Daylight (Atlee Pine, #3)(117)

Pine nodded. “Okay, does the sheriff’s office have a forensics tech?”

“Oh yeah.”

“I’d like prints and DNA samples taken from here. We can take samples from Kyle and his brother for elimination purposes.”

“Do you have samples of the girl’s DNA?” said Roberts.

Pine thought, Yes I do, because it’s the same as mine.

She nodded. “And any prints found here I’d like to match against Joe and Desiree, if you have those on file.”

“We have Joe’s for sure. I don’t know about Desiree’s.”

“Okay.”

They left the cave, with Pine reluctantly leaving Mercy’s doll behind, because this was a crime scene now. But then she stopped and turned back to the door.

“You said Joe Atkins was in the security business?”

Roberts nodded. “Yeah. He’d put together alarm packages, whatever you needed. Most folks around here don’t even lock their doors. But most of his clients were businesses. So he’d put in surveillance cameras and—” He broke off when Pine rushed back to the door and started ripping at the ivy that had grown up on the rock wall and around the door.

“Agent Pine?” said Blum.

Pine said, “Help me pull down this ivy.”

They all joined her and in short order had ripped enough of it away to reveal a small, decrepit surveillance camera mounted onto the rock wall and pointed at the door, with a cable snaking down the face of the wall and into the ground.

“Damn,” said Roberts. “He had this place under surveillance.”

Pine eyed the cable. “And this was before everything went wireless. I think that cable may run all the way to the house.”

“Well, let’s find out,” said Pat.

Pine sprinted back to the house and the others followed.





CHAPTER





75





THEY REACHED THE HOUSE and searched the exterior all over for the other end of the cable.

Kyle spotted it behind an overgrown bush.

The others quickly joined him. Pine looked at the spot where the cable entered the house.

“What room is that?”

Kyle said, “That’s me and Trey’s bedroom.”

“I wonder if Atkins used that as a home office when he was here?” said Blum. She added in a disgusted tone, “Since they only needed the one bedroom, apparently, once the girl got too big to keep in that room.”

They rushed inside, and Kyle led the way to the bedroom. It looked like the bedroom of a typical teenager, meaning there was junk piled everywhere. And there was a giant flat-screen TV set on a table with Xbox controllers set in front of it.

“Where’s your brother?” asked Pine.

“He works at a 7-Eleven.”

She surveyed the room, eyeing the beds on either side.

There were two windows in the room, and one faced the rear yard.

“If I’m Atkins, I think I’d want to be constantly looking in the direction of that jail cell, because let’s just call it what it is.”

Roberts stepped forward. “Okay, desk about here,” he said. “And if he was using cable back then, I bet he was also using a VCR with a videotape.”

Blum said, “You would think that if whoever the bank used to clean out the house had found a tape they would have looked at it or turned it in.”

“Maybe it was in a place they couldn’t see,” said Pine, staring at the floor. “That carpet. Was it here when you bought the house?”

Hazel Simmons had joined them and answered. “No. It was hardwood floors. Made the room too cold.”

Pat added, “There’s no concrete slab under the house. It’s on raised footers with a crawlspace under it.”

“Okay, if the desk was there then, we have two options.” She glanced at the Simmonses. “Can we take the carpet up and look under it?”

Pat said, “Hell, yes, I’ll help you.”

They worked on both corners simultaneously.

Pat got his section up first and was examining the flooring. Kyle reached down and started feeling around each of the boards. “Hey, one’s loose here.”

They rushed over, and with everyone helping, they soon worked free a section of the hardwood flooring. What was revealed set inside a wooden cubby was a Sony VCR.

Kyle reached down and pulled it out. “Wow, never actually held one of these before.”

Blum said, “Look, the cable is still attached.”

Pat pulled the cable free and said, “We can hook this up to the boys’ TV over there. It has the connections in the back.”

“I’ll do it,” offered Kyle.

He carried the VCR over to the table the TV was on and started working away. Within a minute he had it all connected. He turned the power on and hit the Eject button.

“Oh my God,” said Blum. “A tape is still in there.”

“It has to be the last one that he put in there before he was killed. Let’s hope it’s still good,” said Pine.

“That cubby it was in looks well insulated,” said Pat.

“We don’t have the remote,” said Kyle. “But looks like I can work it from the VCR.”