Chapter 10 - THE PEOPLE MARA SAVED
"We don't trade a child for a promise from kidnappers," Chen told Olivia. "We work to find him. I need you to tell us everything you know about his habits, not everything you fear."
Olivia hated the distinction. She obeyed it anyway.
She told investigators Jonah kept paper stars folded inside his pockets whenever he was nervous. He hated closed doors, learned to draw before he spoke much English, and remembered roads by the colors of the houses along them. Tessa brought a shoebox full of his drawings. One showed a gray building with a broken red sign and a mural of a whale.
"He drew that after a school trip," Tessa said. "But he never told me where it was."
Investigators checked Jonah's known trips.
Meanwhile, a woman named Nadia Brooks called Chen's office. Nadia had been one of the twelve children. She was twenty-one now, worked at a grocery store, and had spent years believing the soldiers who saved her had died because she was too slow to run.
Olivia met her with a victim advocate present. Nadia held up a faded photograph of Captain Quinn kneeling in front of the children.
"I never forgot her," Nadia said. "She promised to find us a place with windows."
"She kept that promise."
"Did she die scared?"
Olivia looked away. "She was scared for us. I heard her say our names until the radio went quiet."
Nadia cried without hiding it. Olivia did too. For the first time in years they didn't have to pretend the people in that photograph had never existed.
That afternoon, investigators obtained records showing a Talon Logistics convoy had entered the valley on the day of the disaster, although the company's public statement denied any vehicles were there.
Chen called Hale. "One number matches Voss's notes. We have independent records now."
"What did the truck carry?"
"We don't know yet. But the shipment was signed out by Walter Ward."
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A second record showed who approved the route change.
Victor Sloane.
