Chapter 12 - The Woman in the Back Seat

Elias stared at the manifest for so long I could hear the air conditioner clicking off and on.

"Who was in the truck?" I asked.

"A woman named Alma Rios," he said. "I thought she was a county clerk. She got in at the courthouse and wouldn't let me unload until we reached the archive."

"And?"

"Her hands were zip-tied."

I felt cold all over. "You saw that?"

"Not until she climbed out. I went after Crowley. He told me she had threatened a judge and was being taken for questioning. I made him call someone he said was her lawyer. I heard a woman tell me Alma was okay."

"You believed him?"

"I wanted to believe him," Elias said. "That's the part I can't excuse."

Agent Darby Lin arrived before sunrise. She wore a plain dark jacket and spoke without making promises she couldn't keep. Her team had been reviewing federal disaster-grant payments for months, she explained. They had suspicions but lacked the original records needed to connect the money to specific people.

"Can you find my mom?" I asked.

"We're working with state investigators and local officers outside Harlan's circle," she said. "We need facts we can test. Elias is giving us some."

Elias handed her his company laptop, the dispatch records, and access to his financial files. His attorney stood beside him. Nobody pretended cooperation erased what he'd done.

Lin found Alma Rios in a state hospital under a different last name. She'd survived a beating and had refused to speak to anyone from Bellwether. Luz and Sonia helped arrange a safe conversation with her attorney.

That afternoon Alma appeared on a video call. Her hair was cropped short and one arm rested in a brace.

"Rebecca Calder wouldn't leave those families alone," Alma said. "That's why they took her. They kept telling her an accountant couldn't make people care."

"What was in the last truck?" Lin asked.

"Original receipts. The ones that prove Judge Vane approved the payments himself." Alma swallowed. "I hid the pickup address where he'd never look."

She leaned close to the camera. "Tell the girl her mother knows the river better than the men who own the maps."

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My fingers tightened around Milo's blanket. Mom used to say those words when we hiked the trail behind the old water station.

And there was only one place she had ever called the river's blind eye.