Cora had hesitated to give up a fingerprint. Why?
Hackett was tired of being fed BS.
In his gut, he knew that something beneath the surface was at work with Cora and he vowed to find out what it was. His mood brightened when he spotted a slim, bespectacled man in a tan suit making his way to his desk; the man who would help him find the truth.
“Oren. Good to see you.” Hackett extended his hand to greet Oren Krendler. “I’ll make some calls and we’ll get things rolling as quickly as possible.”
Krendler nodded and adjusted his glasses.
He was the Phoenix Division’s polygraph examiner, a legend for having obtained more admissions than any other examiner in the Bureau.
46
“There’s been a troubling break in the case.”
That’s what Isabel Luna’s last text to Jack Gannon said. Luna gave him no other details, saying only that she would call later.
That was over an hour ago.
Gannon was hammering on his laptop and burning up cell phone minutes in Cora’s living room, going full tilt at everything and getting nowhere. He’d struck out on tracing the phone number tied to the woman who’d hired the private investigation agency to find Cora’s home.
He got nothing.
He called his best source, Adell Clark. She’d struck out. “I suspect it’s a cartel number, Jack. Could be a prepaid phone. Or a case of phone companies being paid to act as if these numbers do not exist.”
Confusion and anger welled in his chest as he reexamined the allegations by Peck, the man Cora said was Tilly’s father, and Lomax, Cora’s pimp.
Was this linked to Tilly?
Increasingly, the FBI was looking harder at Cora. The mistrust swirling about the case was deepening.
Gannon looked at the photo of Tilly, the niece he didn’t know, and tried to make sense of it all, tried to make sense of Cora. At one point, she had been the most important person in his life. Now she was alien to him.
How had their lives changed so much?
He had always figured the critical moment was that night at their home. He was eleven years old, Cora was sixteen. She was flitting between the bathroom and her room getting ready for her first official date, carefully applying makeup, spritzing perfume, putting on jewelry, dressing up.
That’s when he knew that Cora was no longer the older kid who knew how things worked in the family, how things worked in life. She was no longer his big sistermentor. She had been transformed into someone else. She had other priorities. In taking her first steps to becoming a young woman, she had started her journey away from him.
Leaving him behind.
Leaving him alone.
Then came the night of Cora’s Armageddon with Mom and Dad-the night she left and never came back.
That was that.
And now after all these years, Cora needed him.
It haunted him.
As for what was happening, he stared blankly. He had no control anymore, no control over who he was, over the situation, the story, over anything.
All he knew was that a clock was ticking down on Tilly’s life.
Cora woke and in that millisecond of torpor before the nerve cells in her brain connected, everything was right in her life.
But the instant everything registered, the terrible reality crashed on her.
The sedative had enabled Cora to rest, but it was useless against her anguish. How could she live, how could she go on with her daughter stolen from her life?
She couldn’t make sense out of what went wrong with Lyle. She ached to talk to him.
If only she could wind back time, go all the way back to every mistake she’d made that had led to this horrible point. There would be no drugs, no leaving home, no leaving her parents, Jack, no addiction, no pain and no shame. Only Tilly and the good life they’d built together, just mother and daughter. They’d been doing fine.
Until this.
Cora groaned and thrust her face in her hands.
She had to keep going.
Cora sobbed into her pillow for several minutes before she found the will to shower and get into some clean clothes. No one seemed to notice when she padded to the kitchen to make tea. While she had no appetite, she ate some saltine crackers.
All the detectives, including Jack, were watching a TV news report. Through the forest of bodies, Cora saw it was a “Live Breaking News” report on one of the all-news networks. She glimpsed Tilly’s face on the screen and nudged her way to the set.
Seth Bruller was at a podium making a public appeal for help locating Tilly. Then he said the FBI was also seeking the “public’s help locating the following individuals, who are persons of interest in connection with Tilly Martin’s kidnapping.”
Once more, they showed Lyle’s picture. Then three more photos appeared-the faces of Ruiz Limon-Rocha, Alfredo Hector Tecaza and Carlos Manolo Sanchez.
Cora stared into the eyes of the two men who had invaded her home-
She gasped and steadied herself against the back of a chair.
How did the FBI get their photos? Why did they identify them without telling her? Before Cora could react, the TV footage cut to a shaky live aerial angle from a news chopper.
“Now stay with us,” the news anchor said. “We have just learned…have we got it? There it is. Our affiliate in Tucson is reporting out of Willcox, Arizona, east of Tucson, that a bus traveling from El Paso, Texas to Phoenix was believed to have been carrying one of these men as a passenger and was stopped earlier. Sources tell us the FBI, or rather the DPS, did not locate him but is still processing the bus for evidence. That would indicate he was on the bus and somehow eluded police.”
Cora couldn’t stand it.
“Did you find Tilly?”
One of the task force investigators shook his head.
“Ma’am, we just have more information on the people we’re looking for.”
Cora went to her brother but his cell phone rang.
