"Kristine Kathryn Rusch - Sweet Young Things" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

Fala wondered how she could make that statement and still sound sincere. Or
perhaps the receptionist was the person in the Fala position: the young, naive, nearly
broke good girl who would do anything her boss asked.
There were so many young women like that in so many towns; it was one of
the many reasons Preston had had the success he’d had.
****
Fala had found three sweet young things in her own state, four more two
states over, and five scattered throughout the Midwest. It hadn’t been easy; she’d
spent weeks in the university library, reading the local sections of various
newspapers, hoping for an article about the people who had moved to a town
believing they had rented an apartment when they actually hadn’t.
 She wrote down the names, the towns, and the dates, and realized just how
patterned Preston had been. First, he picked college towns, with definite move-in,
move-out times. He targeted professors, young marrieds, and lower-middle-class
families because they usually didn’t have rich parents who would chase him to the
ends of the earth. They would swallow the loss and move on, although not happily,
and certainly not well.
She found two suicides that she could attribute to Preston’s actions: men who
were on their last legs, hoping to make a go of it in one more town, only to discover
that someone had stolen their very last dime. She’d found several more
divorces—young marrieds who couldn’t handle the strain—and an even larger
number of children who lived in poverty because their parents lost the opportunity
that had brought them to the big, bad city and sent them spiraling back to the welfare
office.
But, with the exception of the suicides, they weren’t the worst off. The worst
off were the girls, the young ladies, the innocents who had happily taken a job with a
rental agency, only to find themselves holding the bag for fraud.
The lawyer used them to get a judge to dismiss all the cases against Fala. He
also used them to make the police leave her alone, and to interest the FBI in Preston
Lidner, who happened to be running scams across state lines.
But Fala used those girls—women now—for a different purpose.
She used them for revenge.
****
Fala sat at her kitchen table, her feet crossed at the ankles, her red high heels
resting on the back of her ratty couch. The apartment smelled of old grease and
newly fried bacon. An untouched BLT rested on the Formica tabletop, half a foot
away from Fala’s tapping index finger.
“No,” she said into her disposable cell phone, “I don’t have proof it’s him,
but I know it’s him. And besides, if it’s not, it’s someone just like him who has to
be stopped.”
Tess, the woman on the other end of the phone, sighed heavily. She’d heard
the argument before; Fala knew that because she’d made it. Twice she’d been
right—Topeka and Detroit; three times, she’d been wrong. But in those three cases,
the “Club,” as they called their organization, had still managed to salvage something
from the mess.
“Just send the team,” Fala said, “and hurry. He expects to be done by
Monday.”
Then she hung up, her finger still tapping. She reached for her purse, which
sat on the counter near the landline she’d gotten for her pawnshop-owner persona, a
phone that had only rung five times in the month-plus that she’d lived here. She had