Patrick said.

Nick pulled the top sheet. “These look like comments off MyJournal pages.”

“Bingo,” Patrick said, sitting down backward in a chair and grabbing a slice of cold pizza. “This is part of the huge info dump we got from the MyJournal corporate office. Every archived comment made by Bondage and Scout.”

Dillon interjected, “I think we need to focus on Scout. Both may be dangerous, and we’re going to continue to look into Bondage for possible underage solicitation issues, but I think Scout killed Angie.”

“Based on what?” Carina asked, looking at the comments herself. They weren’t exclusively posted on Angie’s Web page, but a variety of MyJournal pages.

One comment from Scout on a page dedicated to cats: My cat Felix died last week. Someone hit him with a baseball bat. He died in my arms.

“You think being upset about a cat dying makes Scout the killer?”

“Scout posted seventeen different times over the last two years that his cat Felix died. Hit by a car, hit with a baseball bat, drowned by his neighbor. All to women who then started an e-mail relationship with him. Interesting, none appear to still be talking to him.”

Carina sat up and grabbed one of the pages. “The cat. Midge at the library said that the man Becca was talking to the night she disappeared told her his cat had been shot to death.”

“That’s a better connection than I have,” Dillon said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not the cat that tipped me off, though it’s suspicious. Read this.”

Dillon handed both Nick and Carina copies of key comments. Carina frowned as she read them.

Women are beautiful. Soft. Delicate. I’m careful with women, because I don’t want them to break. You can’t put them back together.

My girl isn’t broken and I’m being careful. Very careful. When we make love, it’s beautiful. I made love to her three times tonight. She likes it when I use a dildo. Because deep down all women are sluts. I wonder what they think about when men shove their dicks in them. How it feels. What they really want. Why they lie all the time, saying one thing and doing another. Doing one thing, then lying about it. Why can’t people just tell me the truth? Why does everyone have to lie?

I’m the best liar out there. It takes one to know one, know what I mean? I can lie and no one knows. Even people who know me can’t figure it out.

The next was just as disturbing.

All women lie. Even the ones who are nice to your face, they lie behind your back.

You’re all sluts.

In a response to a guy who’d posted a journal entry about how he learned his girlfriend was cheating on him and how he wanted to strangle her, Scout wrote:

All women are cheating cunts who need to be shut up. Whores. Bitches. Sluts. Lying whores should be thrown out with the trash.

Kill your bitch.

“There’s a lot more like this,” Dillon said. “But read this one dated Sunday late afternoon.”

“Angie was still missing but alive.”

“But Scout had time to go online and write this.”

I’ll be bathing my girlfriend soon, cleansing all the impurities from her body so we can unite as one. It’ll be like her first time, and her last time.

Nick said, “Why won’t the MyJournal people do anything? This is obviously threatening.”

“Misogynistic, true, but not threatening to any specific woman. No one with a MyJournal account has filed a report against Scout for any threatening posts or e-mails,” Patrick said. “Even Angie. She banned him, but didn’t use the MyJournal service, which allows members to file complaints.”

“What can we do? Can we find him now? Do you have an address?”

“Slow down. This is a huge leap forward, but we still only have his public persona. No IP, no home address.”

“The key here,” Dillon said, “is that we can focus our resources on finding Scout instead of wasting time chasing other people down.”

“You’re that certain,” Nick said.

“You have doubts?”

Nick was silent for a good minute, looking over the comments. “No, I think you’re right.”

“We have our work cut out for us,” Carina said, “but we’re getting closer. I can feel it.”

TWENTY-FOUR

SHORTLY AFTER DILLON AND PATRICK LEFT – TELLING Carina to go home and sleep a couple hours – Carina took Nick back to her parents’ house. She glanced at the dashboard clock: 1:13 a.m. The lights were off, except for the front security lights. One in the morning was too late for her parents.

She shut off the car, turned to Nick. The entire drive over she couldn’t get him out of her mind.

Maybe it was because they’d just been at a crime scene and she wanted to rid her mind of the images so she could sleep tonight. Or maybe it was because Nick Thomas was so damn sexy she’d been having erotic dreams about him for the past two nights.

But, if she wanted to be honest with herself, it was two reasons. First, Nick was sexy and he didn’t know it. He didn’t flirt, he didn’t try to be anything he wasn’t. The raw realism that what you see is what you get with Sheriff Thomas attracted her like little else. She didn’t date much because she didn’t want to sort through truth and lies to figure out if her date was someone she wanted to explore a relationship with. And, frankly, her job kept her so damn busy she didn’t want to spend that much time separating the wheat from the chaff.

And second, well, this was a little too close for comfort, but Carina knew herself well: she’d always been attracted to guys who didn’t flirt, the hard-to-get type. Since she turned fifteen, grew breasts, and developed a curvy figure, she’d had guys hitting on her wherever she went. While she didn’t particularly like it, she expected it, so when it didn’t happen, she looked twice at the guy.

Certainly Nick found her attractive. He wasn’t married-no ring, no phone calls to or from a spouse or girlfriend. At least in her presence, and they’d been together virtually every waking hour since he’d come to town. Maybe he was discreet, professional. Called late at night.

There was one surefire way to find out.

She turned to Nick, taking in his rugged sexiness that had been the subject of her hot dreams. His square jaw, piercing blue eyes, the scent of soap and sweat and nothing else. She licked her lips. His eyes dropped to her mouth.

Carina reached over with her right arm and grabbed Nick’s neck. She pulled herself to him, her lips to his, and kissed him. No tentative kiss, no wimpy damsel. A full-frontal, openmouthed assault on the mouth of the man who had captivated her for three days.

There was no turning back now. His mouth was heavenly, hot and sensuous and far better than any dream.