Page 31 of Not Our Daughter

“That hair, boss?” Davis asked, joining him in the slip.

“Yeah. And lots of it. Someone made a quick and dramatic appearance change. We need to get an immediate mock-up done of Cole Shipley without the longer hair and possibly without the beard. Because we’ve likely been looking for the wrong damn guy all night.”

Twenty

They were nearly four hours down the road, headed south toward the Colorado state border, when Cole finally had to pull off somewhere and gas up the van. Lisa sat in the passenger seat next to him. Once they were clear of the valley, Cole had felt it was safe to have his wife join him up front. But she mostly just stared out the window into darkness. Because their daughter was in the back, they’d decided to wait until they were in private again to openly discuss their situation. Which meant a painfully long and quiet car ride. Jade had been relentless in bugging them for the truth. But Cole refused to have that conversation until he’d first talked with Lisa about it. Every word they told her right now carried incredible weight. Jade finally gave up and was currently asleep on one of the beanbag chairs with a blanket pulled over her. When fifty miles had turned into a hundred, and then two hundred, everyone had begun to breathe a little easier. They’d managed to escape immediate danger. Cole could only hope the FBI were still operating with the belief they were hiding somewhere in the valley. He wanted as much runway as possible before law enforcement began to expand their search. If he could somehow make it into Mexico before that happened, Cole felt confident they would be in the clear.

But they still had a long way to go.

He turned into a Loaf‘N Jug twenty-four-hour gas station in the small town of Alamosa, Colorado, which was still about thirty-five miles from the New Mexico border. It was 2:38 in the morning. The parking lot was completely empty except for a rusted yellow Volkswagen Beetle parked over in the corner. It probably belonged to a gas station employee. Cole had his choice of gas pumps. He selected one on the farthest edge of the parking lot to avoid a direct view from inside the gas station.

“You want anything from inside?” he asked Lisa.

“Waters. And please be quick.”

“That’s the plan.”

He got out, circled the van, and hurried toward the gas station. As he approached, he spotted a college-age guy with long black hair sitting on a stool behind the front counter. He looked like he was working alone. At first glance, Cole saw no other people inside the gas station. He entered the store and plopped a fifty-dollar bill down on the counter. The clerk had his eyes glued to a laptop. The kid had a dragon tattoo on his neck and piercings in both his nose and lip, and reeked of marijuana.

“Gas on pump nine,” he said.

“You got it,” said the clerk, not even looking up.

Cole would be paying cash from here on out. He had $5,000 stuffed inside one of the duffel bags. Credit cards were not an option—they could obviously be tracked. He would get new cards under their new names once they got settled, but the cash should be plenty to get them to their destination and hold them over until they got their feet beneath them. It felt surreal for him to even be thinking about Sayulita, Mexico. They had just left their whole life behind. And they were about to start a new life in a foreign country. How hard would it be to find a place to live? What would he do for work? Where would Jade go to school? Would they be able to find a good spine surgeon for Jade in Mexico?

These questions and countless others had been flooding his brain the past four hours on the open road. When they’d initially fled fromAustin thirteen years ago, Mexico had been an option they’d put on the table, and they’d even discussed Sayulita. It felt much safer than staying in the United States, where they might be more easily recognized. But they’d ultimately made the decision to stay stateside because of Jade, whom they wanted to have as normal a childhood as possible. It took them three years to find a normal home, and the longest they stayed in one place during that time was three months. They initially drove to Billings, Montana, where they paid cash for a weekly-rate motel. They mostly stayed in their room those first two weeks, monitoring the news. From there, they began bouncing from one small town to the next throughout Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, and Cole had eventually started taking part-time jobs to make ends meet. Home Depot. Ace Hardware. Lowe’s. It was difficult, both financially and emotionally. They stayed hyperalert and remained withdrawn from any relationships with outsiders. It wasn’t until they landed in Winter Park that Cole decided to get a full-time job. But he still chose something with a low profile. A career with a corporation and any real future—like he used to have—had never been an option. He couldn’t risk his face showing up somewhere more prominent. So they’d mostly lived month-to-month for thirteen years.

Cole left the store and walked back over to the van. The gas pumps were well lit, which made him feel exposed and vulnerable. He pulled a hose from the pump and stuck the nozzle into the van. As the gas started flowing, he glanced at the street they’d just exited. A lowrider car with rap music blaring and what looked like two teenagers with backward ball caps in the front seats slowly drove past. Cole made sure to stay out of view. He wanted as few eyes on him as possible. The gas pump was excruciatingly slow. He spotted more headlights approaching from up the road. As they got closer, Cole felt his heart begin to race. A police car. It paused at a streetlight about forty yards away. Cole pressed his back against the van, as to not be seen. If the police officer decided to pay the gas station a visit, he wasn’t sure what he would do. He’d be a sitting duck. The gas finally finished pumping, but Cole didn’t move.At the moment, he was completely out of sight of the police car. But he would have to step back into full view to return the gas hose to the pump.

Cole peeked around the van. The police car was just sitting there at the intersection, even though the light was clearly green. What was the officer doing? Looking his way? Running his plates? Cole felt his fingers shaking. What if the police car suddenly pulled in directly behind him? Another quick peek. Then he let out a deep exhale as the police officer finally drove through the intersection and farther on down the road.

After returning the gas hose, Cole hurried back to the building. He stepped through the glass doors and moved straight to the back. He grabbed three water bottles from one of the fridges and a bag of Jade’s favorite gummy worms, then quickly headed to the counter. The clerk pecked away on a computer to tally up his items. Cole glanced behind the counter, where he saw four small security camera TV monitors. Only two of them seemed to be operational. Both working security cameras showed views inside the store. His face was center position on one monitor. No cameras seemed to be working in the parking lot.

Cole paid and then glanced at the kid’s laptop. “You connected to the internet here?”

“Yep. Otherwise, I’d be bored as hell all night.”

“I’ll give you a hundred bucks if you give me five minutes with your laptop.”

The clerk pitched his head. “Seriously, dude?”

“Yes. I just need to check something online really quick, and my phone is dead. I’ll use it right here at the counter.” Cole counted out five twenty-dollar bills. “What do you say?”

“Yeah, man, cool. I could use the extra cash.”

The clerk grabbed his laptop and placed it in front of Cole. He then took the hundred dollars and stuffed it in his blue jean pocket.

“Take your time, man,” he said. “I’ll just be over here on my phone.”

Cole watched as the clerk stepped out from behind the counter and walked over to the corner of the store next to the ICEE machines. Hequickly lit up a joint and began puffing away. Working quickly, Cole opened a new browser window and typed in a web address he hadn’t accessed in a while. He thought it smarter to do this on someone else’s computer than his burner phone right now. The site was off the grid and well secured. It was a simple storage website. There was only one video file listed, and he’d placed it there more than thirteen years ago. He clicked on it and watched as the video loaded onto the laptop screen. It had been captured from one of his home security cameras on the night they’d left town. He held his breath and pressed play. The video came from a security camera mounted under the corner of their roof and was focused directly on the front sidewalk and their street. At first, the video showed a calm, well-lit sidewalk. The time stamp on the video said 12:14 a.m., April 18. A white Toyota Corolla suddenly appeared at the curb. Then Jade’s biological mother got out of the vehicle. She wore a black tank top and red micro shorts and was barefoot. Her hair was a mess, her makeup smeared. And she had a distraught look on her face. She hurried toward their front door and was in and out of camera view within a couple of seconds. Cole didn’t have to see the rest to know what happened next. He would never stop having nightmares about it.

The woman had fallen straight into him. She was bleeding out from the midsection and gasping for her life. She claimed someone was coming for Jade. And she begged Cole with her last dying breath to save her daughter. At that point, Cole had scrambled back to the bedroom, woken up Lisa, and frantically told her what had happened. Trembling, they’d grabbed Jade from her crib and raced down the hallway toward the garage. Lisa had shrieked at the sight of the woman’s dead body lying on the hardwood floor in the foyer as blood puddled beneath her. Jade began crying as they hurried into their three-car garage, still in their pajamas, climbed into their Lexus SUV, and pulled out.

They didn’t even take time to strap Jade into her carrier and lock it into the car seat base. Lisa just held her tightly in her arms as they sped out of their neighborhood. They were only three minutes away from the house, sitting at a stop sign, when Cole had gotten a motion alert on hisphone from the front door security camera. He’d immediately opened the security app and stared at the face of a stocky, late-twenties man with a beard, wearing a denim button-down, blue jeans, and cowboy boots at their front door. The man had briskly opened the unlocked door and disappeared inside.

Cole didn’t possess the front door security footage. That night, he’d quickly tried to save all security videos from his home server on his phone. He had managed to download the corner roof footage showing Candace appearing on the front sidewalk followed by the mystery guy a few minutes later. However, someone had deleted all other footage before he could get to it. Cole figured it was the work of the intruder, who wanted to immediately cover his tracks. The guy must’ve known how to access their home system by using the digital pad on their kitchen wall.

Cole paused the video, squinted at the laptop screen. He had a good shot of the guy approaching up the sidewalk toward his front door. He’d been under so much duress earlier, upon discovering they’d been found by the FBI, that he’d been wondering if his mind had been playing tricks on him. Was it actually the same man earlier in the alley as in the video? But watching now confirmed he wasn’t imagining it. The man on the video was definitely the same one who’d shot the policeman in the alley and then tried to also shoot him. Cole zoomed in on the video and could clearly see the same small tattoo on the man’s right hand. He pressed play again and watched as the stocky guy disappeared from view. Cole had no idea what happened inside the house next. But he’d put the pieces together when the story broke the next morning: the guy had set them up for the fall.

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