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Probably.
Eventually, she nodded. “I’ll need to do some research. For all we know, some twisted dumbass is just trying to stir up some shit with photoshopped pictures. But once I know what this is,” she said, nodding to the box, “I’ll fill you in, and we can go from there.”
“Fair enough, darling.”
She hopped down off the desk, grabbed the box, and settled it on her hip.
“You really get off on investigating this shit?” I asked, because I’d never quite understood her motivation.
She smiled. “If you want to know what gets me off, Brute, you’re going to have to do more than throw a box of abduction fetish photos at me.”
I scoffed. “Good to know, darling, but since you’re just about young enough to be my daughter…” Maybe not quite, but close enough.
She cocked an eyebrow. “Let me guess; when I was playing with Barbie dolls, you were busy playing with the real thing?”
“Something like that.”
She laughed. “That may be true, but do you want to know something, Brute?” she asked, leaning closer until all I could smell was her intoxicating, sweet scent.
Now I was hungry, and it sure as hell wasn’t food I had any interest in sinking my teeth into.
“What’s that, darling?”
“I’m not a little girl anymore,” she said, shaking her head while her gaze stayed fixed on mine. “I play with the real thing now too.”
Chapter Four
Greta
“I think they’re linked,” I said to Deo as he leaned his back against the concrete wall in a room beneath one of the Lucianos’ warehouses.
“That would be one hell of a coincidence,” he mused as the guy tied to a chair on the other side of the room screamed bloody murder. Understandable. I’d probably be screaming too, if someone was ripping out my toenails.
“It can’t be coincidence.” I shook my head for emphasis. “Gabe and I started looking into kidnappings for ransom, and suddenly a box of photos of kidnap victims shows up on an… associate’s doorstep?”
Something metal clattered to the ground. Probably the pliers the Luciano’s man, Aurelio, had been using to pull out their captive’s toenails. I’d decided to call the captive Weasel”, since he looked just like one, with an unusually small head, big-ass ears, and dark, beady eyes (that were now red-rimmed and trying to bulge out of his head).
“You think someone’s trying to lend a helping hand?” Deo asked, brow furrowed.
I scoffed. “In my experience, very few people are that helpful. And how the hell did they get their hands on those pictures? Pictures that are legit, by the way.”
He nodded like he wasn’t surprised.
“I haven’t even gotten through a quarter of them, and I’ve made twenty-seven matches to people in missing persons’ databases, some of them dating back as much as ten years ago—all of them from Honduras and El Salvador, andnineof them from the city of La Ceiba.”
“Stop!” the weasel screamed. The sound echoed off the walls around us.
“How long has Aurelio been going at him?” I asked since this party had already been in full swing when I’d arrived here ten minutes ago.
Deo shrugged. “A while.”
I didn’t envy the weasel. Aurelio had already taken most of his toenails and a few teeth—Aurelio liked the old-school techniques. But since the weasel was actually a rat, I didn’t feel sorry for him either. He made his money by taking the dirty little secrets he collected to anyone he thought might pay well for them. And when the dirt wasn’t flowing freely, he made shit up and had gotten a lot of innocent people killed that way.
“What’s next on the chopping block, Aurelio?” I asked, in part curious, in part hoping to scare the weasel a little more. If Aurelio was sticking with the body parts that started with T, then either the tonsils or testicles were next on the chopping block. I don’t think either one of them was going to be pleasant.
“Whatever it takes,carina,” he said, turning around long enough to wink at me.
I winked back because as great as he was with this torture shit, he kind of reminded me of an Italian Mr. Rogers from “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood”—he even wore the cardigans. And let’s face it, a scary-ass Mr. Rogers was just damn cool.
