Page 51 of Shelter for Sharla

There were only two more boxes when Carter opened one of them. “Bingo.”

“Yeah?”

Carter looked up at Cruz and grinned. “Journals.”

“Now I’m getting hopeful,” Cruz said and reached in for a handful of them. “Might as well dig in.”

The first one was obviously written when Imogen was in middle school. She talked about some boy named David and how cute he was. She bitched about her mom making her clean the kitchen after dinner by herself for a week for talking on the phone when she wasn’t supposed to. There was a whole detailed section about how she skipped school by getting on the bus, getting off at school, and slipping away instead of going inside. She threw them off for several days because the school bus driver swore she was on the bus, which she was. Carter had to hand it to her, she was successfully sneaky. But nothing in the journal was anything more than the ramblings of a young girl.

The next one he picked up had a cover decorated with hearts and flowers, and he dreaded that. Sure enough, it was high school, and it was awful. To his horror, she wrote a detailed account of the night she lost her virginity in the bed of a pickup truck behind the football stadium after the game. She only mentioned the boy by his initials,QB, and then he realized?quarterback. She was a pretty girl, so she got one of the popular, important players to look at her. He dug out one of the yearbooks and looked in the back. One inscription caught his eye:To Imogen, one of the most funnest girls I’ve ever known. Stay sexy, babe.He looked at the name and then flipped to the athletic pages. Sure enough, the boy was the quarterback of the high school football team.Guess my powers of investigation are intact, he laughed inwardly as he put the yearbook back and went on through the journal. It yielded zip.

The next one he picked up was different. It was blue, a light shade like the rest of them, but there was a difference?there was nothing on the cover. Just plain light blue. He flipped it open and started to read.

June 7 – Taliq and I went to the park today with Tamara, but I wish he hadn’t gone. He fussed at her the whole time. When I mentioned it in the car, he slapped me hard. I hope Mom and Dad don’t see the finger marks.The journal entry went on in that fashion until Carter was sick of it. He dug farther into it. Nothing. Just the same kinds of things.

Reaching for another one, he opened it and found a much different kind of journal, even though it was pretty and colorful on the outside like the others. Some of the entries were true entries, but some were rambling and incoherent, things he couldn’t make any sense out of. On at least a couple of pages were grocery or drugstore lists. Thumbing on through it, he found long periods where the pages were filled with the usual, and then two or three here or there with the weird stuff. It seemed totally random. When he got to the back, he looked at the last entry: March of the year the robbery occurred. Flipping back through it, he saw nothing that gave him pause, so he went back to the end. That was when he saw it.

The bottom of the page almost appeared empty, but there were marks there, very light pencil marks, three lines of horizontal lines and two of vertical. Five in all. There was no pattern that he could discern, and it didn’t look to be a binary kind of thing. “Hey, take a look at this.”

Cruz crossed the small space and stared at it. “Well, that’s odd.”

“Yeah. I have no idea what they are. Almost looks like somebody was counting something, but there are no diagonal lines, so that can’t be it. Wonder if it’s some kind of calendar markings minus the calendar?”

“I suppose that’s possible. Got a date on it?”

“Not really. The last date was in March, barely three months before the last robbery, but there was one that month.”

“What were the dates on the robberies again? Do you remember?”

“One was in November of the previous year. One in January. And one in March. If that was intended to be a pattern, looks like they missed a month.” Carter thought about it for a minute. “Maybe that’s what set Angelico gunning for the guys. Maybe he wanted another robbery in May but they balked.”

“Could be. Maybe he was mad at them, and when he asked why they hadn’t carried it out, Kent blasted off about having the money from the first three and not needing more?”

That made sense to Carter. “Maybe. Sounds like a good theory. Wish I’d asked Estevez about that.”

Cruz shrugged. “Doesn’t matter what set Angelico off?something did. Enough to try to get three men killed. I’m guessing if he got them arrested, he was going to promise to get a release for the first one to flip on Kent.”

“But they knew nothing.”

Cruz nodded. “Exactly.”

“I’m not leaving this here. I’m taking it with us.” Carter slipped the journal into his messenger bag and headed out of the office, Cruz right behind him. “I’m pretty sure this is what we’re looking for. Now to see if anybody can figure it out.”

* * *

“Our code breakersthink it’s a binary code of some sort, but we can’t figure out what. It doesn’t make sense.” The voice of JamesMaddux, SanAntonio FBI office’s chief analyst, came rolling out of the phone. “But we’re still working on it. We’ve put it into several translation devices, but so far, nothing.”

“Okay. Thanks. We appreciate it. Let me know if you crack it.”

“Will do.”

“And that’s that,” Cruz said, reaching for the phone and turning off the speaker.

“At least they’re working on it.” Carter was frustrated. They’d had the journal for two days and nobody had been able to figure it out. He’d stared at it for hours himself, but nothing had come to him.

Cruz grabbed his jacket. “I’m having dinner with Sam and Dahlia. Wanna come along?”

Carter shook his head. “Thanks, but nah. I’m betting when I get home, Sharla’s there.”

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