Chapter 10 - JASON’S MESSAGE
The message was written on motel stationery.
Mark,
You were supposed to stay out of this.
Sarah made a mistake.
Now you are making the same mistake.
Take Emily.
Forget everything else.
If you keep looking, Sarah pays the price.
There was no signature.
There did not need to be.
Jason knew exactly how to frighten me.
For several minutes, fear nearly won.
I imagined taking Emily somewhere far away.
I imagined refusing every call.
I imagined pretending Sarah had simply disappeared.
Then I looked at my daughter.
Emily had already lived with fear long enough.
Jason had counted on everyone being afraid.
Sarah.
Emily.
His previous victims.
Maybe even Cole.
Fear had protected him for years.
I gave the note back to Alvarez.
“What do we do?”
“We keep looking.”
I nodded.
“Good.”
Police found another clue inside Room 16.
A bus schedule.
One route had been circled.
It ended in Fairmont, a town near the state border.
But Alvarez did not believe Jason planned to take a bus.
“He wants us looking at public transportation.”
“While he goes somewhere else.”
“Exactly.”
Security footage from a nearby restaurant confirmed that theory.
Jason and Cole had left the motel in a gray pickup truck.
Sarah was not visible.
The truck headed south.
Investigators tracked it using traffic cameras until it disappeared near a rural highway.
Then Mrs. Harris called me.
Police had returned her phone after checking it for evidence.
She sounded nervous.
“I remembered something.”
“What?”
“Friday night.”
She had been watering plants near the side of her house.
Jason and Sarah were arguing near their garage.
Mrs. Harris heard Sarah shout one sentence.
“You’ll never get into the account without me.”
Then Jason noticed Mrs. Harris.
The argument stopped.
“What account?”
“I don’t know.”
I told Alvarez.
He immediately reviewed the documents from the blue folder.
One account stood out.
Sarah’s father had left money in a trust after his death.
Sarah controlled it.
The trust held nearly two million dollars.
Jason had tried three times to access it.
Every attempt had failed.
He needed Sarah’s authorization.
Now we understood why she was still alive.
Jason did not simply want to silence Sarah.
He needed something from her.
That gave us hope.
It also created a deadline.
If he found another way into the account, Sarah would no longer be useful to him.
Then the bank called Alvarez.
Someone had just attempted to access Sarah’s trust online.
The login came from a rural property south of Fairmont.
Police traced the internet connection.
The address belonged to an abandoned horse farm.
And according to county records, the property had been purchased eight months earlier.
May you like
The buyer was Aaron Blake.
One of Jason’s false identities.
