Shatter (Unbreakable Bonds 2)

“I haven’t called it in yet, asshole,” he hissed as he pulled out his gun. “And if anyone is in this house, your fancy karate moves just alerted them to our presence. Get behind me, Transporter.”

Snow humored him, glad he’d grabbed Rowe’s gun from where he’d stowed it in his glove compartment. He scanned the shadowed living room as they moved slowly through it, then picked up a fireplace poker. Just for show with the cop. Hollis, who had been in the process of checking a coat closet, scowled at him and shook his head. Snow didn’t give a shit that he had ignored the no touching rule.

“Wait here,” Hollis murmured before he moved to the stairs.

Snow decided to give him a little time to look around up there. In the meantime, he glanced around the room, noticing the bags with fast food emblems, the plastic trays of dried leftovers. If Gratton was here, he’d been staying awhile. And if that odor coming from the tool shed was the body of the owner, Snow was surprised he hadn’t been found out already. The cold temperatures helped to slow decomposition, but not enough.

There were pictures on the coffee table, so he pulled out his pen light and aimed it toward them. His stomach lurched when he spotted his face. He walked closer, seeing that Gratton had been following him. There were images of him at work, at home…and Jude’s. That last had him wanting to race back to the paramedic’s right then to make sure he was okay.

“Frost?” Hollis yelled down the stairs. “He’s gone, but you need to come up here. And don’t touch anything!”

Snow quickly climbed the stairs and spotted Hollis in a room at the end of the hallway. And even in the low light, he could see the pasty cast to his face. When he stepped into the room, he understood why. More pictures covered the walls and they were not only images of Snow and his friends. There were worse ones—Gratton’s sick fascination with young men on blatant display.

Hollis stood in front of them, his back ramrod straight, wide shoulders stiff. “I know some of these faces,” he murmured, his voice sounding rusty like he’d swallowed nails. “Missing kids from years ago. They’ve been circulating some of these images since before I moved to Cincinnati.” He glared at Snow. “You shouldn’t fucking be here.” He waved his hand. “This one room is going to answer a lot of questions.” He stopped on the next wall, made a strangled noise. “Oh fuck.”

This wall mostly held images of him and his friends. Lucas and Andrei in a coffee shop down the street from Lucas’s office. Rowe leaving the gym, walking his dogs. And Snow was in a lot of the photos—most of them. Gratton had even somehow watched him in the ER.

“I’m surprised Ian isn’t in these—” Hollis started cursing.

Snow saw why instantly. Ian had his own section. The scariest were ones taken of inside his bedroom. There was even one of his nurse helping him into bed. Hollis stalked over to the tripod where Gratton had mounted his camera and looked through the window in front of it. Snow could see from where he stood that the top of Ian’s condo was perfectly visible over the roofs of the places in between. Snow looked back at the images, his heart in his throat when he saw there were ones from years ago when Ian had been a skinny, sweet eighteen-year-old and still with Boris Jagger. Snow reached for the first one.

“Stop,” Hollis hissed, striding back to him. “Really Snow, you can’t touch anything. Nobody can know you were here.” He covered his mouth when his gaze lit on the pictures of Ian as a teenager.

“I can’t leave some of these. And he would hate that you’re seeing them.”

Hollis briefly closed his eyes and when he opened them, fury and a pain that stunned Snow filled them. When the cop nodded and pulled on a pair of gloves, Snow understood that maybe, just maybe, this man could be exactly what Ian needed.

If he could get past what he was seeing.

Hollis carefully stripped one of the old pictures off the wall. It was a bad one—one that Gratton must have taken in the hotel room that day before Snow had tracked him down. The blood-splattered walls of his memory weren’t there because he hadn’t yet taken the baseball bat to the man, but it was obvious Ian was not there of his own volition. His thin form slack, hands tied behind his back.

Remembered rage filled Snow. “I should have killed him,” he whispered. “These can’t be evidence, Banner. It would kill Ian.”

Hollis growled, nodded, and began tearing down the images. The fury and disgust rolling off him made Snow feel nauseated and so, so bad for Ian. This would probably kill any chance here and it had grown increasingly obvious that his shy, young friend had been interested in this man. And the last few days had proved to Snow that he’d been wrong to warn Banner off. Just seeing the pain on his face—when he hadn’t even taken Ian out—told him a lot about his heart.