Page 94 of Knotted their Beauty

I made sure Tiffany couldn’t find us, that she had no clue where we were for years, and I fucked up the second I let those vultures get my face on camera.

That’s on me and this new, terrible compulsion I’ve developed. The one that’s growing at a rate that has me more concerned about my sanity than I’ve ever been.

The urge to raid the FBI database and find all of the perverted bastards, to roam the streets hunting for the scourge of society, to eliminate everyone who’s ever considered harming a child is getting out of hand. It’s sitting right under the surface, watching and waiting for an opportunity to claw its way out. And while I’ve only entertained it twice, I want more.

I want so much more, and that’s where I got fucking careless with the most precious thing in my life; I jeopardized my daughter because I’m spiraling out of control.

“You have to see this,” Chandler says as she rushes into the office with her laptop. “I was trying to get a hold of Butler and when I couldn’t…” Her words trail off and she shrugs before setting her computer down and turning it toward me.

When she couldn’t get a hold of him, she went digging.

Marley is a great person, one of the best people I know, and she’s a top notch CSI with an affinity for profiling. That said, she’s not above using her skills and talents to track someone down, suspect or not, and Butler is someone she’s had to cyber stalk more than once.

Which means, if she found something worth running in here to share after snooping on him a few times over the years, it’s not going to be good.

I start scrolling through his call logs, seeing a familiar number come up three times in the last twenty-four-hours, then click on the corresponding location tags.

With a frown, my eyes shift from Chandler’s screen to mine, noting the similarities there before clicking a few more things that have my blood pressure rising.

I look up at Marley and she nods, “He’s been talking to her. Not very many times. Two minute conversations and a couple of texts, but he’s been communicating with Tiffany.”

“Can you recover the texts?” I ask through clenched teeth.

“I’m working on it, but that’s not all.”

My heart starts slamming against my ribs as I go back to her homepage, minimizing the open tabs until I’m staring at a screenshot of a file folder labeled toys.

“Do I want to know what’s in that folder?”

Chandler purses her lips and narrows her eyes as Walker joins me on this side of the desk, leaning over my shoulder as she responds. “No, but you need to see. Butler had all of that hidden in a secondary hard drive, encrypted in code so no one would know what he had on here. He’s a bigger problem than we imagined.”

Sure as shit, Marley is not wrong.

There are several more folders inside the main one, each labeled with a number and what could be a name or at the very least, a code word, and as I continue scrolling through the slideshow, I start seeing fucking red with each image that passes in front of me.

The first set is all dirt he has on multiple high ranking members of the FBI, CIA, and various other branches of the government, and he even included their email and text exchanges as well as copies of any paper trail there was originally.

The next shots are of bank statements for offshore accounts, highlighting massive wire deposits along with the transaction ID and some of the codes from the earlier shot I’m sure Butler used to keep track of who it came from.

My eyes find Marley’s again over the top of the screen. “He’s so goddamn dirty industrial bleach wouldn’t make a dent, but I don’t see⁠—”

“Keep going,” she says, her voice laced with a tone I’m not sure I’ve ever heard before; one dripping in disgust and an anger so hot she’s turning red.

I do as she says, sliding my finger over the mousepad to bring up another row of numbered and labeled folders, but these look more like dates and what could be last names.

My pulse pounds in my ears, my muscles go rigid, and I clench my jaw so hard my molars scrape against each other as the image of a little girl fills the screen.

Between five and seven years old, dirty blonde pigtails, big blue eyes.

Tear stains on her cheeks, bruises on her wrists, and she’s not wearing anything except a soiled pair of underwear.

I shoot up from my desk and fly out the door, running through the station as fast as I can until I’m jumping into my SUV, starting it up then tearing out of the parking lot like a bat out of hell.

I don’t know where I’m going, but I know Chandler and Walker will make sure I have a location before I’m even five minutes down the road, and once I do, I know they’ll make sure I’m the only one who has it until I say otherwise.

And I’m not going to say shit until there’s nothing left of Craig Butler except a pool of blood no one will ever be able to identify.

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