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After tugging gloves on, I crept up to the back of Judd’s trailer, crouched, and peered beneath it. Cobwebs and trash and way too many bugs made a nasty, creepy jungle, but at least it was relatively dry. Though I had a mini-flashlight in my pocket, I didn’t dare use it outside where it could draw attention. Lucky for me, the recent top off of brains gave my vision a decent boost, and I spied a difference in the floor near the very back of his trailer.
Judd’s idea of an escape hatch wasn’t fancy—nothing more than a two foot square hole covered by a piece of plywood and an area rug. I had no trouble shoving them aside to shimmy into the trailer, then took a minute to brush spiders and other yuck off me. Ugh. I’d been through nastier places, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.
No bed or dresser in this room. Old mail and miscellaneous trash littered a floor that had never known the sweet kiss of a vacuum. A gun safe hunkered in one corner, and a matte black crossbow that looked like the lovechild of an assault rifle and Satan’s longbow hung on a rack beside it. A workbench covered in reloading equipment and fletching supplies took up the entire back wall, and on the opposite wall hung a huge image of Bear in camouflage gear and toting an axe, surrounded by posters of naked women with guns. Wow. Talk about hero worship. Ew.
I did a quick search of the room and found a vast collection of porn, but no murder weapons or bloody clothing. The gun safe seemed to mock me. That was the most logical place to stash evidence, and its big lock would keep out anyone who didn’t have the combination or major explosives. I didn’t have any explosives, but I did have experience. I’d been on a lot of crime scenes in the past year and a half, and I knew that a whole lot of people didn’t trust their memory. In less than two minutes I found the scrap of masking tape on the underside of the workbench, and in another thirty seconds I pulled open the safe in triumph.
“Well, crap.” So much for triumph. Guns of every possible variety were cram-packed into the safe, but no machete, no blood, and no car keys or anything else that might have come from the murder victim Seeger. Annoyed, I shut the safe door and locked it. There’d been no room to spare in the safe, so maybe he hid stuff elsewhere?
I proceeded through the trailer, searching as quickly and carefully as possible. The second bedroom held Judd’s bed and dresser along with a three-foot high pile of dirty laundry that I forced myself to root through. I even got on the floor and peered under his bed, and found only a collection of cum-crusted socks and several pounds of weed.
The kitchen was surprisingly clean, and I realized I hadn’t seen dirty dishes or food in any of the mess elsewhere in the trailer. That explained why I hadn’t seen any roaches. Okay, so Judd was gross, but he still had standards. Nice to know. I dutifully checked the cabinets and found jack squat of interest, then moved on to the last room—a marginally tidy living room. But disappointment reigned as I turned up nothing but enormous dust bunnies under the couch, and desiccated Cheetos in the cushions.
Crap! My hopes of getting this done nice and quick vanished. Failure here meant I had to check out Coy’s place, and it would take me at least fifteen minutes to get there. Still, it was that or give up the search, and I wasn’t going to do that. Not if there was any chance Randy was involved or that a clue about the murder might surface.
Fuming in annoyance, I turned to leave but stopped as my gaze fell on a
small table in the corner. It held an ancient computer that I didn’t think Judd had ever used in all the time I’d known him—probably because he bought it cheap and second-hand, and only later discovered that whatever part it needed to connect to the internet was busted. He’d insisted he was going to fix it, but that was at least four years ago. Not surprising since Judd had less computer smarts than me, which wasn’t saying a whole lot. I hadn’t bothered to check the computer during my search since it didn’t seem like a place to hide evidence of murder but, beneath the dust, a red light winked on the front of the computer tower.
A tingle started at the base of my spine, spread up as I moved to the table. Papers cluttered its surface along with a yellow legal pad and a bubble pack for two USB flash drives—with one drive missing. Penis-shaped flash drives, because this was Judd.
What was so important that Judd decided to crank up this dinosaur? I wiggled the mouse and was rewarded with a Windows ME screen. It took me several frustrating tries to find a list of his files, but as far as I could tell everything was several years old. There also wasn’t a damn thing on the computer that looked to be worth saving onto a flash drive.
My eyes dropped to the legal pad, and the tingle increased. I grabbed up a pencil and rubbed the lead over the surface of the paper, like I’d seen in every detective TV show. Words appeared, light against dark, and I had to bite back a whoop of delight. Hot damn. The shit worked! Now I could see exactly . . .
zombie heal
zombie turn
zombie speed
“What the . . . ?” Comprehension seared through me as if I’d grabbed a live wire. These matched the filenames on Grayson Seeger’s printout. If Judd knew the filenames, he either had a second copy of the list, or—
I tugged a crumpled receipt from beneath the penis drive package. It was from the XpressMart with a time stamp of four-nineteen p.m. today. He wouldn’t need to buy a flash drive if all he had was a printout of the list. The only thing that made sense was that Judd somehow had the actual files themselves.
I chewed my lower lip as the implications came together in ugly patterns. Judd must have gotten the files from another flash drive—and the most obvious suspect was one belonging to Seeger. Shit. Judd had bought the penis flash drives between the afternoon and evening hunts. In other words, he checked out the files on Seeger’s drive and then decided he wanted a copy—so badly that he ran out and bought flash drives during the break between hunts. What the hell could’ve been that important?
Mouth set, I continued rubbing the pencil lead over the paper.
zombie feed
zombie frenzy
“Frenzy” was circled. Could be Judd saw the Zombies Are Among Us!! trailer this afternoon and thought that the zombie_frenzy video file—the one I suspected matched up with the film—was interesting because lots of locals were in the big melée scene.
zombie turn 2
The last was underlined four times with a heavy hand. I chewed my lower lip as I pondered those fierce underlines. The sneak preview today hadn’t shown anything that matched up to that filename, but I figured the full mockumentary would. I’d find out for sure at the Fest tomorrow. I rubbed lead over the last few inches of the paper.
ANGEL
The pencil slipped from my fingers. What the shit? My pulse stuttered, and my mouth went bone dry. My name. Why did he have my name listed with the files?
Panic sent waves of cold running over my skin, and my thoughts jabbered like a room full of angry people. I stumbled back from the table and pressed both hands to my stomach. My name on a page of zombie crap. He knew. Judd knew. It was over. I needed a dose so I could chill and figure out what to do. I—
“Stop it!” I gasped, both frightened and furious at myself. “Stop being stupid!” This wasn’t me, wasn’t the Angel who’d remade herself. This stupid freakout was Old Angel, the one who couldn’t handle shit and took the easy way out. I didn’t need a dose. Not for this. Goddammit, I’d survived worse.
The panic gradually crumbled as I forced myself to breathe, steady and deep. The mad galloping of my heart slowed to an unsteady trot. Straightening, I moved back to the table. There, see? I could handle this. No need to freak out. Without the panic gibbering in my ear, I had no trouble thinking of any number of perfectly logical reasons for why my name was on the paper. Judd might have written it on the pad earlier, and it had nothing to do with the files at all. Or could be he wrote my name down because he spotted me in the Zombie Frenzy!! clip of the mockumentary. Hell, maybe he met some other chick named Angel and wanted to hook up with her.
