Page 62 of Wicked and Ruthless

Haisley’s jaw dropped. “You got her off at her desk?”

Ethan’s grin widened. “Don’t look shocked. It worked, didn’t it?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re worse than a fukboi.”

“I prefer man whore, thank you.” He winked. “Afterward, I got her digits and pretended to leave. Then I watched her head to lunch with a loopy smile on her face, and I slinked back into the former mall manager’s office. It had mostly been cleaned out, which he must have done overnight, because I swung by late on Tuesday and tried to ask him a few pointed questions. He was suddenly too busy—seemingly doing nothing more important than picking his nose—to talk to me. His office was a fucking catastrophe when he had security escort me out for ‘harassing’ him. Today? The place was virtually empty. His laptop was still on his desk with an order for IT to wipe it clean, so I absconded with it.”

“Anyone see you?” Nash asked.

“Nope. There are no cameras in the office. Julia told me in confidence just before her big O, and I double-checked for myself.” He pulled the computer from a crossbody briefcase hanging off his shoulder and plopped it on the table. “I called your brother as soon as I got it. It took us until three a.m. to finagle past the asshole’s login. Most of the files on there were boring as fuck, day-to-day mall business. But he had a whole section on his hard drive partitioned off from the automatic backups. Every fucking file is encrypted. Trees has been working on them all day. When he texted to say he’d gotten into that part of the drive and opened the files, I picked it up and headed over here.”

“Did my brother say what was in the encrypted files?”

“No. He said he was fucking tired after being up all night and half the day, so he was going to bed. Laila shooed me out. She’s so protective of her man.” Ethan laughed.

“He’s crazy protective of her,” Nash put in.

Haisley couldn’t argue. She’d seen that in action. “So you have no idea what Yuslav was hiding?”

“Nope. Let’s find out together. I’m really hoping it’s not his personal porn collection. He was the human equivalent of a pimple on a leper’s ass, and I really don’t want to think about his…proclivities.”

She shuddered. “Let’s hope he was hiding something more useful.”

A collective hush settled across the room as Ethan lifted the lid on the laptop, entered the password Trees had hacked for him, then started fishing around the hard drive. She and Nash huddled closer and watched him methodically search the laptop.

At first, nothing made sense. Folders had nonsensical names, but all followed a pattern of a six-digit number, followed by a single letter. Some of those were empty. Some of them had sketchy documents full of more combinations of letters and numbers that Haisley didn’t understand.

“Does any of this mean anything to you guys?”

Nash and Ethan exchanged a solemn glance, but neither responded. Instead, Ethan’s cocky disposition morphed into hard steel. And Nash tensed, looking both dangerous and so protective, she nearly scooted away from him.

“I need the list of victims.” Ethan held out his hand.

Nash rifled through his bag until he pulled out a notebook and flipped it to a page full of his chicken scratchings. “They’re listed here, in chronological order, including the ones who got away.”

Ethan grabbed the notebook and slapped it on the table next to the laptop, glancing back and forth between the page and the screen. “Fuck.”

“It matches?”

Ethan nodded. “Exactly.”

“What?” Haisley felt like they were talking over her head, and it was pissing her off. “What matches?”

Ethan dragged her closer for a better view of the screen. “Each of these six-digit numbers corresponds to a date—the one in which the victim was abducted. The letter corresponds to her first initial. So see this? Twelve, twenty-four, and two digits for the year, followed by a K. That’s Kaylee, who disappeared on Christmas Eve.” He clicked on her file, only to find another assortment of numbers and letters.

“Shit,” Nash muttered. “This spells out everything about the girl abducted. H must be height. The fifty-two must mean she’s five foot-two. The W corresponds to weight. She weighs one twenty-two. The next numbers… B? W? H? I don’t know. We did weight and height, so what would another W or H mean?”

Haisley glanced at the numbers herself and it hit her. “Bust, waist, and hips. They’re measurements.”

Ethan nodded. “So the other stats just below? Another H and an E, next to abbreviations for colors, must be?—”

“Hair and eye color,” Nash cut in. “This lists Kaylee as having brown hair and eyes…and that corresponds to the information her mother provided. Son of a bitch.” He scowled. “But what’s the V for? There’s a Y next to that.”

Haisley knew and it made her sick. “If they’re selling these girls for sex, I’m sure they’re finding out whether or not she’s a virgin.”

“That’s disgusting,” Ethan growled.

“These fucking bastards don’t deserve to live.” And Nash looked ready to kill each and every one of them himself.

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