CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
It was hard to concentrate with the noise of the jail but Dallas Henry did his best to shut everything out. He felt an itch in the back of his brain, one that he couldn’t scratch.
Something about the letter he was holding in his hands made him feel like he was overlooking a key aspect that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
As he lay on the bottom bunk in his cell at L.A.
’s Twin Towers Correctional Facility, where he was awaiting trial for two attempted murders, Dallas studied the one-page note more closely.
On the surface, the letter was like many of the others he’d received in recent weeks.
It praised him for his failed effort to make an example of Hannah Dorsey by torturing and killing her in the Santa Monica Mountains.
For the fans who wrote him, the attempt was what mattered.
The fact that Hannah had escaped and he ended up with bullet holes in his leg and backside, courtesy of her sister, Jessie Hunt, was secondary.
He had taken a stand in the fight for men’s rights and was now viewed by many as a martyr for the cause.
This note commended him for that, just like so many of the others.
But the language was different: more formal, less angry, without misspellings or run-on rants.
Whoever had written it didn’t want it dismissed because of chicken-scratch handwriting or incoherent tangents.
But it wasn’t just that. The phrasing was so familiar.
When he finally figured it out, he shot up in his bunk, banging the top his head on the metal mattress plank for the bed above.
“What the hell, Henry?” demanded Marvin, his cellmate, a middle-aged, heavyset former rideshare driver who had been convicted of drugging and raping a high school student and was awaiting transfer from the jail to a prison in central California.
Dallas wasn’t inclined to explain himself to this guy. He had no problem with punishing a teenage girl. That’s exactly what he’d set out to do. But Marvin wasn’t trying to make a political point with his actions. He was just getting his rocks off.
Dallas ignored him and focused more intently on the wording of the letter.
He was sure of it now. The writer was using the same language style as Dallas’s favorite author, a prominent men’s advocate who had written one of the bibles of the movement.
Now that he looked more closely, he noted that some of the author’s favorite words and phrases peppered the letter.
The author often used the term “vessel” to describe young women, meaning that their only true value was as a vessel for the imminent birth of brave young men, whom he called “future warriors,” a term the letter-writer also used.
But these revelations were secondary to what he uncovered next.
The men’s rights author had often talked about how his favorite number was 8, which represented infinity.
That was the time period he asserted that men would rule the earth: now and forever, until infinity.
Armed with that recollection, Dallas tried something.
He started counting every eighth letter in the note, regardless of where it was in a word or sentence.
He didn’t want to write anything down or circle the letters.
That might tip off the guards if they searched his cell.
So, the process took him a bit longer than he would have liked.
But when he was done, the message was clear.
It read: you are not forgotten/ will finish what you started/ waiting until they get comfortable/ will strike then/ will make it painful/ patience.
Dallas smiled. Now that he’d cracked the code, the knowledge that someone out there had his back filled him with joy. His supporter was clearly smart and careful. And soon enough, this other man would do what Dallas could not: make Hannah Dorsey and the women she loved pay. He couldn’t wait