Page 49 of One Final Target

“What do you hang on to? What’s your true north?”

A half smile played on his lips.

“Too strange a question?”

“No, it’s not. I’d just forgotten what I need to hang on to. What happened here today took a burden from my shoulders. I can see things clearer now than I have been able to since the accident. My true north? I guess it would be this: God is good, Jodie, even when life isn’t.”

Jodie held his gaze, the cool assurance in his eyes a comfort. She had heard the same expression her whole life. She believed it, didn’t she? Why couldn’t she hang on to it now and stop the madness in her soul?

They’d reached Collins’s driveway, and Barstow was talking about the bodies.

“We don’t know how long the bodies have been in the freezer.There are some indications they’ve been dead longer than it appears, and they were frozen for some time. The coroner will have to make the final estimation. The suspect had the freezer on a timer. The unit only recently turned off, so the process of thawing and decay began a few days ago. I don’t need to tell you people to glove up and refrain from touching anything.”

“Have you identified the corpses?” Smiley asked as gloves were handed out.

“I’ll leave identification to the coroner. What is going to be of interest to you right now is what we found in the guy’s office.”

Barstow entered the house by the front door, and everyone followed. They walked by a large bedroom, the master, Jodie thought. From what she could see, it was neat as a pin. The bed was made; there were no obvious personal objects.

They crossed the living room to the third bedroom, which Jodie pegged as Collins’s office. The smell of decay permeated this side of the house. The odor would linger long after the coroner removed the bodies.

The office was lit up bright, much brighter than what would have been standard. Collins liked to see what he was doing. She followed everyone into the small office and froze, feeling as if she’d been struck by lightning. Even her toes tingled when she saw what the lights illuminated.

The room was covered in photos of all sizes, of various law enforcement agencies and personnel, overlapping like the scales on a fish. There were even boards over the windows so every space was covered by a photo of something. But as her eyes focused and she realized what she was looking at, she grew numb. It was like looking at a photo album of RAT’s work assignments for a year.

“Besides the photos,” Barstow said, “there’s a bag of burnerphones, a package of tracking devices, and a closet full of technology. It will be a while before we catalog everything in this room.”

Jodie barely heard him. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. There were photos of her and her team at crime scenes all over Southern California, for the year preceding the IED. There were photos of Gus and his family. There were aerial photos of the cabin in the mountains, arrows marking escape routes. Her whole body stiffened as the realization sank in. This guy had been following their lives. But mostlyherlife.

There were photos of Jodie at her home in Seal Beach, of her surfing, jogging, playing volleyball, coming out of church, going to the market. This creep had photos of just about every moment of her life for the past year, before the IED.

“He really had an obsession with you,” Gresham commented.

“No kidding.” Jodie walked closer to one of the walls where it looked as if Collins had a timeline of her team’s activities. He did. There was a detailed timeline leading up to the IED explosion in the mountains. Some of the notes he’d written on Post-its were comments and orders Jodie herself had issued.

Hayes is cagey and slippery. Be careful.

Know thefloor plan. We need to be quick and decisive.

Don’t be complacent. Every warrant is not the same.

She put a hand over her mouth, suddenly feeling sick to her stomach. “He knew everything.”

“Is it possible Gus was—?” Sam was cut off.

“No,” Mike said with not a little force.

His reaction had Jodie turning toward him. Gus and Mike went through the same academy and had been friends for years. He felt the loss of Gus as much as she did.

Right now her uncle’s face was dark with anger. “Gus was nota corrupt cop. I don’t know how this kid got all this information, but Gus didn’t give it to him.”

“Of course he didn’t,” Smiley chimed in. “This kid is a tech whiz. I’m betting he cloned phones, listened in on conversations. Unfortunately, spying on people isn’t hard to do today. Maybe he got close to Gus, took advantage of the man’s benevolence.”

“There’s a lot of evidence to sift through, Mike. Technology crimes will be busy,” Barstow said. “The chief is on the way. This investigation is high priority.”

“Why did he leave all of this for us to find?” Jodie asked.

“I’ll bet he expected it to be destroyed in the explosion,” Gresham said.

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