Well, this isn’t good.
This is really fucking bad.
Everyone is pulling their phones out, having received the same message from an unknown number. How the hell are we getting out of this one? Of course Whitaker would send this; he wants to punish Jesse. He wants to alienate him from the rest of us. He wants him to have nothing. And then he wants to break him.
Just as my finger is hovering over the picture, a second one comes through. I have to wipe the snow off my phone to see it.
I click it and stare at the photograph of a younger woman standing over a dead body, gun in hand.
“Is that a photograph of Chief Taylor shooting someone?” Chris asks.
Michaels looks panicked as he pulls out his phone to see what’s going on. “Just… we don’t know what these are. They’re likely being sent to cause unrest among us.”
“Please don’t tell me that you thought these shitty photoshopped pictures are real,” Liam scoffs. “I can see the line where Jesse’s head was added on.”
“Oh, you’re right,” Chris says, even though I know the picture is real. Who knows what Chris thinks he’s seeing. Or is it that Liam is always right, so people just agree with him even when he’s wrong?
“Did the killer really think this would work?” Donna asks. “Waste of fucking time.”
Jesse is standing there in the middle of it all, stone still. I don’t think he even remembers how to breathe until Matthew’s smack on his back reanimates him. Jesse jerks back to life and lets out a soft laugh. “For a moment there, I thought maybe I really did kill someone and didn’t remember it.”
“Your little body killing someone? They’d just squish you like a bug,” Liam says.
“I’m not little,” he snaps.
Matthew nods. “I did see him struggle to kill a bug the other day.”
“I wasn’t killing it, I was relocating it!”
“Look, if I run the first photo through Google’s image search, it looks like the real image came from what looks like a bad movie poster,” Chris says, flashing it at me since I’m closest. In this version, it’s a different person stabbing the victim, and it appears to be a poster promoting some indie movie or something.
“What was he hoping to accomplish with this?” I ask. “Did he really think that we wouldn’t check images?”
I slowly walk over to Liam, who is busy following the marks of whatever was used to hide the footprints that’d been made in the snow.
“Liam?”
“Yes, my dearest and sweetest love of all time,” he says.
“How the fuck did you do that?” I whisper now that we’re alone.
He beams at me before trailing a finger over my cheek. “Well… let’s hope Matthew knows how to keep his mouth shut because I couldn’t have done it myself. My skills with tech like that are abysmal. At first, I just had him make the image of Chief Taylor. I told him that the killer was trying to frame Jesse by sending him these fake photographs of him being involved in murders, and that if we wanted to keep Jesse out of it, we needed to make the fake photos seem useless.
“The plan was to wait until Whitaker dropped the image, and then I would send out Taylor’s image right after. But I realized that if anyone did an image lookup, they’d immediately find the source for Taylor’s picture, but no one would find the source for Jesse’s. So… I told Matthew that we needed to make a source for it. That way if someone tried using this tampered photograph of Jesse to get him in trouble, they wouldn’t be able to because the original would be easily found online. Matthew did the rest. I actually told him he did a good job, Gabriel. When I saw the work on the website, the way he made it look older and like it’d been up for years… I was impressed. Can you believe that? Crazy what love can do to a man. But you saw how quickly people went from suspicious to thinking it was ridiculous just because there was a second photograph sent.”
“I did. Do you think Matthew knows it’s real?” I ask.
“Matthew always wants to see the best in someone. I think he’s not going to let himself believe that it’s real because he sees the best in Jesse.”
He glances back at where Matthew is latched on to Jesse, and then turns to me, expression a bit dark. “I’m not fond of this many people knowing this many secrets. It’s gone too far.”
“Liam, we both know that you’ve hidden your involvement in any of this with finesse. Even if they both blurted out you were involved, no one is going to find proof of it.”
“You’re quite correct. I will make sure no one is aware that we had any involvement in this at all,” Liam says as we reach the ice.
“Do wewantto go out there?” I ask while the snow whips around, picked up by the wind that’s not doing much to help this blizzard.
“I’m going to pretend I found the ring out there, but I need to at least go out a bit to ‘find it’ so we don’t raise suspicion if anyone wants to see where it was. I thought leaving it on his body would look too staged.”
