“I’ve seen you eat chicken bones.”
Wren shrugged. “I’m just asking.” He forked salad into his mouth and chewed as he waved at the rest of the bed with the fork. “I went through Earl’s stuff and pulled out what you asked for. I don’t know what good it’ll do you.”
“Me neither,” Ledger said.
But at least it would give him something to do other than stare at Wren.
Most of the clutter laid out on the bed was paper. Receipts, letters tied together with bits of twine or paper clips, newspaper clippings, the oddly prosaic run of paid utility bills.
“I guess even the devil has to keep the lights on,” Ledger said absently as he flicked through them.
Wren tucked the salad into his cheek and pointed with his fork. “The boss used to read a lot. He tried TV, but it was a coin flip whether he could follow that or not. Books, he liked. Non-fiction mostly, but he had some really old Westerns and sci-fi that he liked too. He was dying, but it’s only in the last few years that he got desperate.”
Ledger found a stack of old photographs and started to shuffle through them. They seemed random: badly framed pictures of a busy street or a school or a… woman walking a dog, the lead around her wrist.
“Does he kill them?” Ledger asked. He showed Wren the photo.
“No,” Wren lifted more walnut and cheese to his mouth as he shrugged one shoulder. “They just died. Somehow. Are you going to eat your salad?”
Ledger glanced down at the box still in the bag. He was about to offer it to Wren when his stomach rumbled and clenched. Most of his calories over the last couple of days had been coffee and whatever he’d grabbed from the vending machine. Maybe actual food was in order.
“Yeah,” Ledger said. He pulled the box out and opened it one-handed while spreading the photos on the bed. Set against the backdrop of the crumpled white sheet, Ledger could pick out the pattern.
A photo of a lanky college student on a mountain bike, red hair cropped short and sun-bleached to ginger at the ends, had been taken at the lake. It was a few miles away from Bell’s cabin, near the old brick foundations that were all that was left of the quarry offices.
He recognized the Kroger over in Molly Hill, about forty minutes north, by the masthead visible in the newspaper vending machine parked next to the display of watermelons. There were three people in the shot, but the middle-aged man with a comb-over in the center of the frame was probably the one Earl was interested in.
Earl didn’t have a good eye.
An old woman with a walker having a beer at the Jawbone.
The girl walking her dog in front of the firehouse. The dog probably still missed its owner.
Ledger stared at the photo for a moment, then shook off the masochistic pinch of guilt. The dead girl could have been a dog walker, or a dog thief, for all he knew. Either way, she was dead. The dog had reason to miss her; a funeral wouldn’t help much.
He sorted through the photos. Any taken in Sutton or nearby went in one pile. The ones that he didn’t recognize went in another. Halfway through the sorting process, Wren reached over the top of the takeout balanced on Ledger’s knee and grabbed a chunk of cheese.
“Do you have to?” Ledger asked.
Wren tossed the cube of cheese into his mouth and smirked as he chewed.
“I’m hungry,” he said. “And apparently, ripped doesn’t do it for you, so why worry about my weight?”
Ledger looked up from the photos and let his gaze linger appreciatively on the hard, lean lines of Wren’s body. Heavy, warm lust tugged at his balls with a familiar ache.
“I appreciate the effort,” he said. “But I’ve not got long until I get my bones pulled out my ass, so I’m trying to focus.”
Wren relaxed back into the pillows and folded his arm behind his head. His muscles shifted under tanned skin, pulling long and tight from his elbow to his hip.
“Am I making it hard?” he asked.
CHAPTER16
LEDGER DIDN’T MEANto look down. He just did. The towel had given up on staying knotted together as a bad job. It was draped loosely over Wren’s groin, the thickness of his half-hard cock outlined under the threadbare cotton.
The blood left Ledger’s head like it was rush hour. His cock pressed insistently against the zipper of his chinos, and he shifted uncomfortably to take the pressure off it.
“Kind of,” he admitted as he leaned over to set the takeout box on the bedside table.
