It had been a while since our last date due to my hours. By the time I was getting home in the evening, walking riley and showering were about all I could manage to do before crawling into bed. Last night, he picked me up to take me out to eat, slightly upset that I wasn’t wearing the dress he had asked me to wear. I told him I had simply gained a little weight, and even though it fit, it was no longer comfortable for me to wear. Instead, I had put on a dress I felt comfortable in. It was still pretty, at least to me, but Craig didn’t agree with my explanation.
When we got to the restaurant, he ordered our food while I was in the bathroom. After a long week of a new receptionist overbooking the veterinarian, I was excited to be getting a decent meal. He didn’t tell me what he ordered for me at first, but said it was a surprise. With how well he knew what meals I liked, I was excited to see what he picked.
My heart sank when I saw it was a salad with no dressing, not even on the side. He asked me if I was unappreciative of the fact that he was trying to help me lose the weight I had gained. I smiled and bit the inside of my lip to distract myself from crying, the pain the only comfort I could find at the moment. I shouldn’t have told myself the weight gain was attractive; I knew better than that. He was only trying to help me after all. I promised him I would manage my food better, despite the fact that it would mean losing some of the sleep I was already running low on.
Chapter eight
The Vigilante
September 24th 2023
It was almost midnight, and this day had gone far from how I had fucking planned it would go. My schedule should have been full of individual sessions with my patients, not an entire day dedicated to a flesh suit living on borrowed time. Brandon Everett's clock was ticking, but it wasn’t in the final countdown yet.
The biggest problem with Brandon was that he didn’t have any living relatives or a power of attorney when it came to his treatment. Since he was incarcerated before being transferred for a psychiatric evaluation, all his treatment approvals had to go through his lawyer. The public defender assigned to him was decent at his job, but not at answering a fucking phone call in a timely manner when his client started causing problems."
While he was placed in solitary confinement, his psychiatric care team wanted to try to take a gentler approach, which was where I came in. The last thing the pedophile deserved was gentle treatment, but I couldn’t exactly tell my superiors what I was planning on doing with him. It was common knowledge that I was one of the best therapists the clinic had on call, so itwas no surprise when they asked me to monitor him. Brandon’s entire existence was by definition a waste of space. He wasn’t worth the air he breathed, let alone the amount of care he was receiving. Insane or not, he was going to be held accountable for what he did to his seven-year-old niece.
His outburst had the unlucky coincidence of happening just after I finished reviewing all the information the clinic had on Raelynn Devlin's case. She was a patient who deserved my time and attention. Miss Devlin wasn’t damaged beyond repair like Mr. Everett was. A life still waited for her outside of these walls, and I would help give it to her.
He would be my continued problem tomorrow, for now, though he was resting comfortably sedated in a straitjacket, awaiting his lawyer's response to increase a daily sedative to make him more manageable in a group setting. The confinement wasn’t a permanent solution. Part of his lawyer's negotiation was to be able to prove, once rehabilitated, that he would be able to function normally in society, and the group sequestered in the clinic during his stay were the unlucky guinea pigs he was going to be allowed to interact with. Tomorrow morning, if we are lucky, we should have a response to give us the go-ahead to change his medication.
My primary focus tonight was going to be digging into the scene I witnessed after leaving Brandon in his bed for the night. I was provided with Miss Devlin's intake assessment, listened to it at least a dozen times, and the notes from the EMTsthat responded to her house, as well as her medical records provided by the attending physicians and nurses. Though most of the time doctors and nurses don’t write anything too personal in a patient's chart, their treatment is usually straightforward.
Her primary care physician, who oversaw her two-day hospital stay and signed off on her transfer to the behavioral clinic, noted that his patient displayed signs of paranoia and suggested contacting next of kin for a complete family history of any mental illness. Nowhere in the notes did it indicate that he took time to explore any information she tried to share with the hospital staff, nor were any next of kin contacted to provide any insight into her family's history of mental illness.
After I left Raelynn with her sister in the visitors’ room I went straight to the security office. Not only was I curious about what had brought on her obvious panic attack, but I also wanted to ensure that the man she claimed had tried to kill her wouldn’t be allowed back on the property. Her doctor may think she’s just being paranoid, but a paranoid person wouldn’t be able to act that good and on such short notice. Being locked away in a psychiatric institution, you couldn’t exactly coordinate with the outside world very well to set up a scene of that magnitude.
Michael, our head security officer, had no issue showing me the beginning of her episode when I told him I wanted to see what had triggered her so I could better help her in her session tomorrow.He was easy to get along with, didn’t ask too many questions, and I liked that a lot about him.
The video played out about how I expected. When I got off the elevator, only a few moments had passed from when her panic attack started. There was no sign of hesitation when she saw her ex-boyfriend waiting for her in the visitors’ room, only her body reacting to whatever traumatic events she had gone through and associated with the man with genuine fear. As a professional in the mental health field, I would have to respectfully conclude that her attending doctor was a complete fucking moron for not listening to his patient.
I watched myself on the scene with her. I was taken back to that moment. Helping people was what I desired to do with my life, unraveling the mysteries that hid within their minds. The thought of what resided in hers piqued my curiosity in ways I hadn’t experienced.
When I had stepped in to assist Shemar, I wasn’t expecting her to blindly trust me. There was a process that most patients went through with their therapists to build a strong bond of trust. Raelynn however, seemed to latch onto the control. I tried to weave over her panic, like she wanted me to take the reins. Her eyes didn’t just see me, they completely bore through me, and she never let that pleading gaze drop.
Begging me with her orbs, the color of a summer storm. There was something about her that drew me in, that made me wantto know more. I knew in that instant she needed someone to take control; she wanted to give herself to me. She was a broken mess, desperate to be put back together. All that was needed was someone who could figure out where all those pieces went.
A lot could be told about a person through their eyes, and though her body was trying its damndest to break down in that moment, her eyes held a lot of strength and desire. In my gut, I knew she had been telling the truth about not attempting to commit suicide, and I was ready to try and make that theory concrete.
I had thanked Michael by promising to bring him and his team some doughnuts by the end of the week. Simple men were simple to please, and food usually did the trick.
Trying to look into her ex-boyfriend wasn’t as simple as reviewing the security footage. Hacking wasn’t my strongest forte; it was something I dabbled in when I became bored in college, thanks to my minor in computer science. But I knew enough to dig up some dirt on the man. It was crossing a hell of a lot of professional boundaries for my day job, realistically, I knew it was wrong, but if it meant helping someone, that’s where my boundaries tended to blur a little.
Finding out the basic information didn’t require anything more than a social media account on all the popular platforms. With his first name, Raelynn's full name, and knowing what he looked like, he wasn’t hard to find. People nowadays are too obsessed withtheir online image, and Mr. Craig Grasso was no different than most young girls out there trying to snag attention.
All his profiles were set to public, and even though he had a decent amount of followers, hardly anyone interacted with his posts. The content on his page ranged from extremist political views favoring any politician that gave more freedoms to gun owners than women's rights, to a few photos of him and other guys participating in the redneck version of NASCAR, go-kart racing. In all of his selfies, he never smiled. His fragile masculinity is too far above trying to look happy. Men like that enjoy looking tough. They couldn’t convey strength without overdoing their egotistical exterior. It was a persona that wasn’t strong at all, usually a sign of a weakness to cover up their small dick syndrome that they tried to hide.
His profile didn’t have any mention of Raelynn throughout most of the time they were dating. Whereas hers tended to feature him a lot. Her profiles were all set to private, but those settings weren’t that difficult to get around if you knew what you were doing. She hadn’t posted anything with him in several months, so I had to assume that was when their relationship started going south. Before that, when she would post about him once a week, he never interacted with the post, no likes, no comments, like he ignored her completely. Raelynn didn’t have nearly as many followers as he did, but her friends were more interactive and consistent on her page.
I made a few notes about the things I found on their respective social media sites before I moved into the deeper stuff. If I took what Raelynn said was true and her ex-boyfriend really did try to kill her, chances were high that he would have something on his record, either public or hidden, that would follow the same traits as the domestic violence she claimed she faced. That’s where the deeper hacking part came in. I didn’t want just his public record; I wanted any complaints that may have been filed against him and dropped, not just the ones that brought charges against him. Men who abused women usually left a trail of victims behind them; they didn’t just up and out of the blue one day decide they were going to start. There was almost always more than one woman who had suffered through them. If he was an abusive piece of trash like I was starting to suspect he was, then I needed to know for sure before I made my decision to take him on as a part of my second job. No man who struck that much fear in a woman deserves the chance to repeat the process with a new victim.
The clock was nearing two am when I decided to end my research. Mr. Grasso had multiple complaints filed against him from previous girlfriends, but none of the reports stuck enough to make it official. Either they dropped the charges, or they were convinced it wouldn’t be worth the hassle.
Craig came from money; his family was wealthy enough, so there’s also the possibility that cash may have exchanged hands to make his problems go away. Only once was I able to find analtercation between Craig and a previous girlfriend, where she ended up in the hospital. But the statement she originally gave was later recanted —and revised to match, down to the letter, the one he gave the police: that she had fallen down the stairs.
Part of my sessions with Raelynn weren’t just going to be about helping her heal from both her physical wounds and her emotional trauma, but also figuring out this maestro’s pattern with women. Just because it wasn’t documented in any police reports didn’t mean it didn’t exist. She probably wasn’t even aware it existed at all. Most people aren’t until they’ve been able to put a healthy distance between themselves and a toxic relationship. There’s when they really start to cut the strings on their abuser’s control. If she had ever felt the need to question him, an abusive narcissistic asshole usually defaulted to blaming their victims for being crazy. She would have never known to dig deeper.
Turning off my laptop, I rose from my desk chair, cracking my back multiple times before making my way to my bedroom. At this rate, I would only be getting a few hours of sleep until I was due back at the clinic, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was figuring out the truth, not just with Raelynn's case, but if another monster needed to be stopped.
