by Beth Yarnall
“I’ve learned not to get my hopes up.” I hate the dejection in her voice.
And I hate that I’m the one failing her. Sitting forward, I click out of that program and try another and another. No luck. Then a thought strikes. What if Alice Denise Rodriguez isn’t in the U.S.? I switch programs again. Her last name is Spanish, so I try People Finder in Mexico. We get thirteen hits. Lucky thirteen. We weed through them until we’re left with one name. I check the birthdate. It’s a match. All the hair on my arms stand up. Cora leans so far over me I can barely type. She must feel it too. That low buzz at the back of my head that tells me we could be onto something here.
Alice Denise Rodriguez lives in Ensenada. Just two hours away.
“This might not lead to anything,” I say, trying not to get her hopes up as high as mine. “We should call and see what’s what.”
Cora nods. She’s vibrating in her seat as she pulls her cell out and hands it to me. “Call.”
I open a new window and Google how to call internationally. Before I know it I’m calling Alice Denise Rodriguez in Mexico.
She answers after the second ring. “Hola?”
Shit. I didn’t figure on her speaking Spanish. I know enough to order a burrito and that’s about it.
“Hola,” I say in my crappy Spanish accent. “Habla inglés?”
“Yes,” she says with barely an accent.
I introduce myself as a private investigator looking for Edith Wheeler. I give her some bullshit excuse about old Edith being owed some money by the insurance company I work for.
“Do you know how I can reach Mrs. Wheeler?”
“Yes. She’s in an elderly care center here in Ensenada. I have power of attorney over her affairs. She’s quite infirm.”
I turn to Cora and nod. She grips my arm, her eyes wide. We fucking found Mrs. Wheeler.
“I need to verify she’s alive and your power of attorney before I can release the funds,” I tell Denise. “I’m in San Diego. I can be there around three. Will that work?”
“How much money are we talking about?”
“A little over twenty grand. I also have some papers that’ll need to be signed. Where should I meet you?”
She rattles off the address of the care center. As soon as I disconnect the call Cora screams and launches herself at me, planting a big kiss on my lips. I can’t believe it. I can’t believe we found her.
“I can’t believe it,” Cora says, reiterating what I was thinking. “This could be it. This could be the thing that frees Beau.”
I don’t want to bring her down with the possibility that Mrs. Wheeler could be in a coma or in some other way unable to speak. And even if she can it doesn’t mean she’ll be able to tell us anything useful. But I don’t say any of that to Cora because she’s looking at me like I’m a big fucking hero, with something I’ve never seen before in her expression—hope.
“It could,” I say instead, bringing her in close. “It very well could.”
Chapter 29
Cora
I’m really not trying to get my hopes up, but finding Mrs. Wheeler is the single best lead I’ve ever had in Beau’s case. She could free him. The thought of Beau free is almost too much. My brain can’t process it. I’ve never allowed myself to imagine it. How could I, when the possibility has always been so completely impossible? I bet my parents never envisioned it either. Why would they, when they believed in his guilt from the start? I try to picture their faces when I tell them Beau is going to be freed, that he didn’t kill Cassandra, and that their complete lack of faith in him made them no better than a stranger.
I wonder if my dad will even be sober enough to fully comprehend how badly they fucked up. Or if my mom will pretend she believed in him the whole entire time. She’ll twist the past five and a half years in some way so she comes out the victim in the story.
How will Beau feel to finally be free? What will he want to do first? What will he need? I can’t wait to be standing there when he walks out of that hellhole. I can’t wait to hug him and have him smell like him instead of a stranger. I can’t wait for his hair to grow back out and not to have to constantly worry that he’ll be beaten or killed. I can’t wait to have him home.
Leo and I cross the border into Mexico. It’s been a long time since I’ve been here or anywhere. I had to dig out my passport for the return trip back to the United States. I flip it open and look at my picture. My mom took me to have my hair done like it was some kind of fashion photo session. She made Beau wear a tie for his picture. That winter we went to Italy as a family. The next winter Cassandra was dead, Beau was on trial for her murder, and my dad moved out.
What a difference a year makes.
Leo follows the directions Siri gives him. We’re going to arrive well before the time Leo told Mrs. Wheeler’s niece we’d be there.
“Why did you tell Alice we’d be there at three?” I ask Leo. “We’re going to get there at least an hour before that.”
“I didn’t want her there when we talk to Mrs. Wheeler. I wasn’t exactly honest with her about the reason for our visit.” He winks at me.
“True.”
“I also don’t want to take the chance that she won’t let us talk to Mrs. Wheeler. She might not want to get involved.”
“Also true.”
We grow quiet again. Leo squeezes my hand in his lap. He must sense my nervous excitement. I haven’t been still since the moment Alice confirmed that Mrs. Wheeler is still alive. We ride the rest of the way in silence except for every now and then when I have to translate something for him. My Spanish is much better than his.
We pull up to the care facility and park. Before hitting the road we stopped off at Jamie’s house and recovered the backup copy of my binder that has all of the profiles of everyone involved in the murder investigation. I brought it to help jog Mrs. Wheeler’s memory. There’s no telling what her mental state is and I might need to remind her who Cassandra was to her.
I tell the woman at the front desk that we’re relatives of Mrs. Wheeler’s. She takes us through a winding maze of hallways until we’re standing before room number 232. Mrs. Wheeler’s room. We’re so close.
The woman tells me in Spanish that Mrs. Wheeler is having a good day. Thank goodness for that. Although I’m not sure how good her good days are. The woman leaves us to enter the room on our own.
Mrs. Wheeler lies in her bed, looking out the window. She doesn’t seem to realize we’re here. I hardly recognize her. She’s so much older and more shrunken than the last time I saw her.
“Mrs. Wheeler?”
She turns her face toward us. “Yes?”
Her response encourages me. “Hi. My name is Cora Hollis and this is Leo Nash. I was friends with Cassandra, your upstairs neighbor when you lived in San Diego.”
She blinks at me. I’m not sure she understands me. I repeat myself in Spanish.
“My Spanish isn’t that good. English, please. Come closer so I can see you.”
We move to her bedside. She presses a button on the remote for her bed and raises herself into a sitting position.
“Do you remember when you lived in San Diego? You had an upstairs neighbor named Cassandra Williams?” I ask.
Her gaze is unfocused on mine. I try again. “She lived upstairs from you. She was murdered.”
“Oh, yes.” She does some slow blinking, then her eyes go wide. “Yes. So terrible.”
“Would you mind if we ask you a few questions about what happened to Cassandra?” Leo asks.
“I suppose not. Who are you again?”
“Leo Nash and Cora Hollis. Cora knew Cassandra,” Leo says. “Is it okay if we ask you a few questions about what happened to her?”
She nods. Leo’s worked his magic again. She’s more with it than I could’ve hoped. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with her at all, other than being bedridden.
I inch a little closer to her. “Did you see anyone enter or leave Cassandra’s apartment the day of
her murder?”
“Just the delivery man like I told the officer.”
I ask, What delivery man? at the same time Leo asks, What officer?
I cast Leo an annoyed glance. He puts his palms up, letting me know it’s all mine. I’m annoyed because his question was better than mine.
“You were questioned by a police officer about Cassandra’s murder?”
“Yes. He spent most of that afternoon with me, asking over and over about the delivery man.”
“Can you tell me who the officer was who spoke to you?”
She lowers her brows. “I don’t remember his name.”
“If you saw his picture do you think you’d recognize him?” Leo asks, opening my binder.
I’m too grateful he thought of something I didn’t to be mad at him for butting in again.
Mrs. Wheeler glances down at the binder. “Maybe.”
I turn the page and Cassandra’s pretty face is smiling back at us.
“Oh,” Mrs. Wheeler breathes. “She was so beautiful, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, she was.”
“Wait a minute.” She puts a hand out to stop me from turning the page. “Hollis. Are you related to Beau Hollis?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m his sister.”
She pushes at the binder. “I can’t help you.”
“Please. Please help me find the officer who spoke to you that day. My brother’s life is on the line here.”
“That’s of his own doing, not mine. No. Take that thing away and leave. I don’t want anything to do with that monster.”
Leo takes the binder, snapping it closed. “You don’t have to help us.”
What the hell is he doing?
“I just hope you can live with the fact that you refused to help free an innocent man.” He turns and walks toward the door.
I gape at him, unable to believe what he’s doing. He’s blowing this whole thing.
He’s got a hand on the door handle when Mrs. Wheeler finally finds her voice. “What do you mean ‘innocent’? A jury convicted him.”
“A jury convicted Maurice Battle too.” Leo turns, but stays next to the door. “Mr. Battle sat in prison for thirty-nine years for a crime he didn’t commit before our agency took on his case and found someone like you who helped prove his innocence. Wait. No. Not like you. You won’t help us.” He puts his back to us again like he’s going to leave.
“Is that what you do?” she asks. “Free innocent people?”
“It’s one of the things we do.”
“And you think the boy—her brother—who was convicted of Cassandra’s murder is innocent like that other man?”
He faces us again. “Without a doubt. We just need the proof, and I think you have it.”
She looks up at me. I can’t breathe. I grip the railing of her bed, willing her with everything in me to agree to help us. She’s our only real hope. Every other lead we’ve had so far isn’t enough to bring before a judge to reopen Beau’s case.
“Please,” I beg. “Five and a half years. That’s two thousand and eighty-nine days—including today—he’s sat in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. He’ll never get those days back, but you can help us give him the rest of his life back.” I don’t even care that I’m crying. I’d get on my knees if it would get this woman to help us.
“Two thousand eighty-nine days,” she whispers.
“Please.”
She holds her hand out toward Leo. It shakes. “Bring that book back here.”
Leo returns to her bedside and opens the binder again, laying it on her lap. He slips his hand into mine. When I look at him I see tears in his eyes. He wipes mine away with the backs of his fingers.
Mrs. Wheeler turns the pages. I watch her face for any reaction, any sign of recognition. If we can find that officer, we can find out why he didn’t report what Mrs. Wheeler saw. She’s the only one who can put someone other than my brother at Cassandra’s apartment on the day of her death—a deliveryman. Her missing statement could be the something we need to take to a judge.
If we can get Damien LeFeaux to admit he lied about seeing my brother that day the DA’s case takes another hit. There would be no witness putting Beau there at the time of Cassandra’s death.
We also need to find this deliveryman. He could be a potential witness or even the killer himself. This small, frail woman has done more in the past five minutes than I’ve been able to do in more than five years.
She turns the pages, taking her time, examining each photo as though memorizing it. I can’t move. I keep waiting for her to point to a page and shout, “This guy! This is the one!” But she keeps turning the pages slowly, methodically. I don’t look away from her. I don’t want to miss the moment she blows the whole case wide open.
And then she gets to the last page.
Her watery brown gaze rises to mine. “I didn’t see him.”
Chapter 30
Leo
Cora walks out. I’d go after her, but Mrs. Wheeler is looking up at me like she might cry. I don’t think I’ve got the words to reassure her. I can see how badly she wants to help, how much I made her want to help with my bullshit speech about freeing Beau. I pat her pale, wrinkly hand and mumble something about how grateful we are that she tried.
“Do you think she’ll be okay?” Mrs. Wheeler asks.
“Yeah.” Eventually. Possibly.
She leafs backward through the binder as slowly as she did the first time she looked through it. I study the pages with her. Now that Cora’s not in the room there’s really nothing else to look at. She pauses on a page with a newspaper clipping about the murder Cora printed out from the Internet. I recognize the front of Cassandra’s apartment building cordoned off with police tape. There are a number of uniformed and plainclothes officers in the photo. A crowd has gathered. But none of that is the center of the photo or the accompanying article.
Two officers wrap up Beau, who is struggling to get past them. I almost don’t recognize him. His hair is longer, sure, but that’s not why. There’s something fundamentally different about him from the man I met several weeks ago. He’s rougher, harder, and a lot less sure of himself now. I try to imagine what happened to Beau happening to me. If someone murdered Cora in the cruelest, most brutal way imaginable and then I was convicted for it…I don’t know how he wakes up every day carrying that. How has he not gone insane missing her?
Mrs. Wheeler struggles for a closer look at the photo. I hold it up for her.
“Do you see something?”
She points to a drawer in the tray table. “Get my magnifying glass.”
I find it and hand it to her. I adjust the binder to the right height for her.
She peers through the magnifying glass. “I should’ve done this sooner.” She gestures upward. “Turn on the overhead light.”
I do as she asks. A part of me wants to go get Cora, but I don’t want to get her hopes up like she did last time.
“Is there another picture like this?” Mrs. Wheeler asks.
I flip through the binder. “Here.”
This one is a different angle from the street, looking up. The door to Cassandra’s apartment is open. A bunch of people stand around. I never realized how many people showed up at crime scenes. There are reporters too, like the one who took the photo we’re looking at.
Mrs. Wheeler runs her magnifying glass over it, then looks up at me. “Are there any more?”
I find the third and what I know to be the last photo from that day. She does her magnifying-glass thing again, this time slower, and it’s like my heartbeat has slowed too. She stops moving and holds the glass over one spot in the pic. My arms are killing me, holding the binder all this time, but I don’t care.
She slides a finger between the paper and the glass. “There. Do you see that?” She leans back so I can have a look.
I’m not sure what she’s talking about. “The guy in the blue shirt?”
“No. The one in front of him with his fa
ce turned away. All the pictures of him are like that. I wasn’t sure because he does a real good job of blending in and hiding most of his face, but I’d recognize that ugly tie anywhere.” She taps the page with her finger. “That’s the detective who interviewed me.”
“Detective? You said it was an officer who interviewed you.”
“Same thing, different clothes.”
“I’m not sure they’d see it that way. And he doesn’t appear anywhere else in the book?” I flip back to the pages with the detectives who were involved with the case. “Are you sure it’s not one of these guys?”
“It’s not one of those guys.”
I take out my cellphone thinking I can do a search, but I forgot I’m in Mexico and my cell service doesn’t translate.
We have an almost match. Maybe if I jogged her memory a little it might help.
“What else do you remember about him besides his tie?”
We chat a little more, but she’s not able to give me anything else on the detective, so I change tactics.
“What company was the deliveryman from?” I ask. “Was it UPS, FedEx, the U.S. Postal Service…?”
She shakes her head. “No. It was that one with the arm-in-arm logo. Always reminded me of snakes.”
“Postal Pronto?”
“That’s the one.”
“Do you remember approximately what time he made his delivery?”
“Around four o’clock. Which was weird because usually they delivered to our complex around seven. I remember it being four because my favorite talk show came on. I guess that’s why I only saw him leave.”
“Wait a minute. You didn’t see him arrive with the package, you only saw him leaving?”
“Yes.”
“So he could’ve been there for hours before that. I know it’s been a long time, but do you remember what time you woke up that day?”
“Probably the same as every day. I liked to watch the local news before Good Morning America starts at seven.”
“So you woke up around six a.m. What time did you go to bed the night before?”
