AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“What the fuck?” Ace’s voice reflects my own disgust.
I don’t want to see the rest, but a part of me has to. I have to know the depths of his depravity, and I can’t stop myself from clicking to the next folder. This one’s a different woman, and I don’t recognize her.
There are photos of her in various poses on the bed and on the floor with vomit next to her face. It’s obvious she was intoxicated, but as they progress, she’s not even conscious anymore. When I get to the image of her propped against a wall with a toilet seat around her neck, I want to puke.
He treated these women like trash, and as I continue to go through the images, it becomes evident it’s far worse than I ever could have imagined. There are so many different faces, and I don’t recognize most of them. But when I stumble on photos of Ada slumped in the driver’s seat of her car, I freeze as I take in the details. She’s at the same park where they pulled her from the lake.
“What is it?” Ace asks.
I barely hear him as I stare at Ada’s expressionless face in the image, wondering if she was already dead. Because there’s no fucking way she drove her car into that lake herself.
“I know this girl,” I tell him. “She disappeared after a party at our house one night, and they found her car in that lake.”
Ace is quiet, letting me process what I’m slowly coming to accept on my own.
“This is fucking insane,” I choke out.
But it doesn’t end there. As we go through the folders, we see a different sort of timeline unfolding. One of Adam’s descent to pure evil. Because that’s the only way to describe the escalating violence and disturbing behavior.
After a while, the faces are all unrecognizable—different women in different rooms. The photos have a common theme, with an emphasis on his fetish for choking them. And then, eventually, we find more videos in the files. Videos of Adam doing blow off their bodies. Pissing on them. Dunking their heads in the toilet. Slapping them around. He doesn’t stop until they’re sobbing. Until they’re completely dead inside, waiting for it to end. When we stumble across a woman with a purple face and bulging, lifeless eyes, I stop breathing completely. I want to believe it’s just some photoshopped image he downloaded off the internet, but Ace shatters that delusion.
“Fucking Christ.” He stops me from clicking off the image and stares at it. “She’s dead.”
I swallow, but it doesn’t dislodge the knot in my throat. We both sit there, stunned into silence for a long time before Ace finally breaks it.
“Do you recognize any of these women?”
“No,” I respond. “But it looks like he brought them all to different motel rooms.”
“Could be prostitutes,” Ace observes. “They’d be a lot less likely to report it, and he was probably exploiting that.”
I keep going because I have to see the extent of it. We scour through thousands of images and videos, uncovering more lifeless faces. There are at least four of them by the time we decide to skip ahead months at a time. And then, inevitably, we get to a folder with images and videos of Bianca.
The dates on this folder span a one-month time period, and some of them are selfies that she’d taken to show where she was at the time. But there are others that someone else took from farther away. Photos of her at school. At a house I don’t recognize with some other girls. Images of her getting into a car every day. Her comings and goings, GPS coordinates, phone records, and what appears to be a diary log to account for her time.
“Do you think someone else was following her?” Ace asks.
“I don’t know,” I answer even though it’s the same thought I had.
It isn’t until I get to the images of her on a train that things begin to make sense. I already know before I see them what I’m going to find, but it doesn’t make it any less painful when I click through stills of her on the medical campus in Bethesda. There are shots of her with Kieran, Ryan, and me in the courtyard. In the images, my back is to the camera, but there’s a clear view of Bianca talking to the three of us and one of her hugging me. From there, I watch as our conversation plays out. It becomes apparent that whoever was behind the camera tried to move to a different angle to get a shot of my face, but we were already walking away at that point. It doesn’t look like he followed us after that, at least not that day.
The next series of images begin with Bianca riding the train in a different set of clothes. There are more of her at the medical campus, and then, eventually, her at the house in Bethesda. It’s difficult to tell it’s her because they were taken at night from far away. There are a few clear shots of Kieran’s face, though, which unnerves me, but from what I can tell, every image of me is too grainy to identify. But it still leaves me with the question. Did Adam suspect it was me the whole time? Is this why things went down the way they did when I was back home?
