Chapter 11 - The Woman Who Walked Away
I caught Nora near the courthouse elevators.
“Please don't leave thinking I knew Owen was alive.”
She faced me with red eyes. “I don't know what to think. Luke trusted you. Then I spent three years telling June every word of that report was true.”
“You had every reason to.”
“Did he suffer?”
The question emptied my lungs. The official record said Luke died instantly. I had heard him calling for Mateo after the first shot. I'd heard him still trying to give orders when the radio failed.
“Yes,” I said. “For a little while.”
Nora folded against the wall. I reached toward her, then stopped because she hadn't asked to be touched.
“He asked me to tell June he didn't run,” I whispered. “I was afraid that if I told you his last words, I'd have to tell you I couldn't bring him home.”
“You should've let me decide what I could bear.”
She was right.
I went back inside and requested that my earlier hospital statement be independently reviewed. If it had helped Thorne, I wanted the whole thing exposed, not just the parts convenient to me.
By evening, a local news site published a photograph of my wet sweater with a headline calling me an impostor who had forged a death report. Someone had leaked details from the closed proceeding. Calder ordered an inquiry, but the damage was already moving faster than any investigation.
Tess found me on the courthouse steps. “We tracked the auction receipt. Mateo's repair kit was bought by a reseller named Ellis Hardware Recovery.”
“Can we get it?”
“We can ask. And we can get a warrant if the evidence supports it.”
She handed me a second sheet. The reseller had received an offer ten times the kit's value that afternoon.
May you like
The buyer listed no real name—only an encrypted contact address.
But the payment reference contained Thorne's old radio call sign.
