For Gerard and the buxom Vanessa?
The rest of his charges seemed normal. There was the cable company and his cell phone (she might need that information), electric, gas, the usual. Kat was about to put the bill back in the drawer, when she saw it near the bottom.
The payee was a company called TMJ Services.
That didn’t strike her as anything unusual. She probably would have passed it by except for the amount.
$5.74.
And then she thought about the name. TMJ. Now reverse the order of those initials. TMJ becomes JMT. How discreet.
JMT billing for $5.74.
Like Dana Phelps, like Jeff Raynes, like Kat Donovan herself, Gerard Remington had been using YouAreJustMyType.com.
• • •
When Kat was back in the fly-yellow Ferrari, she called Brandon Phelps.
He answered with a tentative. “Hello?”
“How are you, Brandon?”
“I’m okay.”
“I need a favor.”
“Where are you?” he asked.
“I’m driving back from Massachusetts.”
“What’s up there?”
“I’ll fill you in in a little while. But right now, I’m sending you a photograph of a rather robust woman.”
“Huh?”
“She’s in a bikini. You’ll see. Remember that image-search thing you did on the pictures of Jeff?”
“Yes.”
“I want you to do the same thing with her picture. See if she’s online anywhere. I need a name, address, whatever you can get on her.”
“Okay,” he said slowly. Then: “This doesn’t have anything to do with my mother, does it?”
“It might.”
“How?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Because if you’re still looking for my mother, I think you should probably stop.”
That surprised her. “Why?”
“She called me.”
“Your mother?”
“Yes.”
Kat pulled the Ferrari off onto the shoulder. “When?”
“An hour ago.”
“What did she say?”
“She said that she’d just gotten e-mail access and saw all my e-mails and that everything was fine. She said that I should stop worrying, that she was really happy and might even stay a few days longer.”
“What did you say?”
“I asked her about the money transfer.”
“What did she say?”
“She kinda got angry. She said it was personal and that I had no right to be poking through her stuff.”
“Did you tell her that you’d gone to the police?”
“I told her about Detective Schwartz. I think she called him after me. I didn’t tell her about you, though.”
Kat wasn’t sure what to make of all this.
“Kat?”
“Yeah?”
“She said that she’d be home soon and that she had a big surprise for me. Do you know what it is?”
“I might.”
“Does it have something to do with your old boyfriend?”
“It might.”
“My mom asked me to leave it alone. I think maybe what she’s doing with the money isn’t completely legal and that asking around will get her in some kind of trouble.”
Kat sat in the car, frowning. Now what? There had been so little evidence of any wrongdoing before. Now that Dana Phelps had called her son and probably Detective Schwartz, there was literally nothing here but a bizarre paranoid conspiracy theory coming from an NYPD detective who had recently been given a leave by her superior because, well, she had voiced another bizarre paranoid conspiracy theory.
“Kat?”
“Will you do that image search for me, Brandon? That’s all I’m asking right now. Run that search.”
There was a brief hesitation. “Yeah, okay.”
Another call was coming in, so Kat said a quick good-bye and took it.
Stacy said, “Where are you?”
“I’m in Massachusetts, but I’m heading back home. Why?”
“I found Jeff Raynes.”
Chapter 28
Titus was lying on the grass, staring up into the perfect night sky. Before he moved to this farm, he half believed that stars and constellations were the stuff of fairy tales. He wondered whether the stars simply didn’t shine in the big city or if he had just never taken the time to lie down like this, his fingers interlaced behind his head, and look up. He’d found a constellations map online and printed it out. For a while, he would bring it out here with him. He didn’t need it now.
Dana Phelps was back in her box.
She was tougher than most, but in the end, when the lies and distortions and threats and confusion do not guarantee cooperation, all Titus had to do was hold up a picture of a child, and a parent fell in line.
Dana had made the call. Eventually, they always do. There had been one man who tried to warn the caller. Titus had cut him off immediately. He had debated killing the man right then and there, but instead, he let Reynaldo work on him with the old Amish pruning saw in the barn. The blade was dull, but that just made Reynaldo enjoy himself more. Three days later, Reynaldo brought him back. The man begged on his knees to cooperate. He would have clasped his hands in prayer position, but all his fingers were gone.
And so it goes.
Titus heard the footsteps. He kept his eyes on the stars until Reynaldo loomed over him.
“Is everything okay with the new arrival?” Titus asked.
“Yes. She’s in her box.”
“Did she pack her laptop?”
“No.”
Not surprising. Martha Paquet had been more reticent than others. Her getaway to this farm hadn’t been a week to some reclusive warm-weather locale. They had instead broken her in with something more digestible—two nights at a bed-and-breakfast in Ephrata, Pennsylvania. It had seemed at first as though Martha wouldn’t take them up on it—no matter, you just cut the bait and move on—but she eventually acquiesced.
Having her laptop would have been helpful. Most people have their lives on theirs. Dmitry could go through it and find bank accounts and passwords. They would check her smartphone, but he didn’t like to leave it on too long—though unlikely, a phone that was powered on could be traced. It was why he not only took the phones but removed the batteries.
The other difficulty was, of course, that Titus had less time to work with her. She didn’t have much family, just a sister who had been encouraging Martha to take this chance. The sister might buy it if Martha decided to stay a few extra days, but there was still a small degree of urgency.
Sometimes, when they first arrived at the farm, Titus liked to keep them locked in the underground box for hours or even days. It softened them up. But other times—and Titus was still experimenting here—it was best to get on with it and use the shock to his advantage. Eight hours ago, Martha Paquet had left her house, believing she was on her way to find true love. Since then, she had been locked in a car, assaulted when she got out of hand, stripped of her clothes, and buried in a dark box.
Hopelessness was much more potent when it started out as hope. Think about it: If you want to drop something so it lands hard and cracks, you first have to lift it up as high as possible.
Put more simply, there has to be hope in order to take it away.
Titus stood in one fluid motion. “Send her up the path.”
He made his way back to the farmhouse. Dmitry was waiting for him. He had the computer up. Dmitry was computer savvy, but his expertise didn’t factor into this work all that much. It was Titus’s job to get their account numbers, their e-mails, their passwords—all the information. Once you had that, all you needed to do was plug them into the proper prompts.
Reynaldo would be pulling Martha Paquet out of her box now. He would make her hose off and then give her the jumpsuit. Titus checked the time. He still had about ten minutes. He grabbed a snack from the kitchen—he loved rice crackers with almond butter—and put a kettle of boiling water on the stove.