Page 47 of Hack
CHAPTER TWENTY
Carter rolled onto his back, the papers on the bed beside him crinkling under the weight of his body. He didn't care if they got wrinkled. He was tired, and his mind was going a million different directions as he tried to figure out exactly what he was missing.
"Take a nap," Archer said from the desk where he was doing a deeper genealogy search on the family, thanks to Carter hacking into a huge genealogical database that usually charged an arm and a leg.
"I couldn't sleep." Carter stared up at the ceiling. He closed his eyes. "You finding anything?"
"Maybe, too soon to get excited, but I just found something that might…" Archer's voice trailed off as he continued clicking the mouse to look through whatever he'd found.
Carter didn't press him to continue talking. When he was ready, he'd tell him. That was one of the things he loved about working with Archer. No matter what, they just understood each other. There was no pressure to anything they did. It all seemed natural, as if they had been together for years and able to read each other.
He covered his eyes with his arm as he thought about going to the bar in an hour. As of right now, they were going to leave Luis and Levitt alone and just place the tracking devices on their cars. It was too risky, and the leads they could have were too big to show their hand now. They needed to stay a step or two ahead of the brothers and they couldn't do that if they let Lyle know something was going on.
It killed him not to be able to take Luis and Levitt aside and force them to tell what they knew. In a perfect world, he'd have his STK team with him to hold the brothers hostage and torture them until they talked, but that wasn't possible. That wasn't what STK was about, and just the thought should have made Carter ashamed. But this was his daughter they were talking about. This was the man who'd raped and killed his daughter, and in a roundabout way, also taken his wife from him.
Fuck, he was going to lose his mind before this was all over.
He moved his arm and opened his eyes as the bed dipped. He looked over to see Archer sitting down beside him, a concerned look on his face. "You find something?"
"Yeah, but it can wait. I'm worried about you." Archer ran his fingers down Carter's arm softly. "Are you sure this isn't going to be too much for you?"
He hated that Archer read him so well. "I'll be okay. It's just hard to be patient. I want to rush everything, but I know that by doing that, we'll fuck it up. With my team back home, I'm the one who is patient, always demanding we plan things, wait for the right time to move in. No matter how badly one of the other team members wants to go in quickly, I'm the one who forces them to do things right. Here, with this, I'm struggling to not take Luis and Levitt out in the middle of nowhere and torture them until they talk."
Archer's fingers continued to move up and down his arm in a soft touch. "I can understand your desire to rush things. You want answers. You need justice. Still, the only way we are going to be sure to get the answers is to play this out step by step. If we took the brothers tonight and tried to force them to talk, there isn't any guarantee that they would tell us anything. They seemed to have covered for Lyle this long, they may take what they know to the grave. Then where would we be?"
Carter closed his eyes again. "I know."
"Are you okay to continue? If this is too much, if you are going to go off the deep end and force things to happen before it's time, then go home now and let me do this. I'll bring you back in when the time is right. I won't deny you your retribution, but I will stand in your way now and keep you from ruining everything we've already done over the last while." Archer's voice was firm, as if he wanted Carter to understand how serious he was.
"I'm okay. I won't fuck this up. I want to catch him too badly. This fucking sucks, but it's how it has to be. I'm just mad we have no big breaks, no way to link all these pieces." Carter sat up, gripping Archer's thigh under his palm. "I promise, I'm with you on this."
Archer nodded and leaned in, brushing a soft kiss over Carter's lips. "Then come see what I found, because I think I found our link to North Carolina."
"Really?" Carter's eyes widened and he turned to get off the bed, nearly knocking Archer off the bed in the process.
"Take it easy. It's nothing we can do anything about tonight. We need to try and get hold of satellite images of the area first, I think." Archer stood and went back to the desk, sliding into the chair.
Carter stood beside him, crouching down so he could see whatever it was that Archer had found. "What is it?"
Archer clicked to an open tab. "So, I was looking into Lyle's grandfather, trying to figure out where he went, where the money went since it appears Lyle's father didn't seem to have money and he was an only child. It looks like Lyle's grandfather was a polygamist. Though a very odd form of one."
"What?" Carter stared at the information he was reading. It was a list of women that Lyle's grandfather had been married to. The list wasn't long considering some polygamist groups he'd looked into, but there were four wives listed.
"It would seem that shortly before Mark married Lyle's mother, that Gerald Carmen, Lyle's grandfather, moved from here to Saluda, North Carolina. There isn't much here other than census information. From what I'm seeing, Gerald and all his wives were never listed as deceased."
"That's odd, the likelihood that they are still alive is slim." Carter bit his lip as his mind worked out what he was seeing. "Let me get my laptop and find out if Gerald is still listed as owning property in North Carolina." He moved to the bed, grabbed his laptop, and placed it in front of him as he sat down on the mattress.
His pulse raced as he typed, so excited with what they were looking at that he had to retype the words several times, which was almost unheard of for him. He found the records he was looking for with ease and it took even less time to hack into the system and bypass the logins and other shit they wanted.
As he typed in Gerald's name, he held his breath.
"Well?" Archer came over to him and sat down to look at the site.
"There it is. Right there." He pointed to a spot on the screen. "Forty acres owned by Gerald Carmen. Taxes are up to date."
"It's impossible he's still alive, isn't it? I mean, I guess he could be, but he'd be close to a hundred years old." Archer stared at Carter. "That's where Lyle is. I'm sure of it."
"So am I." Carter's hand shook and he had to take it off the mouse to keep from losing the page. "Fuck, I'm sure it is. We fucking found him."
