Page 62 of The Perfect Betrayal

“Do you have any idea what it means, Dante?” she asked.

“Not a clue,” he said. “We’ve saved the nasty thing in case you wanted to come check it out personally. And I took a photo of it too, which I can send your way. But I don’t know what else I can do for you.”

“You’ve done more than enough,” she said. “Please just send me the photo. I’ll try to come by tomorrow to check out the mattress, though I’m sure I’ll come up empty too.”

“Will do.”

After Dante hung up, Jessie stepped outside for a bit of air. She had no idea what the message meant, but it seemed clear that Haddonfield had intended it for her, perhaps as some kind of code. And it seemed equally clear that he expected that if she got it, it would be after his death, just like his box of personal effects. The box that she’d so far refused to look at.

Then she remembered another message, the one that Haddonfield had asked Hannah to pass on to her when he called the day before his death. He had said:if you want to be independent, you have to go to the mattresses.That couldn’t be a coincidence.

When she’d first heard it, she thought it was some odd reference to the movie,The Godfather, which had a similar line about mattresses. But now she knew he’d said it that way to cover up his true meaning in case the wrong person was listening to the call. The problem was that she had no idea what he meant either.

Jessie thought about what she knew. She had a cryptic plea from a dead serial killer. She had a code written in crayon on a mattress. And she had a box of Haddonfield’s effects. Maybe it was time to finally open that box and see what connection it might have to the code and the plea.

She didn’t know what Mark Haddonfield was up to. And yet, even though she had nothing more than a hunch, some part of her couldn’t help but think that if Haddonfield had gone to this much trouble, what he wanted her to know had to be important.

She couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow Mark Haddonfield was reaching out from beyond the grave, trying to warn her.

EPILOGUE

The young man warned himself not to get over-confident.

Just because everything so far had gone as he’d hoped, that didn’t mean it would be smooth sailing the rest of the way. He’d put in so much hard work and preparation that getting cocky when he was this close to his goal would be idiotic.

He’d scrubbed the traditional internet of anything that might look even vaguely suspicious. All of his more explosive message board comments had been made on the dark web under an alias. But just to be safe, he’d stopped participating in those forums months ago.

And now it was all set to pay off. The young man’s patience and dedication would be rewarded. It had been a lonely road, being a men’s rights advocate as a scrawny teenager. He still remembered the day that he committed to the cause.

He was fifteen and his parents announced they were getting a divorce. He learned it was because his bitch of a mother had been cheating with her boss at the bank and intended to marry him. Needless to say, his dad got fired on some trumped-up charge of malfeasance at the company where he worked as an electrician.

His dad was a good man, but the twin hits of losing his family and his job were too much for him. He sank into a depression and started drinking too much. When he died a few months later in a drunk driving accident, everyone assumed it was a tragic result of his poor choices. But his son knew the truth. He hadn't lost control and gone off that cliff. He'd done it intentionally to end things.

It was in that moment of realization that the young man vowed to avenge his father’s memory. But it would take time to do it right. Of course, that meant that from then on, any hintof bitterness was kept hidden from the world. The young man shared his thoughts on dark web forums related to alpha male uplift and dominance but never with his name attached.

He also began to focus hard on his schoolwork, making sure he’d have the grades to get into a good college. That was the path to a position within the power structure that would eventually allow him to implement policies which supported male primacy in the culture.

He'd found a personal hero last spring when a young college student named Mark Haddonfield emerged. Haddonfield was doing the hard work, taking that celebrity profiler skank Jessie Hunt down by killing people she’d saved, and by proxy, sullying her reputation. He’d almost taken her out too at one point, along with her slut sister, who somehow escaped and injured his knee in the process.

When Haddonfield was captured, it was a sad day. That is until his manifesto appeared online, asking others to take up the mantle and butcher those close to Hunt. The young man almost went out that night. But then he held back, deciding that he needed an action plan if he was really going to do the most damage.

So he came up with a strategy. He was in his fall semester at a community college, working to maintain the grades that would allow him to transfer to a top school. Now, he knew which school he would pursue. The mission gave him purpose.

All that was thrown into question when, a few months later, Haddonfield retracted his manifesto in a video that was made public. In it, he said that no harm should come to Jessie Hunt or her loved ones. The young man felt betrayed. His hero had gone beta.

But then, after a sleepless night, he had an epiphany. He understood what had really happened. Haddonfield was being forced to retract the manifesto. He surely had to do it to survivein that hellhole. He was likely being tortured, too, maybe even subjected to brainwashing. Hunt was a profiler with expertise in psychology. She almost certainly led these indoctrination sessions.

That knowledge gave the young man some solace. In fact, he wrote a letter to Haddonfield in prison, telling him that he knew the video was made under duress. He assured his hero that he wouldn’t let the false repudiation of the manifesto distract him from the mission that Haddonfield hadn’t been able to complete. He would eliminate the one person that the whore Jessie Hunt cared most about: her little sister.

So Dallas Henry picked up the mantle. He learned everything he could about Hannah Dorsey. He studied up on her sordid history, which involved a murderous serial killer father who slaughtered her adoptive parents, not to mention surviving a kidnapping and several stalking incidents. He found a gap in her academic record where she simply disappeared from school for several months but had yet to discern what that was about. He was intrigued to pry open that secret.

He applied to transfer to her school, UC Irvine, and was accepted into both the university and the same major as one of hers—Psychology—for the spring quarter. He worked out religiously so that he would look attractive to her. Even smart girls like Dorsey could be hoodwinked by a sculpted torso, and he intended to keep her in the dark by blinding her with his looks and charm.

He’d heard about how Dorsey was a whiz at online sleuthing who had helped other students out of tricky situations. So he re-checked all his social media data, re-scrubbing anything that might even hint at philosophical leanings. Luckily, he’d never logged on to any site under his own name and had used a VPN to mask his IP address when he visited the dark web.

Then, like a good fisherman, he lured her in. He kept some distance from her during the first weeks of the quarter so as not to seem too eager. He wanted her to come to him. And it would have stayed that way if not for Haddonfield's death at the hands of some human scum hitwoman. Frankly, Dallas didn't dismiss the possibility that Jessie Hunt had hired the woman to kill him as part of an inside job.

After that, he knew that he couldn’t wait any longer. To honor Haddonfield, he had to accept the responsibility of picking up where he’d left off. So he created a situation where he needed help on an assignment. The hook was baited.

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