Gavin spends his morning reading the email of his ex-girlfriend, Stella. Thanks to a restraining order, he can’t approach her. So, the email has to do. Until it stops. Until Stella disappears from the world.
Gavin thinks he knows what happened to her, but how can he help her? Should he risk everything, including his freedom, for the woman who accused him of stalking?
“E-Male,” by USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and from other online retailers.
E-Male
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Every morning, Gavin got up, fixed himself a mocha grande with sprinkles, and padded barefoot to his computer. He kept the computer in the second bedroom of his rent-controlled apartment. The bedroom was the size of a closet, but he didn’t need much. Besides, the apartment itself was big, considering most places in Manhattan were the size of a shoebox, and he paid one-quarter what the square footage was worth. He’d been here since he was a student, only then he’d had to share with three other people.
Now he had the place to himself—him and the cat—and he preferred it that way. He had his routines and his rituals, and he valued all of them. They got him to work by noon, and that was saying something for a man who had been self-employed most of his adult life.
He would set the mocha on the second shelf of the desk and log on, careful to check his firewalls and his virus protection first. Then he’d download his e-mail, with its insistent spam (BIG BREASTS—THIRTY DAYS!) and even more insistent business matters (Need the drawings for the Peterson account Friday. Have any prelims yet? Don’t want to be surprised). Sometimes, he’d find a letter from his sister, filled with news about his niece (first grade and liking it), his nephew (coasting through the second grade) and her husband, who had the uncommon good sense to stay home to raise the baby.
Gavin would answer what he could, delete what he couldn’t, and then he’d go to his morning treat: Stella’s e-mail.
Stella, his almost-wife.
Stella, his now-ex-girlfriend.
Stella, who hated him almost as much as he hated her.
***
Stella’s e-mail was rich in metaphor, lacking in love. But Stella had never been rich in love. Stella preferred lust. Good, old-fashioned, I-want-you-baby-in-the-worst-way lust.
Not hers, naturally.
His.
And he rarely got a chance to use that lust—in a constructive manner at any rate. Or, at least, that was what Stella had told the judge when she got the restraining order.
Gavin seems to think he owns me, she had said. He watches me all the time. I’m afraid of him, Judge.
Gavin clenched a fist and then made himself relax it slowly. She was such an actress. Such a bad actress. But the judge had fallen for it.
Men always fell for her, always lusted after her.
Even that judge.
When Gavin looked at Stella’s e-mail, his memories of that lust would come back. Stella had a wide variety of correspondents, most of them male, and most of them elderly pretending to be younger.
The slang always gave them away. They wrote, “Hey baby,” or “You look like one cool chick.” They wrote in full sentences with capital letters and real punctuation, instead of e-mail shorthand. It seemed strange to see someone type out “in my humble opinion,” instead of using imho.
Gavin wondered if Stella was bright enough to catch these subtle clues, or if she thought all these men writing to her were young and handsome and interesting. Unlike him, as she had told him often enough.
“Yeah? So what am I?” he had asked, later realizing such a question had been the beginning of the end.
She had actually thought about the answer. Then thought about it some more, and then revisited it, like a hole in her tooth, something she couldn’t ignore.
First she’d said, “You’re okay in bed.”
Then she’d revised it. “You’re an artist.”
Finally she ended with, “And you’ve got money.”
The okay in bed had bothered him. He was fucking great in bed. Every woman except Stella had told him that. He saw to them first, and then he took care of himself. What more could a woman want? But Stella hadn’t been that enthusiastic about sex in the first place.
She loved teasing. She loved being the object of lust. But she hated the fluids, the time, the sheer physicality of sex.
He’d thought about e-mailing that to her admirers. Sure, her picture on her website was hot. He’d taken it after a moment of passion, and yeah—artist that he was—the stuff he’d photoshopped out was barely noticeable. You thought you saw a nipple, an attractive nipple, unless you looked closely. Then you’d realize you saw the suggestion of a nipple, not a real nipple at all.
The real nipple was disappointing. Large and bulbous and clearly a tool for child-feeding, not for male entertainment. It made her entire breast look like the end of a baby’s bottle instead of something a man wanted to wrap his hand around.
Whenever he took naked pictures of her—and he took a lot more than she realized—he always had to deal with the nipple problem. He’d become an expert at the nipple problem by the time he designed her website. She hadn’t even noticed how he’d tucked in her waist to make it look just a bit smaller, or brought the color from the blanket over her hips to hide what little hair she had just so they wouldn’t get in trouble from her webhosting service (which actually defined pornographic pictures as ones that showed everything, as opposed to artistic photos which did not).
Of course, all these idiots who e-mailed her read her blog and thought they knew her. Her blog was ninety percent fantasy and ten percent reality, and that ten percent only showed up when she was pissed off.
Any guy who was paying attention would know she was a real piece of work, a woman with a lot of issues and even more hang-ups, and one beaut of a temper.
But guys didn’t think of that when a woman described how she liked to spend her evenings alone, just her, Mr. Buzzer, and a package of microwave popcorn. All the guys figured they could make her give up the buzzer.
He was here to tell them that they were wrong.
***
That’s what he initially thought he’d do, e-mail every Joe Asshole who e-mailed her, warning him away in creative and untraceable e-mails. Instead, Gavin got caught up reading her made-up blog, comparing it to the e-mails she sent and received, and wondering if she really felt better about her life now that he wasn’t in it.
To his friends, he said he didn’t miss her. His work certainly didn’t suffer. He had his commissions, mostly for ad agencies and websites and magazines, and he had two gallery shows this year in Boston, which was the next best thing to New York.
Anyway he wasn’t really without her. He had her cat—well, the cat she’d abandoned to him, even though she still used said cat’s name as her password—and sometimes, in the middle of the night, he could pretend that little ball of warmth against the middle of his back was Stella.
He had her words, too, and not the ones she’d sent him in anger the day she left (he kept those e-mails as well, downloaded and backed up, just in case). He had her sent mail, which he read religiously, and her unsent mail—her drafts folder—which he only opened on Sunday.
He loved unsent. Drafts were written in anger, and Stella excelled at anger. Once he’d found a letter that verged on pornographic, and he wondered if she’d meant it for him until he’d found the name “Tom” halfway down the page. In no way could Gavin be made into Tom, not even when you squinted and blurred the letters together.
There were five Toms in her e-mail list, but none of them had that particular e-mail address, an address she had never sent anything to before or since. Gavin could’ve traced it, he supposed, but he saw no need since she’d never sent the letter.
She might’ve fantasized about this Tom, but she never consummated the fantasy, and that was enough for Gavin.
***
Lately, though, her e-mail had become a little staid. Almost boring. At first, he attributed it to the fact they’d been broken up for more than a year. She’d never been much of a rocket scientist. She hadn’t even graduated from college, preferring to pad her résumé so that the four years she spent at an elite school looked like a complete education.
Over the past two weeks, she stopped corresponding with most of her men. Her letters took on a terse note, as if she were too busy to be bothered to write anything.
Then he realized that she hadn’t used the e-mail account for nearly three days. No sent mail, no unsent drafts. She hadn’t even responded to the real letters—the ones from family members whom he’d met once and hated—and that was unusual. In the past, she would let the men hang for days, letting them think maybe they’d screwed up by sending such a needy letter to a woman they’d never met, but she never, ever (not even when he’d begged) ignored her family.
That was the first sign that something was wrong. The second was subtler. A man whose handle was jondoe61 had disappeared from her regular e-mail. Gavin had to dig deep into her files to realize that Stella had actively blocked jondoe.
It had to take something incredible to make Stella block anyone. She didn’t even block spammers most of the time. She had blocked Gavin, of course, but that had been on the advice of her attorney.
And Gavin had known how to get around it.
Blocking jondoe61 got Gavin’s curiosity up. What had it taken for Stella to decide this guy had to stay away from her, even if it was only in e-mail?
First Gavin checked the junk file, but the web mail provider that Stella used actually had an efficient junk filter. The junk went into the junk folder, then got permanently deleted after seven days.
Stella had blocked jondoe61 nearly sixteen days before. So Gavin couldn’t find what had provoked her, and he certainly couldn’t remember. All of her mail from men he didn’t know seemed vaguely pornographic to him. He blamed her for this—no one should be that explicit in her blogs without expecting some kind of nasty e-mail in return.
But Stella had never had an off-switch. She didn’t seem to realize that things she said, and, by extension, things she wrote, had repercussions. She coveted the lust, although she did want it couched in romantic terms (“you’re so beautiful” instead of “I want to fuck your lovely ass”).
If men were savvy, they understood that she didn’t want honesty. She wanted poetry. But she also seemed to understand that you had to read a lot of raunchy e-mail to get to the pretty ones.
And she never blamed herself for the content. If men wrote her nasty letters, it was because men wrote nasty letters, not because she talked about sex toys and orgasms in her nightly online ramblings.
Gavin sighed, sipped his now cold mocha grande, and realized he’d wasted half a morning on Stella’s e-mail. She hadn’t logged on, either—which would have chased him out of there in a heartbeat—and he’d lost track of the time.
If he wasn’t careful, he would lose the entire day. He couldn’t afford that.
Well, he could, but it wouldn’t be a good precedent to set for himself. A man who was self-employed had to have an asshole for a boss or he’d get nothing done.
At least, that was what Gavin told the cat. The cat, who had been licking her back leg when he spoke, showed her disagreement by sticking out her pink tongue and keeping her leg raised in a sort of feline-finger gesture.
However, cats knew nothing about employment, the little freeloaders, so he decided to ignore her and get to work.
He had a commission to finish.
***
He actually forgot about Stella until the next morning. He made his mocha grande with extra sprinkles, padded barefoot to the computer, and logged on, thinking about his half-finished painting instead of the mystery of jondoe61. Only by habit did Gavin go to Stella’s e-mail—and discovered that she hadn’t written a thing all week.
He scanned through her sent mail, wondering if she was on to him. Maybe she had realized he’d been reading everything, and as a result, she hadn’t saved copies of the sent mail. But he diddled with the e-mail himself, sending mail to one of the spammers as a test, and the mail he sent in Stella’s name and with her account showed up in the sent mail just like it was supposed to.
He deleted the test e-mail and remembered jondoe61.
Stella kept her answered mail. She was too lazy to delete a letter after she had responded. Gavin scrolled down through nearly 1000 messages, searching for jondoe61. When Gavin finally found an e-mail from jondoe61, he clicked on it then reset the e-mail program’s perimeters so that all of jondoe’s letters grouped together.
After reading six of them, he pushed aside the mocha grande, wondering if he could ever drink one again. He knew that both breakfast and lunch would be out of the question.
Gavin wouldn’t have blocked jondoe61. Gavin would have reported him to the e-mail provider and maybe to the police.
This man was sick, his letters so twisted and perverted that Gavin doubted he’d ever get the images out of his head. jondoe61 described what he wanted to do to women and when Stella answered him—
“Babe, what were you thinking?” Gavin whispered, knowing she hadn’t been thinking at all, just answering her mail like she always did—
jondoe61 told her that he hadn’t just contemplated these things, he had actually done them, and he could prove it to her. One little meeting, and she’d never think about Mr. Buzzer again.
Gavin’s nauseous stomach clenched. Only great self-control and an unwillingness to believe that Stella was dumb enough to meet this creep kept him at the computer.
She had blocked the guy, Gavin reminded himself. She hadn’t met with him. She’d blocked him.
And that, in Stella’s mind, was worse that going to the police. Denying the man the comfort of her presence was the severest punishment she could conceive of. Gavin knew that too. He also knew the lengths she would take to punish a man, a man who only wanted a little time with her.
Really, was a little time too much to ask?
His fists were clenched again. He had to work at opening them. He took three deep breaths like that court-appointed counselor ordered him to do, and then he made himself concentrate.
He checked the junk file. Five letters from jondoe61 mixed with the Viagra offers and the Nigerian scam artists. Five letters, all of which grew progressively angrier as Stella refused to respond.
Five letters sent on the same day.
The day Stella had last accessed her e-mail.
Monday.
This was Thursday.
Thursday morning.
Gavin made himself breathe three times again. She had probably just changed her e-mail address. He would have to do a search and find the new one.
But changing her e-mail address wasn’t like Stella. She hadn’t changed her real address in more than a decade. She had kept the same telephone number her whole adult life, and asked for a variation of it when she had gotten her cell phone.
When Gavin’s lawyer had told her moving with no forwarding would solve all of her problems, Stella had looked at him as if he had just suggested she jump in front of a moving bus.
Gavin sprang out of his chair, startling the cat. She looked up at him with green expressionless eyes. He told himself that he spent way too much time alone, that isolated people made shit up.
But he couldn’t shut off his brain.
So he picked up the phone, and dialed Stella’s work number from memory. The receptionist who answered was someone new who didn’t recognize his name and therefore was willing to tell him that Stella hadn’t shown up all week.
“She called in sick on Tuesday,” the receptionist said. “Frankly, I’ve never heard her sound so bad.”
He didn’t like that. He also didn’t like the fact that the answering machine picked up on her landline and her cell’s voicemail was clogged. He went back to the computer and looked at the stupid letters from her annoying family.
They were wondering why she hadn’t answered her phone either and how come she’d missed some baby shower and why the heck she suddenly got so rude.
He went back to the sent mail, and when it told him nothing, he broke into her work account. That took some doing. Even though the company kept its e-mail on its corporate website, the webmail portion wasn’t as sophisticated as the main web providers. He had to keep his fingers crossed, hoping some anti-spyware software wouldn’t find him, and then he had to use the password cracking program that he’d downloaded months ago to access the entire system.
Once he was in, getting to Stella’s e-mail wasn’t hard. And dumb bitch that she was, she used the cat’s name as her password at work as well. When he found her, he’d tell her to be more original.
Then he remembered that he wasn’t supposed to talk to her, and thought maybe he’d send her an anonymous e-mail just to piss her off.
When he found her.
Which he hadn’t, so far.
***
What he had found was a letter to everyone in her personal address book telling them that she had a major project at work and asking them to refrain from contacting her until she contacted them. She misspelled refrain, and that wasn’t like her. She always spell-checked, saying that a correctly done e-mail was like dressing properly for a party.
Gavin’s hands were shaking as he examined the other major e-mail she’d sent late Monday.
Hideous flu. Doc says it’s extremely contagious. Should be back on my feet in a week or so. Staying off e-mail till the dizziness goes away. Sorry—
She hadn’t even signed it, and that was the tip-off. Stella had an automatic sig line in her work e-mail that gave her mailing address, her e-mail address, her cell, business phone, and fax number, as well as announcing to each and every person she had contact with that she had been promoted to Executive Office Assistant, which sounded like a glorified secretary to him, but she was pretty damn proud of it.
He scanned through the rest of the mails.
Nothing sent or received that had the slightest bit of interest. Nothing about her illness except a few queries from higher-ups trying to find out when she planned to return.
No answer to those either.
Gavin didn’t like this. At all.
And there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t go to her apartment because of the restraining order—the damn neighbor called the cops when he was on the stoop the last time—and he couldn’t call her family because they’d just hang up on him.
He couldn’t go to the cops because they’d want to know why he was spying on her. They’d pick him up for violating the restraining order.
Damn Stella. If she hadn’t been trying to punish him so hard, he could help her now. She had shut down all his options.
He had no way to prove that she was missing.
Except his gut.
And the ugly tone of the letters from jondoe61.
***
That was what Gavin kept going back to. jondoe61. The stuff he’d said in his e-mails was beyond disgusting. No one should imagine those things, let alone inflict those images on naïve and somewhat innocent women like Stella. Hell, she couldn’t take Gavin’s anger or his explanations that yelling and throwing were reasonable responses to adverse stimuli.
He’d “scared” her, poor baby, and she’d fled.
No wonder she’d blocked jondoe61. The asshole had raised the stakes considerably, and he hadn’t even met Stella.
Or had he?
Gavin went back to jondoe’s original e-mails. They sounded a bit too familiar, like things a man might say to a woman he met, not one whose blog he read every night.
Not that Gavin knew the difference between an in-person stalker and an online one. Not really. He wasn’t even sure if online stalking was illegal.
Except for him, of course, and only when it concerned Stella. He was barred from contacting her, and in that court order someone had the brains to add “through all forms of communication in existence or to be developed in the future.” Meaning, his stupid overpriced lawyer said, no e-mail and no chat rooms and no texting.
Gavin was just guessing about jondoe61. But his guesses were based on his knowledge of Stella, and the things she’d tolerate.
She would never tolerate jondoe61.
Since Gavin couldn’t check up on her—at least not any farther without breaking a court order—he decided to check on jondoe61.
It took Gavin three hours and two newly downloaded hacker programs to get to the site without paying for it—which should have been a tip-off to him, but wasn’t, dammit, not until he was in—and what he saw made him glad he hadn’t eaten all day.
The man’s website was a study in perversion. Women in states of bondage, women glassy-eyed and black and blue, women looking sad and resigned…and dead, if you came right down to it. Gavin didn’t think anyone could pose that kind of dead, the pasty-skinned empty-eyed version of dead that never showed up on television crime dramas.
He studied the photographs, not because he was perverse (he most decidedly wasn’t) but to see if they were photoshopped. He had a good eye for photo doctoring—he’d done enough of it himself—so he knew he would be able to spot when someone else did it, and he didn’t see any of it here.
What he did find, almost accidentally, was that a lot of the photos were of the same group of women. If you clicked in the center of one of the early photos, the link led you to other photos of her.
They had a sequence: scared woman, bound woman, terrified woman, glassy-eyed woman, and empty-eyed woman.
He found dozens of these sequences, all of them posed—if that was the right word—in the same place, all of them with different women, all of them clearly taken over a period of time. How long, he couldn’t tell. When, he couldn’t tell either.
But it was definitely a period of time because the woman’s hair went from pretty and clean to tangled and greasy. Her face went from well-scrubbed to scratched to sallow. Her eyes went from emotional to vacant.
Gavin looked away.
He wanted to take a shower. He wanted to toss his computer out the window.
Hell, he wanted to burn it—and the inside of his mind.
Instead, he sat back down and found the part of the website that he knew had to be there. The special members-only part, the section for members who paid extra.
Two more hacker software downloads and one frozen screen later, he found it. It was labeled In Progress.
And damned if it didn’t have a photo of Stella inside.
***
Gavin had dialed 9 and 1 before he set the phone down. How stupid was he? He had a restraining order, for crissakes. Cops always suspected guys with restraining orders of illegal activity.
Hell, he’d called Stella to explain that the night he got the order, and then found himself hauled to jail the next day for a violation. His lawyer had played for the judge’s sympathy—and since Stella wasn’t there, had gotten it with a simple (and true) argument: Gavin’s never been subject to such treatment before. He has no idea what the order means. Besides, he hasn’t threatened Stella McAllister in any way. He has never physically harmed her. She’s just trying to make his life miserable. And, Judge, it looks like she’s succeeding.
Gavin had gotten off with a night in jail and a warning that next time, he’d get a lot more time and a hefty fine.
He couldn’t afford either.
Then there were the other matters that the police would frown on: He had just downloaded four different hacker programs and illegally penetrated a for-profit website; he had downloaded what looked like snuff photographs, the worst kind of porn, and to top it off, what set him on this journey was his own illegal hacking of his ex-girlfriend’s e-mail.
He had broken he didn’t know how many laws, and he didn’t have any reason to except simple curiosity. That he’d stumbled on something bad was purely accidental, and proving that it had been accidental stumbling might be dicey at best.
But Jesus, he couldn’t let anything happen to Stella. He didn’t love her, not any more, but she was an okay person. He didn’t wish anything bad on her.
He had to tell someone.
He just wasn’t sure how.
***
He made himself think it through. The key, for him, was to save her without getting caught. That meant that someone else had to do all the heavy lifting. He could hire a private detective, but how the hell would he know the guy was competent or would protect him from the cops or would even do anything besides collect money and sit on his ass?
He didn’t. So that was out. Just like calling the cops directly. Or calling her stupid family.
Except…
One of the benefits of living in New York was that everything was close. The spy store always creeped him out when he went in it, but he went in it all the same. They sold devices that altered a person’s voice over the phone. He could make himself sound like a five-year-old if he wanted to.
Instead, he chose to sound like an older woman. He bought the stupid device, then read the dumb manual, then stopped at one of the few remaining pay phones on the island.
He made sure he was wearing a pair of gloves (thank God it was cold enough that this didn’t look unusual) and before he went anywhere near the phone, he tugged a ballcap low over his face, making sure he didn’t look at any buildings or traffic lights or banks, so no automatic cameras could get a clear shot of his face.
Then he plugged in some newly acquired quarters (which he had touched only with his gloves) and dialed her mother’s number from memory.
(It scared him that he had that number memorized too. How pussy-whipped had he been in this relationship? Jeez, maybe he’d been the one lucky to escape with his dignity intact.)
When her mother answered, he said in his old lady voice, “Stella hasn’t been to work in nearly a week. She’s not home sick like they think. She’s disappeared.”
Then he hung up. He used the same phone, and the same voice, to leave a similar message on her boss’s voicemail.
But he didn’t call 911. Instead, he called the regular police line and asked if they had an e-mail address, something they used for disturbing photographs.
“What do you mean, ma’am?” the person answering the phone asked.
“I’ve seen a naughty website,” he said, “and I do believe there are children on it.”
“Can you give me the URL?” the person asked.
“The what?” he asked, just for verisimilitude.
“The web address?”
“Oh, no. It’s on my son’s computer. When I’m babysitting my niece the next time, I’ll just e-mail you.”
“Ma’am, who is your son?”
“Who do I send it to?” he asked as if he hadn’t heard the previous question.
“We have a computer crimes division, but, ma’am, it might be easier if we just visited your son and—”
Gavin hung up. Quietly, quickly. He stuck the device in his coat pocket and, keeping his head down, walked to the nearest deli, ordered a hamburger to eat in, and a cake to go.
Then he went into his favorite bookstore, and chatted up the pretty clerk like he usually did in the afternoon. She was petite and red-headed, nothing like Stella. He initially thought that was the attraction, but then he realized that the clerk incited the same kind of lust that Stella had, a long time ago.
Only with this woman, he never let on. He’d learned that lesson. Better to fantasize.
So he visited her as a treat for doing a good deed, bought the latest New Yorker, and went home, his heart pounding. He felt like he had done something wrong.
But he always felt like that after he talked to the pretty clerk. He blamed Stella for that too. She had made him ashamed of his own lust.
She had also made him worry that other women wouldn’t be interested in it, when they had been in the past. In the past, redheads had found him as attractive as he had found them. They’d enjoyed each moment with him, whether it was in the darkness of their own bedroom or a quickie in an alley after they’d gotten off work.
He’d tried to go slower with Stella and look where that had gotten him. Making anonymous phone calls and being afraid to ask the pretty clerk for a cup of coffee.
If he hadn’t been so upset, he might have gone to his bedroom and worked off some of the tension. But he didn’t have time. He had to finish what he’d started.
He had to execute the next part of his plan from his home computer and he prayed his skills were up to it. If not, the cops would come after him anyway.
He needed to send the URL for the jondoe61 website to the police computer crime unit.
He’d thought and thought about that all the way home, and finally he decided to have Stella do it.
He sent an e-mail from her personal account, backdated the damn thing to the day she disappeared, and added this cryptic note: If anything happens to me, check out the man who runs this website. He’s been threatening me.
As a last minute thing, he decided to attach all of jondoe61’s letters. Then he sent the mail to the police, ccing her mother and her employer.
When he finished, he paced for another hour, knowing he wasn’t done, but he wasn’t sure what was left.
Finally he realized what was making him so damn nervous.
He had to trust someone else. He had to hope he’d done enough to save her before the scratched-face stage. Or the glassy-eye stage. Or, God forbid, the empty-eye stage.
He had to trust.
And he’d never done that before.
***
He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t check on anything. He couldn’t even break into Stella’s e-mail any more, not without raising suspicions.
And those images from jondoe61’s site kept haunting him. Gavin wanted them to go away.
He wished he could scrub out his mind.
Then he realized he had to scrub his computer. Deleting stuff wasn’t enough. Putting things in the trash didn’t clean it off the hard drive, and doing a disk cleanup didn’t do it either.
He had to make the information impossible to access. He had to make it go away.
Finally he settled for moving his important files to another hard drive. Then he switched drives. Once the new drive (which was really an old drive he hadn’t gotten rid of yet) was up and running, he took the drive with all the incriminating material, and set all of his kitchen magnets on top of it. Then he poured coffee into it while it was plugged in. The resulting electrical surge popped two breakers in his apartment’s circuit box, but fortunately didn’t cut the power anywhere else in the building.
In his closet, he set the stained and ruined hard drive, which no longer powered up (and God, he hoped the information on it was long gone).
Then he prepared for the worst.
***
The worst happened two days later when the police finally visited him. Two rather bored looking detectives, neither of which resembled the handsome and ambitious detectives on television, came inside and asked him when he last saw Stella.
Gavin could honestly say that he hadn’t been near her since the restraining order, and why, he wanted to know, were they looking into this?
Because she was missing, one of them said as if he didn’t care.
Gavin wanted to tell him to care. Gavin wanted to say that Stella had probably progressed from scared woman to terrified woman. But he didn’t say anything. He answered the questions, let some of his peevishness show because peevish was how he’d feel if Stella had gone on an extended vacation without telling anyone.
The detectives made some cursory notes, told him everything was routine, reminded him to stay away from her, and left.
And he didn’t hear anything for another two days.
***
In the end, he heard only because he’d been living with New York 1 as if it were the last television station in town. NY1 broke every damn story in the city, and they would love a kidnapping if they knew about it.
The story came across at 9:21 p.m. as breaking news. The police had found an executive secretary, held captive for days in a website designer’s warehouse. The designer had found her through her blog, traced her address through her webserver, and stalked her. He kidnapped her, sent dismissive e-mail to her friends and family, forced her to call her employer, and set about turning her into one of the horrible before-and-after montages he created for his site.
The story had to sound bizarre to the layperson—what website designer would need a warehouse?—but it soon became clear that this guy and his little circle of friends photographed their grisly pastimes, used their captives until the captives lost their usefulness, and then murdered them.
The cops even found a nearby dumping ground.
Stella was alive, but she’d never be the same. Gavin could tell that from the few glimpses of her he got on NY1 and in the papers. The Daily News had a tearful shot covering its front page.
Stella never used to cry like that.
He nearly sent condolences, but he couldn’t. He had to stay uninvolved. A mystery tip had led the police to the designer, a tip, they thought, from a subscriber who had finally gotten fed up with the website. The paying customers were all being investigated.
Gavin hoped to hell that the cops weren’t as good at digging through computer records as he was. He hoped that they wouldn’t notice the site had been hacked about the time of Stella’s disappearance. He hoped that he had wiped all traces of his own e-mail address from the website itself.
But he wasn’t sure he had.
He and the cat lived in fear for weeks, fear that turned into a nagging worry for a few months, and then into relief after a year.
A year. And he got no thanks because he couldn’t take credit.
He couldn’t even check Stella’s e-mail any more without fear of being caught.
His mornings were ruined. He needed a new routine.
***
He finally found one when he realized the pretty bookstore clerk used her own name as part of her e-mail address on a web-based mail server. Her password was, of all things, “password,” and her e-mail wasn’t as interesting as Stella’s, probably because he had no real vested interest in the clerk, but it gave him something to do while he sipped his mocha grande.
And he could think about her, both at home in his private lustful moments and when he visited every afternoon, careful only to say hello. Because if he said more, she’d know he knew too much about her.
Not that he thought he knew too much. He wanted to know a lot more. Where did she live? What did her bedroom look like? Did she close her eyes when she kissed a man or did she like to watch him?
He liked it when they watched.
But he couldn’t tell her that. He couldn’t tell her anything. He didn’t want her to stop him.
For, in addition to performing a private service for his own momentary entertainment, he was also performing a public service. He was guarding her against creeps and stalkers and people who wanted to hurt her.
Because they were out there. They were all over the place.
And he was a silent superhero, keeping a vigilant eye on her life.
Just in case she needed him.
Like Stella had.
Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Two of the Deadliest, edited by Elizabeth George, Harper, 2009
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Tiero/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
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