“Meadows’s contacts on the dark web put him in touch with the Devil’s own. The Lobos. He made contact with them and suggested that they recruit the Scorpions, with whom he had an ongoing relationship. He promised the gang some big bucks to take out Cricket. At the same time, he introduced their leader to several members of the Lobos. Meadows is on a first-name basis with those bastards. They also thrive on the dark, black web. Hell, I think they own it.”

Abner held up his hand. “Stop right there—go back to how Meadows got into this in the first place. The tenants at Happy Village, the ones who disappeared. Meadows had access to all the tenants’ applications right down to how much money they had in the bank. The guy is a pretty good hacker himself. He found out that they all had massive insurance policies. All of them were older. He cherry-picked the ones he wanted, hacked into the insurance companies, and raised the amount of their policies by several million each. He routed the billing statements through a dummy address at Happy Village, collected the mail late at night, and paid the premiums out of some offshore secret fund. He used a different Happy Village address for the payments.

“Phil told us that Meadows has collected fifty-one million dollars to date on those policies.”

“Who . . . what . . . that . . . that . . .” Maggie started to stammer and couldn’t get her question out.

“I don’t think there is anyone here who wants to hear or could handle the gory details. The missing tenants are deceased. By the worst means possible. For sport as well as for money,” Avery said. “We need to move along here.”

“Meadows hired the Scorpions to abduct and kill the Happy Village tenants and paid them half at the outset. They were to get the final payment on that contract next week, we think, and the same sort of arrangement was agreed to for killing Mr. Cricket, but then Mr. Cricket was shot but not killed, and things ground to a halt. Since Mr. Cricket survived the shooting, we think Meadows refused to pay the second half of the money due on that contract.

“At the same time all this was going on, the Scorpions were trying to become members of the Lobos and decided to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak, and use killing Mr. Cricket as their initiation exercise. It appears they were stalking him, just waiting for the right time to take him out.