Page 53 of Two Kinds of Stranger

‘It’s gone. Could be a technical glitch. The footage is live-streamed to the MTA security office and the NYPD monitoringcenter, but sometimes it’s not saved. Remember the subway shooter in Brooklyn? The Wi-Fi was down in the subway and the cameras didn’t upload the recording to the cloud. PD had to identify the shooter from cell-phone footage of the attack,’ said Bloch.

‘Or it could be somebody wiped it. Somebody who doesn’t want to be identified. Could be the same guy looking for Joe,’ said Lake. ‘How the hell do you wipe camera footage from the MTA?’

‘Let’s find out. If it is the man with the suitcase, then he’s thorough. If we can find Joe first, then we might be able to find our mystery man.’

‘How do you figure?’

‘Because he’s smart. He’ll find Joe Novak eventually. And we’ll be waiting.’

17

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 therealyou. 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’spalm 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.