Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
Gabriel
When I walk up to Tate’s house with Jesse by my side, I find my eyes straying toward him.
There’s so much riding on him keeping quiet that it makes me feel this weird sense of anxiety toward him.
All it would take would be a simple slipup and he could give Liam’s involvement away.
Jesse has confidently told us that he’ll keep our participation hidden, but how is he going to take this display?
I know I need to trust him. And I know I need to trust Liam. Even if Jesse blurted out everything right at this moment, I know there’d be absolutely nothing tying the body to Liam because he’s no amateur.
Jesse glances over at Liam who is staring at the body while looking absolutely natural, like he wasn’t the very person who killed the man and placed his body on the front porch.
“What do we have?” I ask.
“A rather dead man,” Liam replies.
“You’re such a smart-ass all the time,” Donna says.
“Thank you, Donna, your friendship means so much to me.”
“And sarcastic.”
“I’ve never wasted my breath on sarcasm. What are you doing here, Jesse?”
“I was getting coffee with Gabriel when the call came in. Kind of a… we were riding together kind of thing,” he says. “But since I’m here now, is there anything I can do?”
Liam leans in to get a better look at the body. “Looks like he’s been moved. The blood has settled in his back. He likely lay on his back after death. You can even see the way his hair has been frozen flat in the back while the blood congealed. Jesse, since you’re here, what do you think?”
Jesse seems to snap right into work mode as he hurries over. “Definitely moved. The blood pattern on his skin as well as the blood settling under his skin show that he was lying for a period of time before being moved up here. There’s no fresh blood beneath him.”
“Do you think he got wet somehow? Look at the way his clothes are frozen,” Liam comments.
“It’s certainly possible.”
“Of course, since it snowed yesterday, I’m not sure we’ll get any footprints,” Liam says as I realize that he did a phenomenal job dragging the areas they’d walked. The snow currently pelting us in the face is also helping to hide any footprints, but it’s not helping my attitude.
“This weather is miserable,” I mutter.
“Sure is,” Jesse says, probably still sensitive to the cold after last night.
A car pulls up and Michaels gets out, telling me he’s quite concerned by this entire thing if he’s showing up already. His jaw is clenched tightly while he storms his way up to the porch where the body sits.
And that’s when I hear multiple phones beep.
“What the fuck is this?” Chris asks, looking down at his phone.
“Someone send you a nude for the first time in your life?” Liam asks.
“I’m glad you’re mean to others and not just me,” Matthew says as he walks up.
“I got a… Oh my god…” Donna breathes, holding up her phone too.
I hesitate before reaching for my work phone, realizing that I had felt it vibrate while I was caught up in watching what was happening.
I open it up and look at a picture of a much younger Jesse pinning a man to the wall with a knife driven into the man’s side.
Well, this isn’t good.
This is really fucking bad.
Everyone is pulling their phones out, having received the same message from an unknown number.
How the hell are we getting out of this one?
Of course Whitaker would send this; he wants to punish Jesse.
He wants to alienate him from the rest of us.
He wants him to have nothing. And then he wants to break him.
Just as my finger is hovering over the picture, a second one comes through. I have to wipe the snow off my phone to see it.
I click it and stare at the photograph of a younger woman standing over a dead body, gun in hand.
“Is that a photograph of Chief Taylor shooting someone?” Chris asks.
Michaels looks panicked as he pulls out his phone to see what’s going on. “Just… we don’t know what these are. They’re likely being sent to cause unrest among us.”
“Please don’t tell me that you thought these shitty photoshopped pictures are real,” Liam scoffs. “I can see the line where Jesse’s head was added on.”
“Oh, you’re right,” Chris says, even though I know the picture is real. Who knows what Chris thinks he’s seeing. Or is it that Liam is always right, so people just agree with him even when he’s wrong?
“Did the killer really think this would work?” Donna asks. “Waste of fucking time.”
Jesse is standing there in the middle of it all, stone still. I don’t think he even remembers how to breathe until Matthew’s smack on his back reanimates him. Jesse jerks back to life and lets out a soft laugh. “For a moment there, I thought maybe I really did kill someone and didn’t remember it.”
“Your little body killing someone? They’d just squish you like a bug,” Liam says.
“I’m not little,” he snaps.
Matthew nods. “I did see him struggle to kill a bug the other day.”
“I wasn’t killing it, I was relocating it!”
“Look, if I run the first photo through Google’s image search, it looks like the real image came from what looks like a bad movie poster,” Chris says, flashing it at me since I’m closest. In this version, it’s a different person stabbing the victim, and it appears to be a poster promoting some indie movie or something.
“What was he hoping to accomplish with this?” I ask. “Did he really think that we wouldn’t check images?”
I slowly walk over to Liam, who is busy following the marks of whatever was used to hide the footprints that’d been made in the snow.
“Liam?”
“Yes, my dearest and sweetest love of all time,” he says.
“How the fuck did you do that?” I whisper now that we’re alone.
He beams at me before trailing a finger over my cheek.
“Well… let’s hope Matthew knows how to keep his mouth shut because I couldn’t have done it myself.
My skills with tech like that are abysmal.
At first, I just had him make the image of Chief Taylor.
I told him that the killer was trying to frame Jesse by sending him these fake photographs of him being involved in murders, and that if we wanted to keep Jesse out of it, we needed to make the fake photos seem useless.
“The plan was to wait until Whitaker dropped the image, and then I would send out Taylor’s image right after.
But I realized that if anyone did an image lookup, they’d immediately find the source for Taylor’s picture, but no one would find the source for Jesse’s.
So… I told Matthew that we needed to make a source for it.
That way if someone tried using this tampered photograph of Jesse to get him in trouble, they wouldn’t be able to because the original would be easily found online.
Matthew did the rest. I actually told him he did a good job, Gabriel.
When I saw the work on the website, the way he made it look older and like it’d been up for years…
I was impressed. Can you believe that? Crazy what love can do to a man.
But you saw how quickly people went from suspicious to thinking it was ridiculous just because there was a second photograph sent. ”
“I did. Do you think Matthew knows it’s real?” I ask.
“Matthew always wants to see the best in someone. I think he’s not going to let himself believe that it’s real because he sees the best in Jesse.”
He glances back at where Matthew is latched on to Jesse, and then turns to me, expression a bit dark. “I’m not fond of this many people knowing this many secrets. It’s gone too far.”
“Liam, we both know that you’ve hidden your involvement in any of this with finesse. Even if they both blurted out you were involved, no one is going to find proof of it.”
“You’re quite correct. I will make sure no one is aware that we had any involvement in this at all,” Liam says as we reach the ice.
“Do we want to go out there?” I ask while the snow whips around, picked up by the wind that’s not doing much to help this blizzard.
“I’m going to pretend I found the ring out there, but I need to at least go out a bit to ‘find it’ so we don’t raise suspicion if anyone wants to see where it was. I thought leaving it on his body would look too staged.”
“I’ll go with you. I don’t want you out on the ice alone.”
“The only reason Jesse fell through was because that asshole busted a hole in it. It’ll be fine,” Liam assures me. “I’m going to walk out fifteen feet, dig a little in the snow, and turn back around. Just stay here.”
“Okay,” I say. “Just don’t go far. This snow is making it hard to see.”
“It’s a pond, my love. Not an ocean. I won’t get lost.”
I watch him go, the snow being kicked up by the wind consuming him almost immediately, and my unease grows.
I don’t know whether it’s the situation as a whole or that this Whitaker person clearly has been around for years manipulating people and fucking up lives, but I feel unsettled and hurry after Liam.
I don’t get very far before I see Liam, who is doing as he said he would.
“What’s wrong?” Liam asks.
“I don’t know,” I admit. I catch up to him while he snaps some pictures of the necklace and ring.
“This will blow everything open, I promise,” he tells me.
“I know it will,” I say as I notice something a little past him. The ice really is quite solid and isn’t even cracking when I walk a few feet past him while the cold bites into me, even with warm clothes on.
“This weather is actually diabolical,” I decide.
“First time I’ve heard weather called diabolical.”
“Well, it really fucking is,” I say as a dark shape catches my eye. “Did you leave anything else out here?”
“No. What do you see?” he asks, bagging the ring and necklace before slipping them into his pants pocket.
“I don’t know… we’re in a fucking blizzard, but… is that another person?”
“Be careful,” Liam warns when I start toward it. “I watched the body all night waiting for him to come, and instead, he was out here? Did he have another one of his followers dump a body off?”
“Liam, if he dumped something off, you know there’s a reason he did it. Did he leave something on it? He said the body that belonged to Lacey’s boyfriend would have evidence pointing at Jesse.”
“Well, then he fucked himself with the picture. We now know he’s targeting Jesse, so we can play into that,” Liam says, following me as I continue toward the body and confirm that it really is missing its head.
“It’s likely him. Unless there’s another head to be found,” I announce. That’s when I notice the body is lying at an odd angle, like something has been wedged under it. I carefully push up the dead man’s coat to see what it is an instant before panic hits me.
“Liam, run,” I yell, but it’s too late.
The explosion rips through the air and the ice buckles beneath my feet. Pain tears into my side and I’m thrown forward, smashing into the edge of the ice before sinking down beneath the surface, enveloped by the icy darkness.