I go into his Photos. He doesn’t have many of them. I get the feeling that EJ is a bit of a loner—he hardly ever mentions his friends. Mostly, there are a few photos of him standing in front of a mirror with his shirt off. And a few more where he’s flexing his muscles. Then a few more of him completely naked. I scroll through those quickly.
After the naked pictures, there are some of me. These were taken without my permission. There’s one of me coming out of my house. Climbing into my car. And then one fuzzy one of what appears to be my bedroom window. Thank God, the blinds are mostly shut and you can’t see much.
Once I get rid of this stupid video, this man is never coming on my property again. I’ll get a restraining order if I have to.
Finally, I find what I’m looking for. The video from the parking lot. I watch it one more time, the bile rising in my throat. I had hoped it wasn’t as bad as I had thought, but it is. It’s just as bad. I seem so suspicious as my eyes dart around to make sure nobody’s watching me, then slash that tire. The expression on my face is almost demonic.
I nearly jump out of my skin when I hear the knock on my office door. I pull it up open gently—Luke is standing there, a deep crease between his eyebrows.
“Okay,” he says. “I’m here.”
I hold out the phone to him. “This is the video. I want you to eliminate any traces of it off this phone.”
He takes the phone from me, although he’s unable to wipe the disapproving look from his eyes. His index finger hovers over the screen, and I grab his arm. “Don’t watch the video,” I say.
“I wasn’t going to.”
I purse my lips. “You looked like you were going to press Play.”
He lets out a huff. “I can’t delete this video from the phone if you won’t let me touch the screen, Adrienne.”
Fine. I respectfully take a step back and allow him to do his thing with the phone. While he’s working on it, I go back into the office, where EJ is still lying slumped on my leather sofa. I frown down at him, trying to make out the rise and fall of his chest. He is very, very still.
Christ, I didn’t kill him, did I?
Very gently, I place my fingers on his left wrist, over his radial artery. I hold my breath, feeling around for his pulse.
I don’t feel anything. Oh no.
Just before I can start panicking, he lets out a shudder and shifts his position on the couch, pulling his arm out of my grasp. Thank God, he’s alive. But I’m definitely going to have to help him get home.
I reach into his pocket gently and pull out his keys. He’s got the key fob on the ring for his Porsche, then a couple of other keys. I do not know which one opens his front door, but there aren’t that many. Luke can figure that out when he gets there.
When I come out of the office, Luke is standing there, his arms at his side, EJ’s phone in his right hand. “It’s done,” he says.
“And you didn’t watch the video?”
“No.”
“You swear.”
“I swear.”
He hands me the phone, and I lay the house keys in his palm. He sucks in a breath when he sees them. “Adrienne,” he says quietly. “I really don’t want to do this.”
Not this again. I assumed when he showed up here, he was done protesting. “It’s not that big a deal.”
“It is a big deal.” His eyes are wide behind his glasses. “We drugged him, and now we’re breaking into his house and hacking into his computer. That’s a really big deal.”
There’s a famous experiment by a Yale psychologist named Stanley Milgram—or should I say, infamous. The experiment measured the willingness of study participants to perform terrible acts when instructed to do so by an authority figure. Subjects were led to believe they were participating in an experiment in which they were a “teacher” administering electric shocks to another subject—the “learner”—every time he got the answer to a question wrong.
In reality, the “learner” was an actor. And the electric shocks were fake.
During the experiment, the learner would beg for mercy. He would plead for the experiment to stop. He would complain about a heart condition. But the experimenter overseeing the study would tell the subject to keep administering the shocks of increasing intensity. The subjects grew increasingly uncomfortable as the experiment proceeded, but here is the amazing part:
Every single subject administered shocks of at least 300 V. And more than half of them administered a shock of 450 V—a fatal shock if it had been real.