Chapter 41
forty-one
. . .
LANE
Trey and I didn’t discuss anything until we were safely ensconced in his bat cave.
“What happened back there?” he asked, breaking the silence.
“I think she’s given up.”
“Sutton?”
I nodded. “She was so…quiet and had shrunk in on herself. I don’t know what the fuck they told her in that interview room, but it wasn’t good.”
“Are you sure Sutton didn’t do this?” The glare I gave him was lethal enough to kill, and he raised his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. Stupid question.”
“You’re lucky I don’t throat punch you for asking it.”
“I’d deserve it,” he agreed. “But if you want to clear her name, we’re going to need you to turn that anger away from me and toward figuring out what happened. Do you have any idea why Johns believes Sutton did this?”
“Addie said something about text messages. Our text messages. I suppose there could’ve been something in there to convince him.”
“Let me see your phone.”
After navigating to my thread with Addie, I handed it over, and Trey scrolled through.
“You haven’t communicated since after you got shot, when she sent you a few texts to check in…that you ignored,” he added pointedly.
“I had bigger things on my mind.”
“Then consider me confused.”
I laughed. “That makes two of us. If these texts are the reason for Sutton’s withdrawal, we’re clearly missing something.”
“What if…” Trey trailed off as his fingers went to work on the keys.
His eyes took on that glazed-over expression he often wore when his mind was working faster than his hands could.
Like he was a dog that caught a scent. Several maps of the area popped up, as well as a dialogue box and some other information I didn’t understand.
Trey grabbed my phone, tapped around on the screen until he found what he was looking for, then typed something into the box.
While the system loaded whatever he’d demanded of it, he grabbed a cable and connected my phone.
A new window appeared, this one full of little folders labeled with things like “Cache,” “Contacts,” and “Media.”
“What’s all that?” I asked.
“All the data from your phone. I have an inkling about what happened, but if we’re going to prove it, I need to dump yours and run checks.”
“Care to share with the class?”
He smirked but didn’t answer, instead continued to tap away at keys, windows popping up and disappearing seemingly at random. I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of this shit.
“Have you noticed your phone battery has been draining faster than normal? Or any weird clicking sounds when you’re on a call?”
My brows drew together, considering. “Actually, yeah. Both of those things. How’d you know that?”
After a few more keystrokes, another window similar to the one with all of my phone data opened on the screen.
Trey grinned. “Gotcha.” Then he turned to me. “So I’m pretty sure Addie cloned your phone.”
I snorted a laugh. “No way.”
“What do you mean, ‘no way’? I’m telling you this is what happened.”
“How would she even do that? I haven’t been alone with her for ages, and she never had unsupervised access to my phone—” I stopped midsentence as something occurred to me. “Holy shit. When I was in the hospital. That day you saw her running out? She was in my room when I woke up.”
“Probably when she did it, then.”
Propping my elbows onto the desk in front of me, I raked my fingers down my face, mind swirling. If she cloned my phone all those months ago, before I’d even officially rejected her, well before anything with Sutton happened…
It appeared everyone had been right.
I felt like a fucking moron for ignoring it so long too. Maybe if I’d just listened to literally anyone in my family when they explained they thought she was off her rocker, that she was off her rocker because she was in love with me, maybe I could’ve spared Sutton this mess.
“What does this have to do with texts?”
“By cloning your phone, she had access to everything you did on your device. Texts, calls, emails—everything. But the clone she had also acted as a duplicate of your device. Think of it like being able to correspond via text from both your phone and iPad. Two separate devices linked to the same account, or in this case, likely the IMEI.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
He waved me off. “It’s not important. What is important is that, because her device is an exact replica of yours, it’s also capable of sending and receiving messages on your behalf.
But since you have no record of them, I’d be willing to bet she was communicating with a different—” He cut off abruptly, noticing my eyes had glazed over.
“Okay, I’m boring you. The point is, on the surface, these text messages she claims to have look like they came from you, but she was the one sending them.
Staging these conversations to make it look like something was happening when it wasn’t. ”
“And whatever was included in those messages hurt Sutton enough that she couldn’t even look at me earlier.”
“Exactly. So now that I know this exists, I can work on retrieving all the data and proving none of it originated from your legitimate device.”
“How long will that take?”
Trey’s mouth flattened into a line in a way that told me I wasn’t going to like what he had to say. “A few days. I’m going to have to do some hardcore hacking here.”
I nodded, doing my best to tamp down my rage.
It wouldn’t do any of us any good, least of all Sutton, if I flew off the handle.
I knew Trey would work as fast as he could.
For now, Sutton was relatively safe at the department.
I just had to trust we could find what we needed to get her out of there before Addie escalated further.
“I wonder…” I mused aloud, and Trey glanced sideways at me.
I started talking before I could fully marshal my thoughts.
“Addie is clearly crazy, right? She’s off her rocker, and she’s clearly spent months putting this plan into action.
Do you think maybe her team at the FBI has noticed a change in her?
Do you think they could shed some light on her movements and her mental state? ”
“I mean, it couldn’t hurt to try,” my brother said with a shrug.
“Can you get me her supervisor’s number?”
A few minutes later, I headed out into Trey’s living room to make a call to Supervisory Special Agent Erik Fontaine.
“Fontaine,” he said when he answered.
“SSA Erik Fontaine?”
“Yes, I just said that.”
A no-nonsense kind of guy. I appreciated that.
“Agent Fontaine, my name is Lane Lawless. I’m the—”
“Sheriff in Dusk Valley. I remember you from that case about ten years ago. You know, I’ve actually been meaning to call you.”
“You have?” I asked, surprised.
“Yeah. You remember that Jane Doe you found up there last summer?”
“Of course.”
“We caught her killer. A nasty son of a bitch that had been traveling across the country perpetuating his crimes.”
“How many?”
“In the end, he killed five women. All transients. Older teenagers or younger twenty-somethings who had run away from home or simply didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Fuck, I’m sorry.”
“The important thing is he can’t hurt anyone else, and the families will get justice. Including your vic. Her name was Helena Griffiths. Twenty. Originally from Oregon. According to her family, she was hoping to make her way south to somewhere warmer.”
And she was murdered one state over. A horrible end to a life that hadn’t even gotten started.
“Well, thank you for letting me know. It’s bugged me for a long time that I couldn’t solve that one myself.”
“She was his first victim, actually. Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
I chuckled softly. “I’ll try.”
“Anyway,” he said, somewhat more cheerfully. “Was there a reason you called me?”
“Oh, yes!” Deciding to cut right to the chase, I asked, “Are you aware that Agent Caldwell, who I understand is under your command, accused a woman of physically assaulting her today?”
“I…” he started, then paused to clear his throat. “No, I had no idea.”
“Have you noticed anything off about her behavior lately?”
“To be honest with you, Sheriff, I haven’t even seen Caldwell since the end of August. She randomly called in one day and said she was taking an extended leave of absence.
” Holy shit. She’d been off work since Crew’s wedding?
Since I got shot? Fuck, I was such a moron.
“Tell me about this assault,” he demanded. “What’s going on?”
As succinctly as I could, I told him about Sutton’s situation—and briefly dove into all of the other strange things that had been happening around us for the last few months.
“Addie and I had a very brief personal relationship,” I admitted. “But it ended a long time ago. Since then, we’ve been colleagues and friends.”
“She always mentioned what a great cop you are. Said you’d be a great fit for the Bureau.”
I grimaced. “I’m happy where I am.”
“I figured,” he chuckled. “If you’re as good as she says, you would’ve already gone for it if the FBI was where you wanted to be.”
Over the years, Addie had brought up the idea on more than one occasion, extolling the benefits of being a federal agent. Every time, I shut her down. That wasn’t the career I was destined for.
“She was never really the same after her husband died, you know,” Agent Fontaine continued.
“Still a hell of a cop, but…wilder. Less disciplined, like his death had snapped some sort of mental tether on her. But she wasn’t a danger to herself or anyone else.
At least not in a way that compromised her ability to do her job.
So I didn’t press the issue. Of course, she underwent Bureau mandated therapy after Malone was killed and her own near-death experience, and they cleared her to return to duty.
That was good enough for me. But maybe I shouldn’t have let it go so easily.
” He sighed heavily. “I’ll ask around to the rest of our team.
See if anyone has seen or heard from her. Is this a good number to reach you at?”
“Yes,” I said. “One more question before you go.”
“Sure.”
“Is she…dangerous?”
“Why do you ask?”
I hadn’t even shared my theory with Trey yet, but I laid it all out for Addie’s supervisor now. Though it had been years since I’d spoken to the man, I valued his opinion. He was a highly decorated agent with an impressive case closure rate.
When I finished, he said, “If she’s suffered some sort of psychotic break like you seem to think…yeah, she’s dangerous. She’s smart enough to pull all of this off and righteous enough to think she’ll get away with it. Tread lightly, Sheriff. And give me a call if you need our help.”
After thanking him and assuring him I would do that, I hung up and headed back to Trey’s office.
“How’d that go?” he asked when I appeared.
I slid into the chair beside him and rubbed my hand down my face. “About how I expected,” I said, then ran through our conversation and shared my theory about Addie.
“What do you need from me?” Trey asked when I finished.
“Find whatever you need to get Sutton out of jail ASAP. If I’m right, she’s in serious danger.”