Page 59 of You Know Why

He puts his iPad on the table. “I have news. I wanted to wait until we knew for sure.”

“Tell me.”

“We got the footage from Brooklyn Locke’s accident. There were several cameras in the area, as you know. The video feeds were just forwarded to us. There’s something you need to see.”

He hits play, and she sees a car’s headlights flick on, then the car starts moving. It’s a dark SUV. It draws closer to the camera and the video stops, then zooms in on the driver. The face is blurry, but if she’s pushed, she would say it looks male.

“Is this who hit Brooklyn outside Eden’s house?” she asks, getting excited.

“Watch,” Drake says. She does. It goes frame by frame—the lights flicking on, the approach, the blurry face, the impact—then the car disappears around the corner. Theresa swallows hard. It isn’t easy to see Brooklyn flung like a rag doll to the curb, especially knowing how badly she was injured.

“Can you get a better shot of the driver?”

“Nope.”

“Then at least tell me you got a plate.”

“We got a plate. And as it happens, duh-dunn-duhhh, this was the same SUV that Andrew Locke got into when he originally left the Atlanta airport.”

“Oh, wow. So this definitely was a targeted hit.”

“Seems to be. The question is, Was Andrew driving? Or someone else?”

Theresa realizes he’s holding back. There’s more. She crosses her fingers under the table. “Tell me you found the SUV?”

He grins. “We found the SUV. But it was torched. Plates were missing, and the rideshare sticker was scraped off, but it matches the rest. The interior was trashed, no prints, no hairs. A good-sized dent in the front bumper, though. It’s definitely the car that hit her.”

She’s grateful as hell that Drake managed to get involved with the case. It would take her months working alone to make this kind of progress. And she sends another thank-you to Bob Gussin for reporting Andrew for embezzling funds. That’s made justifying the FBI’s involvement much easier.

“Where was it?”

“North of Alpharetta, in a junkyard. Owner saw smoke in the back of his lot. When he investigated and realized someone had dumped a vehicle, he called the police. Happily, there was a BOLO out on the SUV, so they called us. One of those lucky breaks.”

She mentally maps the drive from Eden’s home in Atlanta to Malogen. Alpharetta is dead center between them. “Has anyone searched the traffic cams between Malogen and Atlanta?”

“They have. The SUV shows up in a few spots on Tuesday night the twelfth and then again the thirteenth, overnight into Wednesday morning. I think it’s safe to say whoever was driving was in Malogen the night Andrew disappeared, and the night his parents were murdered.”

“This is good news, Drake. Great work. So now what?”

“They’re refining the video to see if we can get a clearer shot of the driver. But I think I know who it is.”

“Who?”

“It’s him. It’s Andrew Locke.”

She stares at him. “Let me see it again.”

When the video gets to the spot where the driver’s face flashes on-screen for a heartbeat, she hits pause. Squints. “I don’t know, Drake. I don’t see it. In the airport footage, he has a beard. This person is clean shaven, I can tell that much.”

“Not hard to get a razor. I still think it’s him. I think he’s systematically removing everyone in his way. His wife, his parents. He has a weapon now, too, there was a bullet hole in the roof of the SUV.”

“That’s just great. Still, if he wanted Brooklyn dead, why didn’t he just murder her in Nashville? Why an elaborate ruse to get her to another city and abandon her, and then come back to kill her? And then torture and kill his parents and send—” She cuts herself off. He doesn’t know about her intruder. She’s kept that to herself.

“Maybe he wants custody. Maybe she’s worth money.”

“Maybe. This feels pretty tenuous to me. Let’s see what happens when they refine the video.”

“There’s more. The video feeds at Grady were shut off while Brooklyn had her event, correct? Well, we looked a few hours before that, and this time, you aren’t going to be able to argue with me. Watch.” He hits play. “This is the second floor. Keep an eye on the elevator.”