On a regular basis all four officers—Colebank, Spurlock, Gaskins, and Berry—would gather around and watch the surveillance video again and again. After Colebank was “excommunicated,” as she jokingly calls it, the male officers continued the practice. One day they blocked out half a shift and huddled around a large-screen computer monitor. Over and over, they watched the surveillance video that showed Skylar sneaking out her bedroom window. They played it from the beginning, in slow motion. They played it backward just as slowly. They looked at every single frame, trying to figure out what they had missed. Because surely there was something there—something so obvious they couldn’t see it.
Over the course of the next several weeks, the officers continued watching the video, looking for that tiny clue that would tell them whose car Skylar got into that night. One morning, Spurlock, Gaskins, and Berry turned on the video at 8:00 A.M. when their shift began and then studied different car makes and models for hours online.
“We were so burned out, we actually went to the sergeant’s office where he has a bigger screen, to blow up a screen shot,” Berry said. “The coffee didn’t taste good anymore.”
The three men were so specific in their search for details, they looked at the gas caps, the back glass in the cars—everything they could think of to try to find a match to the car in the video. By ten that night, the men began to argue over their theories and the minor differences in vehicle models they found online.
“Let’s stop right here,” Spurlock said. “Let’s go home, take a night, sleep on it, and start out fresh tomorrow.”
“Okay, sounds good to me,” Berry said. Gaskins agreed and the three men headed home.
Chris and Alexis Berry had been married for four years when he was reassigned to the Morgantown Detachment. Alexis had given up her dream of going to medical school to become Chris’ wife, because she was crazy about him. But his work on Skylar’s case began to take a huge toll on their marriage.
Berry spent more hours at the office than he ever had before. That wouldn’t have been as hard on Alexis if Berry hadn’t also brought his work home with him. Many times, he wouldn’t get home until midnight—and yet she’d still wake up to find him texting. Again. It was the same thing every night. At first she didn’t believe him when he told her who he was texting.
“Who are you texting at two A.M.?” Alexis asked.
“Gaskins,” Berry said.
“Sure you are.”
But then he’d show her his phone, and Alexis saw he was telling the truth. She couldn’t stop worrying, though. He looked horrible. She knew Spurlock and Gaskins were equally rundown, because she’d become acquainted with the women in their lives, too.
That’s how Alexis knew she wasn’t the only worried wife. The men were exhausted—and it showed. They had dark circles under their eyes. They were eating on the fly, when they bothered to eat at all, so they all lost weight.
“When we work, we work,” Berry would often tell her.
That night—the night they all worked so long the coffee didn’t even taste good anymore—was awful. Berry couldn’t stop thinking about the case, mulling it over in his mind as he drove home. He knew Alexis was probably going to be “mad as a wet hornet” when he arrived. He was right.
“It was an awful night,” Alexis agreed.
Then inspiration hit him like an early fall frost.
“It just clicked,” Berry said. He’d been watching the video all day long, looking at every possible make and model of car and—nothing. But the minute he sat down with his wife, it hit him: Shelia told police she picked Skylar up and later dropped her off at the end of the street, but they had never seen Shelia pick Skylar up the first time. Damn, he thought. Colebank was right all along.
He didn’t waste a second. He called Gaskins and then added Spurlock so they were all on a three-way phone call.
Gaskins was a few miles away, pacing in his kitchen. Even from upstairs, his fiancée Kelly Wilkes could hear Gaskins talking to himself. They usually only had a few hours each evening to spend together. At one time, that had been because of Kelly’s schedule. She managed a fast-food chain and was going to college at night. But ever since Gaskins got this case they’d hardly seen each other.
So their relationship suffered, too. At first, Kelly expected Gaskins home for dinner a little late. Then she realized if she waited for him, dinner would be burnt to a crisp.
“Well, I’ll see you when I see you,” she finally learned to say. She ate alone many nights, watching episodes of Law & Order.
At other times Kelly tried to call Gaskins but got no reply. “He might not answer me for a couple of hours and I’d be worried he’d be out there dead,” she said.
Like Alexis, she was frustrated by her man’s constant texting—especially when they did sit down to a meal together. “Get off there,” Kelly would tell Gaskins. “Dinner’s gonna get cold.”
Upstairs in bed, Kelly could hear Gaskins below, still talking to himself as he paced around the living room. She knew he was obsessed by the case and figured by the time he’d solved it, the floor covering would be worn out.
Oblivious to Kelly’s worry and only able to think about the missing girl, Gaskins continued to pace, trying to figure out what he’d missed. He knew if he thought long and hard enough, retracing every step of their investigation, replaying the entire case from start to finish, he could find the answer. For the next hour or two, that’s what he did. He remembered how everyone believed at the outset that Skylar left with a boy, or because of a boy—either a random stranger she met online or in the Wendy’s drive-through lane where she worked, or a boy she’d been sneaking around to see, without her parents’ knowledge.
Pretty early on, they ruled out the theory Skylar left with a stranger. That left only boys she knew, so they had looked at Dylan Conaway, at Eric Finch, at Floyd Pancoast, at Dylan’s cousin, Kevin Willard, at . . . so many boys Gaskins couldn’t remember all their names. There was only one problem: none of those boys drove a car like the one in the video and, in fact, no one could remember seeing Skylar with a boy, or hearing her express interest in a boy—any boy. So no, it hadn’t been a boy at all.
Gaskins thought back to Shelia and Rachel, to how they had picked up Skylar and then dropped her off—supposedly at the end of the street. It was Shelia who had given the police names of other boys they might want to look at. But those leads were dead. They went nowhere. There hadn’t been a party at the Conaway home, either, or anywhere else. For once, it seemed like the teens were telling the truth, when they said there had been no parties in Blacksville that night.
He believed someone out there knew something, but they were just too scared to talk. Then again, there was the troubling fact that Skylar wasn’t seen coming home on camera. That took Gaskins back to square one, to Shelia and Rachel, and he realized there was only one answer left: it was Shelia’s car. Nothing else added up.
Walking the floor, ruminating on all he knew, Gaskins was methodically working out the kinks of the case when Berry’s call came through.
“That has to be Shelia’s car!” Berry was practically yelling. “The girls are definitely lying!”
The next day at work, everyone involved celebrated the first major crack in the stone wall Shelia and Rachel had erected. They did so after gathering around the video again—this time backing it up to 11:00 P.M., the time Shelia said she and Rachel picked up Skylar.
Sure enough, no one saw anything like that on the video—because no car showed up to get Skylar then. The vehicle they had been searching for so long and hard, had been there the entire time, just like Colebank originally suspected. It was a silver Toyota Camry—and it didn’t pick up Skylar until 12:31 A.M.