Unhinged (Necessary Evils #1)(20)

He pulled it free just as the other hard drive finished. He then repeated the process with the newly found laptop, but, this time, when the window popped up, the wait time for cloning was three hours. Three hours? Adam’s jaw set in a hard line as he did the math. That kind of time meant there was about one terabyte of data on that encrypted server. He shook his head. He wasn’t surprised. These men were all the same, slaves to their impulses.

While Adam lacked the empathy necessary to feel the pain and horror for what these children endured—a blessing given what he’d seen—he did have a disgust for people who preyed on the population’s most vulnerable. It was weakness. Pure and simple. Wolves feasting off the sick and the lame.

But when these predators were cornered, Adam was the wolf and he was indifferent to their cries, their screams, their hollow apologies. He had no problem putting them down with extreme prejudice. For the greater good.

Adam left the laptop to do its thing and wandered the house, opening drawers and cabinets, looking for anything unusual, anything that might give them some idea of who Gary’s friends were.

In the kitchen, under some random mail, Adam found a strangely shaped key. It looked like it belonged to a storage unit or a bus locker. He pocketed the key, certain it wasn’t something Gary used frequently enough to notice it was missing.

He found Noah crouched in a spare room closet, rifling through a file box filled to the brim with papers. When he dropped beside him, he saw it was bank statements and other important documents. “Find anything good?”

Noah shook his head. “No, it's all just the same boring paperwork everybody else seems to have,” he muttered, shoving the lid back on the box with a grunt of frustration.

Adam nodded. “Yeah, it's not like in the movies. Sometimes, there’s not going to be a magical paper trail. I did find a hidden laptop that seems promising. I don’t know what’s on it, but chances are, it's nothing good. We just have to hope Calliope can crack the encryption.”

With the encryption software blowing their quick in and out timeline, they took their time, searching Gary’s house room by room. While he wasn’t a hoarder by any means, he kept boxes of meaningless papers, each more disappointing than the last. Adam was certain there would be something there. A picture, a video, something. All these creeps kept souvenirs. The laptop had to be the key.

They ended their search in the office, scouring the credenza behind the desk, again finding nothing of interest. Adam checked the hard drive. They still had ninety minutes. Shit. Adam opened his mouth to give Noah a time update when he saw him staring at a picture on the wall.

He was visibly shaking, his hand reaching up to touch the photo and pull it from the wall. Adam came to stand beside him. It was a picture of Gary and Noah’s father standing outside a cabin in the woods, arms around each other’s shoulders and big smiles on their faces.

“I know that cabin,” he said, voice dull.

“Know it how?” Adam gently prompted.

“My dad and Gary used to take me there.” He closed his eyes and swayed on his feet. “I can smell the pine needles.” He shuddered. “They built a campfire. I can still smell it and the oil in the lamps from when the power went out. And sweat.” A sharp gasp ripped from him, head turning like he could somehow look away from whatever memory was playing out in his head, the photo slipping from his fingers. They both watched as the frame hit the floor, the sound of the cracking glass loud in the silence.

Noah looked to Adam with wild eyes. “Shit. Shit.”

When Noah went to retrieve it, Adam snagged his arm. “No. Leave it. Shit falls off walls all the time.”

There were too many chances for something to go wrong if Noah tried to clean up the glass. A picture falling off the wall wasn’t nearly as noticeable as a picture disappearing or returning to the wall with no glass protecting it. Besides, if he cut himself on the glass, those gloves wouldn’t protect him from DNA transfer.

Noah gave a stilted nod.

Adam’s gaze darted to the window as he heard the sound of a car door slamming and then a car alarm activating. He looked out the window to see a man walking up the drive in their direction. “Shit. We got company.”

He snagged the hard drive, dumping the laptop back in the drawer, quickly locking the cabinet and tossing the key back in the drawer, snagging Noah’s arm and dragging him deeper into the house, into the back bedroom, quietly closing the door just as the front one opened.

He slipped the window open and helped Noah out first, sliding it closed behind them. They crept through two neighbors’ unfenced yards, staying low to avoid windows. Only when they were a safe distance from the house did they head back to the sidewalk.

Adam took Noah’s hand as a woman walking her dog passed. He gave her a wave and she gave them a reserved smile after she saw Adam click the lock on his BMW. These suburbanites were all the same. Fancy car equaled they belonged in that neighborhood. She wouldn’t give them a second thought.

Once in the car, Noah dropped his head back against the seat, looking worn out and shell shocked. He didn’t protest when Adam clicked him into his seatbelt before fastening his own. He then snapped a few pictures of the man’s Ford sedan and the license plate, shooting it to Calliope before pulling out of the neighborhood.

Noah didn’t speak the whole drive back, just stared out the window, though he didn’t pull away when Adam rested his hand on his knee. He didn’t take them back to Noah’s, instead hopping on the freeway towards Adam’s loft uptown. There was less chance of anything further triggering Noah at Adam’s place.