Page 88 of NYPD Red 7: The Murder Sorority

“I never heard of it, but according to the Cambridge Dictionary it’s a drug made from Indian hemp.”

“So the person who made the comment is telling Brinsmaid to smoke weed to help her get through her toxic ordeal of working for me?” Shane said.

“I don’t know,” Kylie said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Makes sense to me,” Theo said. “Think of the word with all uppercase letters. HHNF. ‘This should be on HHNF.’”

“Great. What’s HHNF?” Shane said.

“I’m not a detective,” Theo said. “But my best guess is Hell Hath No Fury.”

CHAPTER 58

“Nicely done, Theo,”Kylie said. “I totally missed that one.”

“Smart kid,” Shane said. “Maybe you guys should consider recruiting him.”

I didn’t say a word. I just stood there grinning like mythird-graderbrought home a perfect report card.

Cheryl caught the grin. I couldn’t tell if she approved or disapproved. She just looked at me with that classic, cold nonjudgmental stare that shrinks use to drive their patients crazy.

Theo ignored us all. He was busy typing into the search bar. A page of possibilities popped up. He clicked on the top one, eyeballed it quickly, and said, “This is kind of cool.”

“Jesus, kid,” Shane said. “Somebody tried to put a bullet through my left ventricle. I was hoping for more thankind ofcool.”

Theo didn’t miss a beat. “Okay, how about this? Watson,” he said in a thick British accent, “the game is afoot.’”

“What have you got?” Kylie asked, still not in the mood for male humor.

“It’s some guy’s blog,” Theo said. “I don’t know who he is. It doesn’t matter. There’s a zillion bloggers out there posting shit all the time that nobody ever looks at.”

I leaned in. “Don’t get mad, get even,” I said reading the headline. I squinted at the rest of the page. “Maybe he could get more people to read this crap if he used a bigger font.”

“Or maybe he’s catering to a generation that’s not yet ready for reading glasses,” Theo said. “Sit down, old man. I got this.”

Cheryl’s perfect deadpan face cracked wide open. She was enjoying Theo as much as I was.

“Is the neighbor’s dog shitting on your lawn?” Theo said, effortlessly slipping into an authoritative narrator’s voice. “Is some asshole from your office stealing your yogurt out of the fridge in the coffee room? Did the flight attendant make you check yourcarry-onbag because there’s no room left in the overhead compartment? Hey, we all have issues. And for those of us who want to dump our First World problems on the rest of the universe, we can vent on Twitter or Facebook or Reddit. But those arePG-thirteencompared to theanything-goes,no-holds-barredfreedom of the dark web.

“The shadowy underbelly of the Internet is not only a destination for people looking to buy guns, drugs, or child pornography, but a breeding ground for those who want to incite, even recruit, others to help a jilted lover or apissed-offneighbor get even with the sons of bitches what done ’em wrong. Jilted love—did you catch that, Shane?”

“I didn’t jilt anybody!” Shane said. “I’m the injured party here.”

“Okay, okay, then this is for you,” Theo said, returning to the blog. “The three sites at the top of theget-rid-of-your-grudgeheap are tit4tat, revenj, and hhnf, which the informed know stands for Hell Hath No Fury, and which caters, as the name implies, to women scorned.”

Theo sat back. “There’s more, but I think we got what we were looking for.”

“Great job,” I said.

“Yeah, thanks,” Shane said. “Now what?”

“Hey, I’m not running the investigation,” Theo said, “but the first thing I would do is go down to the snake pit and see what other nasty shit Natalie is saying about you.”

“Can you do that?” Shane said. “Onmycomputer?”

The kid grinned. “Could you cook dinner onmyhot plate?”

Cheryl shot me a look. Clearly, mythird-graderwith the perfect report card was a lot more complex than I’d reckoned.

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