The Pain Scale by Tyler Dilts Read Free Book Online Page A

through the few concrete facts we had so far, attempting to reinterpret the details in such a way that something might break free and emerge as a relevant piece of information.
    Nothing did.
    “So I guess we’re waiting,” Jen said. She was right. We were. Waiting for ballistics, for the interview with Benton, for the GMC van, for anything.
    In my left hand, I squeezed the racquetball I keep next to my phone. My physical therapist told me it was beneficial for my injury, but I also find it a good way to pass the time while I am thinking. I just have to remind myself to switch hands every nowand again so I don’t wind up looking like a left-handed professional bowler.
    “What do you think?” she asked.
    “I think you should hang it up for today.”
    “Just me?”
    “You’ve got your thing, don’t you?”
    Jen has a third-degree black belt in aikido and volunteers as a teacher in a city program for at-risk youth. I once saw her give a demonstration to a group of teenage gangbangers and wannabes from some of the poorest areas of Long Beach. She held up a PR 24 side-handle baton in one hand and a hundred-dollar bill in the other, promising the money to anyone who could hit her with the nightstick. Half a dozen of them lined up to take their shot. Each and every one wound up pinned facedown on the mat, hoping she’d stop before breaking bones. The only thing she did break was the C-note, buying me fish and chips for lunch at E. J. Malloy’s.
    She’s studied enough Shotokan to break bricks, too. I know she could kick my ass without raising her heart rate.
    “Isn’t this a big one?” I asked.
    “It is. Hector’s testing for his brown belt tonight.”
    He’d been one of her first students, and one of her proudest achievements. He was the first of his three brothers to stay out of the East Side Longos.
    “How long has it been?”
    “Almost since the beginning. Four years.”
    “Think he’ll make it?”
    “I hope so.” She shut down her computer, turned off her desk lamp, and picked up her bag. “Don’t work too late,” she said.
    “I won’t. Have a good time.”
    Patrick called it a day soon after. As he left, he handed me a Post-it note that read,
B AILEY0426
.
    “What’s this?”
    “Sara’s password.”
    “Password? For what?”
    “Facebook, Gmail, and just about everything else, it looks like.”
    “Bailey’s birthday,” I said. I’d had to type it into forms several times already in the course of the investigation.
    “Yeah. Bad enough to use such a predictable password. But to use it for everything?” He looked at me and thought he saw something. “Danny, you don’t use the same password for everything, do you?”
    “Of course not.”
    He didn’t look like he believed me.
    I knew we’d probably have to comb through Sara’s e-mail at some point, but I decided to look first at her Facebook page. I’d only been out on sick leave for a bit over a year, but in that time, dissecting a victim’s Facebook page had gone from being something you did when you started running out of things to do to one of the first steps in building a victimology.
    I opened up Sara Gardener-Benton’s account and started with the basics. Under her name it said,
Went to Marina High School * Lives in Long Beach, California * Married to Bradley Benton III * Born on November 24
. Bradley’s name wasn’t highlighted. No page for him. Did that mean the rumors about him running for office were true and he didn’t want any drunken exploits from his college days showing up online? Or just that he’d managed to avoid being bitten by the social media bug infecting just about everybody else? Her privacy settings were set to the highest levels, which I found, for some inexplicable reason, to be reassuring.
    On Sara’s profile page, I discovered she liked the music of Neko Case and Wilco, listed her political views as moderate, her favorite quotation as “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” and when it came to TV,