(Blood and Bone, #2) Sin and Swoon(74)

I roll my eyes. “Laugh it up—you’re watching the video footage we got.” I climb in too and cringe as the last few days make an attempt on my sanity.

“Look, Jane, I like you. But I gotta do Christmas morning in three days. I can’t do that with old people jacking off in my head. Can we just take the week, gather our thoughts, and go from there?”

I look at Henrico and nod as I start the car. “Yeah, I don’t think we are going to come up with anything groundbreaking until all the data is seen. We have protocol on the video footage that needs to be processed. You take what you need for the bureau, and I’ll take everything else, and we will meet back up January 2 here. I’ll send the location.”

He scowls at Stanley in the headlights, still laughing and stumbling as he tries to get up from kneeling on the dirty street. “Look at this jackass!”

“I’m a little grateful it was what it was. When Amanda said it was worse than what we found in that lodge, worse than what was up that hill in that cellar, I was scared. I have to give it to her, visually, this was horrid. But kid porn still trumps this in my head.”

“Yeah, that’s part of the job I hate, the shit you can’t unsee. Kid porn would have killed me inside, this just traumatized me. Not because they weren’t attractive either, but because they’re brother and sister. What is wrong with people?”





22. The long way home




He’s stunned, outright insanely silenced by my request. After a long pause Dash mutters, “You want to go to their house for Christmas?”

I want to say no and have a drink, but that’s not an option. “Yes. I am getting the plane to stop in DC and pick you up on the way. Why don’t you bring Angie with us? She won’t want to stay in DC alone, not surrounded by the things she and Rory had.”

He chuckles a little. “She burnt all his shit, so it’s just hers and some ash. She went crazy too. She loaded it all up in that old T-roof Corvette he bought last year, and burned the whole car and bags of stuff. Then she jarred up the ash, said she saw it on a movie, and has the jars in a box on the back porch, getting snowed on as we speak. Scariest thing I have ever seen.”

“Damn!”

“Oh, she is angry. She already agreed to spend Christmas with us so there should be a change of heart if it’s at my mother’s. Maybe my family will prove to be a distraction. I think she needs to see you anyway.”

I nod. “We will be in DC in five hours, the pilot says.”

“I can’t wait to see you.”

I close my eyes and sigh, savoring those words like they are food for my soul. “Me too.”

I sit back in my chair and hang up the phone, then dial Antoine and put my headphones in. “Okay, lead me through this.”

“Okay, well, thanks for the warning first of all. When you get an ass ton of sex tapes with old fat people in them, you could at least warn a guy. I was eating a big ol’ plate of spaghetti my mom made, and then I was gagging and choking and throwing up. My mom comes running in, yells at me for watching porn, and takes my pasta away.”

I chuckle, remembering the faces Henrico made. “It was bad, walking in on that. You don’t even bother me with your First World problems. Stop taking your work home.”

He scoffs. “The computer at work isn’t as good as mine here. I built a new one, and it’s amazing. Anyway, this hard drive is a hot mess. It’s a million hours of old-people sex. They start, I’d say twenty years ago, so you know they loaded that shit up from CDs they made. Twenty years ago she was fatter too. These are not people who should be filming themselves naked.”

“Anything with the parents?”

He scoffs again. “Oh, let me tell you. These people are frickin’ weird. The mom and dad were bad people. I swear to God, these books don’t add up either. I bet you they have done money laundering for the mob, which is how the dry cleaning made so much money. He went from nothing to a whole lot of something and fast. The whole financial situation is dodgy. And even better, Old Dick has weird videos of himself training girls in those cells. We won’t go there. Then even more bizarre is the old movies on here—after they watch their porn or make it or whatever, they all settle in for Alfred Hitchcock. It’s weird. The Google history is bad. Like ‘how fast does lime dissolve a boy after he’s been dead a week’ bad. The amount of porn these people have searched is criminal. There are teenage boys who don’t know about some of these sites.”

“What about the will? The houses? How about some of the useful stuff?”