Chapter 21
Zen
I toss and turn all night, replaying everything we learned about Terrance in my mind. Rigs and Lexi are right about something feeling off. It takes me a minute to work it all out in my brain. Maybe Terrance spent his entire adolescence fantasizing about horrific acts of violence against women.
I can see him chafing under the authority of his stepfather, who was a law enforcement officer with zero tolerance for his behavior. But being too afraid to direct his anger and resentment at his stepfather, he focused it all on his mother. In his mind, it’s her fault because she married a cop. After a while, the anger spills over onto women in general. He starts finding a reason to hate every woman he meets.
That hatred is expressed in these weird comics where he cuts and pastes real people’s faces and random pictures of naked female bodies over the characters in the comic. Then he goes out and finds women who look like—or represent—the women he hated. Acting out violence on them is the next best thing to abusing the women he hated.
Suddenly, it all makes a certain kind of sense. After that revelation I find that my mind can finally switch off.
Early the next morning, I feel Lexi sliding out of bed and hear the shower come on. Showering with Lexi is too good an opportunity to pass up. I roll out of bed and walk into the bathroom. She turns to look at me over her shoulder.
“Would you like some company?”
A happy grin jumps onto her face. “Only always. From now on, you don’t need to even ask. Consider it an open invitation.”
I shove my boxer briefs down my legs and step into the shower with her. Her hands are reaching for me before I can even get the shower door closed. I move closer to enjoy some of the warm water flowing from overhead. She backs up so the water is spraying directly between our bodies.
Before I can even reach for the shower gel, she pours some into her hands and brings them up to my chest. I watch as she soaps me up, the friction creating a luxurious lather. I decide there’s no better feeling in the world than Lexi touching me and caressing me with her soft hands. Unlike my own harsh movements, hers are gentle and loving. When her hand moves down to grasp my cock, I tug her forward so the spray is on her back. We both look down as she strokes me . The sight of her delicate hands on my thick cock thrills the fuck out of me. I love the way her breasts jiggle as she works me.
“Are you gonna sit on my face when we get out of the shower?”
She smiles at me and shakes her head. “We’ve got work to do, remember?”
“Wrong answer,” I tell her. Grabbing her by the waist, I lift her smaller form up. “Just lean back and let me do all the work.”
She grabs the shower rod with one hand and leans her shoulders back against the wall as I lift her up and hook her legs over my upper arms. I bury my face between her legs and enjoy the taste of her pussy. By now, I know exactly what she likes. Even though my hands aren’t free to assist, my tongue does a magnificent job of sending her right over the edge. It doesn’t take long before I slide her down my body and right onto my cock.
I slide my hands under her ass and use it for leverage, and she helps by putting her hands on my shoulders and moving her hips. This woman loves bouncing on my cock almost as much as I love having her on my cock. Together, we kiss and fuck until we’re breathless. The moment her core locks down around my cock, I come so hard I feel my whole body tense up. We just kiss our way through it, enjoying the connection we’re making.
When we break apart, she says breathlessly, “That was an amazing way to start the day.”
“Damn right it was,” I reply.
Getting dressed is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, because all I really want is to crawl back into bed with Lexi and while away the morning. But like she already pointed out, we don’t have time to waste today. We’ve got to finish analyzing the information Terrance’s mother gave us.
We have the camera, floppy disks, and CDs to investigate. Plus, I want to look up this property he was left in his grandfather’s will. I might even find a lead on his vehicle if I run his VIN number. It seems like we have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to intel on Terrance Harris, and I mean to follow up on all of it.
By the time I’m dressed, Lexi is walking out of the bathroom fully clothed and brushing her hair. She looks more beautiful every time I see her.
I hold out my hand to her, and pleasure courses through my body when she slides her hand into mine. We walk downstairs and get a plate of breakfast and coffee before heading to Rigs’ office. Since he’s always been an early riser, we find him walking around, looking at everything we laid out last night.
“Mornin’, Rigs. Did your wife get off to work okay?”
He whips his head around to stare at me for a second before answering. “Of course. She has to be there by seven. I always take her there on my bike.”
“She’s a really nice lady. I’m glad the two of you found each other.”
He snorts a laugh. “I definitely got the better end of the deal with Mattie.”
“I’ll bet she’s happy to have found the last of those kids who went missing.”
“Hell yeah, we both are. We’ve got so much free time now that we don’t know what to do with ourselves.”
Lexi and I have pulled up chairs to Rigs’ desk to eat because it’s the only clean space in the room to put our plates. Rigs doesn’t give two hoots in hell if we sit at his desk. He’s more of an action-oriented person who rarely sits at it, anyway. I have to admit I like shooting the shit with him over breakfast. Lexi must be starving because she gobbles her food right up and then starts on her coffee. I follow suit as Lexi fills Rigs in on what we learned last night.
Rigs gets visibly excited and comes over to look at the will. “We need to nail down a location on this lodge right away and go scope the place out. Bad guys love hideouts that are off the beaten path. I’ll bet my we’ll find him there.”
“Our plan for this morning is to have a look at his camera and the CDs we found in the boxes.” I pull my laptop out of my messenger bag and turn it on.
Meanwhile Rigs grabs one of the floppy disks with a gleeful look in his eyes, “Damn! I haven’t used one of these in decades. I still have a bunch of them in my desk drawer.”
“Not sure what we’ll find on them, but I’ve got a floppy drive in my office, and I’ll check them later,” I say.
Lexi picks up the camera and tries to turn it on. “This is gonna need to be charged.”
“You can probably find a charging cord in the side pocket of my bag,” I tell her.
She searches through the bag until she finds one that fits and plugs it in. The green charging light begins to flash, so she sets it down and comes back to me. I slide one of the CDs into my external disk reader. I don’t trust this piece of shit, so I run a quick virus scan of the CD-R before opening it up. Once I click on the folder, there are dozens of files, all with numerical designations.
Lexi murmurs, “You might as well take them in order.”
I click on the first file, and the moment it opens I realize all the numbers are actually dates without the hyphens.
“I don’t understand,” Lexi says. “What are we looking at?”
“A bunch of video files of Terrance stalking someone’s house,” I respond.
Sure enough, I click on the first file in the folder, and it’s a video of a pretty blonde woman getting out of her car and walking into her house. The next video is of her leaving her house.
Lexi points out, “It looks like he may have been doing this from his car. See the road that runs along the side of the main road?”
Rigs comes over to see what we’re doing. “Yeah, he’s definitely stalking her.”
I open and close several videos. “It seems like he’s only capturing images of her leaving and coming home. What I don’t know is why he needs weeks of filming her leaving and coming home.”
Rigs speaks up. “He’s trying to get a handle on her schedule. Jump to the last file in the folder.”
When I open the folder, we wait, and nothing happens. She doesn’t show up at all. As the minutes tick by, what I’m seeing starts to sink in. I quickly begin clicking through all the folders and discover there’s no video of the woman returning home.
I immediately start to come up with possible explanations. “This doesn’t automatically mean she wound up dead. It could be that she was scared off, or that she moved voluntarily, or maybe this is just a sick game he’s playing with himself—where she stayed late at work, and he wanted to pretend the reason she didn’t come home that day was more nefarious.”
Rigs thinks it over for a minute and agrees. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but there are a lot of files on that CD. If he did kill them all, then Terrance Harris would be one of the most prolific serial killers in modern times.”
Lexi lets out a relieved breath. “Yeah, there’s something else going on here. I can’t see him just killing that many women without raising the alarm.”
I literally can’t get my head around that many murders, so I’m inclined to agree that something else is going on. This guy is really good at doing weird things that are hard to interpret. It makes me want to keep Lexi close.
I start going through the rest of the CDs, only to find similar files. There are eighty-three in all. The fact that he’s stalked that many women blows my mind. Even if he didn’t touch them, the fact that he was following them and capturing videos is really creeping me out.
Lexi finally announces, “I think we have enough of a battery charge to have a look at what’s on the camera. I dread what we’re going to find.”
And my worst nightmares are realized immediately. The first image that comes up is a woman tied to a tree. She’s half naked and looks terrified. There’s a man with his back to the camera standing in the foreground, facing her.
I jolt forward in my seat. “Is that Terrance? He doesn’t look like his DMV picture.”
Rigs points out sagely, “All you can see is the back of his body. The hair is black and longer, but he could have dyed it and let it grow out. There’s no way to tell without looking at his face.”
When I glance at Lexi, her seat is empty. While Rigs and I were talking, she slipped away. I immediately feel guilty for letting her help with the investigation. Clearly, this is all too much for her. I should have known better. Rigs and I continue looking through the camera roll. It’s just more women tied up. Sometimes there’s the man with long dark hair, sometimes it’s just the woman. Every single picture is disturbing.
Glancing at Rigs, I have to say what’s on my mind. “Have you noticed that every single image he took is perfect?”
Rigs turns on me in a heartbeat. “Perfect? What the hell are you talking about, brother? That’s a sick, twisted thing to say.”
I roll my chair back slightly when I see his hands are balled into fists.
“Calm the fuck down, Rigs, and look at the damn picture.” Pointing to the screen, I tell him, “Look how her shirt is draped back over her shoulder to show off her breasts. See how he tied her up in a way that lifts her breasts and makes her waist look smaller. Even her shirt color-coordinates with her bra and panties. She’s tied to a tree in high heels.”
“If you’ve got a point to make, you’d best make it soon—because you’re sure as hell starting to sound like a man who appreciates this dark shit.”
I glare at my club brother who should know me better, “My point is it looks kind of staged. Like someone has arranged all the details to create the best effect. Look at how her face is illuminated. He set up a damn light in the woods so he could see her expression clearly.”
Rigs leans closer to the monitor. After a few minutes, he says, “You may be right, but for all we know that just means he was making snuff films and wanted it to look a certain way.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I don’t know where I was going with that.”
Truthfully, I’m confused by my own train of thought.
“I’m gonna focus on finding this piece of property Terrance’s grandfather left him.”
“That’s the best chance we have of locating him at the moment,” Rigs responds, still giving me a bit of side-eye.
I slide out the CD and hand it to Rigs along with the camera. “I guess I’ll head to my office to work, so you can have your office back.”
He responds, “I’ll continue to look through all this stuff for clues.”
I grab my laptop, and we part ways awkwardly. I wish I had just kept my mouth shut about how everything looked staged. All it did was make me look like someone who found beauty in a woman’s suffering, which wasn’t remotely true.
I probably need to go check on Lexi, but I don’t because she’s probably already getting support from her friends. They seem pretty tight, so I decide to let her be.
Once in my office, I climb into my computer chair and turn on my laptop again. I find my old floppy disk reader and make quick work of checking them out. After what we found on the CDs and on his camera, I was expecting something incriminating, but it turns out it’s just his high school homework assignments. After making sure that’s all the floppy disks contain, I then do a deep dive into the information in his grandfather’s will. The will said he was to be given his grandfather’s hunting lodge just off Simon’s Creek Road. Since this fucker never went through the effort to legalize his vehicles or anything, I conduct a property search under the grandfather’s name, Harry Harris. The only property in that area associated with the last name Harris is locked in a family trust. Clever. If it’s held in trust, his name doesn’t need to be on the deed.
I make note of the property’s location and send out a text to the club officers notifying them of what I found. I get an immediate text back from Siege asking me to come to Rigs’ office. I grab my laptop and stroll back through, looking around for Lexi in the bar. I don’t see her anywhere, but that doesn’t mean anything—she often hangs out in Cindy’s room, painting each other’s nails and doing girly things.
When I walk in, our contact from the Las Salinas PD is there, bagging the evidence. I see he’s already bagged the bloody t-shirt and friendship bracelet and is working on the camera and CDs. Since I’ve already made copies of the information on both the camera and the disks, the cops taking them doesn’t affect our own investigation at all.
When he leaves, we have a sit-down.
Siege starts the conversation. “Is it my imagination, or is this case just getting stranger and stranger?”
I respond grimly, “There are so many moving parts that I’m exhausted from chasing them all.”
Tank asks, “Do you think that might have been part of the asshole’s grand plan? You know, throw a bunch of shit at us to keep us chasing our own tails until we give up?”
“To be honest, I don’t know, and I don’t care either. My plan is to keep going after this fucker until I find him—and then give him a fucking dirt nap.”
“Roger that,” Tank chimes in. “The only thing we need to figure out is if he’s a stone-cold killer or not. If he is, then we make sure he’s not in a position to kill any more innocent people. If he’s not, we mete out justice that fits the crime he did commit.”
The other club officers all sound off their approval. So that becomes our plan. It sounds simple when Tank says it, but I’m familiar enough with this case to know it’s anything but simple. Siege begins texting brothers to come with us to his hunting lodge. Turns out it’s much closer than Reno—about eight miles across the state line.
I go to the armory, which is right beside my office, and gear up. Truth be told, I’m eager to put this whole complicated, fucked-up situation to rest once and for all. As I tuck guns and ammo all over my body, I realize just how far I am from the stereotypical computer nerd. I love computers, but I also work out, have always had a healthy sex life, and have been involved in more shootouts than the average cop in this small town.
That means I’m more than prepared to do whatever I have to, to get to the bottom of this. My only real regret is asking Lexi if her father could be involved because of finding that kill bag on their property. She didn’t react well to that, but I guess I don’t blame her.
Thinking of Lexi, I decide to send her a quick text to let her know we’re heading out to the hunting lodge. I hang onto my phone for a few minutes, waiting for her to text back, while my club brothers take turns gearing up. I’m just about to call her when Siege walks into the room.
He’s got some long, drawn-out plan on how to run this operation, and as usual, we all listen up. He’s a safety-minded guy, and it feels like we have a much higher probability of finally getting our hands on Terrance than when we went to his mother’s place. This isolated lodge is not only the perfect hideout but also the perfect location for doing dark deeds. Siege has a plan for not disturbing any potential crime scene we come upon. Thinking of all the evil shit Terrance might be doing there sends a chill up my spine. I’m glad my Lexi is gonna be safe and sound at the clubhouse.