Chapter Twenty-Three
Trey
Look, man, I know you’re freaked out,” Alex Autrey said as Trey paced around the small conference room in the Petite C?te Island Police Station. “But you’ve gotta calm down. This is Frankie Barbier you’re talking about. That guy wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“You didn’t see him at those meetings with Khaki, Alex.
” Bobby pulled off his trucker hat with the Jazz Fest logo on it, and ran a hand through his hair in agitation.
“He was facing complete financial ruin. He did manage to stave it off eventually, but I don’t think the bird-watchers are bringing in enough business to fix everything. ”
“And Callie’s been gone with him for over two hours.
” Trey tried not to think about all the things Frank could be doing to her, but it was impossible to keep the nightmare scenarios at bay.
Especially not when he knew what it was like to lose everything you’d worked to build.
If he’d been desperate even with the cushion of family money to rely on, how much more hopeless must Frank have felt?
Not only did he face losing his business, he was also facing the loss of his burgeoning political career.
Men with political ambition would do anything to keep themselves on an upward trajectory.
“We’ve got to find her.” Trey didn’t bother trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. “He might just be trying to convince her to let them make the show, but the truth is, we don’t know what Frank is capable of. And I don’t want to risk finding out.”
Alex leaned back against a whiteboard with a list of numbers on the far side of it, his arms crossed over his chest. “You don’t even know if he’s the one who’s been messing with y’all, Trey. Hell, we don’t know it’s not the bored kids you’ve been blaming it on from the beginning.”
Now, that pissed Trey the hell off. “You know as well as I do that Frank is the only person on this island with a motive for all of this. It makes sense, Alex. Especially since he stepped things up when Callie got here. He wanted to make her think the place was haunted, then when that didn’t work, he left that message from Khaki on Stella’s collar.
And then, when she still didn’t leave, he destroyed the stained-glass window.
He’s been escalating this whole time. And damn it, there’s no good reason for Callie not to answer her phone.
He’s got her and he might have lost patience by now. Do something.”
Alex swore, then nodded. “OK. You made some good points. Especially since Frank has been acting kinda squirrelly lately.”
Trey’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“Nothing major, but Sissy at the Sand Dollar had a laptop go missing, and when she tried to report it, Frank came in right behind her to tell us it was a false alarm.”
“A laptop?” Bobby asked, glancing at Trey.
“It wasn’t new or anything,” Alex said with a shrug.
“Just her old one that she kept out at the reservation desk for playing games and stuff when she was working check-ins. But before Eddie even had time to finish the report, Frank came in and told him it was nothing to worry about. That Sissy had a tendency to forget where she’d put things. ”
“Wait a minute,” Trey said to Alex with a scowl. “Was it the kind of laptop that might be able to run a Bluetooth speaker from a nearby location?”
Just then, Charlie came hurrying in. “The guy at the front desk said y’all were back here.” He greeted Trey and Alex and nodded to his father. “Mom told me that Miss Jameson is missing and she told me to come over here with what I found.”
“What is it?” Trey asked the boy, who seemed intimidated by the fact that they were all standing in the middle of a police station. And who could blame him?
Shrugging out of his backpack, Charlie unzipped it and removed what Trey recognized as the Bluetooth speaker he and Callie had found on her first night on the island.
“I told you I was going to see if I could find a way to identify the networks the speaker had been connected to before. Well, it occurred to me that if I drove around the island to see if it connected to someone’s Wi-Fi, once I got close enough to their house, then I’d be able to at least see which networks it was familiar with. ”
Alex raised his brows. “There’s about a thousand houses on this island, kid. You drove by every one?”
Charlie laughed. “Uh, no. My friend suggested it might be easier to hang out in Mom’s shop and watch the Wi-Fi settings on the speaker to see if it connected with someone’s phone when they came in.
That way we’d at least be able to narrow it down to whoever was in the shop when the connection happened. ”
He paused, and the three men watched him with bated breath. Until finally, Bobby burst out, “Well, don’t keep us in suspense! Whose phone did it connect to?”
Perhaps realizing that now was not the time for dramatic pauses, Charlie cut to the chase. “It actually connected to two different phones. First to Sissy Barbier’s phone, but you’re not going to believe where it connected to next.”
“Her father Frank’s phone.” Trey said grimly.
Charlie gaped. “How did you know?”
But Trey was already on his way out the door.