“The entire neighborhood was buzzing this morning,” Mom said to me as she sipped her coffee, testing to see if it was cool enough to drink yet.

  “Family annihilator struck last night, hit a house Daniels’ Security protected,” I told her.

  “I know, I got the details from Melina during our run,” Mom said. “Melina thinks Nadine is somehow involved.”

  “Lucas is of the opinion it’s just bad luck at the moment.” I answered. “Having said that, if it’s mobsters after Nadine again, that could explain the semi-professional nature of the killings and possibly explain why they’d hit a house with a sign saying it was protected by Daniels’ Security.”

  “I hate those signs; I don’t know why people use them.” Mom took a deep breath. “I hate all those signs, not just Nadine’s.”

  “Why? They deter burglars and things,” I answered.

  “Do they really, though?” Mom asked. “Oh look, we have a security system that may or may not be armed, because people become lax about those sorts of things and forget.”

  “We don’t,” I said.

  “We aren’t most people.”

  Despite living in a neighborhood that was guarded by federal law enforcement officers and Marines, nearly every house in the neighborhood had its own security system. Mine was monitored by Daniels’ Security, and it wasn’t their basic version. I had 12 cameras outside and six inside monitoring all the doors in and out of the house, as well as the ground floor windows. Just in case there was ever another organized attack on law enforcement at our homes. The window cameras only turned on if the window was opened, but the door cameras ran all the time. I had two doors; a front door that was solid steel made to look like wood, and a sliding patio door that was Plexiglas, not regular glass, with a bar built into it to keep it from sliding open when it’s engaged. It was easier to come through the walls of the house than through the doors and windows. Although every ten feet instead of a standard two-by-four wooden beam, there was a steel beam built into the framework of the house to help with integrity of the structure. This hadn’t been standard before the attack, when a few serial killers just decided to drive cars through the houses in the FGN to kill cops and their families who may have remained in their homes during the attack. During the rebuild, it had been made standard. Our houses were rated for hurricanes, tornadoes, and serial killers with Humvees. About the only thing they wouldn’t stop was an airplane or tank. Behind the vinyl siding there was a half-inch-thick metal skin covering the exterior plywood. All the houses had panic rooms in the basement—by panic room I mean concrete and steel bunkers with their own water filtration and ventilation systems. I’d custom designed my panic room to hold a small armory as well as food for two months. There were two bunks that pulled down from the walls and a small bathroom. Oddly, the panic room wasn’t in the basement, it was under it. The door opened up to a four-by-four foot platform, and from that were stairs that led down into something akin to a bomb shelter that had a door with a spin latch like a ship’s hatch. Mom and I could hole up in there for quite some time. There was a microwave, convection oven, mini-fridge, mini-standup-freezer, and a computer system hard-lined 40 feet below ground to the SCTU network in the sub-basement of the FGA, and it had its own power source. Fort Knox had nothing on my house. SCTU members had done a lot of customization to our houses before they got built, deciding we needed extra stuff in the event of another attack.

  “No, we aren’t.” I nodded slightly. “I’m pretty sure Zeke knows something he didn’t tell us. I also think he thinks this is about Nadine.”

  “Why?” Mom asked.

  “He had a look at one point this morning,” I said. I dug out my phone and called Zeke.

  “What’s up?” Zeke answered.

  “Why do you think this has something to do with Nadine?” I asked.

  “I should have known.”

  “Known what?” I asked.

  “That I can’t make any facial expressions around you,” Zeke answered. “You notice so little yet so much at the same time. Someone has been trying to gain access to Daniels’ Security’s internal network for over a month. Fiona gave us some tips on preventing access; like we gave everyone new usernames based on different things that have nothing to do with the person using it. For instance, my username is now EzSpecialK1009.” He spelled it for me, including when capital letters were used. “Sebastian’s is GoliathGrouperB88101.”

  “I see,” I said. He spelled Sebastian’s for me as well. I was surprised I understood either of them, but I did. Ezekiel-EzSpecialK. Although I wasn’t sure about the 1009. Sebastian became seabass which became grouper and the biggest grouper was the goliath grouper. I didn’t know what his numbers meant either, though.

  “Aside from changing everyone’s usernames and not giving a good reason for the association of that username with the person, we’ve forced everyone to use a 25-digit pass phrase instead of a password which requires five numbers and four special characters, as well as capital letters and lowercase letters. Everyone got to pick their own, so they could remember it. I’ve never seen so many requests to reset passwords before. But the attempted intrusions continue, so the high-risk client information has been moved from the network to a single server that can only be accessed through a terminal in the room. It’s air-gapped from the network, and you have to physically be in the room to access the client files and databases associated with the files.”

  “Your people can’t track where the intrusion is coming from?” I asked.

  “All roads lead back to Moscow, but it runs through several dozen proxy servers first, and frankly, we don’t think it is actually coming out of Moscow,” Zeke said. “I’ve had Vasilii look into it, and he doesn’t think it’s the Russian Mob. They seem to be settling into their new organizational layout, and their new head guy seems happy with the money we gave him. Besides, the dangerous packages have all been mailed locally. Blowfish poison isn’t really their style.”

  “That I agree with,” I said. “They are more the car bomb type than poisoners. I take it Lucas and Fiona know about the attempted network intrusions, but Nadine doesn’t.”

  “Lucas and I have been working together to identify Nadine’s enemies likely to send her poison through the mail for a while now,” Zeke told me.

  “He’s become a profiler for you,” I chirped, stifling a giggle. He’d kill me if he heard me say that.

  “He surprisingly knows a lot more about killers than I do,” Zeke answered.

  “We do deal with a lot of them, but killers and serial killers tend to have different motives,” I said. Serial killers killed because they enjoyed it in the same way people enjoyed playing Mahjongg. An everyday regular killer killed for revenge, money, love, or hate. They enjoyed the aftereffects of the murder and not the murder itself. If they killed and found they enjoyed the act of murder, they became serial killers.

  “Right, ours doesn’t act like a serial killer, but it seems like the coincidences are piling up on my end. We have someone trying to get into the network, direct attacks have picked up, then one of our clients was murdered,” Zeke said.

  “Yeah, I know. Finding out the neighbor of a former client was also killed bothers me a great deal,” I said.

  “We haven’t provided security at that address for two years, though, which is about when the blowfish poison showed up in the mail. I already checked out the client to see why they left. They moved from KC to Miami for the husband’s job.”

  “Well, then they weren’t unhappy clients,” I said. “Do you have a file of unhappy clients?”

  “Of course,” Zeke replied.

  “Would you send it to us? Just to cover all the bases.”

  “Yes, I’ll have it faxed over once Lucy arrives at the office.”

  “Thanks!” I hung up. There were a lot of coincidences. But if our killer had fired at Nadine, I think he would have hit her, given the precision of his massacre the night before. However, handguns and rifles were very different weapons. Zeke had said long distance, making a handgun unlikely as the weapon of choice. Even the best snipers often struggled using handguns and their skills didn’t translate; the opposite was also true. I was good with a handgun, but I sucked with a rifle. Even with scopes, spotters, and all the assistance a person could want when taking a long distance shot, I’d still miss nine times out of ten.

  Unfortunately, if the SCTU was correct, there would be another family murdered. Unfortunately, if Zeke was correct, it would be someone connected with Nadine and until there was another murder, we’d just chase our tails looking for leads and clues. Rarely were we on the ground running with a first or second murder, usually it was only after a half dozen or more murders occurred that we were asked to come check out a case.

  Four

  By noon, we were all in our little basement conference room going through the stacks of files Zeke had sent over on unhappy customers, including every threat that had been issued against Nadine or Daniels’ Security in the history of the company. We were sorting them into piles.

  I’ve always known Nadine helped women and children escape situations of abuse, but until I’d started going through the files, I hadn’t realized how many people that entailed. We had a stack just for abusive spouses and parents that had gotten so high, Gabriel had sent out for a plastic tub to put them in. Gabriel and Fiona were going through the files and sorting them, and Lucas and I were each taking a specific file to look at the exact threats. Thankfully, Nadine had made this easy for us. Every threat had been investigated by either Alex Zeitzev or Kenzie Reynolds, her two private investigator cousins; and Daniels’ Security heads had done threat assessments on them. Most people who made threats were just venting their rage at a situation they couldn’t control. Those were marked differently than those that posed actual threats and weren’t just venting their rage. They involved a much different type of threat. Instead of angry notes, they were the people who had shipped boxes of dismembered animal parts or stalker photos of the staff.

  “Jesus Christ, she is not well-liked,” Fiona said after about two hours. A courier from Daniels’ Security had shown up a half hour earlier with several boxes of original files. These were not the files Zeke had his assistant fax to us. By my count, he’d brought 14 boxes. The fax machine was still spitting out pages as well. We’d had to replace the paper seven times already.

  “I knew Daniels’ Security and Zeitzev investigations ran a sort of underground railroad for battered women and children, but I didn’t realize the scope of it until now,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s one thing to know it, it’s another to see all the threats she’s gotten as a result of it,” Fiona agreed.

  “I think I finally understand why she has so many psychopaths on the payroll,” Lucas said. “Some of the men in these files are scary and if their wives and children hadn’t left, they would have killed them.”

  “We haven’t even gotten to her mob files yet,” Gabriel pointed to a line of four boxes marked Russian Mob Threats.

  “Oh look, a serial killer we caught,” Fiona said, starting a new pile and putting the file in it. “It’s probably not him, we would’ve heard if he’d escaped custody.”

  “Oh look, a second one,” I said adding to the pile. “I think this box is all criminals that have been caught,” I said, after opening a third file from the box Fiona had just started sorting through. Fiona ran a name through her computer and then dropped a fourth file in that pile.

  “Well, that one wasn’t a serial killer at least,” she said. I looked at it.

  “Yeah, serial rapists are so much better,” I said with a sneer.

  We ordered dinner in. The actual stack of customer complaints was small and most were that they expected more hands-on protection, not the “I hate you and hope you die a violent, bloody death” type of complaints. We’d found one person that complained just to complain and the others had dropped Daniels’ Security because they weren’t getting the attention they wanted from it. Two files from the box were hateful, ranting threats that filled multiple pages and were the biggest two files. Lucas examined them closely, then put them back in the box they’d originally come out of. We looked at him.

  “I can’t be sure, but I think this client might be a paranoid schizophrenic with money enough to hire Daniels’ Security to protect them from the Intruders, whoever they are. And that is their specific word ‘Intruders’,” Lucas said to us by way of answer.

  “Tin foil hat club then,” I said.

  “Yes, that type. He never comes out and says who the intruders are, so I don’t know if they are aliens or government agencies, but he probably isn’t capable of executing a well-laid-out plan of attack against seven people.”

  “I’d like to meet the Daniels’ Security’s threat assessment team,” Gabriel said. “I have only disagreed with one of them in six boxes.”

  “Too high or too low?” Fiona asked.

  “Too low,” Gabriel said, putting a file on the stack of captured criminal files. I looked at the name, Isiah Cooley. It had a big yellow sticker on the front, meaning it was a low threat risk.

  “Uh, he’s dead,” I said.

  “I know, I just don’t think seven years ago when the file was put together, he was dead,” Gabriel said. “Apparently, Nadine and Alex helped his sister escape him.”

  “Why would a sister need to escape?” Fiona asked.

  “Isiah Cooley was a serial killer. When he was 14, he abducted, raped, and killed a female classmate. It was his sixth. However, in the years leading up to his first murder, his mother tried everything she could to help him. He spent time in mental hospitals, in reform school, and even in juvenile detention facilities. When he was 12, she woke up one night to find he had stabbed her 19 times. He spent a year in juvenile detention where he was a model prisoner, then Child Services returned him to his mother. He’d been back home less than a month when his mother found drawings he’d done of him killing her and raping his nine-year-old sister. Child Protective Services refused to intervene, telling her he’d grow out of it and he was just angry at her because his father had left. When he was arrested by police for the murder of a girl who lived down the road from him, the police found the body of his father in the basement, where Isiah had killed him and stored him. They also found that Isiah had been fantasizing about killing his mom so he could have his sister to himself forever. He started keeping the journals when he was seven and his sister was five. He wanted to be the only thing his sister loved in the entire world. Thankfully, he also kept detailed records of his murders as well. In the months before Cooley was arrested, his sister disappeared. All his mother would say was that the girl was safe from her brother for the first time in their lives.”

  “Wow...” Fiona said.

  “Yep,” Lucas said. “Their mom did her best with him, but he was absolutely fixated on his sister, and he would have killed his mom to get the information, so bringing in Daniels’ Security was probably smart. He was a nightmare. He hung himself in prison when it finally sank in that he would never see her again. He left a suicide note about how she was his soulmate and he couldn’t live without her. Most psychiatrists that talked to him suspected he killed his father because his father found him trying to molest his sister. The sister said he did touch her a few times inappropriately and that when mom put a lock on the outside of his door, he found a way to climb out his window to get into her room. So, mom nailed his window shut. He tore up his fingers pulling the nails out one night shortly before his father disappeared.”

  “That’s the kind of story that will give you nightmares,” Fiona said.

  “Yes, it is. He was 15 when he died.” Lucas replied stuck another folder on the captured criminals pile.

  Gabriel had moved on to the boxes of mob threats. Fiona was still working her way through the unlabeled boxes, which were mostly threats made by spouses, parents, and other abusers against Nadine after their victims had escaped. There was a color system to these; the files themselves were yellow for the lowest risk, followed by orange, then red, then black. Every so often Fiona would pull out a bright blue folder; we’d all learned these were threats made by abusers after their victims had escaped, but without Nadine or Alex’s help. Nadine would claim responsibility for the escape and meet with the abuser with one of her trusted back-up men, and then they would get a colored sticker in the file.

  The first one of these, I had wondered why Nadine would claim she’d helped the victim escape when she didn’t. Lucas had been forced to explain to me that it was much more daunting for an abuser to have to face an organization like Daniels’ Security, even if a friend or family had helped with the escape. By taking credit for it, Nadine was focusing attention on her and Daniels’ Security and not letting the abuser go victimize friends and family of the victim to find out where they were. Facing Sebastian, Zeke, or Anthony was more intimidating than bullying your wife’s best girlfriend to find out what she did with her. It made sense to me once it was explained.

  If I ever had to give up the SCTU, I was going to ask Nadine for a job. I found all this impressive and thought I could probably work for her once my body stopped working well enough to hunt serial killers and mass murderers for the US Marshals. I also decided to volunteer to help with her underground railroad for the battered and abused. I couldn’t be there all the time, but when I was in town, I could probably scare the socks off a few abusive husbands, as need be. If she’d have me. All of these cases had the exact same small group of people involved—Sebastian, Anthony, Alex, Zeke, and Nadine. Fiona had explained the term air-gapped in regards to servers, and it dawned on me now that the server Zeke was talking about probably held the new identities Nadine and Alex had helped these people obtain once they escaped their abusers.