Max wheeled to the table and pulled up the video. “There’s a picture in the last frame I wanted to ask you about.”
Following him to the table, I gulped. “What kind of picture?”
“I think it’s a picture of you as a child.” He fast-forwarded to almost the end. “Watch the wall behind the body.” Max moved the film forward one frame at a time. “There it is.”
The cup slipped from my fingers and shattered on the floor. Barriers broke, and the flood of tears I’d held inside rushed toward the surface. “She’s still alive.” I touched the screen. “Emma.”
“You can’t kill me, Dakota. You still love me.”
“I hate you.” Using both hands to steady the gun, I raised it.
Christian laughed. “If you kill me, you’ll never find Emma.”
“She died. You told me she was dead. You buried her.” The video played inside my head. “You killed her!”
He grinned and raised his arms out to the side. “She just got her second tooth. She looks like you. She’ll grow up to be a perfect killer, just like me.”
“You’re lying!” I pulled the trigger, my scream echoing over and over inside my head.
Max cleaned up the mess and brought me a fresh cup of coffee. He’d also called Gabriel. The two were quietly watching me, waiting for an explanation.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the picture. “He told me she died. Then the day I shot him, he told me if I killed him, I’d never find her.”
“So you didn’t kill him?” Gabriel asked.
“I’ve gone over that scene in my mind so many times. I did shoot him, and I did see him fall.” I met Max’s worried gaze. “The day I tried to kill myself was when I remembered Emma. When I saw that picture, I remembered the rest. Salyer was laughing, telling me how he was going to raise her to be just like him. I must have blocked everything except shooting him and seeing him fall.” I took a deep breath. “The damage to my mind makes it hard to believe everything I remember. After my father’s death, I remembered crawling to the edge of the cliff and seeing him swimming toward shore. I must have passed out after that, because I woke back up in the hospital.”
“Is she Salyer’s child?” Max asked.
“No, she’s Tristan’s. I was pregnant when Salyer took me. He didn’t know that, and neither did I for the first month or so. When he found out I was pregnant, he changed. He started feeding me and stopped torturing me. He was the sweet, attentive person the media portrayed him as.” Tears filled my eyes. “That’s when he brought the other girls in and tortured them. He would tell me it was my fault and because of the baby, they had to suffer my pain.” I sipped the coffee. There was more, and I had to get it all out before the barriers closed again. “The captivity took its toll on my body, and Emma was born early. He let me keep her for a month. I woke up one morning, and she was gone. He told me she’d died. Then the torture started again. Worse than before. I didn’t care. I wanted to die, and in many ways, I did. Memories were too painful, and I buried them inside my damaged mind.” I glanced back at the picture. “I thought I clawed my way out of hell to kill him. I didn’t. I climbed out of that pit to save my daughter.”
“Would you work with Karen if I had her fly out here? If he’s using the same cage, then he’s still using the same place. I think somewhere inside, you know where that is.” Gabriel picked up my cup. “If you’ll let us help you, we’ll find him, and we’ll find Emma.” He placed a fresh cup of coffee in front of me.
Maybe it was shedding the tears or finally telling Max the truth. Whatever the reason, my detective skills were kicking in and my mind plotting out my next move. “You had a subpoena for James Day’s cell phone records. Did that go through, or after his death, did everything just get dropped?”
“The subpoenas were served. I haven’t followed up to see if we received the records.”
“I wish we’d found Day’s cell phone. We could run a tracker on it and maybe get a better idea of everywhere he traveled that day from pings off the cell towers.” I pushed a stray hair behind my ear. “Which is why Salyer took it with him.”
“We don’t need his phone to do that, just the number,” Gabriel said.
His excitement was infectious, and I could feel it as well as see it on Max’s face as Gabriel continued. “We’ve got that. I’ll make a call and get the ball rolling. It will take a while to get the subpoena and map out the pings. If anyone can do it quickly, it’s Calvin Young.”
Gabriel left the room, and I jotted down notes on a pad. “We can use Angelina’s kidnapping to map out distances.” I glanced at the computer. “How long is that tape?”
“A little over an hour.” Max frowned. “You watched it.”
“Actually, I don’t think I watched it.”
Max raised an eyebrow. “So how long have you known about this split thing?”
I avoided his eyes. “Since I woke up after the doctors put me back together. I would get bits and pieces sometimes. I just never knew what was real.”
“You could have told me. How does it work?”
“If I knew that, I’d know how to fix it. Can you print a map of South Carolina and Georgia?”
“Sure.” Max moved to the computer and in seconds had the maps printed. “What are we looking for?”
I circled the area from Beaufort and York to Savannah. “We know he’s killed in these areas, so we’ll consider this his hunting ground. Now we need to find his lair.”
Gabriel came back in. “Calvin is on it, and we should have something in a few hours.”
“Good. What time was the last video you have of Angelina Clark?”
“Around one in the afternoon.” He glanced at the map. “What’s the circle?”
“We’re considering that his hunting ground for the moment. If we assume Angelina disappeared between one and two, and she’s found at three in the morning, that’s thirteen hours. Taking off the hour for the time they had her in the video leaves us with twelve. I’m going to assume it took him at least a couple of hours to get to the cove and set everything up, which leaves us with ten hours.”
Gabriel shook his head. “You can cover a lot of ground in ten hours.”
“But only five hours each way,” I said.
“Which is three or four hundred miles in any direction. The phone is our best bet. Let’s head to the station. We could use Max on this one too. Between him and Calvin, they can cut the time charting the latitudes and longitudes on the pings.”
Max rolled toward the living room. “You two go on ahead, and I’ll meet you there. I haven’t had a shower yet.”
“You haven’t told me about your sister.” I fastened my seatbelt, aware that Gabriel liked to drive fast, and after my earlier outburst with Max, I didn’t want to spend too much time alone inside my own head. “What makes you think Salyer killed her?”
“The killer I was looking for was part of a gang. We had a lot of those in New York. After Colleen was killed, I looked for the weak link. Made him give me the names of every member. Then I tracked them down, one by one.”
“And you found them all except Salyer?”
He nodded. “All I had was a name. I was looking for him when I ran across your story and the information he was dead. My gut said he wasn’t, so here I am.”