Page 53 of Zen's Crash

“I’ll bet she’s happy to have found the last of those kids who went missing.”

“Hell yeah, we both are. We’ve got so much free time now that we don’t know what to do with ourselves.”

Lexi and I have pulled up chairs to Rigs’ desk to eat because it’s the only clean space in the room to put our plates. Rigs doesn’t give two hoots in hell if we sit at his desk. He’s more of an action-oriented person who rarely sits at it, anyway. I have to admit I like shooting the shit with him over breakfast. Lexi must be starving because she gobbles her food right up and then starts on her coffee. I follow suit as Lexi fills Rigs in on what we learned last night.

Rigs gets visibly excited and comes over to look at the will. “We need to nail down a location on this lodge right away andgo scope the place out. Bad guys love hideouts that are off the beaten path. I’ll bet my we’ll find him there.”

“Our plan for this morning is to have a look at his camera and the CDs we found in the boxes.” I pull my laptop out of my messenger bag and turn it on.

Meanwhile Rigs grabs one of the floppy disks with a gleeful look in his eyes, “Damn! I haven’t used one of these in decades. I still have a bunch of them in my desk drawer.”

“Not sure what we’ll find on them, but I’ve got a floppy drive in my office, and I’ll check them later,” I say.

Lexi picks up the camera and tries to turn it on. “This is gonna need to be charged.”

“You can probably find a charging cord in the side pocket of my bag,” I tell her.

She searches through the bag until she finds one that fits and plugs it in. The green charging light begins to flash, so she sets it down and comes back to me. I slide one of the CDs into my external disk reader. I don’t trust this piece of shit, so I run a quick virus scan of the CD-R before opening it up. Once I click on the folder, there are dozens of files, all with numerical designations.

Lexi murmurs, “You might as well take them in order.”

I click on the first file, and the moment it opens I realize all the numbers are actually dates without the hyphens.

“I don’t understand,” Lexi says. “What are we looking at?”

“A bunch of video files of Terrance stalking someone’s house,” I respond.

Sure enough, I click on the first file in the folder, and it’s a video of a pretty blonde woman getting out of her car and walking into her house. The next video is of her leaving her house.

Lexi points out, “It looks like he may have been doing this from his car. See the road that runs along the side of the main road?”

Rigs comes over to see what we’re doing. “Yeah, he’s definitely stalking her.”

I open and close several videos. “It seems like he’s only capturing images of her leaving and coming home. What I don’t know is why he needs weeks of filming her leaving and coming home.”

Rigs speaks up. “He’s trying to get a handle on her schedule. Jump to the last file in the folder.”

When I open the folder, we wait, and nothing happens. She doesn’t show up at all. As the minutes tick by, what I’m seeing starts to sink in. I quickly begin clicking through all the folders and discover there’s no video of the woman returning home.

I immediately start to come up with possible explanations. “This doesn’t automatically mean she wound up dead. It could be that she was scared off, or that she moved voluntarily, or maybe this is just a sick game he’s playing with himself—where she stayed late at work, and he wanted to pretend the reason she didn’t come home that day was more nefarious.”

Rigs thinks it over for a minute and agrees. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but there are a lot of files on that CD. If hedid kill them all, then Terrance Harris would be one of the most prolific serial killers in modern times.”

Lexi lets out a relieved breath. “Yeah, there’s something else going on here. I can’t see him just killing that many women without raising the alarm.”

I literally can’t get my head around that many murders, so I’m inclined to agree that something else is going on. This guy is really good at doing weird things that are hard to interpret. It makes me want to keep Lexi close.

I start going through the rest of the CDs, only to find similar files. There are eighty-three in all. The fact that he’s stalked that many women blows my mind. Even if he didn’t touch them, the fact that he was following them and capturing videos is really creeping me out.

Lexi finally announces, “I think we have enough of a battery charge to have a look at what’s on the camera. I dread what we’re going to find.”

And my worst nightmares are realized immediately. The first image that comes up is a woman tied to a tree. She’s half naked and looks terrified. There’s a man with his back to the camera standing in the foreground, facing her.

I jolt forward in my seat. “Is that Terrance? He doesn’t look like his DMV picture.”

Rigs points out sagely, “All you can see is the back of his body. The hair is black and longer, but he could have dyed it and let it grow out. There’s no way to tell without looking at his face.”

When I glance at Lexi, her seat is empty. While Rigs and I were talking, she slipped away. I immediately feel guilty forletting her help with the investigation. Clearly, this is all too much for her. I should have known better. Rigs and I continue looking through the camera roll. It’s just more women tied up. Sometimes there’s the man with long dark hair, sometimes it’s just the woman. Every single picture is disturbing.

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