Page 96 of Capturing You

Marijuana was much lighter. But would that much marijuana have a value in the tens of millions?

A quick internet search proved his guess was right. It couldn’t be marijuana.

It could be heroin. Or cocaine. Or…or any number of things.

If Brooklynn’s theory was correct, then the smugglers had been moving serious drugs.

How, how could his father have been involved in something like that?

Maybe Brooklynn’s theory was wrong. But what else could it be?

“Are you okay?” Brooklynn asked. “You’re pale as flour.”

“I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? You look…I don’t know.”

“I said I’m fine. What did you learn?”

She blinked at his harsh tone but didn’t respond. “Nothing on the first page, nothing that you wouldn’t have seen. The shipments came once a month. They got gradually larger, then abruptly stopped a few weeks before the murders. But I did see something else.”

She tapped the ledger sheet, not the list, but a tiny doodle in the corner. “Have you ever seen that before?”

He’d seen it, sure. He’d paid no attention. He studied it now and realized it was a tiny sketch of a bird in flight. “It’s just a doodle.”

“Was Charles an artist?”

“You call that art?”

“It’s detailed, a seagull. The tiny feathers along the back of the wings, longer at the tips. See how the wings are bent like that? It’s diving.”

He’d seen a squiggle. She’d seen a bird in flight.

She flipped to the next page and tapped another doodle he’d ignored. It was the same thing, a tiny bird, but this one was inside a circle, the beak poking out on the bottom right side.

There were similar doodles on the next few pages of the journal.

“Weird that they’re all the same,” he said.

“You’re sure he wasn’t an artist?”

“Maybe he wanted to be.” Forbes had no memory of his father ever drawing anything, though, so that didn’t feel right.

“Maybe.” Brooklynn nodded to the stack of files Forbes had yet to put away. “Did he doodle a lot on those?”

Forbes thought back. “I didn’t pay attention. I think there were some doodles, yeah.”

“Do you mind if I look?”

“What difference does it make?”

She took out her phone, took a photo of one of the tiny drawings, and then enlarged it on her screen. “This isn’t random. This is a specific image, drawn multiple times. You say he’s not an artist. Was he on the spectrum, do you think?”

“Are you asking if he had autism or Asperger’s?” Forbes needed to hide his irritation, considering that Ford would find the question fascinating.

Since nothing ever got by Brooklynn, she winced at his tone.

He tempered it. “I’ve seen no evidence of that. Why?”