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“Shit,” I grunted, tearing open the box. Stacks of money stared back at me.
Over a hundred bundles of fives and tens, small bills that were easy to pass. At least twenty thousand dollars’ worth. A second box below it held a similar amount in Canadian dollars, and a third held Euros. I pocketed several stacks of US tens, just in case, and moved on.
After an hour and a half, I’d found nothing. Hopelessness began to envelop me, and it was all I could do not to think of what Owen might be doing, or had already done, to Dahlia.
A final box held nothing but some odds and ends, but at the bottom of the box, something caught my eye. A key ring, with two keys. When I lifted it, a brass key fob shone in the light of the storage unit. I read the words engraved there: The Right Way Accounting. Owen’s day job. He’d always had a small accounting firm, a tiny hole in the wall office on the outskirts of Savannah. The neighborhood was fairly skeezy, and I’d never bothered checking it out. Did he still have it? Could the office still hold secrets, or had he cleared it out?
Glancing around, I thought there might be something there. If he hadn’t cleared out this storage unit, then maybe I could find something there. With nothing else to do, I shoved the keys in my pocket and walked out, leaving the door hanging open. Fuck it. Maybe some poor shit would walk by and find the boxes of cash. My little contribution to society.
Outside, the late-night air was cool on my skin, drying the sweat on my arms. Everything was so quiet and still this late. It didn’t make sense that it would. The world should have been burning, screaming, and writhing in agony. My woman had been taken, yet the world peered back unconcerned. It had done nothing to keep her safe. God, if he existed, was a cockless and impotent fuck, who didn’t do a damn thing to help those who needed it. That was part of why I did what I did. Someone had to punish the ones who did awful things. Somebody had to give people the catharsis and agency they needed to continue on.
With a snarl of rage, I hurried to my car and sped off toward Owen’s office. The entire drive, I fantasized about what I’d do to him when I got him in my hands. I imagined pulling his guts out of his stomach cavity and stuffing them down his throat. Maybe I’d tie a knife to a horse’s cock and force it into his mouth, and watch it fuck Owen to death. Even more deranged images flitted through my mind, making my dick hard until, at last, I pulled up to the small strip mall where Owen’s office was located.
The inky moonlight sky sat cloudless and passive, staring down at me as I exited the car and pulled the key fob from my pocket. A quick glance through the glass door showed no wiring or control box for a security system. With that out of the way, I slipped the key into the lock, unbolting the door and stepping inside.
Stale air met me, but not overly musty. Another ember of hope flared within me. Owen hadn’t been here in a while, but it hadn’t been months. Inside the office, I found a calendar on the wall that was for the current year, and it was flipped to the prior month. I was right. Four weeks or less since he’d been here. There was a chance I could find something useful.
Owen’s office was not large, consisting of a small waiting area out front, a half bathroom, and a tiny office in the back. When I stepped into the small office, I froze in surprise. On the desk sat a laptop computer, plugged in and ready. A fine layer of dust skimming the closed lid. Really? Owen had left it here? That didn’t bode well. Personally, I would never have left a computer here if it had anything important on it. Still, I had to try.
Sitting at the desk, I lifted the top and the screen flashed to life. The cursor blinked in a password window. Locked. Of course it was. I sat there for several seconds racking my brain then tried a few options:
Playhouse
Playhouse1
Owen&Drake
0wen&Dr@ke
Then a thought occurred to me. I could still see the heartrending horror on Owen’s face as I’d opened up his nephew’s throat. My fingers flew across the keyboard, inputting new password guesses:
Blaine
Bl@ine
Blaine1
Blaine1!
The screen flashed, revealing the desktop. The stupid fuck. I was happy to have gained access but also gob smacked that the password had been so easy to figure out.
Moving the mouse, I tried to pull up the folders on the screen, but it became evident that Owen had deleted nearly every file and program on the hard drive. Yet, he’d been dumb enough to leave the computer here and naive enough to have such an easily guessable password. Maybe I was in luck, and he wasn’t as good at covering his tracks as he wanted me to think.
Right clicking the file icon, I selected Restore Previous Version, and selected the last date available. Within five minutes, I’d restored everything on the computer. The excitement I felt as file after file reappeared was almost too much. My knee bounced in excitement as I clicked through each one, and scanned what it contained.
Most were banal bullshit. Spreadsheets for his accounting clients, tax documents, and email templates. It was a laborious task, and my eyes grew heavy and my head ached as I combed the computer.
One file struck me as strange when I saw it. It had no name, but had a fairly large amount of data. Almost four gigabytes. When I clicked on it, the excitement that had been fading rekindled. This was what I’d been after. His secret file that held all his dirty information. There was even documentation on how he’d faked my identity to gain access to my accounts. It boggled my mind that he could be both so smart and detailed in some aspects, yet a complete moron in others.
The dive went deep, and with each click of the mouse, more secrets revealed themselves to me. Eventually, I found scanned PDFs of receipts and invoices for construction. The biggest expenditure so far.
“What the hell is this?” I muttered, leaning closer.
Another folder was labeled simply: Blueprints. I clicked on it, and my jaw dropped. Page after page of schematics and floor plans. Familiar floor plans. Attached were screenshots of email exchanges between Owen and someone who was most likely a foreman on the job. Owen pushed them for completion as soon as possible. That had been months ago. It was complete now from what I was seeing. He’d rebuilt the playhouse in a new location.
“Dear god,” I gasped, leaning back.
Another ten minutes and I found the address for the new house. Scribbling the location down on a sticky note, I gritted my teeth in barely contained rage. This had to be where he’d taken Dahlia. Owen planned on repeating our game in a new location. His first victim would be Dahlia, and I had to hurry if I was going to save her.
