Chapter 36
Back in the lobby, Jem sat on the floor, the briefcase next to him. He could tell at a glance that the locks had been forced. Inside, a pile of documents waited to be examined.
“We didn’t break it,” Milo said.
Which Jem took to mean that they had broken it. But all he said was “Is this Gerald’s?”
Maeve answered, “We were just playing with it.”
Which Jem took to mean that yes, it was Gerald’s. He said, “That’s okay. I know he wouldn’t mind. Did you know a lot of people have been looking for this?”
Milo’s scrunched-up nose suggested he had no idea why someone might want the briefcase that badly—never mind the recent fight over who got to play with it. “Why?”
“It might have something important in it,” Jem said. “Did you take it from Gerald’s bedroom?”
“No,” Maeve said.
“Where’d you find it?”
“It was in our room,” Maeve said.
Milo nodded. “Where Brigitte put it.”
Jem met Tean’s gaze; behind the glasses, the doc’s eyes were dark.
“Was it open like this when you found it?” Jem asked.
“Brigitte couldn’t get it open,” Maeve said. “She kept trying, but she didn’t know the code.”
“Maeve threw it,” Milo said helpfully.
“I didn’t throw it! It fell!”
“Yes, you did! You stood at the top of the stairs and threw it because you said you could throw it farther than me!”
“No, I didn’t!”
“Yes, you did!”
“It fell!” Maeve turned wet eyes on Jem. “It slipped out of my hand when I was doing a dance!”
“It’s fine,” Tean said. “Nobody’s upset about the briefcase.”
“When it hit the floor,” Jem asked, “did the lock break?”
Maeve sniffled and nodded.
“It flew open,” Milo said.
Fingering a scuff on the leather, Jem nodded. It wasn’t like most briefcases were designed for high security. If it landed right, and if the locks were old or cheap or both, the impact might have popped the latches.
“You’re sure Brigitte didn’t open it?” Jem asked.
“She got really mad,” Milo said.
“And then Stephen came over,” Maeve said, “and she put it under the bed.”
“Okay,” Jem said. “That’s great. Thank you. Hey, you know what? You guys didn’t finish your dinner. You still need to eat your pretzels. And if you don’t eat your dinner, then no candy.”
A few minutes later, Maeve and Milo were dunking their pretzels in fresh nacho cheese. And Tean was giving Jem a look.
“What?” Jem said.
“I don’t think ‘Finish your pretzels’ has ever been part of the USDA’s dietary guidelines.”
“They’re good. They’re practically bread. They’ve got lots of salt. They’re dipping them in cheese.”
“Those are all bad things.”
“Well, I’m sorry. It’s not like we’ve got a million vegetables sitting around for them to eat.”
“I just wanted to make sure you knew that bargaining with them to eat a nacho-cheese pretzel so that they can eat more candy is problematic at best.”
“Tean, babe.”
“Like when you got Scipio all those chicken nuggets, and then you said that the Filet o’ Fish was going to be the topper—”
“The briefcase?”
To judge by the look on Tean’s face, it was surprisingly difficult to pull himself away from that topic. But he settled on the floor next to Jem, and he accepted the papers as Jem passed them to him from the briefcase.
“A talk from General Conference—that’s a semiannual meeting that the church holds, with the leaders giving messages.
” Tean set aside documents. “These articles—” He paused to scan them briefly.
“—are about conversion therapy, although they don’t call it that.
They look like pseudoscience—I wonder if this is even a real journal.
And these—” Another pause. “—look like blog posts about ‘the perils of same-sex parenting.’”
While Tean was talking, Jem continued to investigate the briefcase.
The first set of documents had been the ones in the central compartment.
Now, as Jem checked pockets and flaps, he came across another sheaf of papers.
He glanced at them long enough to see that they were screenshots of an app before handing them to Tean.
“These are from Prowler,” Tean said.
At the mention of the dating app, Jem said, “Oh shiz. Are there any dick pics?”
“Uh—”
Jem grabbed the page. “Four and a half.”
“That’s got to be more than four and a half inches.” Tean seemed to realize a moment later what he’d said, and color rushed into his face. He even put a hand over his mouth.
“No, it’s a four and a half. Out of ten. See how it’s all veiny, but not in a good way? More of a ‘what’s wrong with it’ way. And it’s skinny at the top and then wide at the bottom. Looks kind of like a slug. You know what? Four. I’m knocking off half a point.”
“Oh my gosh,” Tean whispered. He was also covering his eyes by this point.
“Why does Gerald have pictures of a truly subpar dick in his briefcase?”
“Jem,” Tean said. “Children.”
Lowering his voice, Jem said, “Do you think he had a slug-dick fetish?”
“No, I don’t. And before you tell me—”
“It’s a thing. Like chodes.”
Tean was silent for an extended moment.
“They make these silicone dongs, but, like monsters and aliens and one that’s supposed to be Sasquatch, but if you think he’s an inch under two feet—”
“Jeremiah!”
“Uh, what were we talking about?”
Still covering his eyes, Tean reached out and turned over the page with the dick pic.
“You know what a real detective would ask?” Jem said. “Whose dick is it? Maybe this is the killer’s dick.”
Tean lowered his hand. He stared at Jem with that judgy look that never stopped being a little terrifying. Then he said, “Let’s read the messages.”
They weren’t anything original—definitely nothing that Jem hadn’t seen before.
They were a conversation between hornyforheaven99 and suck4suck, and they started with a classic opening: pics?
A dick pic followed from suck4suck, and then he sent another, this one of a White man’s chest and crotch as he fondled himself.
hornyforheaven99 responded: nice
And then: can u host
suck4suck: no sorry my fam
hornyforheaven99: np we can figure something out
hornyforheaven99: you wanna bottom?
suck4suck: idc I’m just horny af
hornyforheaven99 sent back a devil emoji and then an eggplant
suck4suck: pretty much
suck4suck: pic?
hornyforheaven99 replied with a photograph that showed a stubbled jawline, a perfectly sculpted body, and a big dick.
“Catfish,” Jem said.
Tean blinked at him from behind his glasses.
“That’s totally a catfish,” Jem said.
“What?”
“That’s not a real person. Babe, this is, like, porn-star level hotness.”
Tean frowned at that. Of course.
“Look at the picture.” Jem tapped the page. “Look at the lighting. This isn’t some selfie he snapped in bed, you know? That looks like the kind of thing a teenager would save in his special wienie-mashing folder.”
It took several seconds before Tean let out a slow breath.
“Ignore that last part,” Jem said with a big grin. “But you see what I’m talking about?”
“Maybe this person is a porn star. Or maybe they had boudoir photos taken, and they use this one when they’re trying to hook up.”
“Wait, are boudoir photos what I think they are?”
“I don’t know. Don’t tell me.”
“Should we do boudoir photos?”
“Absolutely not.” Tean actually picked up the next page and held it between them to block out Jem’s face. “Moving on.”
The conversation unfolded more or less the way they usually did.
hornyforheaven99 brought up topping again.
suck4suck was open to that. There was the usual dirty talk that, in Jem’s opinion, always felt kind of sad when you were reading it—I’m going to tear you up, and You want my babies inside you and That hole is going to gape.
Nothing all that original. Nothing that would have cranked Jem’s motor.
Maybe, he thought in an aside, because he’d been getting his motor cranked by a wildlife vet who currently had a book from the library called Flesh-Eating Bacteria and You.
It got interesting when hornyforheaven99 asked for a face pic.
suck4suck, it turned out, was Tafton. There was no mistaking him. He’d taken the photo so that the angle took in some of his arm and chest, but his face was clearly visible. He wore the derpy grin some guys got when they knew they were going to get their nut.
“Shit,” Jem said.
Tean stared at the image. “So, these are messages between Tafton and someone else at the lodge.”
“Yep.”
“And Tafton was going to hook up with a guy.”
“Yep.”
“And even though Tafton thought he’d figured out a way to keep the Stripling app from reporting back to Gerald, he still got a copy of this conversation.”
“Which means we’re back where we started, right? Because we already figured Tafton and Gerald had argued about Tafton fucking around on his phone. This is just confirmation.”
“It explains why Gerald was upset after his interviews Friday morning.”
“Yeah, but since somebody killed Gerald and Tafton, he’s not exactly our lead suspect.”
Tean put his chin in his hand. He considered the pages again, flipping through the rest of the conversation.
Maeve and Milo were climbing on the concession counter, and Jem cupped a hand to his mouth like he was shouting up to a mountain top and called, “Be careful up there,” which only made them giggle.
“Anything else interesting?” Jem asked.
“Not unless you count user error.” Tean flipped through the pages.
“When Tafton asked for a face pic in return, hornyforheaven99 sent this.” It looked like a screenshot of the home screen of a phone.
Little icons from apps covered the wallpaper photo: a nice suburban house.
“Then he tried again and sent the proper image, and Tafton agreed to meet up in the men’s room of the ski rental. ”
The face pic showed a square-jawed, dark-haired man who would probably be at home on a sailboat with a sweater tied around his neck. Jem said, “This is definitely some catfish shit.”
Tean made a noise that might have meant anything; he was staring into the middle distance, not seeming to see anything—or, for that matter, hear anything.
“We know Tafton went somewhere with Stephen the night Gerald was killed. And we know Stephen was in Tafton’s chalet.
Is it possible that Stephen knew about these photos and convinced Tafton to help him kill Gerald?
And then, when he didn’t need Tafton anymore, he got rid of him? ”
“But somebody else took Tafton out of that chalet,” Jem said. “Somebody had to march him out to that tree well with a gun.”
Tean’s mouth tightened.
“You don’t have to say it,” Jem said. “I know you think it was Brigitte.”
After a moment, Tean said, “I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Nothing. It’s okay. I get it; we’ve got to consider her. And it makes sense. She and Stephen were stealing from Gerald. They had a motive.” Jem rolled his still-tight shoulder, working at it with his fingers. “But something feels weird.”
“It’s possible Tafton wasn’t involved at all,” Tean said. “It’s possible Stephen or Brigitte learned about these messages, and they realized it gave Tafton a motive. It made him the perfect person to frame for the murder.”
Jem opened his mouth to respond to that, but something on the page caught his eye. “What does this mean?”
“It says ‘hornyforheaven99 unsent a message.’”
“What message?”
“I don’t know.” Tean frowned. “I would have guessed the picture, since they clearly didn’t mean to send that, but it’s still there.”
“Usually when you unsend a message, there’s a little spot that shows you where it used to be. Why isn’t there something like that?”
“I don’t know.”
Jem considered the page for a moment. “Because we’re not looking at the app.
We’re not looking at printouts from Prowler.
We’re looking at printouts from Stripling.
The whole point is to record everything from Tafton’s phone.
It wouldn’t be very useful if Tafton could delete stuff on his phone and have it disappear from the tracker. ”
“Okay,” Tean said slowly. “But what does it matter? It’s an accidental screenshot. And it would have disappeared from the app, so hornyforheaven99 wouldn’t have been worried about it.”
Jem started to answer.
And then he saw the sign taped to the glass of the lobby door.
No power.
“Fuck me,” Jem said. “I know who did it.”