Page 50 of Ground Truth

“What’s there to see?” Drake had said. “There’s nothing but water that far from shore. The sailboat was swamped and they drowned, according to the official accounts. And it’s been four years. Whatever was left of the boat and everything on it wouldn’t be in the same location anyway.”

“Yeah, I know. But it helps me to be surrounded by the conditions. Or at least, as much as we can re-create them. I need to understand exactly what she was faced with. The question we need to answer is, how could Greta be alive?” Flint pointed out. “Unless we believe in miracles, it seems to me there’s only one answer.”

Gaspar agreed. “Somebody picked her up. A recreational boater, perhaps. Because if somebody official rescued her, like the Coast Guard, we’d have an official record of the fact.”

“Don’t bother trying to convince me that we weren’t doing around the clock surveillance of the Gulf in that area four years ago,” Flint said. “Can you get satellite footage back that far?”

“Finding video from four years ago isn’t a walk in the park,” Gaspar replied flatly. “It’s not like I’m still FBI and I can just call up Homeland or the Pentagon or even NASA and ask for it.”

“Four years back wasn’t the Ice Age. There’s thousands of satellites up there watching every minute of every day,” Flint replied. “Somebody’s got that footage. Let’s find out who has it first. Then we’ll figure out how to persuade them to give it to us.”

Gaspar had laughed. “So this is the royal ‘we’?”

Flint grinned on the other end of the call. “Okay, you then.”

“And what about Scarlett? I’m fairly sure she’s got a list of paying clients I’m supposed to be working for, right this very minute,” Gaspar replied.

“You let me handle Scarlett. She says anything to you, just send her my way,” Flint said, as if the prospect didn’t terrify him. Which Gaspar knew it probably did.

The relationship between Flint and Katie Scarlett was complicated. Gaspar didn’t know enough about the history there. All he knew was that Scarlett ruled the cases Gaspar worked on, and like him, Flint was a hired hand.

Gaspar wasn’t sure where the Campbell case fit into all of this.

Technically, Hanna Campbell wasn’t a paying client at all. Gaspar didn’t know whether any of the work he’d been doing so far had been approved by Scarlett.

Nor did he plan to ask. No point.

He would do the work anyway. Why give Scarlett a chance to issue an order he had no intention of following?

This was a circumstance where it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

He reached into his desk drawer for the Tylenol bottle and swallowed a couple of the tablets as he hit the fast forward button on the satellite video feed, running the footage from the time he’d left for dinner through the present.

Gaspar searched until he saw the Robinson moving toward the boat’s last known location and then increased the viewing speed. The Robinson moved along easily until a speedboat approached.

The boat was plowing through the water at a high rate of speed. The captain cut the engine and the boat floated to a stop.

Which was when Gaspar zoomed in on the boat and realized Flint’s helo was in serious trouble.

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Chapter 26

Gulf of Mexico

Flint glanced through the side window and focused on the horizon. The dizzy feeling still spun his head and his belly, but purposeful focus was helping keep him upright.

He’d had vertigo once while he was still in the Marines. Miserable experience. For at least two weeks, he’d had the sensation that everything around him was spinning. He could barely walk until the episode passed.

The dizziness he felt now was similar. He could only hope it would correct itself shortly.

Drake punched a few buttons on the GPS and a circle appeared, their position marked on its edge. “We can fly loops inside the circle, and we’ll home in to center. We might see something on the floor that could lead us to the wreckage.”

“Yeah, but keep in mind that they did a lot of search and rescue in the area at the time. It’s not likely we’ll find anything. I just want to get a feel for the place. Try to understand what happened that day,” Flint said.

“Copy that,” Drake said.

They leveled out, tracing the curve on the screen. The heading indicator showed them rotating around the circle’s center.

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