16. Cal Walker
B uddy’s name was actually Kyle Bradshaw, and he was a fucking judge .
Classy.
Once Vox had breached the alarm system, I searched the home to find that there was no one else in the house, meaning I had free reign to do whatever the fuck I wanted with Judge Bradshaw.
Of course, there was always a risk someone would come home while I was busy with him, but that would honestly just be a bonus. If he had a wife, which seemed to be the case, considering he was wearing a ring, I would need to determine whether or not she needed to die, too. If she had laid one finger on that boy, I was icing her ass as well, so hanging out till she came home just made sense.
If you kill them, they will come.
HA! I was on a roll with the pop culture references today.
Anyway, while waiting for Krusty Kyle to wake up, I hunted down his modem and sent a picture of the make and model to Vox. I got a thumbs down, which meant Kyle, or someone he had hired, had changed the default username and password.
This shocked me. It was extremely rare for people to know how to do this. Like, unless you’re in IT or do what I do, you wouldn’t know how to change the admin password. The fact that Kyle had done that raised serious red flags.
I mean, I guess you could argue that he was a judge and would want a super secure network, but you would be surprised.
Since I was literally in the house and I had my wardriving laptop with me, it didn’t matter. I just connected directly to the network and gave Vox remote access again.
Voila.
All your secrets were mine now, Dis honourable Kyle Bradshaw.
Bwahaha!
I had Kyle tied and gagged to one of his kitchen chairs in his swanky modern kitchen. I had made sure to cover the entire place with a shit ton of painter’s plastic… you know, for all the blood.
He was going to be out for a while, so I spent the next few hours sifting through the files upon files on documents that Vox was steadily decrypting for me.
Most of it was basic judge stuff, but the deeper I went, the more suspicious I became.
No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find any evidence that Caleb was this man’s biological son. I couldn’t find a birth certificate anywhere. There weren’t any adoption papers either. During my initial canvas of his house, I found a safe in the master closet. Once I broke into that, I found his marriage certificate there. He was married to a Ms. Amanda Grey… though there were literally no pictures of the happy couple anywhere, not on the walls and not on his computer.
I had begun the tedious process of going through his security footage when I heard the telltale grunt of a tranquilized man waking up.
I fired off a text to Vox, who was watching the footage with me from his remote location at Apex.
Cal:
My new friend is waking up. Ping me if you find anything I can use.
Vox:
*Thumbs up emoji*
“Morning, Krusty!” I beamed. My bandana was no longer covering my mouth. I wore it around my neck because Kyle, for sure, would not be leaving this house alive. Once I got them in a chair, I usually abandoned all attempts at anonymity.
He was understandably groggy and staring at me with a confused look on his face.
Resting my palms on my knees, I leaned forward, still grinning.
“How’d ya sleep?”
He started screaming into the duct tape I had plastered over his mouth, and I chuckled.
“Oh, Kyle. If I were you, I would save the screaming for later. No one can hear you anyway, and I haven’t even gotten started yet.”
He ignored me and continued to thrash and shout into his gag, which was disappointing.
Sighing, I strolled over to the counter, where I had some of my favorite tools laid out. Picking up a scalpel, I turned to face him, rolling it expertly through my fingers.
“Listen. Shut your ass up, or I’ll be forced to remove your eyelids. I mean… I’m probably going to do that at some point anyway, but wouldn’t you want to put that off as long as possible?
My threat did not have the desired effect. He just began screaming and thrashing more frantically.
I shrugged. “Alright. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” I straddled his lap and forced his head back with my elbow, pinching one of his eyelids together so I could lift it away from his eye.
Abruptly, he stopped screaming. Instead, I heard what sounded like muffled begging.
I paused, pulling away, giving him a comically ‘stern’ look.
“I can’t understand you. Nod once if you’re going to be good.”
He nodded. I smiled.
“Great!” In one swift movement, I tore the duct tape off his face as I stood up, and he shouted out in pain.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” He gasped, his skin now raw and red from where the tape had adhered to his face.
I cackled. “That fucker’s not gonna save you, I can promise you that.”
Kyle glared up at me but said nothing. He knew what this was. Whatever power he was accustomed to wielding in his daily life as a judge was no use here.
Now I was the fucking judge. I was also the jury and the mother fucking executioner. And Kyle Bradshaw fucking knew it.
“What do you want?” he snapped, and I leaned against the counter, rolling my scalpel between my thumb and index finger as I watched him. “You want money? How much? I’ll give you anything you want!”
I feigned excitement. “Anything I want?” I gasped, and he nodded frantically, either not picking up on the sarcasm or refusing to acknowledge it.
“I want to live in a world where children like Caleb aren’t beaten within an inch of their lives by sick fucks like you.” I smirked, though this time, my smile didn’t reach my eyes. “Can you help me with that?”
He narrowed his eyes on me and snarled. “I did no such thing!”
Rolling my eyes, I pushed up from the counter and made my way over to my laptop, which I had set up on the kitchen table. Vox had already screenshot several still frames from Kyle’s security camera footage that showed him hitting his son.
I turned the laptop around to show him, and his face blanched.
“This is going to be perfect backup footage for the email you’ll be sending later to all your colleagues explaining how you were blackmailed and needed to leave town.” I gave him a dark smile, and his face went from white to green.
He knew what I meant by ‘leave town.’
Strolling back up to him, I leaned over again, tracing the tip of my scalpel gently down the side of his face.
“Now, we both know you’re going to die today, Kyle. That’s not up for discussion. However, if you answer my questions quickly and honestly, I might make it quick for you. If you don’t cooperate…” I leaned in close to his ear and whispered, “Ever wonder what it would feel like to have an eye cut out of your face while you’re still breathing? I’ve been told that it’s fucking horrible . I can’t speak from personal experience, though. You’ll have to let me know.”
He whimpered. The bitch whimpered. My nostrils flared, and the scent of urine filled my nose. I pulled away from him, disgusted.
“You can beat a little kid up, but you piss yourself the second someone threatens eyeball removal? Pussy.”
“Please. I’ll tell you anything.” He was literally crying now, and I wiped away one of his tears, mocking him by pouting my bottom lip.
“Aww. Krusty Kyle’s gonna cry. So sad,” I crooned before jamming the scalpel into his thigh, making sure to avoid any major arteries. He screamed bloody murder, and I grinned.
I watched him writhe and scream in satisfaction for a moment when my phone buzzed. I glanced at my conversation with Vox, which now just had several of those big red exclamation point emojis. I frowned and slipped back over to the laptop to see what he had found.
I scrolled through the pop-ups of what looked like… ownership papers?
I narrowed my eyes at the screen.
Jesus fucking Christ…
I had seen papers like this before. These were drawn up and usually heavily encrypted in the human trafficking industry. Rich people with more money than morals exchanged these slips to solidify the sale of literal human beings on the dark web.
What was the Honourable Kyle Bradshaw doing with these on his fucking computer?
Choosing one of the slips, I ran a search for the name listed under the field labeled ‘product.’ My stomach bottomed out when a missing person ad immediately popped up for a little girl named Cherry Dawson.
I flipped through several more slips before coming across one for… Amanda Grey. My blood went cold. Amanda Grey? As in his… wife?
He owned his wife?
I glanced up from the screen to look at Kyle, who was slumped over in a kitchen chair that probably cost more than most people’s cars.
Had I just stumbled on someone involved in a human trafficking ring?
Was Caleb a child born from this man raping his ‘wife’ ? Or had he purchased him, too?
Judges were elected officials. I knew enough about the process from what Cassandra had told me to understand that you didn’t necessarily need to be a good person to be elected. You just needed to be popular.
It was common for judges to marry to assume the image of a ‘ family man.’ People trusted a man more if he had a family. Don’t ask me why, but it’s true.
Why not just marry any gold digger off the street? Well, I would assume it would be a pain in the ass to hide the fact that you’re helping some underground crime ring literally sell fucking people from someone who lived in your house.
Why not just buy a wife from the ring you’re running and call it a day? He probably knocked her up with Caleb and paid someone to deliver him privately to keep her out of the hospital. Hospitals typically needed identification and health records… That would explain the lack of a birth certificate.
My mind was running a mile a minute. Of course, this was all speculation, but it was all very fucking plausible.
When you run in the circles I do for as long as I have, you start to assume the absolute worst of people.
You know the term innocent until proven guilty?
Yeah, well… as far as I was concerned, it’s guilty until proven innocent. The world is a vile place filled with people like Kyle fucking Bradshaw operating in plain sight… I would even consider myself one of the vile people that plagued this planet.
Not everyone I killed deserved to die. Many of them were just targets on a list, and I told myself that whatever they had done to get their asses put on said list was none of my business.
But… sometimes… sometimes I wished things were different.
Maybe that was why I had this hobby. It was my way of trying to balance out my karmic debt, considering the amount of innocent blood I probably had on my hands.
Or maybe it was just fucking revenge against the mother that I never got the chance to kill myself.
Either way, Kyle would be answering for more than just his own sins today… As soon as he answered my questions… and I suddenly had a lot of them.
“Hey, Kyle?” I asked, keeping my voice deceivingly light. “Where’s Amanda?”