That night…
Mr. Tepes sat in his large downtown office in the gloom of 2 a.m., dark eyes half-hooded, perfectly manicured hands resting on the mirror-polished ebony of his desk, a perfectly aligned row of iPhones in front of him, color coded.
Back when the Byzantine Empire was still a thing, there would have been heads on stakes, and public impalings.
These days, that's not how you did business.
But you could do the next best thing.
You could make sure your victim lived long and regretted that you'd ever been born.
Too bad the Spencer boys hadn't survived their encounter with the security system he'd personally installed in the form of two large RADs with law-enforcement training.
Too bad their grandmother in her filthy hoarder's house was too addled with Alzheimer's to be worth suing, much the less bringing of charges against.
As far as she knew, Jimmy and Dakota were six years old.
As far as she knew, she had purchased Nerf guns for them with her credit card.
Online.
For Christmas.
Suing, much the less having her publicly pulled apart by four horses or putting her on display in front of his office building on a greased pole while letting gravity do what gravity was good at, would have been a waste of a good pole, grease, or four horses.
She wouldn't have understood what she was being punished for.
Still, though messy, the defense system he'd put in place, overruling the objections of the School Board, had been effective.
Mr. Tepes like being effective.