AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Twelve
No steps forward, five steps back.
That’s the kind of pace it felt like we were working at, just adding more and more questions, without getting any answers, and I was tired of it.
Monicawas tired of it.
She hadn’t said much on the way to the hospital where Kim had been taken, after her landlord found her passed out in her apartment, so badly beaten that her doctor had insisted on keeping her sedated.
She hadn’t said much on the way back, either.
Now, we were back at home, where Monica had retreated to the guest room. I made my way to the office, completely content to just sit andthinkfor hours, until I figuredsomethingout.
Kim was lucky that we’d been looking for her. After three days of unanswered attempts to contact her, no activity on her bank account, and no outgoing messages or calls, Marcus had finally taken it upon himself to go to her building. A few bills in the landlord’s palm had convinced him to take Marcus upstairs, and that’s when they found her – with a rope around her neck, and “Untying the Knot” written in money green nail polish on the floor beside her.
I wasn’t sure which detail bothered Monica the most.
The hospital got in touch with Kim’s family, who’d been trying to get in touch with her too. I managed to sneak in a conversation with her mother, where yet another question was introduced – who was this mystery long-distance boyfriend that Kim was telling people about, but couldn’t convince to be introduced?
None of her friends or family, Monica included, had met this guy, but apparently Kim was crazy about him. It took a little prodding, but eventually her mother had remembered a name – Dave, or David – that automatically set my suspicion sensors off.
David Asher Ross.
Monica had brushed that off immediately, insisting that there was no way Asher and Kim were dating. But when I pressed her about her reasoning, she couldn’t give me anything more than an assumption that they wouldn’t do it without telling her, knowing the connection she had to both of them.
Personally, I wasn’t so sure.
I was willing to admit that on paper, Asher looked like a model citizen, but my gut told me he wasn’t to be trusted – something that rarely, if ever, led me astray when I listened. Just because I couldn’t find anything on him didn’t mean he wasn’t a snake. And that thing with the names? Way too much of a coincidence for me to let it go. So I wasn’t about to.
My moral objections to hacking Kim’s Facebook account lasted about two seconds before I was in her inbox, scouring for that name.
“Jackpot,” I muttered to myself when I came across messages from a “Dave R”, but when I tried to go into the conversation, I frowned. I didn’t have the ability to click on his name like I should’ve, and the profile picture was blank. Kim’s side of the conversation was still there – and it was obvious that this was the right Dave, from the tone of the messages – but there were never any responses.
“He deleted them… but how?”
Searching “Dave R.” on Facebook gave me more results than it made sense to try to sift through, so I didn’t even try. Instead, I left Kim’s account and hacked my way into Asher’s, searching for any signs of her.
Asher’s inbox was completely clean, as if he either didn’t use it, or made a habit of deleting messages. Since that was useless, I shifted my attention to his pictures, scrolling all the way to the beginning of them.
That’s where I found Monica.
She was a common fixture in his pictures, mostly in a group, but by herself often enough that the casual observer might think she was his girlfriend. Initially, because everybody looked so young, I thought maybe these were pictures from college, but Monica was thirty-six. Facebook wasn’t even invented until after her college years. But, these were definitely the years right after.
From wedding pictures to BBQs to fireworks at a lake, it was obvious that their little group was tight. Kellen and Monica were glued at the hip, looking just like the happy couple that the rings on their fingers implied. Asher, and the woman I could tell from the captions and tags was “Amanda”,just looked… like they were there.
Many of the pictures were just three of the group, while the other person took the picture. Even with that dynamic, even though this wasAsher’sFacebook page, the clear subject of most of the pictures was Monica, with Kellen as an afterthought. She was always sandwiched between Kellen and either Asher or Amanda, both as attached as her husband seemed to be. I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised – Monica was magnetic, and beautiful – but now I understood the comment Kora had made.
These pictures showed a vibe of borderline obsession.
As I scrolled, and time went on, there was a clear shift. Monica’s presence in the pictures dwindled as they got older, or… maybe there were just fewer pictures. Snapshots of friends turned into snapshots with the cigar club, colleagues, proof that he’d met and shook hands with the president. I expected to still see Amanda’s face, since I was under the impression they’d dated a while, but her appearances were few and far between, until they just… stopped.
Following a hunch, I clicked over to her profile, which was still active, but apparently defunct. Her pictures showed the same adoration for Monica that Asher’s had, from group pictures to kissy-face selfies, and then… nothing. Her last few posts coincided with her complete disappearance from Asher’s page, and since then, there hadn’t been a shred of activity.
This shit is strange.
I made a mental note to ask Monica about Amanda again, and see if I could get any more details from her on that. Something about that whole situation was off. In the meantime, I left Facebook and let myself into Kim’s email accounts to see what, if anything I could find there that was out of place.
I still had the records from when I shut down the hack atVivid Vixen, so I cross-referenced the timestamps on when that sabotage had started against all of Kim’s email accounts. There didn’t seem to be any clear pattern, but therewasa particular name that stood out.
