Page 81 of Sutton's Shadow

“I gave her my old camera.”

“Yes, you mentioned that.”

“All my cameras are set up so the pictures go to my cloud storage. I forgot to remove that from the camera I gave her.”

“Are you saying we might have pictures of what she’s up to?”

She shrugged, a nervous hopefulness in her expression while she nibbled on her thumbnail, waiting for the computer to do its thing. It was taking forever, a sign she needed a new one.

Finally, she clicked into her cloud storage. It took a few seconds for the images to generate, but when they did, he gasped. “That’s Kaitlyn.”

“The missing girl?”

“Holy shit. She found Kaitlyn,” Graham said from behind him.

“How?”

“Looks like a basement. The floor is cement. She took pictures of a locked door. How could she have known where Kaitlyn was?” Wyatt mused.

“And why didn’t she tell us?” Sutton wondered.

“Is there any way to tell where the pictures were taken?”

“Unfortunately, no,” Sutton answered.

“What about her cell?” Graham asked. “Emma?”

“On it,” she called out. Emma was a genius with computers. If anyone could track Bethany’s phone, it was her. He’d been intending to download one of those family locator apps but hadn’t done it yet. Now he was kicking himself.

“Either she turned off the location indicator or her phone is off. I’m not finding anything since she left the house last night.”

Last night?Wyatt’s stomach sank. “What time did she leave?”

“Around eleven.”

Wyatt glanced at his watch. It was seven now. She’d been gone for eight hours, and he’d had no clue. He was doing a bang-up job at this guardian thing.

“It’s not your fault, Wyatt,” Sutton asserted. “You tried to do everything possible to get her to talk to you. She knows you love her. And if she’s in trouble, she knows you’ll find her.”

He thrust a hand into his hair, combing the strands back. “But will it be in time?” he murmured, giving voice to his darkest fear.

“Absolutely,” Sutton answered assuredly. “You have the best of the best at your back. You’re not alone in this. Nobody in this room will stop searching until she’s found.”

There were nods and notes of agreement throughout the room. He beheld his teammates. Three of them had been where he was right now. Graham, Logan, and Marcus had lost the people they cared about most, and the team had rallied around them for the searches. Just as they were now. His throat was thick with emotion, which he swallowed down.

The team got back to work planning the search as Wyatt’s mind raced. He couldn’t understand what Bethany had been thinking.

“Why would she do this alone?” he asked.

Sutton glanced away, but not before he noticed something in her expression. “What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”

Sutton stared at the floor, her hands clasped in front of her, which she began wringing. She’d done this before, most often when she felt guilty about something. He waited for her to speak, knowing whatever she had to say would not please him.

“She’s always full of questions when we work together. Mostly, she wants to know why I do it. What was the purpose of documenting the things I used to work on before Liam died? We’d witnessed that hit and run, and she wondered why I took pictures of it and why it would be important to the investigation. And the other night, all those questions about Colombia. Why did I stay to take the pictures when I should have run? Why did I hide them for so long if they were so important? So many questions.”

“What did you tell her?” he prompted when she grew silent.

“I told her it was ingrained in me to document what was happening. That I hoped someday my pictures would bring justice to those who died and how important it was to have the evidence of the atrocities on film. I told her that when I woke from my coma, I was alone and scared, and that’s why I hid them. She asked if I was afraid the bad guys would come after me. I told her I was. Then she wondered why, if I was so scared, I was willing to release the pictures now.”

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