It was perfect.

Or at least, it had been.

Titus had seen small-time hustlers think small-time. They’d put ads up for sex on websites, make a date with a guy, and then roll him for chump change.

No, that wouldn’t do.

Titus had gathered all of his past operations—prostitution, extortion, scams, identity theft—and taken them to the next level. First, he created the perfect fake online profiles. How? There were several ways. Dmitry helped him find “dead,” “deleted,” or inactive social media accounts on sites like Facebook or even MySpace—people who had created a page, thrown up a few photographs, and then never used it. Most of the ones he ended up using were from canceled accounts.

Take Ron Kochman, for example. According to the cache, his account had been set up and then deleted two weeks later. That was ideal. Take Vanessa Moreau. They had found her bikini portfolio on a casting site called Mucho Models. Not only had Vanessa not updated her account in three years, but when a fictional magazine tried to “book” her for a job, Titus got no reply.

In short, both were dead accounts.

That was step one.

Once Titus had located potential IDs he could exploit, he ran a more thorough online search because any potential suitor would do that. It was the norm nowadays. If you met someone online—or even in person—you Googled them, especially if they were potential suitors. That was why a completely fake identity wouldn’t really work. You’d be able to sniff it out in a Google search. But if the person was real and just unreachable . . .

Bingo.

There was virtually nothing on Ron Kochman online, though in that case, Titus had still had “Ron” be “cautious” and call himself Jack. It worked well. The same was true of Vanessa Moreau. After a ton of extra research—which the average person would never be able to muster without hiring a private eye—Titus had found out that Vanessa Moreau was just a professional name, that she was really Nancy Josephson and was now married with two kids and lived in Bristol, England.

The next important criterion was looks.

Vanessa, he had figured, would be a problem. She was simply too attractive in a pinup-model type way. Men would be suspicious. But, as Titus would have learned during his days in prostitution, men are also dumb when it comes to the female sex. They all have this misguided belief that they are somehow God’s gift to women. Gerard Remington had even waxed on to Vanessa about how superior specimens—him in terms of brains, her in terms of looks—should naturally gravitate toward each other.

“Special people find one another,” Gerard had argued. “They procreate and thus enhance the species.”

Yes, he had said that. For real.

Ron Kochman had been a perfect and rare find. Normally, to be on the absolute safest side, Titus used each profile to nab only one target. After that, he deleted the ID and started using another. But locating ideal identities—people who had some online presence but couldn’t be found—was difficult. Kochman had also had the look and age he wanted. Wealthy women would be suspicious of someone too young and figure that they were perversely into cougars or after their money. They would have less interest in being romantic with someone too old.

Kochman was both a widower (women loved those) and “real world” handsome. Even in photographs, he looked like a nice guy—relaxed, confident, comfortable in his own skin, nice eyes, an endearing smile that drew you in.

Women fell for him hard.

From there, the planning was pretty simple. Titus took the photographs he’d harvested from their old Facebook or Mucho Model or whatever accounts and put them on various online dating services. He kept the profiles simple and clean. When you do this often enough, you learn all the tricks. He was never lecherous toward the women or overly sexual to the men. Titus thought that the communications—the seduction—was his forte. He listened to his suitors, truly listened, and responded to their needs. This was his strength, going back to the days of reading the young girls at the Port Authority. He never oversold himself. He kept far away from “personal ad” speak. He showed his personality (his comments, for example, were lightly self-deprecating) rather than told it (“I’m really funny and caring”).

Titus never asked for personal information, though once the communications began, the target always gave him enough. Once he knew the name or address or other key information he would have Dmitry run a full check on them and try to figure out a net worth. If they didn’t reach high six figures, there was no reason to continue the flirtation. If they had a ton of family ties and would be missed, that was also reason to bail.

At any one time, Titus could have ten identities flirting with hundreds of potential marks. The large majority fell by the wayside for one reason or another. Some were just too much work. Some would not go away without first meeting for a coffee. Some did the research and, with IDs not quite as off the grid as Ron Kochman or Vanessa Moreau, saw that they were being tricked.

Still, there was a never-ending stream of potential targets.

Currently, Titus was holding seven people at the farm. Five men, two women. He preferred men. Yes, that might sound strange, but a single man going missing drew almost no attention. Men disappear all the time. They run away. They hook up with some woman and move. No one questioned when a man wanted to move his money to another account. People do wonder—and yes, this was pure old-fashioned sexism—when a woman starts going “crazy” with her finances.

Think about it. How often did you hear on the news that a forty-seven-year-old single man had vanished and the police were searching for him?

Almost never.

The answer becomes “completely never” when the man is still sending e-mails or text messages and even, when needed, making phone calls. Titus’s operation was simple and precise. You keep the targets alive for as long as you need them. You bleed them in a way that may cause a raised eyebrow but rarely more. You bleed them for as long as it is profitable. Then you kill them and make them disappear.

That was the key. Once their usefulness is over, you don’t let them live.

Titus had been running his operation at the farm for eight months now. In terms of geography, he cast his net within a ten-hour ride to the farm. That gave him a great deal of the East Coast—from Maine to South Carolina, and even the Midwest. Cleveland was only five hours away, Indianapolis about nine, Chicago was right about at the ten-hour mark. He tried to make sure that no two victims lived too close to each other or had any connection. Gerard Remington had been from Hadley, Massachusetts, for example, while Dana Phelps lived in Greenwich, Connecticut.

The rest was simple.

Eventually, most online relationships had to progress to the point where you had in-person contact. Titus had been surprised, though, at how intimate you could become without ever meeting face-to-face. He’d had some form of online sex or sexting episode with more than half his victims. He’d had phone sex, always using a disposable mobile device, sometimes hiring a woman who didn’t really know what was going on, but most of the time, he used a simple voice changer and did it himself. In every case, words of love were exchanged before a face-to-face meet was even set up.

Odd.

The getaway—be it a weekend or a week—evolved into a given. Gerard Remington, who clearly had some social issues (he almost ruined the plan by insisting on taking his own car—they ended up improvising, conking him over the head in the airport parking lot), had bought a ring and prepared his proposal—this despite never laying eyes on Vanessa in the flesh. He wasn’t the first. Titus had read about relationships like this, people who talked online for months or even years. That star linebacker from Notre Dame had fallen in love without ever seeing the “girl” who was conning him, even believing that she had died from a bizarre mix of leukemia and a car accident.