There was a brief hesitation. “Yeah, okay.”

Another call was coming in, so Kat said a quick good-bye and took it.

Stacy said, “Where are you?”

“I’m in Massachusetts, but I’m heading back home. Why?”

“I found Jeff Raynes.”

Chapter 28

Titus was lying on the grass, staring up into the perfect night sky. Before he moved to this farm, he half believed that stars and constellations were the stuff of fairy tales. He wondered whether the stars simply didn’t shine in the big city or if he had just never taken the time to lie down like this, his fingers interlaced behind his head, and look up. He’d found a constellations map online and printed it out. For a while, he would bring it out here with him. He didn’t need it now.

Dana Phelps was back in her box.

She was tougher than most, but in the end, when the lies and distortions and threats and confusion do not guarantee cooperation, all Titus had to do was hold up a picture of a child, and a parent fell in line.

Dana had made the call. Eventually, they always do. There had been one man who tried to warn the caller. Titus had cut him off immediately. He had debated killing the man right then and there, but instead, he let Reynaldo work on him with the old Amish pruning saw in the barn. The blade was dull, but that just made Reynaldo enjoy himself more. Three days later, Reynaldo brought him back. The man begged on his knees to cooperate. He would have clasped his hands in prayer position, but all his fingers were gone.

And so it goes.

Titus heard the footsteps. He kept his eyes on the stars until Reynaldo loomed over him.

“Is everything okay with the new arrival?” Titus asked.

“Yes. She’s in her box.”

“Did she pack her laptop?”

“No.”

Not surprising. Martha Paquet had been more reticent than others. Her getaway to this farm hadn’t been a week to some reclusive warm-weather locale. They had instead broken her in with something more digestible—two nights at a bed-and-breakfast in Ephrata, Pennsylvania. It had seemed at first as though Martha wouldn’t take them up on it—no matter, you just cut the bait and move on—but she eventually acquiesced.

Having her laptop would have been helpful. Most people have their lives on theirs. Dmitry could go through it and find bank accounts and passwords. They would check her smartphone, but he didn’t like to leave it on too long—though unlikely, a phone that was powered on could be traced. It was why he not only took the phones but removed the batteries.

The other difficulty was, of course, that Titus had less time to work with her. She didn’t have much family, just a sister who had been encouraging Martha to take this chance. The sister might buy it if Martha decided to stay a few extra days, but there was still a small degree of urgency.

Sometimes, when they first arrived at the farm, Titus liked to keep them locked in the underground box for hours or even days. It softened them up. But other times—and Titus was still experimenting here—it was best to get on with it and use the shock to his advantage. Eight hours ago, Martha Paquet had left her house, believing she was on her way to find true love. Since then, she had been locked in a car, assaulted when she got out of hand, stripped of her clothes, and buried in a dark box.

Hopelessness was much more potent when it started out as hope. Think about it: If you want to drop something so it lands hard and cracks, you first have to lift it up as high as possible.

Put more simply, there has to be hope in order to take it away.

Titus stood in one fluid motion. “Send her up the path.”

He made his way back to the farmhouse. Dmitry was waiting for him. He had the computer up. Dmitry was computer savvy, but his expertise didn’t factor into this work all that much. It was Titus’s job to get their account numbers, their e-mails, their passwords—all the information. Once you had that, all you needed to do was plug them into the proper prompts.

Reynaldo would be pulling Martha Paquet out of her box now. He would make her hose off and then give her the jumpsuit. Titus checked the time. He still had about ten minutes. He grabbed a snack from the kitchen—he loved rice crackers with almond butter—and put a kettle of boiling water on the stove.

There were various ways for Titus to bleed his “guests” dry. For the most part, he tried to do it slowly so no one, to keep within the metaphor, applied a tourniquet too early. Over the first few days, he would have them transfer amounts close to ten thousand dollars to various accounts he had set up overseas. The moment any money arrived, Titus transferred it to another account, then another, then another. In short, he made it virtually impossible to track.

Just like in the old days when he watched a girl getting off a bus at the Port Authority, Titus knew that patience was key. You had to wait, letting some targets go by, so that you could find ones more ideal. With the buses, Titus would hope to encounter maybe one or two potential marks per week. But the Internet made the possibilities endless. He could hunt from a steady pool of targets on various dating sites. Many were deemed worthless immediately, but that was okay because there were so many more out there. It took time. It took patience. He wanted to make sure they didn’t have much family. He wanted to make sure that a lot of people wouldn’t miss them. He wanted to make sure they had adequate funds to make the enterprise profitable.

Sometimes the mark bit. Sometimes they didn’t. C’est la vie.

Take Martha for example. She had inherited money recently from her deceased mother. She told only her sister about Michael Craig. Since their rendezvous was over a weekend, there was no reason for Martha even to tell her bosses at NRG. That would have to change, of course, but once Titus got her e-mail password, it would be easy for “Martha” to inform her employer that she had decided to take a few days off. With Gerard Remington, it was even easier. He had planned a full ten-day vacation-cum-honeymoon with Vanessa. He had notified the pharmaceutical company that he was taking some of his much accrued vacation time. Gerard was a lifelong bachelor and had virtually no family. Transferring the bulk of his account was easy to explain, and while his financial adviser had asked plenty of questions, there was really no serious issue.

Once that was done—once Titus had taken as much as he could from Gerard or any mark—they were useless to him. They were the rind of a just-eaten orange. He obviously couldn’t let them go. That would be far too risky. The safest and neatest solution? Make the person disappear forever. How?

Put a bullet in their brains and bury them in the woods.

A live person leaves a lot of clues. A dead body leaves some clues. But with a person simply missing, supposedly alive and seeking contentment, there were virtually no clues. There was nothing for anyone, especially overworked law enforcement officers, to investigate.

Eventually, family members might wonder and worry. They might, weeks or months later, go to the authorities. The authorities might investigate, but in the end, these “missing” people were consenting adults who had claimed they wanted to start anew.

There were no signs of foul play. The adults in question had given reasonable explanations for their supposed disappearance—they’d been sad and lonely and had fallen in love and wanted to start a new life.

Who couldn’t relate to that fantasy?

On the rare occasion that someone might not buy it—that some ambitious law enforcement officer or family member might want to investigate further—what would they find? The trail was weeks old. It would never lead to an Amish farm in rural Pennsylvania, one that was still registered to Mark Kadison, an Amish farmer, who had sold the land for cash.