Page 13 of The Guy Next Door
My stomach forgives me for my neglect, and I breathe a sigh of relief, happy this whole bit has prevented me from saying anything else to hurt Leif.
“So why would you care about some dumb post I made?”
“There are these subreddits where you can speculate about different crimes. A bunch of podcasters and social media sleuths gravitate to it. While I was trying to figure out what happened to the second guy who disappeared, I ran across a comment from a user who claimed he knew him and that he’d received a letter from an admirer about a month before he went missing. I tried to reach out to the Reddit user to see what he was talkingabout, but he didn’t respond to my DM. Then I mentioned it to the cops, but they didn’t give a fuck about some random Reddit user who could have been bullshitting. I followed the subreddit, and sometime later, I got pinged, and suddenly I see a reply to that previous comment from one of these Reddit sleuths—a link to your Insta post. Never underestimate the power of geeks with too much time on their hands.” As I reveal this, his shoulders relax, along with the arm holding the pepper spray, so that now he seems a little less ready to temporarily blind me.
“So you found my Insta. And then…”
“I searched through your other posts, saw you’d tagged your mom in a picture together. She had some posts up for her financial consultant business. There was only a PO Box on the website, but her LLC paperwork on the Georgia Corporations Division site listed this address for her contact information…which…I assume you get where this is going.”
Damn, I’m really begging him to just call the cops on me again, aren’t I?
I shift uneasily in the chair. “You know, it sounds much worse when I say it out loud like that.”
Leif stares at me for a few moments. I’m waiting for him to flip out over that, but it doesn’t seem to affect him—maybe because he’s already pieced together that I must’ve done something like that to be here in the first place.
Finally, he says, “And then you decided to rent a house near me, so…what? You can watch and wait for this serial kidnapper?”
“So that I can get this fucker myself,” I say through gritted teeth. “Hence the gun.”
“And you think that’s who was in my house?”
“Someone was creeping around the back. Looked like a guy. Average height, slender build. I have night-vision cameras to keep an eye on your yard, and—”
“You what?”
Shit.
“I’ve set up some stuff around your yard to keep an eye on things. I’m not doing it to violate your privacy.”
“But you are violating it. You know that, right?”
He’s not wrong.
“Yes,” I confess.
He takes a breath. That’s fair. He has a lot to consider. This is all new information, and if I were in his shoes and didn’t know anything about this shit, I’d be wigging out too.
“Assuming it was a guy you saw last night and he is this serial abductor, why would he be after me?” he asks, and it’s not even a question directed at me. Be a great time to keep my damn mouth shut, but I can’t help myself.
“Let’s just say you’re his type.”
“What does that mean?”
“You have a certain similarity with the two other guys who went missing. Around the same age—eighteen to early twenties. College kid. Dark hair, pale skin. Little muscular. Attractive. Very attractive.”
That makes him wince. And if I haven’t given myself away already, I sure as fuck did just then.
3
LEIF
This guy isso strange.
Why does he keep looking at me like that? And why did he lick his bottom lip when he called me attractive…no—veryattractive?
He was probably getting a smudge of a chocolate morsel off his lip.
It’s the last thing I should be fixated on, especially after he’s revealed that he believes I’m the target of someone who kidnaps men who are “my type” and that he was over here intervening in what could have been my kidnapping. Not to mention what he’s been doing—cameras watching my parents’ yard? What the hell? Where else does he have cameras?