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Jason stepped to my side, keeping his gun up, his attention focused on protecting my blind spots. If there was anything I may have overlooked—or anyone—then Jason would be there to catch it.
“Clear,” I said, not taking long to see that the tiny underground bunker was empty of people. I glanced at Jason as he lowered his gun and couldn’t help but smile. “We still work really fucking well together, don’t we?”
“We do,” Jason replied. “Maybe you should think about dropping the badge and coming to Stonewall.”
The comment was tossed out as if it were the most casual suggestion in the world. I stumbled for words, for once in my life finding myself speechless.
“Just a thought,” he said, a cocky smile on his face, his defined cheekbones highlighted by the shadows that shifted every time I moved my hand. “Hey, look, a light.” Jason reached up and pulled a cord which turned on a bare lightbulb hanging in the center of the small room.
And just like that, there was light. The dim yellow bulb was barely any stronger than the flashlight on my phone, but it lit up the entire area at once, and that made things easier.
I tucked away Jason’s thought to deal with later. If I were completely honest, it wasn’t the first time I entertained the idea, but to hear it out loud from Jason rocked me off-balance.
“This place is like someone’s perfect man-cave,” Jason commented as he walked around the roughly seven-square-foot room, stopping at a worn desk pushed up against a scratched-up wooden wall. There were nails in the wall, bent upward like hooks. Across from the desk were two bean bag chairs, both looking heavily used, facing an old television set perched precariously on a narrow shelf. An ancient-looking gaming system sat on the floor underneath it, two controllers connected to it. The wires and cables looked like they’d been tied together and lay exposed on the ground, running down through a roughly drilled hole.
“Yeah, if that man-cave were made for a serial killer,” I said. I put on a pair of gloves I’d brought with me, handing another pair to Jason. I glanced at my watch. “We’ve only got five minutes before the cops show.”
“Let’s see what we can find.”
We took a fine-tooth comb approach to the search. Jason started in one corner, and I started in the other, and we looked over every inch of the space. I lifted the bean bags, moved them around to feel if anything were inside. I checked the television next, moving it off the shelf, not finding anything behind or underneath it.
Next to the gaming system was a minifridge. I opened that, finding sodas and potato chips, which somehow was the creepiest find yet. “Who the fuck refrigerates their potato chips?” I asked.
“Maybe they aren’t chips?”
I was already one step ahead of him, taking the bag and getting ready to open it. It was light and didn’t feel like it would contain severed fingers or eyeballs, but we really were in uncharted territory right now. I steeled myself for whatever could be in the bag and opened it.
“Nope, they’re chips. Just cold Lay’s.”
Jason huffed and shook his head. “Okay, so he’s definitely a serial killer then.”
I chuckled. Finding some humor in the moment helped keep the sanity intact.
I placed the bag of extra-crispy crisps back in the refrigerator, and that’s when I noticed something. There was a cup of iced coffee, stuffed all the way to the back of the tiny fridge, far enough behind the collection of Pepsis and Cokes that it may have been forgotten. I reached over the soda and grabbed the half-drank cup.
“Jason, look.”
I lifted the cup up to the light. The name had faded, but some letters were still legible. “B-on?” Jason read the letters aloud.
“That looks like a y right there.”
Jason leaned in closer and gave an affirmative “hmph.”
“Byron,” I said. “And that faded letter there is an R. Byron Rosewell.”
“Okay… that’s weird. Could the Pegasus have stolen the cup, maybe for some creepy ritual? Or do you think Byron was actually down here?”
I shrugged, the coffee cup suddenly seeming so much more significant than a vessel to hold coffee and creamer in it. I took a picture of it with my phone and placed it back in the fridge. “Maybe he was down here. We know the Pegasus might groom some of his victims. Maybe he brings them down here to do exactly that.”
“So you think Byron could be next?”
“Possibly.”
Three minutes left. We didn’t have much time. I closed the fridge, and we got back to searching. We could work on putting the pieces together later; we just had to collect those pieces first.
Jason drifted back to the table and made another noise, an “oh” that made me turn to him. He crouched down and looked under the desk before he dropped to his hands and knees. I normally found this view extremely distracting and would have acted accordingly, but this was definitely one of those “dick stays in the pants” moments.
