Squall Line (The Forgotten Coast Florida Suspense Series Book 9)

by Dawn Lee McKenna

  “Can you make it full screen?” Bledsoe asked. “Let’s see if we can pick anything out of the background there.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not really full screen, the way Netflix would be. It’s better, though,” he said, clicking the little icon.

  It did make it larger, but not by much. The bigger problem was that it was fairly dark.

  “I don’t think he has any lights on,” Quincy said, mirroring her own thought. “That could be something. He might be somewhere without electric.”

  “He could just have them off,” Bledsoe mused.

  “It was kinda dark in the YouTube video, too, though,” Myles said. “I think Quince might be right.”

  “Hold on,” Wyatt said. “If he’s someplace without electricity, how’s he keeping his phone charged? Kyle has to charge his phone something like ten times a day.”

  “He has it off a lot, though,” Maggie said. “I mean, we haven’t been able to pick him up at all, except for when he first left the scene.”

  “Adrian’s car,” Quincy piped up. “I don’t know any kid with a car who doesn’t have a car charger in there. These guys can’t handle the idea of their phone going dead.”

  “Good point,” Bledsoe said. “Let’s get this going again, please.”

  Myles clicked it back on.

  “I know probably nobody will believe me,” Ryan said. “Or care, actually, whether it’s true. I get it. I get why people are really, really angry. But I’m telling the truth.”

  He glanced just past the camera, off at an angle. Then he reached over with his free hand and pulled something toward him. It looked like he was at a counter or a work table. The object didn’t come into view, but it sounded substantial. To Maggie, it sounded like it could well be a handgun.

  He stood up, picked up the phone in one hand, and the object with the other, but that arm remained at his side, and they couldn’t see what he was holding. He walked a few steps, still holding the phone, though it kipped a little diagonally, leaned over like he was looking at something, then walked back and sat down.

  “Can you stop it?” Wyatt asked quickly. Myles did. Ryan sat there with his mouth open, the picture blurred.

  “Did you hear that, when he was walking?”

  “Sounded like leaves, papers,” Myles said, nodding.

  “Trash,” Wyatt said. “If you back it up a second when he got up? You can just see some graffiti on the wall. Not the one behind him, the one to his left.”

  “Let me rewind,” Myles said, and dragged the little icon backwards on the white line. He clicked it to play.

  “I know probably nobody will believe me,” Ryan was again saying. “Or care, actually, whether it’s true. I get it. I get why people are really, really angry. But I’m telling the truth.”

  They watched him stand up, then pick up the phone and what Maggie assumed was the gun. He took a few steps and leaned, and they could just see the portion of a wall that Wyatt meant, covered with graffiti. The only thing Maggie could make out for sure was a four-letter word in giant red letters. Then it was out of view again.

  “Looks like an abandoned building of some kind,” Myles said. “Too bad we have a crapton of those in this county.”

  Ryan sat back down. “I also want to say, Mom, I’m really sorry about all of this. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I wish we could just—”

  “Somebody get me the hell out of here!!” they heard Adrian Nichols yell angrily, and Ryan reached out and turned off the camera.

  Everybody in the room either took a deep breath or let one out.

  “Okay, we think he’s in an abandoned building, maybe a house, maybe a storage place, something, but abandoned building is sounding good,” Wyatt said.

  “Yeah,” Quincy agreed. “Probably. We don’t know about the first video, but this one, yeah.”

  “You should see all the crap these people are saying on the comments,” Myles said. “You’d think it would be distracting, but I don’t think he was even looking at them. Usually, you know, it’s kind of an interactive thing; the person is answering questions as they’re asked, saying hi, whatever.”

  “So what are they saying?” Maggie asked.

  “Oh, it’s nice,” Myles said, reaching for his wireless mouse again. “Here.”

  The video started going again.

  “Um, this is Ryan Warner. I’m making this live post because I want to tell the family of the deputy I shot—Deputy Shultz—I want to tell them that I’m really sorry.”

  The comments started scrolling almost immediately.

  “It’s hard to see,” Maggie said.

  Myles started reading the comments as they scrolled up. “Loser. Hey, Ryan, happy face, go Ryan, sad face, go shoot yourself, praying hands, okay, I won’t read that one out loud. Just call someone. More praying hands. Oh, look, it’s Newman. He has laughing faces. Myles turned around. “There’s like two hundred that came in while he was live, and they’re still posting.”

  “That’s nuts,” Maggie said. She leaned in. “What’s that one?”

  It was an ad for a suicide hotline. Wonderful. She watched as Myles went back to scrolling. The comments were all scrolling so fast, and the thing that caught her eye didn’t register in her brain until it passed.

  “Stop, go up,” she said, leaning closer.

  “What is it?” Wyatt asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Something looked familiar or something.”

  Myles scrolled for just a second, and Maggie reflexively reached out and snatched the mouse, stopped the comments.

  “Which—” Myles started, then he saw it.

  Maggie was simply startled at first, when she saw the name and familiar tiny picture. But the message made her want to throw up.

  “Is that your Sky?” Quincy asked.

  Maggie straightened up as Wyatt leaned down to read, but Maggie already knew what the comment said.

  Ryan, I know where you are. I’m coming to talk to you.

  Ordinarily, Maggie didn’t speed on the bridge between Eastpoint and Apalach. There were too many tourists gawking as they drove on the two-lane bridge, and two many pelicans and seagulls miscalculating their altitude or stopping for a quick break. Today, however, Maggie’s Jeep ran twenty miles over the speed limit of thirty-five, and her mind twenty miles an hour over that.

  As Wyatt and the other guys watched, Maggie had tried to call Sky, gotten her voice mail, and left a short message to call her back. Myles hurriedly tried to get a ping on the phone, and did manage to get a ping on the tower closest to Maggie’s house.

  She’d tried to use Find My Phone to get her location, but by then Sky’s phone was turned off. She knew Kyle was at his friend Shayne’s house, so he wouldn’t be able to tell her if Sky was home. In the hope that she was, and in the absence of anything else that would satisfy her urge to take some kind of physical action, Maggie had decided to go the house herself.

  Meanwhile, Myles and Wyatt were going through Ryan’s Facebook posts, further back than they had before, to see if there were any interactions between Ryan and Sky. Sky had said she didn’t really know the boy, but she’d seen the video because she’d been on his Friends list.

  Her mind whirled with questions about whether Sky had been dishonest with her, and why she would do something so stupid as to try to find Ryan Warner. She was a cop’s kid. She wasn’t naïve or ignorant. She knew a bad situation when she saw one. Maggie couldn’t help wondering, over and over, why she would do this. In her mind, the question came out as Why would you do this to me, Sky? even though that question made her ashamed.

  Once she got off the bridge and onto 98, she started reasoning with herself. Sky would be at the house. She would have rethought what she’d said to Ryan, realized what a bad idea her impulsive comment was. She wouldn’t put herself in danger that way, especially for a kid
she barely knew. She barely knew him, right? The idea that maybe he was someone important to Sky, someone she would do something stupid for, made Maggie want to throw up.

  Maggie took several deep breaths as she drove the last couple of miles to her house. Sky would be there. She had reconsidered, knew she couldn’t actually go to this kid. How did she know where he was? How?

  She should have called Maggie if she knew where the boys were. She was probably thinking about that right now, making sure it was the right thing to do. She was thinking about that, and she’d forgotten to turn her phone back on. Or it was just dead.

  When Maggie stopped in the road, waiting for traffic to let her turn into her driveway, her heart stopped pounding, and felt like it stopped beating altogether. Sky’s truck wasn’t in the driveway.

  The rational part of Maggie’s mind knew that this meant Sky wasn’t where Maggie needed her to be. The other part, the part where every cell of her motherhood dwelled, was going to look anyway. She’d look anyway, the way a desperate person looks in the freezer for their keys, even though they know they wouldn’t have put them there.

  There was a slight gap in traffic, and Maggie whipped out in front of a blue mini-van that she could still hear honking after it had passed behind her. White dust flew up from the crushed oyster shell driveway and Maggie sped up to the house. It was only once she’d slammed to a stop that she realized she had forgotten to watch out for Coco, and some part of her heart registered shame and guilt, but Coco wasn’t outside, and that was a good thing, but another bad sign.

  Maggie left the Jeep door open behind her as she ran up the porch steps. She heard Coco dancing and keening on the other side of the front door as she jerkily shoved the key in the dead bolt. Then she flung the door open, barely missing Stoopid.

  She could feel the emptiness of the house as soon as she ran in. The lack of any of her people.

  “Sky?” she called anyway. “Kyle?”

  She ran down the hall toward the bedrooms, Coco and Stoopid on her heels. Kyle’s door was open, his bed kind of made, his pajama bottoms on the floor where he’d dropped them that morning. She glanced at them for just a second, then ducked back out to Sky’s room.

  When she opened the door, she saw her daughter’s battered brown leather backpack, a gift from three years ago, lying on her bed. It was accompanied by piles of notebooks and papers, an open differential equations textbook, and a make-up bag full of pens and pencils and highlighters.

  Hoping that Sky might have written something down, maybe even doodled Ryan’s location, Maggie tore through the loose papers and then flipped through the notebooks, but there was nothing there but math problems and Western Civ notes and several pages of the valedictorian speech Sky was working on. She’d written, read to Maggie, and then rejected every draft.

  Seeing her daughter’s handwriting was like hearing her voice, and Maggie ignored the hitch in her throat. She would not cry. She would not pick up Sky’s turquoise bandana and sniff her scent like a mother chimp already in mourning. She was a cop, and she would think like a cop. Thinking like a mother would kill any chance she had of finding her daughter. Thinking like a mother would leave her crying in a corner, depending on the men in her life to rescue and return her baby girl. She was not going to be that.

  She stalked out of Sky’s room, shoved Coco and Stoopid back out of the doorway, and ran to the kitchen. It was the habit of everyone in the household to leave notes on the kitchen island. If a note was required, it was left there. Maggie allowed the quickening of hope that Sky would not go to Ryan without leaving Maggie a note, telling her where to find both of them.

  But there was nothing on the island that would help Maggie. The gallon sized canning jar full of utensils was next to the fruit bowl. The crumbs from Kyle’s morning toast were on the cutting board. Wyatt had put the mail there last night, and neither one of them had opened it.

  Sky had gone to do something stupid and dangerous and had not left Maggie the means to keep her from it.

  She pulled her phone from the back pocket of her cargo pants and tapped Sky’s number. It went straight to voice mail, but she couldn’t hang up, not while she could hear her daughter’s voice.

  “Hey, this is Sky,” it said, with the faint strains of a Third Day song in the background. “I’m either sleeping, studying or ignoring you. Or I’m in class and you should know that and you shouldn’t be calling me.” Maggie heard the smile in her voice. “If you need me to call you back, leave a message. If this is a telemarketer, go away. I’m a kid and I don’t have a job.” Her voice turned slightly softer. “If this is my mom, yes, I’m wearing my seat belt.”

  Maggie had heard the message many times. Sky hadn’t changed it in two years. But that last line almost did her in. Yes, this is your mom, she thought, and I need you to come back here right now.

  The tone chimed and Maggie took a calming breath. “Sky, I need you to call me or text me right away. Right away, do you understand? Please.”

  She wanted to say I love you. They always made sure the last thing they ever said to each other was I love you. Going out the door, going to bed, ending a phone call. Sky and Kyle teased her, because they knew why Maggie insisted. They knew Maggie needed to make sure that it was the last thing they heard from her if something happened. The truth was that it was the last thing she needed to have heard, if something ever happened to them, though she only admitted that in the most secret place in her soul.

  But saying I love you meant she was scared. That there was a chance something would happen to her daughter.

  “I love you,” she said, just before the voice mail beeped and cut her off.

  She was about to put the phone away when it buzzed in her hand. It was Wyatt.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey. If she was there you would have called me.”

  “Yes.” She heard him let out a slow breath, although he tried to make it silent.

  “Okay. So, Quincy got the range on the cell tower that Sky’s phone pinged. Yes, it’s the same tower we use at the house, but it also covers roughly from just north of the airport to 98 in the south, and from the water department west to The Prado.”

  “Okay.”

  “Just remember, please, that she could have been at the house when she pinged off that tower, and she could be in Eastpoint right now.”

  “I know. But I’m here, and I don’t have anywhere else better to look. Are you still trying Find My Phone on your phone?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “And I will keep trying. Here’s what we’re putting together here. Myles has Cooper monitoring both Ryan and Sky’s Facebook pages—”

  “Did you find any posts between them?”

  “Not really, Maggie. A few very short posts from Sky the first week of school, pictures of his class schedule, a post about some pep rally, a couple of ‘good luck, take care’ kind of things. Since then, there have been a few posts of his that she’s given a thumbs-up, but that’s it.”

  “So they probably don’t know each other any more than she said they did,” Maggie said. She felt relief that she didn’t have to feel hurt anymore that Sky might have lied. Or feel bad anymore because she suspected it.

  “Probably not,” Wyatt said.

  “But how did she know where he was?”

  “I don’t know. Something. Myles and Bledsoe are still looking at the Facebook video, trying to see something we missed, something that one of us will recognize.”

  “That’s it? That’s all?”

  “Of course not,” Wyatt said gently.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We’re dividing up the area this tower covers, and we’re getting ready to head out. We’ve got three units from PD, six from our office, and we’re working on a chopper to see if we can spot her truck or Adrian’s car. We’ve got a BOLO out on the Toyota, so if she’s on the road…”

 
“Yeah.” Maggie took a deep breath and let it out. “Why did she do this, Wyatt?”

  She heard him sigh. “I don’t know. We’ll ask her tonight when we all get home.”

  Maggie nodded. “Yeah. Okay. I’m—”

  Her phone vibrated and she saw a notification that Wyatt had texted her a picture.

  “What’s this?”

  “I drew a circle on the Google map, of the tower range,” he said. “We’ve all got different sections, but you go wherever it is that you’re going and just keep in touch, okay?”

  “Oaky.”

  “Maggie.”

  “What?”

  “If by some wild chance you find them, you call it in, do you hear me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Before you get out of your car.”

  “Yes.”

  His voice changed to a near-whisper. “I promise you I will choke you by the neck if you go rushing in someplace with calling.”

  “I know. I will. I love you,” she said hurriedly.

  “I love you.”

  She disconnected and was about to slide the phone into her pocket, when she suddenly turned and slammed the fridge with her fist; one, three times, five. “You come back here right now!” she yelled.

  Maggie shoved the phone in her pocket, turned, and almost tripped over Stoopid, who was uncharacteristically silent. Coco sat behind him, not smiling, her tail thumping slowly. She knew fear when she heard it, especially Maggie’s fear.

  “Come on, Coco,” Maggie said, and Coco jumped to her feet and followed.

  Sky pulled the Toyota into the mixture of grass, weeds and gravel that made up the yard in front of the derelict trailer.

  She didn’t know what kind of car Adrian Nichols had, although Mom and Wyatt had been talking about it the other night; she just hadn’t paid attention. She supposed it didn’t matter anyway; there were no cars there at all.

  That didn’t mean Ryan wasn’t still in there, though. She sat in the truck, listening. The engine was ticking, and the little keychain hanging from the rearview mirror clicked against the back of it. She glanced at it nervously. Like the truck, it had been her dad’s. It had been hanging there when he died, and she wasn’t touching it unless she was forced to get rid of the truck someday.