Leslie Parrish - Pitch Black

“In what way?”

Leaving his window seat, Alec moved to a chair in the small kitchenette, pulling it close to the dining table. He reached for his laptop case and pulled out a notebook on which he’d jotted his thoughts during today’s interview. “I think I was the most surprised at the way he talked about his victims-at least, once you were out of earshot.”

Sam left the sofa and took the chair opposite him. “I’m not. When I talked to him the first time, I got the impression that he really looked down on the people he stole from, had no sympathy for them.” She shook her head and added, “Elderly grandmothers notwithstanding.”

Unable to resist the impulse, Alec reached out and covered one of her hands with his, squeezing lightly. “I hate like hell that you went through that nightmare today. What he said… Did it change your opinion about his claims?”

“Regarding the supposed other inmate? Maybe. It’s hard to see how he could know as much as he did.”

“Look, Sam, you said yourself this guy was good enough to bilk hundreds of people through the Internet. You really think he couldn’t find out everything he wanted to know about you and your family history? He certainly knew today was your birthday.”

“I don’t know how he found that out. His sentence forbids Internet access.”

“Sentences usually also forbid drugs, pornography, and weapons in prison. You honestly think there aren’t any? I have no doubt Flynt has at the very least found himself in the vicinity of someone who has online access and can find out anything he wants to know.”

She conceded his point with a nod.

“He really knocked you for a loop, didn’t he?” he murmured.

“I guess.”

“You feeling better now?”

“I’m fine. I was fine almost right away, once I got out of that hot room. But I didn’t want to interfere, so I didn’t even think about coming back.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. I don’t think I’d have kept Jimmy’s attention if you were there.”

“It wasn’t a hardship. Despite being a prick about women’s skirts, the warden was pretty nice to let me wait in the privacy of his assistant’s office, rather than sending me to the car. I guess he felt bad for making me keep the coat on.”

He tried to lighten the mood with a teasing smile. “And no dress code?”

“No dress code. Now, back to Jimmy?”

His smile faded immediately. “I don’t think it was just that he had no sympathy for his victims, although that was certainly true.” Alec thought about it, trying to put his impressions in words. “He seemed almost… disgusted with them, I guess, for being stupid enough to fall for his line.”

“Like they had it coming?”

“Exactly. Had a very Nietzschean philosophy that some people were predators and some were prey and that’s just the way things are. That it was no more wrong for him to steal from them than it was for a hungry wolf to cull the weakest sheep from the flock to fulfill its needs.”

“Sociopathic,” she murmured.

“Probably. He honestly saw himself as doing the world a favor by teaching these fools a lesson, even though he doubted most of them learned from it.”

“Kind of like your unsub.”

Alec nodded. “Most definitely. He has referred to his victims as fools, called them stupid.”

They both thought about it. Alec kept playing Jimmy’s words in his head, knowing there was something he had overlooked. Some natural conclusion he should be able to reach; yet it remained elusive, hiding in the corners of his mind.

“Lucky him to have found a way to lure gullible people,” Sam mused. “I bet it’s not hard for him to find people he considers stupid online.”

And just like that, something clicked. He sat very still, closing his eyes, thinking about her words. “Lucky,” he whispered. “Yes, he just sends out a blanket lure and waits for the right type of victim to respond.”

Sam seemed to realize he was talking more to himself than to her and remained silent.

“But maybe he doesn’t see it as luck. Maybe it isn’t random.”

“What?”

Alec rose from his chair and paced the room, trying to verbalize the idea he couldn’t quite nail down. “I mean, maybe he’s not just trying to find miscellaneous victims to satisfy his need to kill. He intentionally sets his lures up to be easily avoided. The scams are simple to check, the backgrounds so obviously faked. Even the crime scenes, which seem like such senseless deaths, usually have a way out.”

“So the objective…”

“Isn’t just to kill.” He placed his hands on the back of the chair he had just vacated, and gripped it. “The victims aren’t random. The means he uses to pull them in ensures that he’s getting exactly the kind of people he wants to kill, and the farther they venture into his path, the more they confirm their status as sheep to be culled. The ones he considers unworthy, stupid.”

“Like the world would be better off without them?”

“Yes!” He dropped back onto the chair, mumbling, “Darwin. He wasn’t just referring to the survival of the fittest. He is trying to help evolution along by thinning out the gene pool.”

Sam shook her head in disgust. “Unbelievable.”

“But true,” he said, nearly certain of it. He just needed a little more information to firm up his theories. “His first several victims, the ones he killed without the e-mail scams… There must have been something that attracted him to them.”

The victims hadn’t had any surface connections. They’d been from widely different backgrounds, different ages, sexes, socioeconomic groups. Yet there must have been something to swing Darwin’s big, evil eye in their direction.

Alec flipped open his laptop and opened his documents on the case. The details of each murder were here, and he refamiliarized himself with them, again acknowledging that there were no surface similarities.

Acting on a hunch, he went a step further and established an Internet connection. “We checked the backgrounds on every one of these people and found absolutely nothing that linked them. Now, I wonder if Darwin himself does,” he muttered.

Sam eyed him curiously, but he didn’t explain. Instead, he typed the name of one of the victims and the word Darwin into a search engine, and pressed enter.

The returns were almost instantaneous, and they were numerous. He scanned down the first page, glancing at each snippet, not entirely sure what he was looking for.

And then, he quite simply found it.

“Here it is,” he murmured, his heart thudding in his chest.

“What?” she asked, scooting her chair around so she could see.

Alec clicked on the link, though he didn’t need to read the entire newspaper article that came up to know what it contained.

“Oh, my God,” Sam whispered after she read the first few paragraphs.

“The Darwin Awards,” he said. “They’re not only real; the expression is commonly used to describe people who survive after doing something stupid that should have killed them.”

“Thereby cleaning up the gene pool.”

Exactly. Before their unsub had begun bringing the stupid masses right to his door via the Internet, he’d had to go out and hunt for them. He’d found them by watching news feeds from up and down the East Coast, keying on that one expression, on the word Darwin . And had, over a period of a few years, found six people to slaughter.

Alec reached into his pocket to retrieve his phone. Wyatt needed to know about this. If Alec’s hunch was right, and the other victims all had a similar Darwin Awards-type incident in their past-which a little more digging should confirm-they had another tool with which to view the psyche of the man they sought. But before he could even retrieve it, the thing rang.