Page 136 of Sapphire Sunset

The old monitoring room had worked fine, but they’d decided toconvert it into office storage for the same reason airlines took certain flightnumbers off the schedule after one of the planes flying them crashed.

For someone who looked like he could plow through a brickwall without missing a step, Keoni was surprisingly soft spoken. But he wasstill bleary-eyed from watching hours of surveillance footage, so maybe the guywas simply tired. And after all that work, he’d only found a few glimpses ofRodney on the new security cameras.

“So it’s like Rodney said,” Keoni explained. “He came on theproperty while everybody was looking for that little boy.”

Logan raised a hand. “Okay. Hold up. Sort of. He jumped a fenceeast of the villas then went up the east staircase of the main building whilewe were all huddling in the lobby coming up with a plan, so J.T. wasn’tmonitoring the feeds. Otherwise he would have seen him. As soon as we splitinto search teams, J.T. came back here, but he was so busy paging through allthe live angles looking for Benji he didn’t go back into the archive.That’swhy we missed Rodney.”

“All right,” Connor said. “Well, the system’s only a few daysold, so maybe we could all use some more training sessions.”

“Copy that.” Logan’s nod told Connor he’d phrased thedirective diplomatically enough not to raise his boyfriend’s hackles. But themessage was clear—J.T. had goofed up.

“He never came down off the roof again?” Connor asked.

“We can’t find a trace of him on any of the other cameras,”Keoni said. “Believe me. I’ve watched them all. He had to have stayed up there untilhe broke into your room.”

“Which suggests,” Logan said, “he really did come backbecause he wanted to talk to you.”

“It’s still weird he went straight to the roof and stayedthere until the hotel went to sleep.” Connor leaned closer to the freeze framethey’d been studying, hoping some telling detail would reveal itself once hisnose was inches from the screen.

“Well, he didn’t just stay there,” Logan said. “He passedout drunk. He had a flask on him.”

“Also, there’s another thing,” Keoni said. “I can’t proveit,’causehe had a cap on, but I think there mightbe a moment where he notices the new cameras.”

“Which means,” Logan said, “he realized he didn’t know howto evade them. They’re all in different places now, so if he had a map in hishead of how he was going to sneak around for hours before he caught up with yousomeplace private, that was out the window. Also, he might have thought thewhole system was still in smithereens after the raid. We moved hell and highwater to get new cameras put in. Nothing moved that fast when he was GM.”

“And he didn’t have anywhere else to go, right?” Connorasked. “Didn’t the FBI say his friends were all telling him to turn himselfin?”

“Yep, and he obviously didn’t have the means to leave the countryeither,” Logan said.

“Good lesson there,” Keoni said. “Gonna run a blackmailring? Pack a go-bag.”

“I know this might be hard to believe,” Logan said, “butRodney might have actually been feeling remorse about what he said to you.People change when they hit the end of the road. My dad did.”

Maybe, but Rodney’s apology hadn’t been unconditional. Therewas something he’d wanted in return—for Connor to tell him what his dad hadsaid about Rodney in his don’t-open-till-I’m-gone letter. The thought of sharingsomething so personal and intimate with his uncle after everything the man haddone made Connor’s stomach lurch. Thank God Logan had broken down the door beforeRodney could add a new level of menace to his demand.

“There’s no comparing your dad to Rodney,” Connor said.

“Today,” Logan said. “Iwouldn’t have wanted tohang with my dad when he was on the streets. He still doesn’t even like talkingabout some of the stuff he had to do out there.”

There was a buzz in Connor’s pocket, one of the urgent alertshe’d assigned to his department heads.

“Jonas,” Connor said when he saw the screen.

“A 911 fromJonas?” Logan asked. “First event’s notfor three weeks.”

“I better go talk to him,” Connor said.

The special events office was by itself right next to the conferencecenter. It shared a small hallway with a storage closet and an employeebathroom most of the staff seemed to have forgotten about. Jonas was standing outsidethe hallway’sSTAFF ONLYdoor, phone in hand, expression graver thanany he’d worn in Connor’s presence before.

“We have a problem,” he said.

“Ditto,” said another voice from behind Connor.

Gloria was next to him suddenly.

“Yikes,” Connor said. “Well, the timing suggests they mightbe related. Jonas, you go first because you got to me first.”

“I have an email from the Lighthouse Foundation’s executivedirector,” Jonas said.

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