“But you hurt your leg in the process.” I pushed out a breath. “And to answer your question . . . I’ve had better days.” I motioned to the phone. “How long do you think it will take before it’s charged enough for us to see what’s on there.”
“Not long. Maybe five minutes or less. The question is how we’re gonna get into it. It’s bound to be locked with a password. Do you have any idea what Jerry’s could be? Presuming it’s Jerry’s.”
“No, and I’m not certain it was his. He never had a cell phone.”
“Bart might have had him carry one so he could get a hold of him whenever he needed.”
I shook my head. “Maybe.” But there was limited cell phone coverage. Maybe it was for whenever Jerry ran into Ewing.
He took both of my hands and squeezed them. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”
“I should have looked closer at what was in the box when Emily brought it to me.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered,” he said firmly. “Nothing would have changed.”
“Michelle Abernathy might not be dead.” I still struggled to believe she was. I’d seen her just last night.
“No,” he said. “I think they would have killed her regardless.”
But he didn’t know that. Neither of us did, any more than we knew that the phone would be of use to us.
As if on cue, it sprang to life. The background was a generic screen that had likely come with the phone, but there was nothing to indicate whether it had been Jerry’s.
Marco looked up at me. “Okay. It’s go time.”
“We only get so many shots at this before it locks us out, right?”
“If I remember right, we get ten tries.”
I wasn’t sure that was enough. “Okay. I say we go with the obvious. One, two, three, four.”
“Jerry was a simple man. That seems logical.” He opened the screen to input the passcode and cursed. “We need six numbers.”
“Then add five, six.”
He nodded and tapped them in, then got an error.
“This just got a whole lot harder,” I said.
We tried putting in the numbers that coordinated with the letters of his last name and then his first name and the first letter of his last name. For lack of a better option, we tried a simple 000000. Of course that didn’t work. Then in exasperation, we tried the numbers one to six in reverse order. All five attempts struck out.
“Try his birthdate,” I said, feeling like a fool. “I know it from the funeral.” I recited it for him, using double digits for the month and the date and the last two of the year.
He grimaced. “And now we’re locked out for a minute.”
I spent a few seconds mentally combing through everything in Jerry’s box. Which was when it hit me. “I think we’re onto something with the birthdate. We just had the wrong one.”
“Obviously.”
I shot him a dry look. “He had two framed photos of his daughter. I bet it’s her birthdate. I’d have said the numbers tied to her name might have worked, but it has too many letters.”
His eyes widened. “Jerry had a daughter?”
“I’m pretty sure she died when she was a little girl, but he still had lots of photos of her as well as a locket with her name. It’s got to be her birthdate.”
“So we go to the courthouse and look for a death certificate? I can probably find it at the station.”
“No,” I said softly. “It was engraved on the locket. July 2, 1979.”
“Okay,” he said, grabbing my hand and linking our fingers. “We’ll try that next.”
We watched the timer count down, and when it reached zero, he kissed the back of my hand.
“For luck,” he said, smiling up at me. Then he entered the number.
Both of us released loud exhales when it worked.
“Now what?” I asked, looking at him.
“Now we start diggin’ around.”
But it didn’t take him long to find out why the phone was so important. He pulled up the open apps, and the icon for photos was on top. Marco clicked through.
“There are three videos,” he said. “Are you ready?”
I nodded.
Marco played the video that had been recorded first. It was dated the day before Jerry’s death, 9:23 p.m.
The screen was dark at the start of the video. I could barely make out a figure slipping into a house. Then I realized it was the Drummond house, and a woman had gone in through the side door.
Whoever was holding the phone, presumably Jerry, crossed the driveway and went around to the back of the house, entering that way. He crept down a hall I recognized from my visit with Bart and then stopped next to a partially closed door. Bart’s office. I could hear a man and a woman conversing inside.
“I’ve got information that will end you,” Louise said. “All you have to do is pay me a million dollars, and I’ll make it all go away.”
“You’re bluffing,” Bart said.
“Am I? Remember that kid from fifteen years ago? I sure do.”
Bart was quiet for a moment. “If you remember it so well, then why did you tell me about Lula?”
“It was worth the risk,” Louise said. “And if you’d killed her, well . . . I figured I’d have one less thing dependin’ on me.”
I gasped at her callous disregard for her daughter. But then, I knew she was a monster. Why did the proof of it still surprise me?
“And if I don’t pay the one million?” Bart asked on the video.
“I think it goes without sayin’ that I’ll have to share what I know with the world,” Louise said in a smug tone.
“I don’t believe you have proof,” he sneered.
“Oh, I got it all right. Right next to my golden ticket out of this shit town.” She released a raspy laugh. “Literally.”
The video ended, and Marco turned to me. “In all your research on Bart’s favors, did you come across anything about a kid being murdered fifteen years ago?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’d remember a child, Marco. I didn’t find anything.”
“Okay. Ready for the next one?”
I nodded.
The video was dated ten minutes after the first one. A parked car in the Drummond driveway filled the screen, the trees opposite the house in the background. Jerry must have been standing in the shadows of the house, and I felt a pulse of pride in him. Few people had given him credit for it, but when it had counted, he’d always shown himself to be a very brave man.
A man got out of the car as Louise emerged from the house’s side entrance.
“Well?” the man asked. I couldn’t see his face very well, but I recognized his voice. It was Derek Carpenter.
“He’s gonna play hardball,” Louise said in a low voice, trying to keep quiet, but the microphone of the phone picked it up. “We need to get us some bolt cutters before we head out to my property. I never got the key to the padlock on the toolbox. Stupid Bruce got himself killed before he could hand it over. Michelle’s had it all this time and never realized it.”
“If you’d just told me it was at your place, I could have picked it up before I got you from the bus station,” Derek grumbled. “If nothin’ else, we should have gotten it before we came here.”