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Instead of grinning back, she took a bite of her sandwich and raised her eyebrows.
“Right, I need to impress you, pretty lady.” And impress her, I would. Because I’d found a gold mine, to be honest, I was kind of glad she’d already killed him. If she’d seen this before, I have a feeling she would have made it last longer. I pulled a chair out for her and she took a seat. Then I leaned past her, careful not to block her view.
Three terminal windows opened when I entered my password. The first showed I’d loaded about 38 percent of the files to the cloud. The second continued to compile results from the search for Thackery and Vienna Drew. The images under Drew’s name irritated me. Using my thumb and forefinger, I opened that whole file. The third terminal window could wait until she got a look at my first task.
“These are the files on us,” she murmured, licking her fingers one at a time though there wasn’t a single crumb from her sandwich. I glanced at her. This angle had me half wrapped around her and I liked it so I hooked my foot under the nearby stool and rolled it over so I could sit on it and in her space at the same time. “You’ve read them?”
The lack of emotion in her voice as she studied the first row of images, before she used the mouse to begin tabbing through them, betrayed none of her feelings on the subject. Some of these pictures went back to Drew as a child. More than one lingered on her legs, developing breasts, and her eyes. I don’t know why those disturbed me more than the other shots, but they did.
I really hoped he wasn’t one of those sick fuckers that got off on child images. Then again,whyelse would he have taken them?
“Dion wasn’t old enough to have taken some of these shots,” she said, her clinical tone and assessment pulling my attention back to the screen.
“A guy should never ask how old a lady is, but you can’t be more than what—nine in these pictures? And you’re twenty now? Dion was easily thirty.”
“I’m twenty-three,” Drew said, still clicking through the images. Rick leaned forward in his chair, his expression grim and when I glanced at him, I read some of my own aggravation there. Hey, look at it, the big guy and I had more in common than just wanting Drew. “Dion was twenty-six.”
Twenty-six. The asshole was younger than me? “He looked like shit for twenty-six.”
“Drugs do that to a person.” She continued to tap through the images. There were more shots with Drew closer to this age, but she flicked through them faster and faster. She stopped abruptly on one and I didn’t say a word as she stared at the man who had to be her father.
He had her hair, well, I guess she had his. The same slope to their cheeks. The same even gaze, only where hers held warmth and humor, his were absolutely devoid of anything human. No lie, her dad scared the piss out of me, and I was pretty sure he’d fuck with most of my crazy ass relatives if they had to sit across a table from him.
This was the kind of guy who could slit your throat, wipe off his blade, and go back to whatever he was doing without an ounce of struggle. Yeah, no. I was just fine if she never had to bring me to meet Daddy.
The most profound sadness reflected in her eyes though and when I glanced at her, I ached for the pain reflected there. “Do you have a printer attached to this?”
“No,” I said. “Give me ten and I’ll get it set up. You want high resolution?”
“Please.”
It didn’t even occur to me to quip or to tease. The roughness of her voice had me moving even faster. Rick leaned forward in his chair as I moved toward him. “What do you need?” he asked.
“We might have picture paper, it’ll be in the boxes you stacked in the hall closet.”
“On it.” He was out of the chair and moving before I even got my printer out of the box. I hadn’t bothered setting it up because the job was decrypting, not printing. But I had four different printers, all designed to do very different tasks. Well—only three now. The best one, the largest one, hadn’t been one I could move, so I’d had to destroy it.
As soon as I got my new place set up, I’d get another one. At least I factored replacing it into my budget. Rick was back with the paper before I got the printer plugged in. I preferred connected to wireless. Less worry about someone tapping in on my bluetooth connection. Hard to do, but not impossible. I’d done it.
Hard lines reduced risk. I liked reducing all risk right now. That was me, Mr. No Fuss, No Muss, No Risk, No Getting Frisked.
Once the photo paper was in, I found Drew watching me, cradling her coffee mug. “Printer’s ready.”
She selected the image with her father and printed it. Then she resumed her task. We were here for a while and I was not feeling like I’d wowed her. Twice, she snorted as she skimmed the documents also present in her file, but I had a feeling those snorts were derisive more than anything.
When she moved to her father’s folder, I debated staying or getting her a coffee refill. “You need more?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, passing me the mug and blinking like she’d just remembered we were here. I got that. Happened to me all the time while working. “Thank you.”
“I’ll do it,” Rick said, meeting me before I could get out the door. “You want some?” The fact he also included me on the offer had me blowing out a breath.
“Maybe just hook me up to an IV.”
“No,” he told me. “When Vienna is done, you’ll go to bed. You can’t function on just caffeine and fumes.”
“Wanna make a bet?” I challenged him as he left the room, but he didn’t bother to respond. Raking a hand through my hair, I turned back to see Drew clicking through her father’s folder far faster than she had her own. In fact, she hadn’t opened everything, she’d sorted them from most recent to oldest and seemed to be focused on the first few.
“I need you to find this place.” She nodded to the screen and I squinted forward to read the sign in the background. But then she pulled up the next image and it was a copy of a contract with a storage facility. Just a name and a number, no address.
