Hold Tight
“Mom, what’s going on?”
“Just give me a second, sweetie.”
Tia picked up the phone and called Dr. Forte’s phone. It was Saturday, but she knew that with all the after-school kid activities, the area dentists often had weekend hours. She checked her watch and listened to the third ring, then the fourth. Her heart sank on the fifth ring before salvation:
“Dr. Forte’s office.”
“Hi, good morning, this is Tia Baye, Adam and Jill’s mom?”
“Yes, Mrs. Baye, what can I do for you?”
Tia tried to place the name of Forte’s receptionist. She had been there for years, knew everyone, ran the place really. She was the gatekeeper. It came to her. “Is this Caroline?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Hi, Caroline. Listen, this may sound like an odd request, but I desperately need a favor from you.”
“Well, I’ll try. We’re pretty jammed up next week.”
“No, it’s not that. Adam had an after-school appointment on the eighteenth at three forty-five P.M.”
No reply.
“I need to know if he was there.”
“You mean if he was a no-show?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, no, I would have called you. Adam was definitely here.”
“Do you know if he was on time?”
“I can give you the exact time, if that would help. It’s on the sign-in sheet.”
“Yes, that would be great.”
More delay. Tia heard the sound of fingers tapping on a computer. Papers were being shuffled.
“Adam got here early, Mrs. Baye—he signed in at three twenty P.M.”
That would make sense, Tia thought. He normally walked directly from school.
“And we saw him on time—at exactly three forty-five P.M. Is that what you needed to know?”
The phone nearly dropped from Tia’s hand. Something was so very wrong. Tia checked the screen again—the time and date columns.
The Huff-party e-mail had been sent at 3:32 P.M. It had been read at 3:37 P.M.
Adam hadn’t been home then.
This made no sense unless . . .
“Thank you, Caroline.” She quickly called Brett, her computer expert. He answered his phone: “Yo.”
Tia decided to put him on the defensive. “Thanks for selling me out to Hester.”
“Tia? Oh, look, I’m sorry about that.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
“No, seriously, Hester knows everything around here. Do you realize that she monitors every computer in the place? Sometimes she just reads the personal e-mails for fun. She figures if you’re on her property—”
“I wasn’t on her property.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
Time to move on. “According to the E-SpyRight report, my son read an e-mail at three thirty-seven P.M.”
“So?”
“So he wasn’t home at that time. Could he have read it elsewhere?”
“You’re getting this from E-SpyRight?”
“Yes.”
“Then the answer is no. The E-SpyRight is just monitoring his computer activities on that computer only. So if he signed in and read the e-mail elsewhere, it wouldn’t be in the report.”
“So how could this be?”
“Hmm. Well, first off, are you sure he wasn’t home?”
“Positive.”
“Well, somebody was. And that somebody was on his computer.”
Tia looked again. “It says it was deleted at three thirty-eight P.M.”
“So someone went on your son’s computer, read the e-mail, and then deleted it.”
“Then Adam would have never seen it, right?”
“Probably not.”
She quickly dismissed the most obvious suspects: She and Mike were at work that day, and Jill had walked with Yasmin to the No- vaks’ house for a playdate.
None of them were home.
How could someone else have gotten it without leaving any signs of a break-in? She thought about that key, the one they hid in the fake rock outside by the fence post.
The caller ID buzzed in. She saw that it was Mo.
“Brett, I’ll have to call you back.” She clicked over. “Mo?”
“You’re not going to believe this,” he said, “but the FBI just picked up Mike.”
SITTING in the makeshift interrogation room, Loren Muse took a good long look at Neil Cordova.
He was on the short side, small-boned, compact, and handsome in an almost too unblemished way. He looked a little like his wife when you put them side by side. Muse knew this because Cordova had brought photographs of them together, lots of them—on cruises, on beaches, at formals, at parties, in the backyard. Neil and Reba Cordova were photogenic and healthy and liked to pose cheek to cheek. They looked happy in every single photograph.
“Please find her,” Neil Cordova said for the third time since entering the room.
She had already said, “We’re doing all we can,” twice, so she saved it.
He added, “I want to cooperate in any way I can.”
Neil Cordova had close-cropped hair and was dressed in a blazer and tie, as though that was expected of him, as if the outfit itself could help hold him together. There was a nice shine to his shoes. Muse thought about that. Her own father had been big on shined shoes. “Judge a man by the shine on his shoes,” he would tell his young daughter. Nice to know. When a fourteen-year-old Loren Muse had found her father’s body in the garage—he’d gone in there and blown his brains out—there had indeed been a nice shine to his shoes.
Good advice, Dad. Thanks for the suicide protocol.
“I know how it is,” Cordova went on. “The husband is always a suspect, right?”
Muse did not reply.
“And you think Reba had an affair because her car was parked at that motel—but I swear to you, it’s not like that. You have to believe me.”
Muse made her face stone. “We aren’t ruling anything in or out.”
“I’ll take a polygraph, no lawyer, whatever you need. I just don’t want you to waste time looking down the wrong avenue. Reba didn’t run away, I know that. And I had nothing to do with what happened to her.”
You never believe anybody, Muse thought. That was the rule. She had questioned suspects whose acting skills could put De Niro on unemployment. But the evidence so far backed him, and everything inside her told her that Neil Cordova was telling the truth. Besides, for right now, it didn’t matter.
Muse had brought Cordova down to identify the body of her Jane Doe. Foe or ally, that was what she needed desperately. His cooperation. So she said, “Mr. Cordova, I don’t think you harmed your wife.”