Chapter 3
With Pointy Teeth
“BUT HE’S a stockbroker,” Joey said for what felt like the fifth time.
Joey didn’t so much hear Harding and Chadwick’s collective breaths as feel them in his bones. Dammit. He wasn’t going to be able to keep this job, this sense of safety, these nice people who would coddle him through orientation and feed him, if he kept being stupid about things.
But Chester Schumer was obviously a stockbroker. Everything on the screen Gideon had brought up indicated… well, boring white-guy vibes. Joey knew not all white guys were boring—his father being a slithering, venomous, carnivorous example—but this guy?
“He’s a stockbroker with a history of legally screwing anyone who invests with him,” Gideon corrected.
“I know you don’t have behavior analysis training, but one of the things we’ve learned is that ‘boring white guys,’ as you put it, can be chameleons.
Look like respectable businessmen, are actually raving lunatic sociopaths or toxic narcissists.
Or both. They mask well, and, you know, people who look like me and Harding get away with a lot. ”
Joey blinked… and assimilated. As somebody who’d been aware he was passing for a white man, because his skin color was a pale dusky clay instead of a dark ochre, he’d been peripherally aware of this.
He’d just never heard a white guy say that.
Apparently part of analyzing behavior was actually voicing what much of the world refused to acknowledge to get to the truth of things.
“A raving lunatic sociopath?” he asked, considering the idea for the first time.
“Or a toxic narcissist,” Harding reminded him dryly.
“Witness certain politicians we’re all painfully aware of.
They look like milquetoast with a Maalox chaser, but the way they think, their ability to coldly abuse millions of people for their own political gain, to dismiss the deaths and suffering they cause, that’s sociopathic, narcissistic behavior.
The only difference between them and literally millions of people behind bars is the bank account they were born to and the color of their skin. ”
“And they think bigger,” Chadwick muttered bitterly. “The only difference between those people and this guy is this guy’s decompensating before they do.”
“Decompensating?” Joey asked, fascinated.
This explained so much about those orders he’d defied.
Who would do that? Order a village razed, order the people to evacuate or die, just because they wanted to access the lake the people had lived on for years.
For that matter, it explained so much about his own heritage, how his father could seduce and abandon his mother, how the Europeans could befriend and abandon the natives of the land, marginalizing them to tiny plots of inferior land while scrubbing the resources of the other lands bare.
What could stop swarms of human locusts?
“Spinning out,” Chadwick told him, pulling him back to the convo with a yank.
“Making mistakes. Kathy did a pretty comprehensive background here. If we look at it, we’ll see that these three people—Connie Norway, Craig Baugh, and his wife, Angie—all went missing in a span of a year.
The couple made the news, although the suit they were about to file against our Chester Schumer did not.
Connie was young, liked to party. She didn’t even rate a bump in the newspaper, because misogyny sucks, but she was linked to a watering hole for the people in Schumer’s company.
By all reports, Schumer liked to hit on her, and she liked to tell him no.
Does being rejected automatically mean he killed her?
No. Does filing a suit against your stockbroker because he benefited from a trade that sucked away your retirement mean you have to worry about said stockbroker wreaking revenge?
I hope not. But it’s building a pattern.
People who make Schumer’s life inconvenient don’t do well.
That was three years ago. The year after that it was this guy—” He pointed to an equally bland white guy.
“—who stole clients from Schumer because they followed Schumer’s trades closely and didn’t like what he was doing.
By now Schumer’s company has a low-level buzz going.
Not enough to fire him—he’s making them money—but enough for a sort of…
vague warning when people asked for a recommendation. ”
“He starts making less money,” Joey deduced, and Chadwick lit up. He likes it when people follow his brain.
“He does indeed. He’s got a big brick of property in New Jersey and a really nice house, and suddenly his mortgage is not guaranteed.
” Gideon pointed to a bullet-pointed list, complete with chart.
“If you see here, suddenly he’s hustling for new investors.
He’s wining, dining, the whole sixty-nine yards.
And he gets them. He can be charming when he tries.
He gets a whack of them. But at this point, I don’t think he knows how to make money unless he’s fucking people over. It’s like a compulsion with him.”
Gideon pointed to three other faces on the board.
“Boom, boom, boom,” he said.
“Three of his new investors who are now broke and pissed off disappear,” Joey followed, excited now. This was a new kind of hunt, he realized. A new chase. This wasn’t tracking somebody through underbrush or scouting terrain. This was putting a bunch of disparate clues together to form a path.
A pattern of behavior.
Oh wow. He got it now. Got what Chadwick and Harding and whoever this Kathy Novacek woman was that Gideon couldn’t shut up about all did. Too bad the prey was so… ew. Boring.
“Exactly,” Harding said. “In the space of four or so months. So he’s escalating. And he’s not being as careful.”
“And then….” Joey frowned at the screen. “It’s… they’re all the waitress,” he said.
“Noticed that, did you,” Harding commended. “Yeah. Blond, in their twenties. Four of them, spread across all the counties touching the Pine Barrens.”
Joey turned toward him, frowning. “Wait—is that what that area is?” He motioned toward the map, circling the big blank spot. “Isn’t that where the Jersey Devil is supposed to live?”
Chadwick snorted. “If the Jersey Devil is this guy, then sure. But seriously”—he sobered—“all we’ve got is conjecture.
The odd word dropped by the odd witness.
An escalating pattern. First he killed the woman who rejected him.
Then he killed the couple that dared to call him out at work, and then he just kept doing both.
But those last four disappearances were only since December. That’s what we mean by decompensating.”
“He can’t keep up this pace,” Joey said, nodding. “A murder like the ones he’s doing—luring his prey, executing the murder, hiding the body, covering his tracks—that’s a lot of work. It’s exhausting. You do too much of that, you make mistakes.”
“I’m sure if we interviewed his contemporaries at work, we’d see a pattern of odd behavior,” Clint said.
Then he eyed Joey and Chadwick. “Gid, it’s your call.
You and the kid take his office, or leave that to me and Tal while you and the kid take Chester Schumer himself for a preliminary interview. ”
“They need to happen simultaneously,” Chadwick said, completely focused on the board.
“He can’t know he’s a suspect. Let’s do it on an off day.
Tomorrow’s Saturday, the market’s closed.
You and Tal start interviewing the people from his office, and we can say we’re part of a team.
Joey and I can even hit some other office people afterward.
But he can’t think he’s singled out, or we’ll lose him. ”
“Your call,” Harding said. “Meet here tomorrow. Crosby’s here to take an online class, so he can do overwatch while we’re out.”
Chadwick gave a sweet little smile, and Joey’s heart twisted.
Why should he care? Why should he care if this thin, dry man sounded all warm and gooey when he was talking to the BAU lady, Kathy whatever?
Why should he care if Chadwick seemed to have a hard-on for the other rookie?
This wasn’t what that was about, was it.
“His second weekend doing online classes here,” he said. “Kid seems to be throwing himself into it.”
Harding grunted. “He told Gail he wasn’t sure when we’d realize our mistake, and he wants to learn as much as he can while he’s here.”
Chadwick groaned. “Oh God. Fuck me. We’re keeping him.”
“So far she says he’s pretty field-ready,” Harding admitted. “And the best part is he admits what he doesn’t know.” He nodded at Joey. “Witness.”
Joey realized then that while they hadn’t necessarily meant this meeting as a test, he’d still passed by being willing to learn stuff.
On the one hand, he felt a warmth in his stomach, one that he’d gotten while learning to hunt and track with his grandfather.
It was a pride of sorts for being the best he could be, for pleasing an authority figure who neither demanded nor ridiculed.
He hadn’t been aware that feeling could be replicated.
But on the other hand, he realized that he’d walked in here with a sort of arrogance.
He knew he was hot shit—he was the best tracker his unit had ever seen, and he’d heard that again and again and again.
He’d been able to stay out of his father’s clutches while he lived with the bastard; he’d always thought that should qualify him for some sort of award.
He was silent, he was able with any kind of weapon, and hand-to-hand?
Forget about it. He could take out guys three times his size, which was a good thing because height and mass were not his friends.
If the stupid major in the stupid Green Berets had just listened to reason, he wouldn’t have had to leave deployment, or the military, and he wouldn’t be stuck pencil pushing here in this building where the fluorescent lights made him half blind.