Page 200 of Tenderfoot

“Is it worse than we thought?” I asked.

Shanti just leaned forward in order to shunt Luna’s laptop so it was facing me.

“We can just say, he didn’t delete the videos,” Luna said.

“And he’d been able to be unemployed for a while and still live because he did this shit a lot,” Willow said and emphasized, “A whole lot.”

I sat on Luna’s armchair and looked at the screen.

“Arthur dropped all the video files on a cloud,” Shanti shared. “You don’t have to watch. We only watched a couple and that was more than enough. It’s just the sheer magnitude of them.”

I reached out a hand to touch the mousepad and wake Luna’s laptop, then stared at the screen and gasped because I saw an open directory with medium icons selected, and there was a whole slew of video files on it. They filled up the screen.

And even with those tiny icons, you could see what was in those videos.

Gross.

“I am so glad I never app dated,” Shanti declared. “I mean, you got a load of chaff to wade through at the clubs and bars and gyms and coffee shops. But the weasels come out on those apps like crazy.”

I’d never app dated, outside of Kev, who didn’t count, but I knew a few people who met decent guys or gals on apps.

But they were in the minority.

There was so much you could hide behind text banter. And by the time you’d convinced someone you were a decent person, and they finally met you, you already had your in. You could hide the skeeve a lot better when you’d established a preconceived notion about who you were when you were not that at all.

“He’s numbered them, so there are no names,” Luna shared. “We’d have to go through them one by one to see if we know any of them, or if any names were spoken during the, erm…”—Luna cleared her throat—“activities. But Phoenix is a big place. The chances we’ll know any of them are small.”

“But we need to find the one who would have the resources to shut Trev down so thoroughly,” Shanti added. “So maybe we can find the killer.”

“So what do we do?” I asked.

“We’ve asked Arthur if he has any face recognition software,” Willow said.

“He does,” Luna said. “And he has already started, but with the sheer number of files on there?—”

“There are fifty-seven videos,” Shanti cut in to say.

“He’s got his work cut out for him,” Luna finished.

I looked down at the screen and mumbled, “This is crazy.”

“It’s diabolical,” Willow snapped. “Can you imagine, you meet a guy you think you like. You let him in that way. You give him that. You share that intimacy. You offer that gift to him. And he videotapes you without you knowing and threatens to humiliate you if you don’t give him money?”

No, I couldn’t imagine.

“Internet lasts forever too,” Shanti put in. “You could lose jobs for that kind of shit. I know, if my mother saw anything like that, she’d have a stroke. My father…” She shivered.

Another indication I’d done the right thing to cut my family out of my life.

If this happened to me, I knew my father would be silent. My mother would rave at me about being so stupid. And the whole time, Easton would smirk his superior smirk and file my little peccadillo away so he could bring it up at a later date when it might cause the most pain.

Yeah.

I wasn’t going to mourn them.

Or at least, I wouldn’t do it for long.

There was a knock on the door at that point, so I quickly reached out and slapped the laptop shut.

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