deep breathing exercises, I felt pride well deep inside me. “Here’s my thought. According to the love of my life, Winslow and Beverly always make a huge deal out of the people they’ve helped with their foundation. A huge slideshow of self-congratulations and humble bragging.”
Tali smiled. “You want to put the victims up there. Force them to see their faces again.”
I nodded. “I want to not only put their faces up there, I want one of the women gathered here to read their names. Their birthdate, their death date. I want Jessa—if you’re up to it—to read aloud the cause of death. I want to shove it down these people’s throats that we see them for the monsters they are. That we have unmasked them. Spotlighted the blood on their hands.”
I let that sink in.
Nik licked her lips. “I am more than willing to help with the background stuff. But you know I’d butcher it if I had to get up in front of a huge group of people.” She looked at me, stark fear in her eyes.
Willow came to the rescue. She leaned forward so she could look Nik in the face. “I’ll read their names. I saw their faces. Most of them anyway. I’ll read their names, that I can give them back. Give back what my creation donors stole from them.”
“I’ll read their dates,” Tali offered.
I smiled, nodded. “Perfect. The rest of the show goes to Nik.” I waved the attention to her.
She glared at me. “At least we’re all family, right?” Her chuckle was a little nervous. “Let me get my computer.” She popped up from her seat and ran across the room to her gear bag. She was back and had it hooked to my TV with a whole presentation set up. She dimmed the lights and I saw her shoulders settle in the light of her laptop screen.
“Bossman had me looking into the files that Ethan kept. Yes, I copied his drives as I was sending them to the DA’s office. Everyone keep your mouth shut about it.”
I couldn’t be certain since the lights were low, but I was pretty sure Nik glared at each of us. Of the two, I was much more terrified of Momma.
“Go on, cricket. You’re safe with us,” Turo called softly in the dim lighting.
“Right. Within the Errington drives, I found out that the bad doctor was doing extensive dissection and DNA typing with his subjects. From what Willow has told us, I have no idea why. That’s for the medical brains to figure out. What I do know is that he did most of the work for us. He pinpointed the regions each of his subjects came from. He did full DNA assays on them as well.”
I bit my tongue to keep from asking Jessa why the psychopath had done such a thing. Since the monster wasn’t alive anymore, it would all be speculation anyways. We didn’t have time for thought experiments.
“So Ethan gave us his victims’ names,” Willow said. She made it a statement instead of a question.
“Yes. He even went one step further. He was either a software genius on the side or he paid out the waz for it, but he was able to send out a bot into the first email he responded to back to de Silva. That bot replicated in the host server. Every time she sent an email that contained a series of keywords, Errington would get a copy of it.”
My eyes widened. I hadn’t known that. Then again, I usually asked Nik to bottomline it for me. My tech skills were good, but hers were in the stratosphere.
“So, not only did Ethan give us his victims’ names, he gave us all potential victims in de Silva’s organization?” Willow asked. Her voice was shaky.
I reached out, grabbed her hand. It was trembling. I pulled her into my lap, curled around her.
Nik hit a button on her computer. A solid click that sounded somehow triumphant. A world map showed. Pinpricks of light dotted the surface. The only place without a dot was the landmass of Antarctica. Most of the dots were in the Eastern Bloc countries, the US, Mexico, and large portions of Asian countries.
“Clearly we have an epidemic on our hands. We also have two sociopaths who were trying to somehow outsmart each other and both ended up dead,” Nik said. “And we have one survivor who bested both of them.”
Willow shrank against my chest, shook her head.
“Can we link Winslow