Page 154 of Nowhere to Hide

Nyx shook her head. “I didn’t do anything. Someone else is in the server.”

It wasn’t a video, it was a live feed of a building of some sort. It was an empty room and dark save for a bit of light through a window.

Suddenly there was movement and four men fanned out inside.

“Locke,” I whispered.

A white light blew out the camera lens. Then the feed went black.

“No!” I stood up. “Bring it back.”

“I’m trying.”

My heart was racing, and I couldn’t hear anything over the blood rushing in my head. The whole lab was one throbbing heartbeat.

Bastian ran back over to us. “Nyx?”

“I can’t get in.” Her eyes were laser focused on the screen as she typed in passwords again and again, but the feed didn’t come back. “I don’t know how it came up.”

“What happened? Is he alive?”My voice was little more than a whisper. “He can’t be dead.”

Suddenly the feed came back, and the screen filled with the mask that would forever haunt my dreams. The eyes were black again and the cartoon smile was so close to the screen there was no room to see anything else.

“She was mine first,” came the modulated voice of my nightmares.

The same one that he used when he told me not to lie there like a fish.

“And she’ll be mine last. You can’t escape fate.”

Then the screen went black again.

“He cut the feed.”

“How could he know that we were able to figure out where he was?” Bastian picked up the phone on the desk. “Leo, I need you and Dom down to the lab.” He hung up.

Nyx had her fingers over her mouth, and she was shaking her head.

“C’mon, we need your genius, Nyx.”

With shaking fingers she found the half broken sphere on her desk and snapped it back together.

I wanted to take it out of her hands and hurl it against the screen, but I knew the little blocks helped her think.

I pushed my chair away and got up to pace. “He can’t be dead. He just can’t.”

Leo and Dom came running through the doors. “What happened?” Dom asked

Nyx’s hand shook as she squeezed the Lego sphere as she relayed all that happened. The more she spoke, the steadier she got.

Finally, she sat back down. “It’s not just about killing.”

“Explain,” Dom said tightly.

“There are payments for access.”

Bastian ran back over to his station and yanked his laptop off the docking station and brought it back. “Yes, the payments track to a whole lot of the earlier murders. Not every single one, and sadly more than we actually found in Stone’s files at the Salem PD. There are more victims out there, but the fee for each video has increased.”

“Jesus,” Leo said darkly. “This guy is making snuff films?”