Listening to the conversation with Skelton was both frustrating and a little creepy. Not only did the man sound like he was crazy, very little of what he was saying made any kind of sense at all. Even with the entire leadership team sitting around the conference table, poring over every bit of information, dissecting every word, going over the conversation ten times didn’t make any of them feel any more confident that they had any idea why the old man had taken the risk and showed up on campus to begin with.
“The clippings are significant,” Hannah said, looking over the ones she had in front of her. “We know that Daunator has done this before, though it has been a while.”
“I wonder why something like this never made it to the history books,” Elliott questioned. “Sure are a lotta people to go missing at once.”
“Maybe for the same reason not a lot of media are reporting it now,” Jamie said. “Daunator might have more control over the situation than we realize.”
“With the missing persons count growing every day, it’s bound to get some international attention sooner or later.” Aaron had his arms folded, and Cadence could see how frustrated he was in the way his forehead wrinkled and his left eye squinted at the corner.
She ran a hand through her hair and pushed her chair back. “Okay, so let’s try a different approach. Let’s assume that Skelton came here to warn us not to go over there. He said a few times that it was the worst thing he’d ever done. He also said Daunator was in his head. Could this be Daunator telling us not to try to find him?”
“Good point,” Aurora said with a nod. “Daunator could be the one who made Skelton crazy in the first place.”
“Did he seem crazy, back then?” Elliott asked, looking from Aaron to Jamie to Hannah on his other side. “Not when he shot Jordan, but before that. Did he look like the same sorta wild animal?”
“No, not that I ever noticed,” Hannah said, looking at the guys at the other end of the table for confirmation. “He was skittish, kept to himself a lot. Said he was working on a project, but none of us ever saw what it was.”
Aaron agreed. “I tried to avoid him as much as I could because I knew Jordan didn’t trust him, but I certainly wasn’t expecting him to do anything like that.”
“Me neither.” Jamie still looked agitated, and Cadence could tell bringing up that fateful night from so many years ago continued to bother him.
They sat in silence for a few moments, and Cadence went back over the conversation she’d had with the crazy man. It was mostly one sided; any questions she’d asked had gotten such an off-shoot of an answer, she could hardly bridge the pieces together. If he had been acting the same way the night he killed her grandfather, it would be easier to connect his behavior to an infiltration from Daunator. But the only person who’d been in the apartment with the two men that night before the gunshot was her grandmother, Janette, and she was gone.
“We could listen to the audio from that night and see if there are any clues,” Aaron was saying, reaching the same conclusion Cadence had just gotten to. “I’ve heard it before, but maybe with this new information, we’ll hear something we didn’t notice the last time.”
“Good idea,” Hannah said with a nod, even though her teeth went immediately to her bottom lip.
Jamie swallowed hard and his face went a little pale. Cadence offered him a small smile, but he shifted his eyes. He wasn’t going to say he didn’t want to listen, but she could tell he’d rather be just about anywhere else in the world.
“It might take me some digging to find the audio.” Aaron stood and crossed the room since the recording wasn’t even stored in his IAC, which Cadence thought was unusual. While he riffled through tapes in a filing cabinet in the closet, she continued to ponder Skeleton’s statements. Why had he been so persistent that Daunator had made him kill Jordan?
Her thoughts were interrupted when Aaron came back to the table with a cassette and a recorder. “High tech,” Elliott joked.
“Yeah, I know. All of these need to be uploaded. We should’ve been working on that while we had all of that downtime.”
“Why did it take so long to find it?” Hannah asked.
“It’s mislabeled. I remember Janette telling me that she wanted it somewhere that no one would ever stumble upon it, but I couldn’t remember where she’d had it filed.” Aaron plugged the tape player into the wall and checked to see if the tape was rewound. When he held it up, Cadence could see it was labelled “Plane Crash” in her grandmother’s handwriting. Since Janette had told everyone outside of LIGHTS that Jordan was killed in an airplane crash, it made sense to Cadence that the label would help people aware of that information to find it--eventually.
With the tape in the machine, Aaron looked around the table, his eyes wide, checking for confirmation that everyone was ready. Cadence wanted to run around the other side of the table and grab hold of Jamie, but he was looking at the floor, his magical hands folded in front of him.
Aaron pushed play.
Cadence had no idea how the recording device her grandfather had been wearing worked, but this tape picked up part way between a conversation in which it was obvious that Skelton was describing the project he said he’d been working on to Jordan. Skelton was either sitting or standing across the room from Jordan, which made it hard for the recording device to pick up his voice, but she could hear her grandfather loud and clear, and it was eerie. She’d seen him a few times on VHS tapes from the early ‘80s and knew his voice, but hearing him now felt a bit like falling back into a dream after she’d thought she was awake. She could only imagine how those who had worked with him must be feeling.
