He’d pursued random women—and sometimes girls—all over the web. He’d invited complete strangers to move in with him, to live in his boyhood room, going so far as to list extensive requirements: virgins only, no vegans, no religious or political types, no one taller than five-five or weighing more than a hundred and thirty pounds.

And those were only the beginning of his delusional demands.

He would accept certain races—how noble of him—but absolutely refused others. His prospective wife/woman would cook him three meals a day, keep his clothes clean, know how to cut his hair and follow his orders without question.

Eli’s stomach turned; he took a chance and swallowed more coffee in hopes of keeping his vending-machine lunch down.

Dan must have read the revulsion in his face. “Wait till you see his profile pictures,” he said. “You’re not going to be happy.”

Eli flipped through the pages and found the photos Freddie had used as bait.

He was stunned to see his own much-younger face looking back at him.

He spat a raspy curse.

Then he sat back in his chair and closed his eyes, fighting down a rage the likes of which he’d never experienced before.

That monster had used his face—his face—to troll social media for victims, some of them mere children.

“I took them all down, Eli,” Dan said, his voice a low rumble, like thunder rolling in over the plains. “The pictures, I mean. And from what I could figure out, nobody took the bait—except Tiffany Ulbridge.”

Eli murmured a word he wouldn’t have said aloud.

“It’s all there, in those printouts,” Dan went on. “When Tiffany got here and met up with Freddie—the real Freddie—she was thoroughly pissed off. She’d been catfished, come a very long way to hook up with you in your early twenties. My guess is, she told him off, and he, being your typical nice-guy, wasn’t about to finish last—so he shot her.”

Eli nodded, turned the pages of profile photos facedown on the desktop and finished reading Freddie’s posts.

He’d gone into the blackest fury imaginable, splattered the dark web with vile insults directed at Tiffany but striking, like shrapnel, at all women.

No, he hadn’t confessed to killing her.

But he had wished her dead, her and every other woman who had ever rejected him.

There must have been hundreds of them.

“So you definitely think Freddie murdered Tiffany Ulbridge?” Eli asked, weary to the marrow of his bones.