“Mostly I helped Darrell at PEI. At first, I thought he was a lunatic, but I didn’t care ’cause he was giving me money. Then after a while…I don’t know…I got into it. Darrell started making sense. Especially the stuff about the Jews controlling everything. Because when you got a father like mine—the most controlling asshole in the world—it’s easy to believe that. That’s what Darrell and I really had in common. We both hated our fathers!”

Somehow it always boiled down to bad parenting. Which made Decker feel queasy. Sure, there were lots of other explanations for Jacob’s rebellious behavior—the loss of his father at a young age, the molestation, the remarriage of his mother, a new baby, and his innate temperament. But did Decker do all he could have done to get the boy through it? All those nights working instead of taking care of business at home.

Erin continued. “After a while, I got into it…the whole PEI philosophy. He told me he got most of the ideas from some genius guy named Ricky Moke. I’m not the sharpest knife in the block, but it didn’t take long for me to figure out who Moke was. But I went along with it anyway. That was Darrell’s thing—different identities. He had a million of them. Most of them came out in his sex games.”

“When did Darrell use the name Darrell Holt, and when did he use Ricky Moke?”

“Ricky Moke was his baaaad boy.” She leaned forward and grinned knowingly. It made her look years older and decades harder. “He actually became this Ricky guy with separate identity pictures, a Social Security card, a graduation diploma. God, that was real impressive to me. I told him to get me one of those. It’s like Darrell cut himself in two. As Darrell, he was the political activator. Sometimes it was real weird because Darrell would talk about Ricky like Ricky was another person. A real ’nother person. Like they were really two people—”

“I get it.”

“And he’d say things like…like although he admired Ricky, he didn’t like him because Ricky was doing illegal stuff like hacking and bombing and being a sexual pervert. Tell you the truth, I liked Ricky better than Darrell. He was more exciting. Ricky’s wanted by the FBI, you know.”

“For computer hacking.”

“For hacking and for bombing.”

“I haven’t found the bombing to be true.”

“Yeah, look again. I wouldn’t put it past Ricky.”

“Ricky is Darrell, Erin.”

“I know,” the teen answered. “But they’ve been two separate people for so long, it’s hard to think like that. Darrell…he’s an alien, but he’s brilliant.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Why should you doubt it? Most pervs are brilliant.”

“No, Erin, that’s not true. There are many stupid perverted people.”

“Not the ones I know.”