Gannon.
“I apologize for boring you.”
“Don’t,” Gannon said. “It must mean you’re comfortable with me. I still want to profile you, but you’ve been so quiet. I know very little about you.”
Luna told him about her life.
She was thirty-one. Her mother died from cancer when Luna was young. Her father remarried. She had a stepbrother, Esteban. She’d lived in Los Angeles when she attended UCLA. After graduating she’d returned to help with the paper. She was married to a human rights lawyer and they had a four-year-old son. They were guarded about their lives.
“Because of the cartels and what happened to your father?”
Several long moments passed before Luna answered. “You must never tell anyone this, but I was there when my father was murdered. I saw his killer.”
“Did you tell police?”
“No. We told them there were no witnesses. My husband and stepbrother urged me to trust no police. My father’s death was an orchestrated cartel hit because of his editorials about the cartels corrupting police. The killer came to my father’s house as a courier, very nonthreatening. He didn’t see me, but I was there and I saw him. One day we will find him.”
Luna stopped.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t like to talk about it. My father was a respected man. I don’t have the influence he had. No one among the Juarez press does. He was incorruptible. Please, Jack, you must never reveal what I told you. If the cartel knew that I was a witness, they’d kill me. Swear you will not tell anyone, please.”
Gannon gave Luna his word, then drove her home to her family.
That night he stepped out onto his hotel balcony.
He gazed upon the twinkling lights of the city. He could hear sirens and see a helicopter’s searchlight sweep over the latest killing, and a creeping sense of looming failure came over him.
How would he make sense out of this chaos?
He was tired and his thoughts shifted back to himself, the price of being alone. Unlike the teen gangster in the morgue, Ramon Chavez, no one would mourn Gannon. His parents were dead. He’d been estranged from his older sister since she’d run away from home some twenty years ago.
He got into bed.
But before sleep came, Gannon fell into his usual pattern of wondering what had happened to his sister.
3
Fear pulsed through Cora Martin.
Cora’s cries for Tilly were muffled by the duct tape sealing her mouth. She tried to move but was fused to the kitchen chair.
Questions blazed through Cora’s mind.
Cora forced herself to concentrate.
Her arms were tingling. Her blood circulation had been squeezed by her bindings. Cora’s kitchen chairs were Windsor-style, armless with a fan backrest. The invaders had duct-taped her wrists behind the narrow back and they were starting to hurt. She kept making fists so she wouldn’t lose the feeling in her hands.
Tape bound her chest to the chair’s back and her ankles to the legs.
Time was slipping away.
She rocked the chair, got up on her feet, only to lose her balance and fall back, sitting in the chair. It wasn’t easy to move. She had trouble directing her weight. She could try smashing the chair but it was metal and heavy. She couldn’t risk hurting herself.
She had to find a way out of this.
Again, Cora rocked until she got to her feet. She bent forward, tensed her muscles and, using the weight of the chair, kept herself upright. By carefully shuffling her feet with the heavy chair affixed to her back and legs she painfully inched her way across the kitchen like a grotesque snail.
When Cora reached the drawer where she kept utensils, her heart sank.
The splayed legs and angle of the chair kept her from reaching the handle with her hands.
Cora growled into the tape.
Carefully contorting her body with strategic leaning, her fingers blindly brushed the handle to the utensil drawer. Her arms, legs, shoulders were ablaze as she forced herself up on her toes and with one great heave got the drawer open. She rattled it until the plastic tray erupted with utensils. Finally the weight against her position demanded she sit.
She fought the pressure.
She shook as her fingers clawed at the disgorged spoons, forks, knives.
Eyes on the ceiling, fingers sweating, Cora sorted the knives and ran her thumb along each blade, one by one. The first was a butter knife. So was the second.
She dropped the others. Working her fingers down the blade to improve her grip, she delicately sawed at the edges of the tape. The first ripping sound encouraged her to work harder. It was followed by another, then another as she sawed without stopping until the tape gave way.
Relief flowed into her arms as she brought them forward, pulling the tape from her mouth, gulping air as she yanked the remaining strips of tape from her wrists, massaging them before cutting her chest and ankles free.
She reached for her kitchen phone, jabbed the button for 9 then 1-
Recalling the kidnapper’s warning stopped her cold.
She called his cell phone, got his voice mail and left a message.
“It’s me! Something bad has happened to Tilly!” Cora broke down. “She’s gone, Lyle! They’re going to kill her! Call me!”
Then she called his home number, her heart racing as it rang. No answer. She left a message. Then she texted him and urged him to call.
Cora fumbled through her bag for her notebook, struggling with her composure as she called his hotel in San
