Page 54 of Shelter for Sharla

“Huh.” He could practically see the gears turning in Mike’s mind. “Got a ruler?”

“Yeah.” Carter dug around in his desk drawer and produced one.

“Mind if I sit down with this for a minute?”

“Don’t make any marks on those pages!”

“I won’t, sir. I would never do that. I just want to check something.” Reluctantly, Carter handed off the journal and the ruler, and Mike sat down at another desk with it. In a few minutes, he stood and headed to the copy machine.

“What are you doing?”

“Hang on, sir. I think I’m on to something here.” He watched as Mike made several copies of the page, then took them back. Carter tried to busy himself with something else, but curiosity was getting the better of him. “Scissors, sir?”

“Sure.”Okay, this is ridiculous, Carter thought, but he handed Edwards the scissors and sat back down. The young deputy cut the copies into strips and began to arrange them oddly. “What exactly are you doing?”

“I think I figured it out, sir.”

No fucking way!Carter wanted to yell. “Oh, you do, do you?”

“Yeah. Come look.”

Carter watched as Edwards drew a line on a plain sheet of paper. Each strip he’d cut had two horizontal lines on it that bordered the marks there. He put the plain paper on top of a strip, lined up the lines on the paper with the lines on the strips, and traced the markings on the strip. When he finished the first one, he moved on to the second strip, doing the exact same thing.

Carter’s mouth flew open. They were digital numbers, the kind seen on an LED clock or a gas pump. As Edwards traced each strip in turn, they became clearer and clearer as they went from their original chaos into complete organization.

“There you go, sir. Does this mean anything to you?” Edwards said and handed the paper to Carter.

They were strings of number, but he recognized them immediately, held them up, and turned back to Edwards. “What do you see, deputy?” he asked, praying Edwards confirmed his thoughts.

“Looks like GPS coordinates to me, sir.”

Carter couldn’t believe it. The twenty-four-year-old rookie had solved a puzzle that he and Cruz had been looking at for days. Not only that, FBI analysts were working on it with no luck. They’d all tried to turn it into its own language and make it harder than it had to be, but it was simple?toosimple. “Well, I’ll be damned. Mike, I owe you a steak dinner.”

“Thank you, sir!” the young man chirped, beaming. “Glad I could help!”

“You earned it. And say nothing, do you hear me? Nothing toanybody.”

“Yes, sir. Got it, sir. Nothing to anybody. My lips are sealed.”

Carter took the paper and looked at it, then opened his laptop and started typing. For some reason, it crossed his mind to use a proxy server, so he found a free one and typed in the information. There were several different formats for latitude and longitude coordinates, and he needed to figure out which one was correct. Ten numbers?decimal degrees, but without the decimals. They would go after the first two numbers in each five-number string. No letters, but he knew north came first and then west. If they made no sense when he looked them up that way, he’d reverse them on the outside chance that Taliq had done the same. He found a site on which to enter them, took a deep breath, and waited.

And he almost fell out of his chair. The site was about five blocks from the courthouse in O’Fallon, right where they’d been just days before. Then he typed them into a map of aerial photography and waited. What the hell was that? It was weird looking, that was for sure. He zoomed in as closely as he could and stared at it. That weird object…

It was a scrap yard. The odd things he was seeing all around? Crushed cars. And the object in the center? A crane. Taliq had buried the money and the body in plain sight, and no one had ever detected it. Matter of fact, if the picture was accurate, it was dead in the middle of the drive that ran straight through the yard. How had he buried it there and nobody noticed? Had there been a connection between Taliq and the scrap yard? Carter could ask Sharla, but he didn’t think she’d know. She seemed to have little knowledge of her sister’s life until Imogen moved back due to her illness.

But there was a bigger question. Who was he going to tell? Nobody. As he thought about it, he decided he had to tell Cruz, but that was it. No one else. Until they could figure out how to lure CaboPaolo and his henchmen to the site and arrest them, Cruz was to say nothing to anyone. Not one word. There was more at stake than just his reputation. He had to think about Sharla, Chelsea, and Lionel’s safety, and if that information got out, they wouldn’t be safe. No one could know.

No one.

Chapter 9

Morning came too soon.He said goodbye to Sharla as she left for work and then headed back into the kitchen. Ten minutes later, Cruz wandered in and got a cup of coffee. Twenty minutes later, he knew everything Carter knew.

“Why the hell didn’t you call me and tell me?” Cruz almost screamed. “My god! You broke the code and?”

“I didn’t break the code. Edwards did.”

“So he knows?”

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