While he waited for Mark Sevcik to contemplate the risk vs. reward of adding a total stranger as a friend (judging by Mark’s eight-hundred-plus friends, Mark must have added people freely), Shaw scrolled through the photos and updates that Mark had made available to friends of friends—and thank God, Shaw thought to himself, for Teddi Larsen’s web of associations.

Whatever security options Mark had enabled must have been lax because his page held a surprisingly large amount of information. The majority of it was as photographs, but they told a complicated story—one that Shaw wasn’t entirely sure he understood.

“I’m going to stretch my legs,” North said, and he stepped out of the office, and a moment later, the front door opened and shut.

Shaw retrieved a Sharpie from the desk and a safety pin and then he scribbled a few words on the Ding Dong wrapper and then planted his elbow on it again. Just to make sure it didn’t go anywhere.

Turning his attention back to the computer, Shaw tried to assemble the information into something cohesive. There were times when Shaw’s brain worked like anyone else’s, and then there were times when it seemed like the drain was clogged and nothing got through. This was one of those dirty drain, soap-scum, old bathwater times.

Mark Sevcik wore a Cardinals jersey. Four years ago, according to his timeline, he had played on a softball team that won a regional championship. Eighteen months ago he had listed his hobbies as Dungeons and Dragons (third edition only), Xbox (Forza Motorsports and Skyrim), and e-sports (League of Legends). Twelve months ago, he had, according to a series of poorly designed banners, proudly started his own business doing interior design (just a side hustle, he added in the comments, something to keep him from going crazy in the finance world), and six months ago—

Well, six months ago was the strangest part. There was nothing. A blank space that was invisible unless you paid attention to the dates. Everything picked up again two months ago, late February, when Mark announced that he had met the love of his life and was doing much, much better. He was now pursuing his passion of sound design, anyone interested in having him DJ an event, and on and on like that.

Better than what? What had happened six months ago? And why, after meeting the love of his life, was Mark in a bar cruising for anonymous sex?

It wasn’t just those questions that bothered Shaw. In the span of a few years, Mark had gone from a gone-to-seed bro playing on a softball league to a hardcore nerd to a pseudo-stereotype gay. And while Shaw loved the idea of a Renaissance man, Mark’s variety of interests were consecutive, not coexisting. He jumped from one to the other, an abrupt and total shift. And the more Shaw stared at the timeline, the photos, the check-ins, the more he guessed that for Mark, these hadn’t just been shifts in how he spent his freetime. Shaw was willing to bet that Mark had reinvented himself completely every time. That kind of behavior was pathological, probably stemming from a degree of personal dissatisfaction and an underlying psychic instability. Shaw would have to discuss it with Dr. Farr the next time he saw her. Maybe he could squeeze in an extra appointment next week. But however pathological the pattern might be, it wasn’t criminal, and it didn’t necessarily point to the kind of cruelty and manipulative behavior Mark had exhibited with Matty Fennmore.