Chapter 2
HARLOW
"Nice place," Boner said as he followed us inside. "I bet the walls are thicker than mine." He tapped on the drywall beside him. Waited a few moments and nodded in satisfaction after no one yelled at him to stop.
"Yeah, it's okay," Cass said with a shrug. He headed over to a desk in the corner, flopped into a chair and powered up his computer.
As if automatically drawn there, I stepped over to the kitchen and started to make a milkshake and coffee. Both machines going, I hunted for snacks and found a bag of chips and a couple of apples. Not much else.
I searched in a couple of drawers before I found a knife so I could slice the apple and place the pieces on a plate beside the chips.
"You can take the chef out of the kitchen." Boner leaned a hip against the counter and grinned. "I'll be the first to admit nocturnal activities such as these makes me hungry." He leaned over and snagged a piece of apple.
"Food is my way of showing appreciation." I placed the plate close to Cass and poured his milkshake.
"Is that another way of saying it's your love language?" Boner accepted the coffee I handed him with a wink.
"Are you asking if I love all my customers?" I carried Cass' milkshake over and placed it beside his right hand.
"Just the handsome ones, right Cass?" Boner stuffed a couple of chips into his mouth.
Cass glanced over and frowned. "Sure."
Clearly he wasn't listening, his attention focused on the screen. With one hand, he slid open a drawer beside him and pulled out a long cable, plugged one end into the computer and the other into the phone.
I picked up a piece of apple for myself and bit into it. It wasn't my usual snack of choice for the middle of the night, but it would do.
"I'm going to download the data from the phone onto my computer," Cass explained. "Then I'll run it through…" He glanced up at us as he waved vaguely toward the screen.
"Do whatever you have to do," I told him. This sort of thing wasn't my forte at the best of times. Better that he got on with it, than stopping to explain to us, step by step.
“There are…photos and videos," he said, voice weak.
"You don't have to look at them," I said. "Leave that to me and Boner."
Not that I wanted to look either, but if it helped us to find the other three men, then I'd look.
Quickly and without trying to see.
Right before deleting every single one. Chances were, we'd see no adult faces in any of them.
"Sick fucks," Boner muttered.
There was nothing I could say to that, just a hum of agreement.
Cass nodded and turned back to the screen. "This might take a while." He picked up his milkshake to take a sip before staring at it like he hadn't realized it was there. He gave me a faint smile and went on sipping.
"You know what'd be really good right now?" Boner asked. "An app that says 'all the incriminating shit is here, including the name and address of the last three assholes.' I can't think of a single problem right now that wouldn't solve."
I snorted. "How inconsiderate of them not to include that feature. Maybe we could make one. Do you think they'd be nice and use it for us?"
Boner tapped his finger against his lip, pretended to think that through. "Considering they're card-carrying members of the asshole club, I'm going to guess the answer to that is no."
I sighed. "So selfish of them."
He put an arm around me, careful not to spill either of our coffees.
"On the other hand, I'm even more motivated to add their hearts to your collection. And you know what, I might start a collection of my own. The right middle finger of each of them."
"You want a collection of them flipping you off?" I asked with a short laugh.
He frowned. "Huh, I hadn't thought of that. Scratch that idea. There's no other body parts of theirs I'd want to keep."
I patted his chest. "I guess you'll have to hold onto the memories instead."
That was marginally more sane and sustainable than collecting body parts. Unless technology changed drastically, memories couldn't be used as incriminating evidence against us.
Although, who knows what technology they would come up with next? Maybe mind reading apps were the next big thing.
I fucking hoped not.
Boner grinned. "That I can do."
Cass grimaced up at us like we were both out of our minds.
"Don't mind us," Boner said. "Dark humor is how we cope. It's what separates us from the psychopaths."
"Psychopaths don't have a dark sense of humor?" I asked.
"I was thinking more along the lines of psychopaths not bothering with coping mechanisms outside doing crazy shit," Boner said reasonably.
"Us, we're trying to cling to our humanity.
The minute we let go of that, we are, as they say in the classics, fucked.
They might as well lump us with Fairfield and that Carl guy. "
He gave me a brief glance to indicate he remembered where Carl ended up, but wasn't going to bring it up in front of Cass.
At some point, Cass and I would have to have that conversation. Now was not the time. Not when I had no idea how he'd respond. He was determined to take his place as one of us. Knowing what was in the meatballs he ate that night? That might make him look at everything differently.
"You're right," I said. "We have to do what we can to keep from losing ourselves. Otherwise, we're as bad as they are."
"As long as you don't say we're worse," Boner said. "Them? They all know what they're doing. They know it's wrong and they do it anyway. They enable each other to do it. We enable each other to stop them." He said the words with pride and a puffed out chest. All cocky Englishman.
"We are definitely not worse," I said firmly.
We enjoyed killing a little bit less than those assholes did. That meant we were still relatively sane. Right? We hadn't lost sight of what was important. Hadn't lost our humanity.
"You know those TV shows where the crime scene is so clean it's suspicious?" Cass asked, his eyes still on the screen. "Like there's no way in the world the place could be that sterile?"
"Sounds like Archer's place," I said. "Yes, what about it?"
He tapped a finger on the top of the phone. "This is the same. Without actually looking at the photos, I can see there's only three of them. There's no social media. No music. No heart rate tracker. Not even a compass app."
"Some people hate social media," Boner pointed out.
"Have you seen how toxic those places can get?
I love me a good cat video or silly dance as much as the next guy, but then you get to the comments section.
Someone always has to be a prick. The cat isn't cute enough.
The goalie didn't make enough saves. The dress is blue.
For the record, the fucking thing was white. "
"I'm sure Archer will have an opinion on the dress," I said. "Cass is right though, most people have social media in one form or another. If only to communicate with customers and… Whatever."
"I love me a good 'whatever' too," Boner said, having taken a breath after his brief rant.
I snorted and turned back to Cass. "What else have you found? Or not found?"
"He has an email app, but all of the email has been deleted. Even the trash." Cass' frustration was evident in his tone, and the way he shoved his hair back off his face.
"If we didn't already know he's evil, we'd really know now," Boner said. "What kind of person doesn't have at least two hundred unread emails sitting in their inbox?"
He shook his head, looking so confounded I almost believed he was sincere. If it wasn't for the sparkle in his blue eyes, I might have thought he was. Of course, he never took anything seriously for long.
"I don't," I said. "I read them and delete the unnecessary ones. These days, most of them are from scammers, singing the praises of Angel's Rest and offering to market the restaurant more broadly." I rolled my eyes. AI had its uses, but this new scammy spam was irritating.
Boner snapped his fingers. "I get those too, that's why I don't check my email. Also, by the sound of it, you don't delete everything in sight. That means you're not as evil as Fairfield was."
I wasn't sure if that was what it meant, but I'd take it for now. I didn't want to be compared to him in any way. He was the worst kind of devil. One who deserved to suffer in the pits of hell.
Me? I was the avenging angel who put him there.
"What about text messages and calls?" I asked.
"Absolutely nothing," Cass said. "Wiped clean. If it wasn't for how old this phone looks, I'd think he picked it up this morning and only added his contacts." His frown deepened.
"Why leave his contacts on there?" I asked.
"My guess is he's finished with any messages he sent or received, so he deleted them,” Cass said slowly. "Emails too. The only thing he needed was his contacts."
"Makes sense," I said reluctantly. "We should take a look at the three photos he left on there." If they were important enough that he didn't delete them, they might be useful to us.
It seemed unlikely they were nothing more harmful than some funny memes, especially given the lack of social media apps on the phone. Shame, I could have done with a good laugh right then.
Cass glanced up at me.
"You can step aside," I told him.
"Yeah, let us take a gander." Boner gripped the back of Cass' chair to roll him away from the desk.
Before he could, Cass placed his hands to either side of the keyboard, his fingers spread wide, as though somehow he could hold on like that. As if Boner couldn't pull the chair all the way back from the desk.
"I can do this," he said firmly. "If I'm going to be a part of this, then I need to suck it up."
"You don't need to suck anything up," I said.
"Unless…" Boner said meaningfully.
When I glanced at him, he grinned. "What? I'd never turn down a perfectly good blow job. Have you seen that mouth of his?" He gestured toward Cass, whose face promptly turned pink.
I absolutely had seen Cass' mouth, and felt his lips and tongue on my pussy. For a guy who blushed as much as he did, he knew what he was doing. He also knew how to tell me what he wanted, in no uncertain terms. The sweet Cass and the dominant Cass; I couldn't decide which one I liked better.
Fortunately, they coexisted in one body, so I didn't have to choose.
"Anyway," I said, tearing my mind from those thoughts and forcing them back to the present. "None of us wants to see those photos, but we need to. Anyone who decides they can't take it can walk away."
I included myself in that. Sometimes it got too much, even for me. I was all too aware at some point I might see photos of my sister and the things they did to her.
Nothing could ever prepare me for that. Was that what I was about to witness? Coffee and apple turned in my stomach.
"We could spend all night talking about it or we could—" Boner leaned over and moved the cursor to the folder containing the photos. Double-clicking on the trackpad, he opened it.
"Well…fuck," he whispered.
"Yeah, fuck." Of all the things I was expecting, that wasn't it.
"Is that…" Cass looked at the screen sideways.
"Yeah, yeah it is," Boner said.