Think about it. How often did you hear on the news that a forty-seven-year-old single man had vanished and the police were searching for him?
Almost never.
The answer becomes “completely never” when the man is still sending e-mails or text messages and even, when needed, making phone calls. Titus’s operation was simple and precise. You keep the targets alive for as long as you need them. You bleed them in a way that may cause a raised eyebrow but rarely more. You bleed them for as long as it is profitable. Then you kill them and make them disappear.
That was the key. Once their usefulness is over, you don’t let them live.
Titus had been running his operation at the farm for eight months now. In terms of geography, he cast his net within a ten-hour ride to the farm. That gave him a great deal of the East Coast—from Maine to South Carolina, and even the Midwest. Cleveland was only five hours away, Indianapolis about nine, Chicago was right about at the ten-hour mark. He tried to make sure that no two victims lived too close to each other or had any connection. Gerard Remington had been from Hadley, Massachusetts, for example, while Dana Phelps lived in Greenwich, Connecticut.
The rest was simple.
Eventually, most online relationships had to progress to the point where you had in-person contact. Titus had been surprised, though, at how intimate you could become without ever meeting face-to-face. He’d had some form of online sex or sexting episode with more than half his victims. He’d had phone sex, always using a disposable mobile device, sometimes hiring a woman who didn’t really know what was going on, but most of the time, he used a simple voice changer and did it himself. In every case, words of love were exchanged before a face-to-face meet was even set up.
Odd.
The getaway—be it a weekend or a week—evolved into a given. Gerard Remington, who clearly had some social issues (he almost ruined the plan by insisting on taking his own car—they ended up improvising, conking him over the head in the airport parking lot), had bought a ring and prepared his proposal—this despite never laying eyes on Vanessa in the flesh. He wasn’t the first. Titus had read about relationships like this, people who talked online for months or even years. That star linebacker from Notre Dame had fallen in love without ever seeing the “girl” who was conning him, even believing that she had died from a bizarre mix of leukemia and a car accident.
Love blinds, yes, but not nearly as much as wanting to be loved.
That was what Titus had learned. People weren’t so much gullible as desperate. Or maybe, Titus concluded, those were two sides of the same coin.
Now his perfect operation seemed to have hit a major snag. Looking back on it, Titus could blame only himself. He had grown lazy. It had all gone so smoothly for so long that he let down his guard. Immediately after “Kat”—he recognized her as the woman who had reached out to Ron Kochman at YouAreJustMyType .com—had contacted Ron Kochman, Titus should have closed down the profile and cut the line. He hadn’t for several reasons.
The first was, he was close to nailing two other victims using that profile. It had taken a lot of work to get there. He didn’t want to lose them over what at first blush seemed to be nothing but contact with an ex. Second, he had no idea that Kat was an NYPD officer. He hadn’t bothered to check her out. He had simply assumed she was a lonely ex-girlfriend and that his “let’s not go back to the past” spiel would be the end of it. That had been incorrect. Third, Kat hadn’t called him Ron. She called him Jeff, making Titus wonder whether she had mistaken him for another guy who looked like Ron, or Ron had once been known as Jeff, therefore making it even harder to find him and an even better fake profile.
That too had been a mistake.
Still, even if hindsight is twenty-twenty, how had Kat put it together? How, from a small communication on YouAreJustMyType, had Detective Kat Donovan found Dana Phelps and Gerard Remington and Martha Paquet?
He needed to know.
So now Titus couldn’t just kill her and be done with it. He had to grab her and make her talk to see the level of threat. He now wondered whether his perfect operation had run its course. That could be. If he learned that Kat was closing in on him or had shared the information with anyone, he would hit the DELETE button on the whole enterprise—that is, kill the rest of the targets, bury them, burn down the farmhouse, move on with the money they’d made.
But a man had to find balance too. A man could panic under these circumstances and make the mistake of being overcautious. He didn’t want to make a final decision until he knew more facts. He needed to get ahold of Kat Donovan and find out what she knew. He would have to make her disappear too. For some reason, there seemed to be this myth that if you killed someone, the law would come down on you harder. The truth was, dead people tell no tales. Missing bodies give no clues. The risk was greater, far greater, when you let your target or enemies work with impunity.
Remove them entirely and you’re always better off.
Titus closed his eyes and leaned his head back. The ride to New York City would take about three hours. He might as well take a nap so he could be well rested for what might come.
Chapter 36
Kat stood frozen in the backyard of this ordinary house in Montauk and felt the earth open up and swallow her whole. Eighteen years after saying that he no longer wanted to marry her, Jeff was a scant ten feet away. For a few moments, neither one of them spoke. She saw the look of loss and hurt and confusion on his face and wondered whether he was seeing the same on hers.
When Jeff finally spoke, it was to the old man, not Kat. “We could use a little privacy, Sam.”
“Yeah, sure thing.”
In her peripheral vision, Kat saw the old man close the book and go in the house. She and Jeff didn’t take their eyes off each other. They had either become two wary gunfighters waiting for someone to draw or, more likely, two disbelieving souls who feared that if one of them turned away, if one of them so much as blinked, the other would vanish into the eighteen-year-old dust.
Jeff had tears in his eyes. “God, it’s so good to see you.”
“You too,” she said.
Silence.
Then Kat said, “Did I really just say ‘you too’?”
“You used to be better with the comebacks.”
“I used to be better with a lot of things.”
He shook his head. “You look fantastic.”
She smiled at him. “You too.” Then: “Hey, that’s becoming my new go-to line.”