Page 28 of Unnatural (Men and Monsters #2)

The man who’d entered Deercroft Academy with a firearm, ultimately killing four teachers, wounding two children and a custodian, and finally shooting himself, was named Jason Leads, and he’d lived alone in a studio apartment in Queens.

He was a loner, apparently, and his neighbors reported that they’d only seen him on occasion, either coming or going.

He’d barely responded to attempts at conversation, only giving terse, one-word replies to neighborly greetings.

Mark used his gloved hand to pick up a photo on the desk in the small main room.

It was the suspect, along with an old woman with a head of tight gray curls.

The woman had an oxygen tube in her nose but was offering a weak smile.

Leads’s grandmother, Shirlene, who had died ten years before.

Other than her, the suspect had no family and no friends who’d come forward. A complete loner.

Just like the others.

The suspect worked as a website designer from home.

The computer was gone now, being looked over by techs, but Mark didn’t expect that anything of any consequence would come from it.

The police had ID’d the suspect after a wallet and a Deercroft Academy brochure were randomly found wrapped in a jacket and stuffed behind some shrubbery near the front of the school the day after the tragedy occurred and hours after Mark had surveilled the schoolyard.

Convenient. It looked as though the gunman had intended on returning for the personal items he’d brought.

The authorities had gone to the man’s apartment and found ample evidence that he was in fact the shooter, and techs had finished up that morning.

“Do you see anything unusual, Agent?” the cop who’d accompanied him here asked.

“No,” Mark answered. The bed was unmade, covers thrown back.

He expected the DNA found on the sheets and elsewhere would be a match to the body in the morgue.

He’d also bet that the body had been left unattended long enough that he couldn’t be sure it was even the same man who’d been transported from Deercroft Academy.

But of course, he had no way to prove that, and he’d sound like a lunatic if he voiced such a thought.

“The diagram was found over there?” he asked the man who had been one of the first responders to arrive at the apartment and seal it off after Jason Leads had been identified.

“Yeah,” the officer said. “On the bedside table, along with another brochure from the school. The shooting was definitely not random or spontaneous. How long he was planning it though is hard to say. Any clue to motive?”

“That aspect’s out of my purview,” Mark said. But he anticipated that a motive would not be found. Crazy was the conclusion they’d have to come to. Just plain crazy.

Which was very legitimate in plenty of crimes, even if crazy could be defined in more technical terms. But not this one. At least he didn’t think so.

“Oh right, you’re working on a separate case.” The officer opened his mouth as though to ask about that, then realized Mark wouldn’t be able to answer and sighed. “At least he made it easy for us to identify him. And then he left all his plans behind.”

Mark made a sound of agreement. Yes, too easy.

Then again, he didn’t want to jump to conclusions based on what was in large part a gut instinct.

He had to consider the possibility that Jason Leads was not connected to the lost, even if the man with the white hair was.

Perhaps it was easy to identify Jason Leads because he hadn’t planned on getting caught, hadn’t planned on someone stepping in, and had adjusted plans at the last minute with a bullet to the head.

Why had he considered that drastic option necessary though? Why hadn’t he tried to get away? The white-haired man was down, and the police were still blocks away.

There was time. After all, the white-haired man and the unknown woman had managed to evade police. Then again, they’d had some time. When the police had arrived, the gunman was dead, and they hadn’t immediately known about the other man and woman.

Some interesting things had come out from forensics the day before though regarding the white-haired man, things they were having a hard time explaining.

Notably, several of the bullets they’d found had appeared to hit him but then been stopped and ended up on the schoolyard, the heads blunted. Almost as if he wore armor.

The forensics team had appeared stumped. Mark had only become more certain the white-haired man was someone it was imperative he find, and quickly.

Mark looked around for a few more minutes and then left with the officer, parting ways in the downstairs lobby.

Mark walked to his rental car parked just down the block and sat in it, tapping the wheel for a moment as he considered what he knew and what Jason Leads’s apartment had confirmed for him.

He took his phone from his pocket and pulled up several different news pages and scrolled back a few days on each.

A married senator from the East Coast had been caught soliciting sex from a sex-trafficking victim in DC.

The lawmaker had run his campaign on a platform of old-fashioned family values, so the scandal was particularly damaging.

He claimed a sex addiction. Mark sighed.

When caught with your pants down—literally—claim an addiction.

Become the victim. Cast those accusing you of indecency as the indecent ones for their lack of compassion and understanding.

The senator had done exactly that, and then he’d gotten his wife to make a teary statement about how she was sticking by her husband and attempting to understand his addiction.

Even so, there were calls for him to resign, and the calls were getting louder.

His party leaders were sure to step in any moment and press him on stepping down.

The other story that caught Mark’s attention was about money said to be missing from the Department of Development and Urban Housing in New York.

Some officials were calling for an investigation, though those being accused were claiming the discrepancy was a simple case of human error and that nothing untoward had happened.

To make matters more suspicious, however, the accounting data drives had gone missing, so the accountants were having to recreate the records from what data was available.

Mark read through a few statements of various officials, some calling the whole situation outrageous and corrupt, others saying that an explainable situation was being blown out of proportion by windbags looking for a crime that wasn’t there.

He scrolled forward on all three sites he’d brought up, noting that neither story had been mentioned since the school shooting had occurred.

“Well, aren’t you all lucky?” Mark muttered, thinking of those involved in the scandals that had been front-page stories two days ago and now weren’t even back-page news.

Only he had a very strong feeling there was more than luck involved. And four young teachers paid the price.

Mark closed the browser and opened his phone, dialing his wife’s number. She picked up on the second ring. “Hi! I didn’t expect to hear from you until tonight.”

Mark smiled, leaning his head back on the headrest. Just the sound of her voice brought him the calm he sought.

Humans could be so damn wicked, and though it was his job to hunt them down and capture them, he was human too, and sometimes the evil he uncovered plain depressed him.

He let the gratitude for his wife, Laurie, wash through him.

He never took it for granted. He’d almost lost her, and he never let himself forget it.

Not to death but to heartbreak and misunderstanding, doubt and despair.

They’d made it though, and because they’d walked through that valley and emerged together , they were stronger than ever.

“I had a minute and thought I’d call.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“What are you up to?” he asked her, needing to hear about some normalcy.

“I just got home from Jak and Harper’s. They had some errands they wanted to run together, and I watched Eddie for them. That boy never stops, I swear. I’m worn out.” But the way she said it made Mark smile too.

Mark had played a part in solving not only the crime Jak was wrongly accused of but the mystery of the young man’s parentage and background after he’d been discovered having lived alone in the wilderness for much of his life.

Mark and Laurie had grown very close to Jak and his wife, Harper, in the aftermath.

And now, their four-year-old little boy was as much their grandson as their flesh and blood would have been if their daughter, Abbi, had lived and had children.

They adored little Edmond Fairbanks and loved nothing more than spoiling him rotten.

Mark didn’t feel an ounce of guilt about it either.

Eddie’s parents kept him grounded and enforced the rules.

Grandfathers’ boundaries were different, and he pushed each and every one. The balance worked.

“Tell them all I said hi.”

“I will. Jak thought…you might have some news for him.”

“Not yet. I’m confirming a few things first. But it looks…similar.”

Laurie let out a breath. “Oh.” A lot was contained in that little word, and Mark heard it all. She paused for a moment. “I read that the suspect took his own life.”

“Yes,” Mark confirmed. “But there’s someone else…

of interest. Like I said, I’m still trying to confirm a few things.

” He scrubbed his hand down his face. Damn, he was tired.

He hadn’t slept well the night before, tossing and turning and trying to put things together from the little he had.

“Or at least draw the outlines of a picture, if there’s one to draw. ”

“Let your gut point the way,” she said.

The fact that she still trusted his gut—and maybe now more than ever—was another small miracle.

He’d turned away from what he knew to be true once in an effort to avoid his pain.

He’d figured things out in the nick of time.

But he had , and that was the important thing.

That gratitude again. That she was on the other line, and she was his.

“I will,” he said. “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

Mark disconnected the call and sat there for another minute, staring at the nondescript apartment building where Jason Leads had lived.

He thought of the photo again, of the guy and his dead grandmother, picturing the man’s hefty build.

The witnesses had described the gunman as very muscular, though eyewitness descriptions were notoriously faulty, especially in high-stress situations.

But where were all his other guns? A shooter rarely had only one.

Let your gut point the way.

His gut told him this was exactly what he thought it was.

Which meant he had to find the white-haired man, who’d somehow gotten away despite being shot several times, and the woman in the coral sweater, who still hadn’t come forward.