Breaker's Reef (25 page)

“Marcus Gibson is free,” Sheila cried. “What if he sensed her getting closer and came after her?”

Cade looked as if he’d considered that possibility already. “He’s been under surveillance, Sheila. He couldn’t have done anything like that without being spotted.”

“You don’t know him,” she said. “He’s slippery. If anyone could slip out of surveillance, he could!”

“Well, if he has, we’ll find out tonight. You can mark my word.”

W
hen Cade left Hanover House, he called Yeager at the GBI office and told him Sadie Caruso was missing.

“She has a cell phone with her,” Cade said. “I need you to trace the Global Positioning chip in her phone and see if you can locate her.”

Yeager got back to him in minutes with the exact coordinates of her phone. It was in a seedy area in Savannah, not a safe place for a teenage girl to be. “I’ve sent some men over there. Hold tight, and I’ll get back to you.”

It was nearing midnight. What could Sadie possibly be doing in that part of town? Had she been taken there against her will? He turned his car around and headed there. If they found her, he wanted to be the one to bring her home.

His phone rang when he was halfway there.

“Bad news, Cade.”

Cade’s heart sank. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it. “What, Yeager?”

“They found Sadie’s purse with her cell phone in it, but it was in the backseat of an old Volvo at a bar called Rover’s. Car was abandoned. No identification. When we ran the tag, we saw that the car was reported stolen last month.”

“Are they interviewing the people in the bar?”

“As we speak. But it’s a popular place, and there are a lot of people to question. They’re also running prints. Meanwhile, it looks like we’ve got another missing girl. Maybe Sadie’s with her sister.”

Cade slammed his hand against the steering wheel. Why hadn’t he gone to the Flagstaff himself when he heard from her today? Sheila was right. He should have known Sadie was stubborn enough to stay there until she got what she wanted.

What had she told him? His mind raced back through their conversation. She’d learned that Gibson had been seen hanging around at the Flagstaff.

His jaw popped as he ground his teeth together and headed to the DA’s house. He would wake him up and convince him to issue another search warrant for Gibson’s house. The DA gave him one without a fight.

Cade found the GBI agent, who had Gibson under surveillance, sitting in his dark car on the street in front of Gibson’s house, his windows rolled down. He’d already been warned that Cade was coming and gave him a quick rundown on Gibson’s activities throughout the day. The man hadn’t left home at all since yesterday. He hadn’t so much as poked his head out the door, and the “lifeguard” who’d been posted on the beach said he hadn’t come out the back way, either.

Cade knew better than to rest on that. Gibson was sneaky, and his imagination might prove useful as he tried to find ways to evade the authorities. It was possible he’d gotten out of the house without their notice.

Armed with the search warrant, Cade led the way as they went to Gibson’s door. Scott Crown, Alex Johnson, and Joe McCormick scattered out around the house, while the GBI agent came with him.

Cade knocked on the front. “Open up, Gibson! Police!”

He heard footsteps through the house, the bolt being unlocked. The porch light came on, and Gibson stuck his head out, squinting as if he’d been snatched from sleep. “You could have rung the bell, gentlemen. Less dramatic, I realize, but certainly as effective.”

The man’s smugness made Cade want to spit. “We have a warrant to search your house again, Gibson.”

“For what?”

“For Sadie Caruso, another teenage girl who’s come up missing.”

“And I’m supposed to know where she is? Tell me, gentlemen, how do you suppose I abducted a girl when I’ve had police guarding my house day and night?”

Cade went in and looked around. The place was still a chaos of clutter. Joe headed through the house, searching for any sign of Sadie.

“You’re not going to find anything.” Gibson watched them go from room to room. “I haven’t been out of the house. I’ve written fifty pages longhand over the last twenty-four hours. Here it is.” He brandished the yellow legal pads with his scrawl all over them. “You’re welcome to read it. And surely you have my phones tapped. You must know I haven’t even made a phone call in the last day. I’m clearly being set up for this. Chief Cade, you must see that, especially now, since you were set up too.”

Cade turned back to him, wondering what he knew about that. “How do you know I was set up?”

“I heard them discussing it in your police station. It isn’t difficult to eavesdrop through those walls.” Gibson shook his head. “I’m telling you, we’re both being played. In fact, I thought of proof—something that might help you find the real killer if you’ll just listen. But I’ll need my computer to show you.”

Cade shot him a disbelieving look. “I can’t give your computer back to you. The state has it as evidence.”

“Yes, of course they do. They took it because of some incriminating file in which they claim that I described the last murder in
my work in progress. However, I maintain that I did not write that scene. Someone else either came in here and altered my work, or they hacked into my computer and did it. And if it was the latter, I think I can prove it.”

“We’re not going to let you alter the evidence, Gibson, so you can let go of that idea right now.”

Gibson’s expression revealed his rising agitation. “Chief Cade, there’s a feature on Microsoft Word called ‘Track Changes.’ Writers and editors use it all the time, so that we can see the changes the editors make on our work. After the editor sends me my edits, I’m able to see what was altered. When that feature is turned on, it records every change that’s made. I had that feature turned on, so it might hold a clue as to who got into my work and changed it.”

“How could it show that?”

“When it’s on, it makes my work come out in blue. My editor’s changes are in red. I can see every single change that’s made in a document. And in case I ever wonder which editor did what, I can click on the change and see whose initials are beside it.”

Cade laughed. “I doubt seriously if there was a hacker that he would have signed his initials on his work.”

“He might not have realized he did it. When you get a new computer, one of the first things you do to set it up is to give it profile information about yourself. One of the things you give it is your initials. The computer provides that in Track Changes. I don’t have to tell it it’s me, it just knows because I’m on my computer.”

“So if, by some wild stretch of the imagination, you were telling us the truth, and someone else inserted that stuff into your book, how do you know they didn’t break in and use your own computer to do it?”

“That’s possible. And if that’s what happened, then it would seem to be my work, with my initials. It would be more difficult to prove, other than the fact that it’s so obviously not my style. The grammar was terrible, the punctuation was awful … I would never have produced anything that poor.”

“You told us your first drafts were terrible. You said that you burn them.”

“I do, but they’re not
that
bad! Even my
worst
effort is better than that.” He thrust the legal pad back at Cade. “Read that. It’s not what I’d consider publishable, but for heaven’s sake, it’s better than the average drivel. The person who inserted that scene didn’t know how to construct a simple sentence. I’m a university English professor, for heaven’s sake.”

Cade realized that made sense. He’d wondered why a professor of his magnitude would have written something so amateurish.

“You see, it would have been so easy to hack into my wireless computer. All someone would have to do is park outside my house with their own wireless computer, and they would be on my server. I have file sharing enabled, so they could tap into my files and change them. My colleagues have warned me about this for years, but I never got a firewall, never took any measures to protect myself. I thought I lived a secluded enough life that no one would do such a thing. But clearly, this is a game, and whoever the killer is, he wants me to take the fall. And perhaps he’s trying to take you down as well, Chief Cade.”

Cade thought about that shoe in his truck. There obviously was someone out there trying to throw the police off. But how did he know it wasn’t Gibson? The evidence was too strong.

Gibson’s face seemed less preoccupied and more intense than it had been since Cade met him. “All I’m asking is that you examine the evidence you have. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation must have a computer person on staff, someone who knows what he’s doing. It might be a way to identify the killer.”

Joe came back, shaking his head. Cade and the GBI agent stepped to the side with him. “Nothing,” Joe said.

Cade might have known. He looked at the agent. “Did you check on phone calls?”

“Sure did. He was telling the truth. No calls in the last twenty-four hours, and my men are certain that he never left the house.”

“The DA’s going to pull the plug. If he’s got a confirmed alibi, then we don’t have probable cause.”

McCormick looked at Cade. “Maybe we are barking up the wrong tree.”

“But he’s been living in the woods. He wrote the scene …” Cade glanced back at Gibson, who was sweating profusely, his gray, Einstein hair looking as if he’d come out of a wind tunnel. Maybe … just maybe, the man was telling the truth.

“All right, let’s go check out his computer story, see if it turns up anything.”

McCormick nodded.

Cade drew in a deep breath and walked back over to Gibson. “We’re going to be watching you, and you won’t make a move that we don’t see. Got it?”

“I’m being set up, Chief Cade, just as you were when you found the body in the grotto.”

“Why would someone set both of us up? That doesn’t even make sense. It makes a lot more sense that one of us is guilty and is trying to pin it on the other.”

“But I don’t believe you’re guilty, Chief Cade.”

Cade almost laughed. “I wasn’t the one of us I was talking about, Gibson. But thanks a lot for that vote of confidence.”

“Perhaps your perpetrator has a God complex. Just wants to have power over two powerful men.” Gibson didn’t look all that powerful, sitting there with that demented hairdo. “Maybe he wanted to hedge all his bets. Make sure that one of us took the fall in case it wouldn’t stick on the other one. Or maybe it’s all part of some game.”

As Cade left Gibson’s house, he drove to the GBI office. He’d get them to examine the computer file and see if any of what Gibson had told him was true. As eccentric as the man seemed, he did make sense.

But if Gibson didn’t have Sadie, who did?

I
t finally occurred to Sheila to look in Sadie’s room. Maybe she would find a note, if she looked hard enough. Maybe something Sadie had jotted on a piece of paper would tell her that she hadn’t done something stupid.

She stepped into her daughter’s room. It was clean, as Sadie often kept it. That was her way of keeping some order in her life when her family was in turmoil and everything else was out of control.

But on her made-up bed, Sheila saw the pages of Amelia’s journal. Sheila had finished reading what she’d had, but hadn’t realized Sadie had more. She picked up the pages and started to read.

She dropped the page as if it had burned her.
“Morgan!”

Morgan came running up the stairs, Jonathan behind her. “What is it?”

Sheila thrust the page at them, and Morgan read. “Oh, no wonder she went there!”

“I’m going there now!” Sheila pushed past her and started for the stairs.

“No, Sheila, you can’t. Please!”

Sheila pulled away from Morgan’s grasp. “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault! I have to go!”

“How is it your fault?” Morgan demanded.

“If it hadn’t been for my actions, Amelia wouldn’t have come looking for me and she wouldn’t have gotten kidnapped. Then Sadie wouldn’t have gone looking for
her.
”

Jonathan tried to block her. “Sheila, I need you to calm down and just listen to me. If you go to the Flagstaff, something could happen to you, and then you’d be of no help at all to Sadie or Amelia.”

“I should have gone there sooner. It should have been me who found that journal. Me who went out to that motel room and started asking questions. Why does it have to be my children?”

“Because it just was.”

She pushed past him and started down the stairs. “Well, it’s not too late. I’m going to that motel, and I’m going to find my daughters.”

Morgan followed. “Sheila, please don’t go!”

“I
have
to. I’m not going to sit here wallowing in self-pity. I’m going to take action. I’ll find my daughters. And if they’re still alive, I’m going to get them back.”

Morgan followed her down and into the kitchen where the car keys were hung. “Sheila, I want you to stay here.”

“I need to take the car, Jonathan. Please, I need your permission.”

“No, you don’t have my permission! You can’t go. I won’t let you.”

“Then I’ll take it against your will!
My children’s lives are at stake.
Don’t you understand?” She started out the door, and Morgan followed her out to the porch.

“Sheila, let us go with you! Please—”

Sheila heard a choked yelp as she reached the car, and she turned back around.