Shit. Her soldier voice. She’d left the military twenty years ago, but the intensity of her soldier voice hadn’t diminished. His body tried to comply with her order, but his stomach protested. ‘Fucking hell, Mom.’
She gasped. ‘Jeffy! Language.’
‘Mom!’ he gasped back. ‘Trash can. Please.’
With an impatient, angry sigh she dumped the contents of his trash can on his desk, then handed him the empty bin. ‘You deserve to be sick. How could you, Jeff? How could you?’
He blinked, trying to focus through the haze. ‘Huh? How could I what?’
‘Get drunk? Disappear for days without a word?’ She shoved her phone in his face and he recoiled, all the letters out of focus. ‘Write this . . . trash?’
‘What?’ he asked dumbly. ‘What is it? ’Cause I can’t see.’
‘Serves you right. Your poor father’s turning in his grave. I am so ashamed of you, I could cry.’
‘Join the club,’ he muttered, but knew it had to be bad. She never brought up his dead father unless it was. His father had died of cancer when Jeff was eight years old, but his mother maintained what was basically a shrine to him in the spare bedroom. ‘What time is it?’
‘One a.m.’
He stared at her. ‘What? Why are you even awake at one a.m.?’
‘Why am I awake? Why do you smell like a brewery?’
‘Distillery,’ he corrected absently. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘This.’ She jabbed her finger at the phone screen. ‘This piece of trash that is so far beneath you that I . . .’ Her voice broke on a genuine sob. ‘I don’t even know what to say.’
That got his attention. His mom being speechless didn’t happen often. Her crying was even rarer.
He squinted at the phone screen. ‘Let me see it. Can you maybe . . . I don’t know. Make me some coffee?’
She tossed the phone in his lap, making him wince again. ‘Shi— oot, Mom. Be careful.’
‘Be careful, he says. Make me coffee, he says. I should turn you over my knee, is what I should do,’ she grumbled. ‘You want to be so goddamn independent, get your own coffee.’
He blinked a few times, grateful when her phone screen came into focus. It was his story on Mercy Callahan. ‘What’s wrong with it?’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ she whispered, tears still tracking down her face. ‘You admit that you wrote that?’
‘Yeah, of course,’ he said, scrolling through the article. ‘It’s not my best work, I admit, but—’ He broke off, staring in horror. There were quotes that he’d deleted and – ‘Oh my God.’ It was the video. The video. The one he’d decided not to send to his editor the night before. ‘Oh no. Oh no, oh no, oh no.’
His mother came back to the bed, lowering herself to perch on the edge. ‘You . . . didn’t write that, then?’ Her relief was evident.
His gaze flew up to hers. ‘I did, but I took a lot of it out before I sent it in. I never sent this video to the Gabber. Never, Mom. I never even uploaded it to the Gabber server. I never copied it to my own laptop. It was on a thumb drive and I viewed the video from that.’
She closed her eyes, exhaling slowly. ‘Thank the good Lord for that, at least.’
He scrolled further, his stomach hurting more with each word he read. ‘I didn’t write this part either, Mom. I swear it. I took out the reference to this Prescott guy because he was a sleazebag.’
Just like my editor.
Oh my God. How had Nolan gotten this? ‘I don’t know how this happened.’
‘Well, you’d better figure it out quickly because it’s had over a million views since it was put up.’
Jeff backed out of the article to see the time stamp. ‘It was posted last night at eight p.m. I sent in my edited version at seven.’
‘Then drank yourself stupid?’
‘Yeah. Because . . .’
‘Because?’ she prompted. At least she was no longer yelling.
‘Because . . . reasons.’
She looked away, her lips still trembling. ‘Grow up, Jeff. You posted a video of a woman being assaulted. And you make it all better by getting drunk.’
‘No, Mom. Yes, I’m drunk. No, I didn’t post that video. I did not.’
‘Then how is it under your name?’
‘I don’t know. Let me think.’
She wiped her face with her fingertips. ‘Where did you get the video?’ she asked, a little more calmly.
‘From this real douchebag in New Orleans named Stan Prescott. He sold me the thumb drive.’
‘Wait,’ she interrupted. ‘You were in New Orleans? Are you serious? How the hell did you get to New Orleans? You are sixteen years old. You don’t even have a car.’
‘I flew.’ He dug his knuckles into his temples. ‘You can yell at me about that later.’
‘Trust me, I will.’ She drew a deep breath and let it out. ‘So, back to the video.’
‘Fine. I was doing an article on one of the women who escaped that serial killer back in February. Mercy Callahan. She lives in New Orleans. One of her college friends there pointed me to this guy. Said he had some information.’
‘This is not “information,” Jeff.’ She crooked her fingers in air quotes. ‘This is evidence of a criminal act.’
‘What? How?’
‘He drugged her, Jeff. He drugged her, then recorded her . . .’ She pinched her lips. ‘He tried to rape her.’
Oh God. ‘I didn’t know that, Mom. I didn’t watch it all. I couldn’t. How . . .’ He shook his head, trying to think, for God’s sake. And then he knew. ‘Oh. The payment.’
‘What payment?’
‘The guy said he had good dirt, but it was going to cost, you know? I told Nolan and he approved the payment.’
‘Nolan is your boss?’
‘My editor, yes.’ Jeff rubbed his aching forehead. ‘When I talked to him last night, I told him that I was deleting something I wasn’t comfortable with and he said to leave it in, that he’d delete it. I knew better than that, but I wasn’t expecting him to contact the guy who gave me the video.’ The guy who’d drugged and sexually assaulted a college girl. ‘He had Prescott’s name for the payment and he must have called him. Oh my God, this is awful.’ He looked up to find his mother still crying. ‘What am I going to do about this, Mom?’