“Listen, we need to check something out. Give us a couple of minutes.” They reluctantly quieted down. Outlaw headed for his room/office. I didn’t let him leave me behind. Dad and Bull went too. As we got into place, he looked at me. “Tarin, maybe we should watch this without you. We have no idea what’s on here.” He looked like he was worried.
“I’m not leaving. I can handle whatever is on that disk. Play it.”
He hesitated another couple of seconds then he inserted it and started clicking away. I leaned toward the screen. I could feel Dad and Bull doing the same. Suddenly, there was a picture on the disk. It was a picture of Merrill. He was sitting on the edge of a bed. It was obvious he was in a girl's bedroom. There was a girl in the bed.
I swallowed down my scream and instead a whimper came out. The girl was me! He had his hand up under my nightgown. I was crying. You could see it in the picture. He had a smile on his face. I pushed away from the guys and bent over the trash can. I wrapped my arms around my stomach and heaved. Oh my God, he’d somehow taped those terrible moments. How many were there? What had he done with them? How could I stand knowing they exist?
The rustle of fabric had me looking up. Outlaw was out of his chair and he was crouched beside me. His hand came up to rub my back. I flinched and moved away. Suddenly, I was feeling dirty, and I didn’t want him to get dirty too. “Don’t, Outlaw. I feel disgusting and dirty right now.”
“Bullshit. You’re not fucking dirty and I’m going to hold you,” he growled before he yanked me up and into his chest. He gave me a kiss on the top of my head and I broke. A stream of tears poured down my face. I beat on his hard chest with my fists.
“Why won’t he go away? I thought once he was dead, I’d be free of him, but he keeps coming back in some way. You know what this means, don’t you? There are probably more pictures out there and God knows who has them,” I sobbed.
“We don’t know that. I doubt he trusted more than one or two people to know his dirty little secret. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I need to analyze this and see if I can find anything from the paper or even this disk. If there has been anything recorded and erased off it, I might be able to put the fragments back together. I just need time to do it.”
He looked at Dad and Bull, who were watching me with worry on their faces. “I want to talk to the guys. Can you get them into church?” Outlaw asked, and Bull nodded.
Dad came over to me. He tugged me into his arms and he squeezed me. “Honey, I promise we’ll figure this out. You just calm down. If you’re pregnant, this isn’t good for you or the baby.” He whispered, so I was the only one who could hear him.
“I hope I’m not, because this would be the worst thing to happen,” I whispered back, He jerked and gave me a startled look. “I’ll explain later.”
I looked over at Outlaw, who seemed to be deep in thought—probably thinking how he would get out of being a dad. “I don’t want that picture shown to the others. You can tell them what was on it, but I don’t want them or anyone else to see it.”
“I won’t show it to anyone else, Tarin,” Outlaw said. He came over to me and Dad. I slid out of Dad’s arms and headed to the door.
“I’m going to go to the house. I have some things to do.” I slipped out of the room before he could stop me. First, I was going to take the pregnancy test. Second, I was going to decide what to do next. That depended on the results of the test. My tentative excitement from earlier today was gone, and all I felt was sadness and anger.
Outlaw:
I watched Tarin leave my room. Something was bothering her and it was more than that damn picture. As soon as we were done with this meeting, I was going to find out. While Bull got everyone rounded up, I took the disk and put it in my safe. I’d work on it later. As I walked down the hall to church, I thought of the reason Tarin had gone into town. She wanted to buy a pregnancy test.
Jesus, could it be possible? Was she really pregnant? I was still stunned at the idea. I never thought a thing about her not getting her birth control pills during her hospital stay, or about needing to use condoms after she got home for a while until they kicked back in. Hell, what did I know about how they worked?
I was trying not to get excited. If she wasn’t, I didn’t want to be more disappointed than I already would be. So, I was trying not to react and be happy about it. If she turned out to be, I’d be shouting that from the damn rooftops. I’d always wanted kids, though the idea scared me.
I put that thought away as I entered church and sat down to get down to business. Bull yelled for everyone to quiet down. “Okay, shut your faces. We have a little issue, as you know. We had to go into town to get Tarin. Outlaw, I'll let you explain.”
“Tarin ran to town to the drugstore. When she came out, she found a note on her windshield.” I passed the note to Joker. He read it and then swore before passing it to the next guy. Once they all had a chance to read it, I told them the rest. “Taped to the note was a small SD card. We brought it back here and watched it.”
“What was on it? We can see you don’t want to say,” Demon said.
“It was a photo of her stepdad, Mercer. He was sitting on the edge of a little girl’s bed with his hand under her nightgown. She was crying, and he was smiling. The girl was Tarin.” I wanted to vomit just saying it. The words made me feel dirty.
“Motherfucker! Son of a bitch! Cocksucker!” rang out from my brothers. They all got restless and were scowling.
Bull banged on the table to get them to settle. “I know we all fucking hate it but listen to Outlaw,” he told them. They settled down.
“I’m going to analyze the disk to see if I can find anything from it, like erased data that might tell us who sent it. I’ll analyze the note as well. It’s not likely that it will, but I have to try. That means I’ll be digging into Mercer more. Someone out there knew his secret. He shared that photo with him or her and most likely more.”
“How’s Tarin handling this?” Joker asked. He didn’t have his usual grin on his face.
“About as well as you’d expect. She’s afraid of how many more there are and how many people have them. She’s feeling dirty again. She didn’t even want me to hug her. She thought with him dead, he was out of her life, but this happened. She was feeling so much better after talking to all the ladies and now this happens.”
“You do what you have to and we’ll keep an eye on her. Let her know she can’t leave on her own anymore. I’ll call Terror and ask if Smoke and Everly can help. There has to be a way to catch whoever did this,” Bull growled.
“Thanks, Bull. I’ll take all the help I can get. I’m going to pull up footage from the cameras around the drugstore and see if by chance I can get a look at who put that on her car. Bear, I want to ask Petrillo to go back to Atlanta and do more on-the-ground investigating. He might find someone who was Mercer’s special friend. Someone he felt safe sharing those photos with. I would say it had to be another child molester like him. Mutual destruction. If he or she told on him, he’d tell on them. That kind of thing.”
“Do it. If that’s it for now, I think you need to get back to her. She didn’t look good when she left and you have something else to discuss.” Bear raised his eyebrows. I knew he meant the possibility of a baby. Again, I stomped down on the excitement.