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They clicked on more, faster and faster, just a few frames of each one, then Cooper ejected the drive and said, “Okay, we suspected that, he’s a kiddie porn freak. There’s nothing from the gym...”
But the second one...
The second one was in the boys’ locker room in the gym, and was full of naked kids, with Hess, fully clothed, moving among them.
“I can’t watch this,” Cooper said.
“I can,” Melton said, grimly. “You go away.”
Cooper stepped away. Melton clicked through the files, then said, “You should come look at this one. Let me rerun...”
She reran. The video, from a fixed point, showed a boy getting out of the shower, followed by a naked Hess, who showed a wobbly erection. “He’s in there with them, naked.”
“But he’s in there alone with that boy... I don’t know who that is.”
“I need to look at the third one,” Melton said. “I haven’t seen Art or Blaine.”
The third one contained more commercial kiddie porn, and Melton closed it down.
“Nothing with your boys,” Melton said. “I wonder... I wonder if maybe one of the boys justknewabout it. Knew about it and said something, and Hess decided he had to get rid of them.”
Cooper said, “We’ll talk about it later. We should get out of here. I want to run upstairs for a minute.”
Melton closed down the MacBook. Cooper was running back down the stairs and came through the stairway door holding the other two Mac laptops. She picked up her tote bag, crawled across the carpet to a cold air return register, knelt beside it, and took a screwdriver out of the tote.
“What are you doing?” Melton whispered.
“I’ll explain later. This is a return air register. I learned about them when we were doing our remodel.”
She took out the two screws that held the register in place, pulled it loose, pushed the stack of laptops inside. “Give me the flash drives,”she said. Melton handed them to her, and she put them with the computers, and screwed the register back in place. “Get me a couple of damp paper towels.”
While Melton did that, Cooper used the screwdriver to scrape the paint out of the grooves in the screws that held the register in place, and to scratch the area around the screws.
“Making it so a search crew couldn’t miss it, but Hess will,” she said.
Cooper cleaned up the chips with the damp paper towel and put the towel in her tote bag. “All done. Time to go home.”
The front door had a keyed lock, but the side door would lock automatically when it was pulled closed from the outside. Cooper closed the sliding glass door they’d come through, but left the wooden safety block on the carpet outside the tracks. Then she stepped into the bedroom and tipped over the silk orchid, leaving the plant and pot lying on their sides.
Melton: “What are you doing?”
“I’m telling Hess that we’ve been here,” Cooper said.
“What?”
“C’mon.”
They turned off the lights, went out through the side door, and crossed the backyard into the trees and through them to the abandoned railroad tracks. Sticking close to the trees, but moving faster than they had coming in, they got back to the car and inside.
Melton said, “Jesus Christ, I’m shaking like a leaf.”
“So am I, but now we know for sure,” Cooper said.
Melton started the car and pulled wordlessly into the street, and drove out to West Seventh, took a left.
“Tell me what you just did,” Melton said, when they were back in traffic.
“I’m making sure that Hess will come after me again,” Cooper said.
