Page 12 of Two Kinds of Stranger (Eddie Flynn #9)

‘It carries some risk, as does all repositioning of brands. The alternative is to cut staff and install digital ordering screens in all of your outlets. They make money because people order more food when they use touch screens. The forty-year-old father of two, on his lunchbreak, doesn’t want to have a conversation with an eighteen-year-old cashier to explain why he wants a Hartfield meal and an extra burger on its own – not two meals for two people.

The soccer mom doesn’t want to see the look on the face of that same cashier as she orders two Harty Sundaes to go and one non-fat latte.

The screens take away most of that guilt at the point of ordering.

So your sales will go up, and in a year you’ll have paid for the refit of the screens, but guess what?

You’re still not McDonald’s. That’s your strength.

And that’s what you will tell people. That’s the second part of my marketing campaign – you’re going to ditch the line about paying for quality.

Your main campaign will be – Hartfields , and a picture of the most delicious burger you’ve ever seen.

Below it, the slogan – We’re not McDonald’s. ’

The department heads held their breath. They didn’t know whether Hartfield was going to throw Logan out or kiss him.

Hartfield didn’t keep them waiting much longer. He pushed his chair back from the table.

Stood.

Laughed and applauded.

One by one, as predictably as the sunrise, the department heads stood alongside him, beaming smiles at Logan.

‘Logan, you’re a goddamn genius, you know that?’ said Hartfield. ‘Where did you learn marketing? Harvard? Yale?’

Logan stood, shook Hartfield’s hand, said, ‘I’ve never studied marketing. I’m a behavioral psychologist. I know what people think. I know what they do. I know what they feel. More importantly, I know how to make people buy whatever I want them to buy . . . ’

‘We’ve been playing this the wrong way all these years. We do have a good product, and we should be making more money from it. Thank you.’

‘My pleasure,’ said Logan, and as he released Hartfield’s grip he felt his phone vibrate again, three times. Three notifications.

His very teeth ached to look at that phone. But he resisted.

‘I’ll be honest, Logan, I’ve been looking for a creative guy like you to spearhead a new direction for this company. We’d love to have you join Hartfields as Vice President of—’

‘I’m afraid I must refuse. I like to stay in private consultancy, Mr. Hartfield. Don’t worry, you’ll be paying me a lot of money for these campaigns, but I like to be flexible and work with different companies. It suits my lifestyle better.’

‘Oh, sure, God, tell me about it. Nothing like being your own boss. Say, what do you do in your spare time? Racquetball? Golf? I would love to take you out on the course for an afternoon. We could hit nine and then hit the bar.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t play sports.’

‘But you look like an athlete. What is it? Running?’

‘Yes, in part, but I run alone. And I train alone.’

‘Come on, Logan. I’m trying to seduce you into my company here. Let’s do something together, get it in the diary. What do you like to do to relax?’

A slow, long smile spread over Logan’s face as he said, ‘I kill people.’

All the air left the room. Silence and shock. The room was frozen, like a cold breeze on an Alaskan lake.

Logan let his grin widen further, his eyes playful.

Hartfield pointed at him, the laugh came deep from his great belly, then he said, ‘You sonofabitch, you’re fucking with me. Damn, you almost got me on that one . . . ’

Logan made pistols with his fingers, mock shooting him, laughing along with Hartfield as the rest of the room joined in with nervous laughter.

After ten minutes, and more congratulatory talk and plans, they agreed on half a million dollars for Logan to prepare a detailed strategy and tactical marketing plan.

Contracts would be sent in a few weeks. Logan left the room.

He walked along the corridor to the sound of Hartfield, still roaring with enthusiasm in the conference room, his obnoxious voice growing fainter with every step.

Logan walked into the elevator, and could feel the phone in his jacket, heavy and delicious, loaded with notifications that would spike his adrenalin, giving him a dopamine hit and releasing juicy pleasure endorphins. The anticipation was intoxicating.

Delayed gratification is sweet. Logan knew this more than most.

It wasn’t until he was on the street and headed for the subway that he took his phone from his jacket pocket.

Logan could easily afford a town car and a driver.

And, for a time, he had enjoyed those pleasures – but he missed the subways.

It was on the trains that Logan had time to study people.

Their faces, their reactions to different social and environmental situations.

Ride the subways in New York for a week and you will learn more about human beings and psychology than spending a week in close study of the great textbooks.

Once you understood the mechanisms and triggers for human behavior, the subway becomes an entire psychology course.

Logan liked to be among people, so that he could watch them unobserved.

People of all walks of life used the subway, rich and poor, because it was still the fastest way around the city.

But, for now, his phone had his full attention. He had set an alert for news articles with specific search terms. Now, the results were coming in fast.

TikTok Star Elly Parker charged with double homicide in Manhattan.

The TikTok Murders: Influencer Charged in Revenge Slaying.

Social Media Kills. Elly Parker, TikTok Star, and Her Descent into Murder.

Logan smiled to himself, descended into the subway from the street. He swiped his MTA card at the turnstile, walked down the stairs and stood on the platform.

Elly was not supposed to survive the visit to the apartment. It reminded him that he could control the environment, the decision-making and a person’s reactions to psychological, social and environmental stimuli, but he could not predict an individual’s biological reaction.

Vomiting shortly after she had ingested the treated water had saved Elly Parker’s life.

It wasn’t supposed to be a revenge killing – it was supposed to be a murder suicide. That’s why he hadn’t balked at giving her his name. Elly kills her husband and her best friend, the people closest to her who had so utterly betrayed her, and then Elly takes her own life.

Still, the first part of Logan’s narrative had worked perfectly – the double homicide.

Elly would be telling her story, or as much of it as she could remember, to her lawyer.

She would tell them about a man named Logan she met on the subway steps.

About his yellow suitcase and his broken leg and his crutches.

And his vulnerability. And her guilt at having lashed out at James and Harriet by nuking their lives online.

And then she would tell them how she dropped the gentle, vulnerable stranger’s case.

How it had burst open. How she had felt utterly compelled to help this man.

Then the apartment, and the broken elevator, and the stairs and the sweat and the cold water from the fridge and how good it had tasted, at first. Logan’s only distinguishing mark was the small scar on his chin.

In every other way, he had a plain, angular face.

A sketch artist would draw something that resembled a quarter of the population.

But Logan knew he had no real need to worry about being recognized by Elly, the police would not believe her and there were no witnesses nor any physical evidence to corroborate her story.

She could not tell them what she did not know.

That the man would be impossible to trace.

That the man had spent time strategizing, testing suitcases and how they would break when he removed a screw from the handle and cut through most of the fiber weave below the zip with a razor blade so that a heavy blow would rip the remaining threads holding it together, how he had rehearsed his lines, studied her routine, when she went out, what time and where she was going, to make sure she would be the one to offer him help at that precise moment at the top of the stairs leading to the platform.

Like much of the world, Logan had never heard of Elly Parker before he’d watched the video of her accidentally discovering her husband in bed with her best friend.

She had looked so shocked, so utterly betrayed.

The pain was writ large on her face. The reality of that discovery is what fueled the viral reaction to the video.

Logan then watched some more of Elly’s content, and discovered her daily acts of kindness.

That made him feel sick.

It seemed performative to Logan. Not only was Elly deriving the endorphin pleasures of goodwill from her acts, but she was doubling those little rushes of satisfaction by filming these so-called kind acts and lapping up the praise from her followers.

Logan realized then that he had found his next masterpiece. He’d drunk in the hate from Elly’s followers directed at her husband and the friend who had broken her heart. If anything should happen to those two, Elly would be the prime suspect.

And if she was genuinely a kind person, then this was an aspect of her personality he could exploit.

Her act of kindness for Logan would be her last.

A train pulled in, Logan waited with a few other passengers on the platform while people got off and then he stepped inside.

He was looking for a female butterfly.

She was not in this carriage.

He checked his watch. She would likely be on this train or the next.

He stepped out of the train car, ran to the next and hopped on just as the doors closed.

There she was – his butterfly girl.

Following her through the subways and the city as he had done for the last months, he had been reminded of a particular summer when he was seven years old.

That year, his parents went traveling alone, leaving him in their mansion in the Hamptons with his nanny.

He spent those two months alone, in their garden.

It was hot that summer and for some reason their garden was filled with the most beautiful colorful butterflies.

And his father wasn’t there to punish him or beat him. Instead, he chased butterflies.

This woman reminded him of that happy summer. She was his butterfly.

Logan took a seat and for a moment, reflected on his business meeting as he tried to ignore the young woman sitting opposite him. He took out his phone and let his mind wander.

Logan had told the truth to Mr. Hartfield.

He liked to kill people.

For Logan, killing was a lot more fun than golf. And probably easier.

Even though he had turned his admission in the boardroom into a dark joke, the thrill of merely speaking those words was enormous. Logan liked to talk. To really talk. There was, he knew, a deep psychological need for conversation.

Mostly, Logan talked to the dead.

They were excellent listeners.

His intellect had given him insight, and he knew that talking to the dead was merely an outlet, or a symptom of a deeper problem.

Logan was, and perhaps always had been, lonely.

He looked up from his phone at the commuters in the subway car around him. Directly opposite, sat the young woman he had been following for some time now. He had been alone for so long that even following this young woman, this butterfly, felt like a relationship.

The only question in his mind was how this relationship might end. Normally, they ended in a pool of dark blood.