Page 67 of Wild Tempest

“Thanks for looking after them.”

“They love me more. They told me so.”

I laughed. “Liar.”

She climbed into her car, fired up the engine, and pulled out of the lot.

I watched her go, then strolled back to the Avventura.

The boat was quiet.

I checked on Jack. He appeared to still be alive and well.

I climbed up to my stateroom, went through my nightly routine, and crashed out.

By the time I woke up in the morning, Jack was in the galley grilling breakfast.

I stumbled in, wiping the sleep from my eyes. "You're up bright and early. How are you feeling?"

Jack smiled. “I feel great. Never better."

Bacon sizzled in a pan, and the smell of fresh coffee swirled. Morning news played on a small flatscreen in the galley.

When breakfast was ready, we dished up our plates and ate on the sky deck as the morning rays spilled across the marina.

I told Jack about my adventure last night on Whistler Cay but left out the part about the Raptor.

His face wrinkled with annoyance. "You should have woken me up. You know better than to go out on a mission alone."

"I wasn't alone. Teagan was with me."

Jack frowned at me.

“There was one slight complication.”

“What’s that?”

My phone buzzed with a call from Crenshaw, an IT guy at the department. "I was able to get into that phone. I just punched in random passcodes until the security screen cleared. 123456.”

A surprising number of people used it, along with 111111, 000000, and other simple patterns on the keypad.

Crenshaw continued. "The phone belongs to Garrett Larson. I think you need to see this footage."

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JD and I hovered around Crenshaw's desk as he pulled up the footage. He'd copied it over from the phone and made a duplicate of the device's hard drive. It was standard practice.

Crenshaw pressed play, and we watched the dark footage.

The cameraman hid in the woods, filming through the trees. The subject of his cinematic masterpiece dug into the ground. An LED lantern illuminated his face. He shoveled out scoopfuls of dirt, then dropped to his knees and clawed out the rest of the dirt.

This was the pit we had discovered.

We continued watching the video.

The man pulled a decomposing body from the shallow grave.

It was hard to see, but judging by the condition of it, the corpse had been there for a while. Perhaps a month or two. It had shriveled and desiccated. What was left of the leathery skin made the remains look almost mummified. Decaying connective tissue barely held joints together. The shriveled and contracted facial skin exposed the teeth and turned the eye sockets into deep hollows. A waxy, soapy-like coating from fat breakdown covered parts of the remains. Maggots and beetles had feasted. There wasn’t much left for them now.