Caitlin hung up and stared at the telephone. Something was wrong. Or maybe she’d just pushed Penn too hard. She rubbed her eyes to clear the sleep from them. The problem with loving a great guy was that when you needed to bend the rules, he didn’t always have the proper flexibility. Yet Penn had stretched his ethics last night, and even more today. She was thinking about driving over to Ferriday to sit in the waiting room on Henry’s floor (hopefully out of Sherry’s sight) when Jamie thrust her door open again.

“Guess what?” he said, his eyes bright with excitement.

“Tell me. I’m desperate here.”

“They just had a fire at the Concordia Beacon. We caught it on the police radio.”

“What?”

“It started in a file room. A flash fire took out a bunch of storage boxes and stuff, then spread to the rest of the building. But get this: their computers melted.”

Caitlin blinked in confusion. “So? Isn’t that what computers do during a fire?”

“Sometimes.” Jamie smiled strangely. “But when the firemen got to the Beacon fire, they could still get inside the building. Yet the computers looked like someone had turned a blowtorch on them.”

This detail raised the hair on the back of her neck. “Oh, man. This is crazy.”

“How do you want to handle it?”

Caitlin looked at the phone on her desk and thought about calling Penn back. Instead, she got up, grabbed her coat off her chair, and waved Jamie out the door.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“We’re going to Ferriday.”

“You and me?”

“You’re a quick study, aren’t you? Get your fucking coat.”

CHAPTER 55

“DO YOU HAVe the security code?” Walt asked, as the Roadtrek nosed along the road bordering Lake St. John. The oxbow lake looked black in December, and the mostly bare trees didn’t offer any sense of warmth or invitation.

“Written on my hand,” Tom replied, scanning the mailboxes that lined the road.

“Which one’s your partner’s?”

“You were here two months ago. You don’t remember?”

“It was dark. Just like now.”

Tom’s eyes were peeled for the tall storage shed that stood beside Drew Elliott’s lake house. The former owner hadn’t built a boathouse, preferring to keep his ski boat (with its wakeboarding tower) in a prefab storage shed. Drew had complained about the shed when he acquired the property, but he hadn’t yet got rid of it. Tom was sure the Roadtrek would fit inside the tall building, so long as they could clear enough floor space.

“This whole damned lake is lined with houses,” Walt grumbled. “How are we going to sneak this thing into a garage?”

“The houses on either side of Drew’s are empty in the winter. And nobody’s moving around this late.”

Walt grunted.