Page 25 of Two Kinds of Stranger (Eddie Flynn #9)

Logan

Karl Kaplinsky was a sad little man.

Karl sat in the driver’s seat of a van parked in a disused lot beneath the Williamsburg Bridge.

His neck arched; the back of his skull nestled on the head rest. Mouth open.

Eyes open and fixed. In as quiet a spot as one could hope for this close to Manhattan, Logan, in the passenger seat of the van, unfolded a sun-shade and spread it across the inside of the windshield for some additional privacy.

The van didn’t belong to Karl. The logo SECURE ONE in red lettering was displayed across the sides of the vehicle.

Karl had worked as a technical specialist for Secure One for almost ten years.

The van was filled with high-speed cable, wiring, power cables, dongles, servers, hard drives and various technical pieces of equipment that Karl used daily.

It wasn’t Karl’s job that made him sad. It was his life outside of his job.

That’s the way he had described his life on Reddit when Logan and Karl had first interacted.

Karl identified as an incel. A man who was involuntarily celibate.

Logan was looking for Karl, of course, as well as finding and interacting online with a number of Secure One employees of a certain kind.

Karl was the most interesting to Logan, because he was sad and lonely, and lacked the intellectual rigor to divine that he was sad and lonely through certain life choices.

Karl was, despite his decent career in IT, a failure. A loser.

Logan liked losers.

Inherent in each of them are the seeds of their own condition. All of these markers of failure were evident in Karl’s social media. His personality flaws writ large in his posts on X, Reddit and Truth Social.

The real truth was that Karl’s isolation and depression had pushed him ever further to the extremes of society and politics.

In these chat forums and digital communities, there existed valid reasons for Karl’s unhappiness – woke culture, liberalism, political correctness, immigration, the deep state and equal opportunities.

Here, in the far reaches of extremist groups, Karl had people to blame other than himself.

Logan had learned that the Karl Kaplinskys of this world were among the most susceptible to manipulation and control. Essentially, they were already deluding themselves. Logan’s interactions with Karl fed that delusion, and so it was easy to quickly gain his trust and exploit it.

In the passenger seat of the Secure One panel van, Logan scrolled through the list of dates and times displayed on Karl’s laptop screen.

He found the last entry for the date he’d met Elly in the subway – marked 6p/12a – and deleted the file from cloud storage.

He had already deleted the previous three recordings for that day.

The security system uploaded recordings to the cloud every six hours.

The Manhattan Transport Authority subcontracted its digital file storage maintenance to Secure One for an eye-watering amount of money.

It turns out that storing data in cyberspace for thirty days is about as expensive as storing it in a suite at the Regency Hotel.

In contrast, the steps Karl had taken to disguise his online personas were less than adequate.

Logan turned to Karl in the driver’s seat, said, ‘You’ve been most co-operative, but I’m afraid I still have to show your online activities to your employer . . . ’

Karl said nothing.

‘I know I said I would keep it secret if you co-operated, but, unfortunately, Karl, I have no choice.’

Reaching inside his jacket pocket, Logan produced what looked like a small sampler bottle of perfume, no bigger than his little finger, with an aerosol top.

Inside was a clear liquid. Logan sprayed the laptop keys and the trackpad, liberally, then used a cloth to wipe it down.

Some of the liquid had run beneath the keys, causing the screen to freeze and then go blank.

He put the bottle back in his pocket and put on a pair of black latex gloves.

He shut the laptop, wiped it down again and placed it on the floor of the van.

‘The email you have scheduled to send tonight won’t be read by your boss, Mr. Telford, until tomorrow morning.

He’ll choke on his granola when he opens that one.

But don’t worry, Karl. It’s good to get everything out in the open: your views on immigrants, women, African Americans .

. . It’s a good thing that the world will finally see the real you.

There’s no reason to be afraid any more . . . ’

Logan’s nostrils twitched.

Karl had soiled his pants shortly after he had given Logan his log-in details to access the MTA security-footage archive.

He leaned forward and angled his view so he could take a good look at Karl.

Both his eyes were bulging and black with eight-ball hemorrhages from the bullet that had ripped through his skull.

Both his front teeth were chipped. They might have been damaged when Logan put the gun in Karl’s mouth, or maybe when he pulled the trigger – the kickback or perhaps the slide had broken Karl’s teeth.

Logan picked up the Ruger pistol from Karl’s lap, unscrewed the silencer and placed that in his jacket pocket.

Then he sprayed the gun, wiped it clean, dried it.

He lifted Karl’s dead hand, put the gun in it, to make sure Karl’s palm prints were on the grip, then let go.

The Ruger tumbled to the floor of the van.

‘You’ve been most helpful, Karl. And you are at peace now. I hope you enjoy that gift. You see, I don’t care that you are dead. I liked killing you. It feels . . . empowering ,’ said Logan.

He enjoyed talking.

Logan knew the importance of talking openly about one’s feelings and emotions.

Studies had shown that even patients who attend bad psychotherapists often get better purely because they have voiced their fears, their desires, their guilt and unhappiness.

The mere act of speaking about problems makes people feel better.

Not that Logan needed to feel better about his activities – the act of killing exhilarated him.

He felt nothing for his victims. He’d realized, early on in his studies of psychology and human behavior, that he was a clinical sociopath – uninhibited by moral conscience.

With that knowledge came self-awareness.

Neither psychopathy nor sociopathy were classified as mental disorders in and of themselves.

Logan knew he wasn’t sick. He merely had psychological traits enjoyed by a small percentage of the population.

Was he born that way? Or was it his upbringing? Logan tried not to think too much on this. The past could not be changed. He could only move forward.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He took it out, smiled.

Grace, the girl he had met on the subway, had replied to his message.

A drink sounds good. See you there at 8?

He texted a reply confirming the date. As he hit send, he felt something strange.

It wasn’t excitement, not exactly. Not like the delicious thrill that had shuddered through him when he put a bullet into Karl’s skull. This was different.

Strange.

For the first time in a very long time, Logan felt nervous.

He made sure no one had entered the lot. Then he opened the door, got out and shut it quietly. As he stepped away from the van, a boy wearing a puffer jacket and sweatpants pulled up on his bicycle at the mouth of the lot.

Logan couldn’t see his face. His cap was pulled down too far.

Logan tensed. The boy was twenty feet away.

The boy sat on his bike and stared, then said, ‘You can’t park in here.’

Logan stopped, just a few feet past the van. The lot had brick walks on either side. On one of them someone had spray-painted, in white, No Parking .

‘Are you the owner?’ asked Logan.

‘My dad owns this lot. You can’t park here. See the sign,’ he said, and pointed at the wall.

Logan reached into his jacket and took out his wallet.

‘Sorry, didn’t see it. My friend here, he’s on the job, but he’s had a rough day and put down a few beers with lunch. He just needs twenty minutes to sleep it off. How about twenty bucks, for the use of the space?’ said Logan, retrieving a twenty and holding it up for the kid.

The boy stared at the bill clamped between Logan’s fingers. The boy kicked off the ground and rode his bike into the lot. As he got closer, Logan was able to see his face.

No more than fifteen years old, if that.

His puffer coat was old and ripped in a few places, with graying tufts of insulation peeking through the tears.

His sweatpants were of a similar age and covered in lint balls.

The kid pulled up on his bike, just within reach, and stretched out a hand to take the twenty. He had dirty fingernails.

‘Why aren’t you in school?’ asked Logan.

‘My old man doesn’t care.’

Logan had felt the same way, at that age.

He nodded. He stretched out his right hand, let the twenty fall and grabbed the boy’s wrist.

Logan leaned back, quickly, yanked the kid clean off the bike and pulled him toward the van. Pivoting as the kid came stumbling forward, Logan put his left hand on the back of the kid’s head and drove his face into the front grille of the van.

The thump of the kid’s head hitting the grille was accompanied by an equally loud crack as the boy landed on his chest in front of the van.

His dead eyes stared back up at Logan, his neck horribly twisted.

Logan sat on his ass, and with his feet pushed the boy’s body underneath the van.

It was more difficult than he first thought.

The van didn’t have great ground clearance.

As he kicked the boy’s legs underneath, he thought about what he might wear when he met Grace tonight.

The Armani charcoal suit, certainly, perhaps with the black Versace shirt and the polished, calfskin Salvatore Ferragamo Oxfords.

For his timepiece, either the Patek Philippe Golden Ellipse or the vintage Cartier Tank.

He didn’t want to look too formal, so perhaps the Cartier would be preferable.

Once most of the body was underneath the van, he got to his feet and lifted the boy’s bike, smashed the handlebars into the hood, to make a dent and ensure mutual transfer of paint for the forensic investigators.

He stood, took out his phone and exited the lot.

From his VPN, he accessed a secure internet connection and logged into Karl Kaplinsky’s email.

He made one addition to the draft email to Karl’s boss.

Karl’s depression and isolation were bad enough, but the last straw had been when he’d run over a kid in a parking lot.

Karl knew he was going to jail, apologized to the boss for the damage to the van and had decided to check out permanently.

Logan hit send on the email. No point in waiting any more.

The only problem with killing is making a mistake. One little error, one oversight, or one piece of bad luck could lead to a lot more work in covering his tracks.

A quiet street. No one around. Only the thrum of traffic on the bridge above.

He walked back to his car, parked a block away. Before he got in, he took the cloth and the gloves from his jacket and knelt at the curb, as if he was checking his front tire. Logan casually tossed everything into the storm drain, and had just got into his rental car when his phone began to ring.

Caller display read Tokyo Management . A brand and marketing company that had Logan on an extravagant non-exclusive monthly retainer as a fixer. He hit answer.

‘Logan, Brett here, we need you to come in. Full crisis on the perfume launch. It’s not selling.’

The company specialized in product placement with celebrities who wanted to sell tequila, vodka, wine, perfume, clothing or even phone cases – it was all part of brand extensions and maximalization.

‘I can’t right now. What’s the problem?’ asked Logan.

‘I’ve got a mightily pissed-off A-lister and a shitload of terrible perfume that won’t move on the website. Sales are ninety per cent down on launch week.’

‘Any badpress issues I should know about?’

‘None. It’s just a bad product. What do we do? We can’t lose this client.’

‘Having a bad product doesn’t matter,’ said Logan. ‘It’s demand and saturation that we have to control. We don’t have the balance right on the universality and scarcity scale.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘People buy new products for two reasons – either because everyone is buying it, or because hardly anyone can buy it. Both have value. It’s the way we humans are programmed.

You want something because few people can have it, which increases its value, or because everyone has it and you don’t want to miss out.

Put a notice on the website saying that due to demand you can’t fulfill orders for twenty-four hours.

Issue a press release to confirm it. Hike the price by a hundred dollars and reissue the product for sale tomorrow and watch those sales numbers go through the roof. Got to go now, Brett. Good luck.’

He ended the call, and hit the ignition button on the car. The radio came on.

‘ Our phone-in today is all about the TikTok murders. What are the latest theories doing the rounds on social media? When will Elly Parker break her silence? And then later we’re going to be talking to Chef Tommy about the ultimate omelette . . . ’

The Toyota’s navigation system sprang into life and Logan entered his next destination.

A business in Tribeca.

It sat above a tattoo parlor.

The offices of Flynn and Brooks, Attorneys at Law.