Page 55 of After All The Wreckage
And that’s when it hit me. The lines were all wrong. Based on the trajectory of the curves, the skid marks should be on the opposite side of the vehicle. The brakes should have applied on the passenger side and not the driver’s side. If the wrong set of brakes had engaged, they would have caused her to spin out instead of helping her through the corners. They’d sent her over the cliff instead of toward safety.
Dad was right. Something had gone wrong with her brake system. It would have been nearly impossible to control the carwith it acting this way. In the movies, you always saw the bad guys cutting a brake line, but the truth was that modern cars made it almost impossible for a cut line to cause an accident like this. No, the only way to really achieve this kind of accident was to get into the car’s computer system. It also meant it would be nearly impossible to track. Had someone put a physical device on the car to hack in? Or had it been done remotely using the manufacturer or the navigation systems?
My simmering anger spiked all over again. Finding answers now would be that much harder. The culprit would have had plenty of time to erase the computer trail he’d left behind. If I’d known the truth, if I’d donemyjob and asked to see the scene, I might have had a better chance.
But my emotions had blocked me. I’d been focused on Mom in the hospital and not how she’d gotten there. I couldn’t afford to be blinded anymore. I took another deep breath, closed my eyes, and then turned back to the rest of Muloney’s file.
It didn’t take long to go through it. The physical file was almost as thin as the online one had been. It included a handwritten note from his talk with the mechanic at the tow yard confirming his suspicions about the brakes failing, and a list of places Mom had been that day.
Muloney had sent the rookie out to interview the attendant at the garage where she’d parked near the Lincoln Memorial and a clerk at the gas station outside D.C. where she’d filled her tank. I hadn’t even known she was coming to Cherry Bay that day, just like I hadn’t known anything about her meeting with the Space Force guy. Why hadn’t she told me? What other secrets had she been keeping?
Sometimes, in order to see what I was missing, I needed a visual image of all the data we’d collected—like putting together a real-life puzzle. I went out to the garage, dug through some ofthe things from our condo that we hadn’t had room for at Nan’s, and found an old corkboard I’d had in my bedroom.
Taking it back into the office, I spotted a plate with a grilled cheese sandwich sitting at the edge of the desk. My throat bobbed. Even after our argument, Nan was looking out for me. She wanted what was best for me. I believed that, but there was no way I could choose my life over Mom’s. It wasn’t going to happen.
I unwrapped the corkboard from its brown paper and stared at the pictures pinned to it—my life on display. There were plenty of photos of Shay and me, and one of a teenaged Gage holding a tiny Monte with me grinning up at him instead of looking at the camera. Other photos showed Mom, Nan, and me on a trip to the Bahamas after my high school graduation.
My eyes stalled on a lone picture of Dad and me from before the divorce. We were fishing. Except, looking back, I was pretty sure he’d been on a stakeout and had used fishing as an excuse to keep me quiet. There were a lot of good memories reflected here, but they felt shadowed by all the bad that had come later. The divorce. Losing Mom.
My jaw clenched as tears pricked my eyes again. She wasn’t lost. Not yet.
I carefully took the photographs down, replacing them with an enlarged map of D.C. that I’d printed over several pages of copy paper. I stuck red push pins into the locations where Mom had been on the day of her accident before adding blue tacks for locations she’d been throughout the week leading up to it.
Cutting out names of people she’d met with, I taped them next to the pins along with a one-sentence summary of her business with them. I also included one-sentence summaries of the interviews the police had done. The biggest question mark was at the Lincoln Memorial.
I had no idea what she’d discussed with the unknown Space Force person, but I included a pin for the Argento Skies building near the Capitol, adding the company’s logo to it. Finally, I printed a picture of the man in the building’s lobby, noting that there’d been a possible sighting of him at the police station.
After I was done, I stepped back, hoping I’d see a pattern or a glaring hole. Nothing jumped out, but I wasn’t discouraged yet. Sometimes it took a day or two for me to see the overlaps. Sometimes it took digging more before it came together.
Tomorrow, I’d head back to D.C. to the Argento Skies office, and see if they’d hired Mom. If they hadn’t, then she had to have been researching them for another case. Maybe the Space Force case. I’d pick at that a little bit and see if I could find out who she’d met with.
I also needed to find a way into the companies responsible for the computers in Mom’s car. That would take quite a bit of effort as those systems were guarded with serious firewalls. I wasn’t in the right frame of mind to do it tonight because if I made a mistake, I’d get caught—possibly arrested—and I certainly couldn’t afford that.
I turned back to the computer and the bills waiting for me. The money from the cheater’s wife had come in. It would allow me to pay the invoice for Shady Lane this month. But I still had other expenses to pay.
A year ago, I’d planned on being almost two semesters into my master’s by the time I applied for the FBI in February. But now I was barely going to have finished my bachelor’s, and continuing my education felt like choosing between my future and Mom. I hated the voice at the back of my head whispering Nan was right. That my mother would despise me choosing her over myself.
I straightened my shoulders. I could do both. I could and I would.
What I needed was more money. None of the jobs I’d applied for had responded yet. Not that I’d expected them to with Thanksgiving looming in two days, but waiting added another unknown to the pile of uncertainty sitting on me.
I shut off the light in the office and headed into the bathroom, needing to get rid of the stench of the day. The grief. The sadness. But as the heat pounded on my back and my shoulders relaxed, I was surprised to find tears pouring from my eyes once again. For Mom and Nan. For me. For Monte and what he’d been through. For the guilt I knew Gage was still feeling even though his brother was safely home. I even cried for the loss of my childish attraction to Gage and whatever it was that had started to bloom between us since I’d first seen him on Friday night.
It wasn’t until the water turned cold that I stopped crying, but once I did, I felt surprisingly better. As if I’d purged enough dark and ugly from my soul to actually move forward again. Maybe my parents were wrong after all. Maybe, like Shay was fond of saying, you just needed a good cry once in a while.
I changed into sweats and a T-shirt and climbed into bed, hoping for sleep and knowing it would elude me. It wasn’t just Mom’s case that hung on me as I stared at the ceiling. My mind whirled with questions about Dunn’s and West’s strange reactions, the disappearing footage, the men who’d kidnapped Monte, and why they’d let him go.
What haunted me even more was Monte’s expression as I got into Gage’s car. Why would he be afraid of me when I hadn’t seen him since he was a toddler?
My eyes had just started to close when the realization hit me.
I was in his vision! Holy shit. That had to be it.
He’d seen me in the vision of Dunn getting shot.
What had Gage told me about it? Not much. But his words in the Pathfinder were the key.You told me you didn’t know Dunn.
There was no way I could sleep after that thought registered, so I went back to the computer. This time, I searched Dunn’s and West’s backgrounds even more thoroughly than I had the day before.
