Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114820 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 574(@200wpm)___ 459(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
Rus was trying to educate them.
Karen was done.
“What he’s saying is,” she boiled it down, “you fucked around and found out. Now, hands to the vehicle.”
The women looked at each other and fortunately, for once in their pretty-girl lives, they made the right decision.
Rus stood as Karen relieved them of their backpacks, patted them down, Mirandized them, cuffed them and informed them to pay their fines, the county accepted all major credit cards, PayPal, Zelle and Venmo.
When Rus had their packs stowed, and they were in the back of Karen’s cruiser, the brunette threatened, “We’re gonna vlog this and everyone is going to know about this insanity in Fret County. All the shit that goes down here, we should have known. This place is crazy. No one should come here.”
“I’d be obliged if you would,” Rus replied. “You have that many followers, it’d help a lot.”
He shut the door on her.
He moved to his cruiser.
He made sure Karen was all good and rolling out.
Then he followed her into town.
An hour and a half later, guiding him by the hand, Madden led him to the front of her class.
“Okay!” she called out. “This is my kinda stepdad, Lieutenant Zachariah Lazarus. He’s a detective with the sheriff. But before that, he was in the FBI!”
Rus buried a smile as she paused to preen from the excitement coming from the class.
She mostly gave up the goods with that, but tried to rally by finishing, “So he’s gonna talk to you about being in the FBI!”
She gave his hand a squeeze, beamed up at him, let him go and went to sit at her desk.
He waited until she was there, scanned her class, who were all staring at him expectantly, and he started it with, “Hey there.”
From just those two words, there was a ripple of anticipation through the crowd.
No pressure.
On that thought, he launched in on a very condensed, G-rated version of working with the FBI.
“And so, I was like, ‘Jeremy, if you save the world from a serial killer, you get to quit and kick back with a cushy detective’s job.’ And Jeremy was all, ‘If I was an FBI agent, I would never quit.’ And I was all, ‘How do you know? You’ll never be an FBI agent.’ And he was all, ‘Yes I will!’ And I was all, ‘No you won’t. I should know what it takes. Even though Rus isn’t in the FBI anymore, all his FBI friends come to the house when he cooks steaks on the grill.’ And he was all, ‘You think you’re so cool because you were kidnapped.’ And I was all, ‘Well, obviously. I mean, they’re making a TV show about me!’”
They were.
Well, not about Madden, specifically, but what happened to her would be in it.
Lucinda was openly annoyed, which meant deep down inside, she was infuriated.
Rus was a lot more obviously infuriated.
Nevertheless, it was bound to happen. Not even a week had passed after Richard Sandusky surrendered himself, and Hollywood and a variety of producers of documentaries, podcasts and the like had been in touch.
Rus shut them down. Lucinda shut them down. Surprisingly, Gary and Dakota Iverson shut them down.
Melanie was in negotiations, but when Gary landed the big lawsuit on her, and it was clear she knew little about her daughter and couldn’t contribute anything substantial, not to mention, she might lead them to a massive libel payout, they backed off.
None of that stopped them.
So now they’d been informed there was a docuseries being made.
More true crime fed to the world.
And the beat goes on.
After his talk with her class, which ended the day, Rus was bringing Madden home from school.
This was his job on days when Jaeger was flying, and today, when Rus was there anyway.
Yes, the man moved back. Too much shit going down in Misted Pines, his daughter kidnapped, that was inevitable too.
His girlfriend, a lifetime resident of Portland, as were all of her family, had decided not to come with him and was heartbroken he’d left.
History repeating.
It worked though, because Jaeger was a solid individual who loved his daughter, and Rus respected him. Jaeger gave that back.
There were times, however, that Rus couldn’t wade into, when Lucinda and Jaeger butted heads.
They did this about how she was raising a confident girl to be a confident woman who didn’t feel anything was out of reach, and Jaeger was raising a beloved girl who he thought one day would be as awesome as she was now, no matter what she did (though, while she was doing it, she’d be trained to make some man really happy).
It could be said the hot fudge she learned to make wasn’t just an activity father and daughter did together.
It wasn’t overt, it was just the way of the world, which was why Jaeger didn’t quite get it.