Page 50 of Maverick Detective Dad
“You really think I can do that, repair things with him?” the woman asked.
Noah wasn’t so quick to answer that time, maybe because he was asking himself if he’d ever be able to forgive her. “I don’t know,” Noah finally said. “Just go straight back to the inn and don’t forget to lock the door. If you do hear from Bobby again, let me know.”
“I will,” she said, but there wasn’t a lot of conviction in her voice.
Everly thought about the woman driving around in this storm. Helen could indeed get into an accident, and she hoped that wasn’t what Helen had in mind by looking for Bobby. Maybe Helen intended to end her life the way everyone believed it had ended fourteen years ago.
Noah ended the call and then reconnected with Dispatch to give authorization to immediately put through any other calls from Helen. In this case though, no news would be good news because it would hopefully mean she’d gotten herself to safety.
“You really think Jared or River could have made that call to Helen?” Everly asked him when he’d finished with the dispatcher.
“Possibly, but if so that means they probably have Bobby. How else could one of them have gotten his phone? And if one of them does have him, then it means the likely plan is to set him up to take the blame for the murders.”
True. Bobby would make a good scapegoat. If he wasn’t the actual killer, that was. But if he was the vigilante killer, he could have made that call to Helen though, just to taunt her.
“I’m going to try to get a trace on Helen’s phone,” Noah said. “That way, I might be able to figure out where the call from Bobby came from.”
Everly nodded and was about to turn her attention back to the financials, but she glanced at the nightstand at the tiny bead of red light on the baby monitor that she kept by her bedside.
“What’s wrong?” Noah asked, obviously noticing that something had alarmed her.
“It’s maybe nothing.” Or rather she hoped it was nothing. “Notice the light on the baby monitor. That comes on when it’s been triggered. The camera’s in the nursery, and it’s motion activated. Maybe one of us set it off when we came in the house. It would have sounded with a little beep, but we might not have heard it.”
The bad feeling came, twisting at her stomach. Because they’d been listening for sounds, any sounds, and even if they’d been several rooms away, Everly thought she would have heard the beep. It was the one surefire way to get her attention and would have even snapped her out of a deep sleep since it normally meant Ainsley was awake and had moved around enough to set it off.
Noah stared at the monitor. “Does it record what activated it?”
“Yes. It keeps the feed for about twelve hours.” She stood to go to it, but Noah motioned for her to stay seated, and he eased across the room toward it.
It occurred to her then that the monitor was almost directly in front of a window. The blinds were closed, but she recalled the infrared Hudson had used. If the killer had that, then maybe he’d set off the monitor some way, maybe with a remote, and was waiting for one of them to go near it so he could shoot them.
Noah had obviously also considered the same thing because he drew his gun and then stooping down, he went to the nightstand. He snatched the monitor up and brought it back to her.
Everly steadied her hands enough to take the monitor and look at the bottom to see the time when it had been activated. Her stomach tightened even more.
“Judging from the time, it was triggered shortly after I was taken to the hospital,” Everly managed to say.
Noah stayed quiet a moment. “Hudson came back here to install the locks a couple of hours after that. Maybe it happened then. I let him use your phone to get into the house, and he dropped it back at the hospital right before you finally woke up.”
The relief came. Yes, that had to be it. Hudson had come inside to install the two dead bolts, and even though neither of those locks had been near the camera in the nursery, he might have checked out all the rooms in the house.
Everly hit the button on the monitor to view what the camera had recorded, and she didn’t see Hudson.
However, she did see something that sent her heart to her knees.
She watched, her gaze frozen on the small screen as a man jimmied the window in the nursery. Everly couldn’t see his face because he was wearing a dark hooded raincoat, and he kept his head down.
Everly saw the man climb through the window and into her daughter’s room.
“OH, GOD,”Everly muttered, her voice trembling. She stopped the recording, the image of the intruder frozen on the screen. With the dark hood and hulking posture, he looked like some monster from nightmares. “Oh, God.”
Noah drew his gun and was silently repeating the same thing. He had to force himself not to jump to some really bad conclusions. Conclusions like the killer had gotten in and planted a bomb.
A bomb that could go off at any moment.
Or that the killer was still inside the house. He battled his instincts to grab Everly and get her out of there fast.
Because that might be exactly what the killer wanted them to do.
