CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Noelle hardly remembered the trip to Evan’s apartment, almost surprised she’d been able to guide herself there in a stupor of shock. She grabbed the iPad and her purse and then climbed out of her car and rushed toward his door.
It only took him a minute to answer her knock, his brow lowering when he saw her. “Noelle. Hey, I thought we were meeting for—are you okay?”
She thrust the iPad toward him. “I took the money to Louise, and she gave me this. It was Dow’s. She was going to wipe it and sell it.” She stepped inside, and he shut the door behind her.
“Have you looked at it?”
“Just the photos.” She opened the iPad and then brought the photos up, handing him the device. She didn’t know exactly what they meant. Her brain felt fuzzy, and she was having trouble connecting the dots between this and everything else they’d found.
Evan took it, his frown increasing as he scrolled through the handful of pictures. “These are pictures of . . . the gym where I used to go.” He looked up at her. “The gym I was taken from.”
“I thought so,” she said. He’d never told her the name of the gym where he’d been snatched, but she’d recognized it as one that used to be—and perhaps still was—about ten minutes from their high school. All the jocks had used it. “What does it mean?” she asked.
Evan had opened something else on the screen, and his eyes widened as he looked at it. “He wrote the name and address of the gym in the notes app,” he said. “And my name too.”
She let out a breath. Okay, well, if they’d been wondering if there was a definite connection between Evan and the photos, they didn’t need to guess anymore. Had Dow come upon information that Evan would be snatched and was gathering evidence? Was it why he was killed? Had he gone to her father because what he’d found involved the son of the man her father had once sued? Had her father learned something, too, and feared the same people who killed Dow were after him? Her mind veered from one question to the next.
Evan tapped on something else, and then paused, rotating the screen, and then rotating it again.
“What?” she asked.
He turned the iPad toward her. “This photo here. It’s blurry and looks like a picture of a picture.” He bit at his lip, appearing troubled.
She took the iPad from him and turned it in the same way he had, trying to make heads or tails of it. “It looks like the corner of a couch and the corner of a screen.” It was an odd photo. It almost looked like someone had dropped a camera and it snapped a photo on the way down or like someone had been trying to take a photo secretively. She brought the iPad closer, squinting. “Can you see what’s on the screen? You can see a portion of a website. Or maybe it’s a whole website, but it’s a strange one.” It was weird because it wasn’t the name of a business or anything recognizable. It looked like a string of numbers and letters, separated by slashes and dashes. She reached for her phone and realized that in her haste, she’d left it in her car.
“What’s your wireless password?”
He gave it to her, and she typed it into the settings and then pulled up a search engine. She went back and forth, entering the website address from the picture a few numbers at a time. It was a long enough string that she couldn’t remember it in its entirety. “Damn,” she murmured when it told her the site didn’t exist.
“Noelle.”
She looked up, surprised by the grim expression he was wearing. “What is it?”
He rubbed his finger under his bottom lip for a moment. “What if . . . what if that was the website viewers used to watch us? To . . . send gifts . . . to rent us and whatever else was available as part of a sick game we were unknowingly playing?”
She frowned, blinking. She’d just been wondering at Dow’s possible knowledge of Evan’s abduction. But to have direct proof of people being caged and tortured? She shook her head. They had questioned the fact that Dow was a hacker, and maybe he’d come upon something because of those skills, but . . . “If Dow had hacked into the actual game, he would have called the police, whether he saw me or you or anyone. Any decent person would.”
He shook his head. “The date on the notes app is from less than a week before I was abducted.” His eyes speared her, and she blinked, looking away.
“What are you saying?” she asked. But she thought she knew. And it was too horrible to comprehend.
“I went missing from the gym in those photographs, the one listed by name and address in the notes app. The one where I had a physical therapy appointment scheduled for that day and that time. Someone knew I’d be there. Someone set me up to be taken. To be caged.”