“I guess a little?” Talia said. “But then, her mom was a cop and she couldn’t get away, plus look what happened to her ’cause she’s dead now, and Mandy almost died, so maybe it’s better that she didn’t try?”
“It’s not right, though.” Emmy put some authority into her voice. “You should never let anyone hurt you. No matter what. You can always call me any time and I will make sure you’re safe.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Talia said, but surely the girl was thinking about the fact that Emmy hadn’t kept Allison safe for the last ten years. “Thank you.”
“Okay.” Emmy didn’t have time to hate herself right now. “Put your mom back on the phone, please.”
Valerie had clearly been listening. “Sheriff, what the hell is going on? Does he know where we live? Talia, why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“Ma’am, I can’t tell you what to do, but I would go to a hotel. My deputy will stay right outside your door until Shane Russell is caught.” Emmy caught Cole’s eyes. “I promise you, another child will not be hurt on my watch.”
“God,” Valerie whispered. “Okay. Okay. We’ll leave now.”
Cole waited for Emmy to hang up before going back at her.
“This isn’t right. I have a job to do, Mom. I’m not a baby.”
“You’remybaby, and if you don’t want to stay with me, then you can go to your dad’s, but I swear to God if you try to go out on those streets, I will lock you in a cell myself.”
“Mom—”
“Stop.” Emmy couldn’t take much more of this. She’d already had one nervous breakdown today. “I told you he knows who I am. That means he knows who you are, too.”
“Great, you want me to lead him right to Dad.”
They should be so lucky. “Coleman, please. I can’t do my job if I’m worried about you. That’s the end of it.”
He clearly wasn’t going to let it end, but the door to the staff area opened. Jude had retrieved the stack of music CDs from the archive room. Barbara was trailing behind her, a curious look on her face. She’d thrown a coat over her pajamas. She was clearly expecting an explanation.
Emmy dashed her hopes. “Cole, take Barbara somewhere quiet. I need you to get her statement about Allison using the library. Dates and times. Anything she can remember.”
Cole’s jaw was so clenched it could’ve been wired shut. Still, he gestured toward a seating area, telling Barbara, “Ma’am?”
Jude showed Emmy one of the CDs. “The Boston Pops on the Fourth of July. Look at the label. It’s inkjet, not professionally printed.”
Emmy remembered noticing that the label was smeared but at the time, she’d thought that was because it was old. Now, she could see the ink hadn’t had time to dry before being removedfrom the printer. The lines on the waving American flag bled into each other. The serifs on some of the letters had been lost because the jets were clogged. Everything was so obvious now. The plastic bin with the money was in a blue bin with a red top. Both Louis Singh and Teena Nixon had said that Mitch was a patriot.
She walked down the row of computers, Jude’s boots thudding behind her. Emmy chose the station at the very back of the building. She used her library card to log into the computer. The ancient IBM laptop from the archive room was already at GBI headquarters because Emmy had sent them the wrong thing.
Jude sat in the rolling chair beside her. She slid the CD into the slot.
Emmy heard a whir from the machines. The disc name and extension looked unfamiliar—
03_02.wmv
“WMV is a legacy format from the early two thousands.” Jude leaned across Emmy and started typing. The screen went black, then lines of code started to scroll. “You’ll need a K-Lite Codec Pack and Handbrake to open it.”
Emmy rolled her chair out of the way so Jude could sit in front of the monitor. She looked at her sister in the glow of the screen. Laugh lines fanned out from her eyes, extended under the Band-Aid at her temple. Her eyeliner needed a touch-up. She’d gone too long without seeing her hairdresser. But there was a natural beauty about her. The way she didn’t take herself too seriously, even though she had every right to. The fact that she was the smartest person Emmy had ever met. That no matter what, she always held Emmy up when she faltered.
There was a new stop on the swinging pendulum between gratitude and irritation: confusion. Emmy had humiliated herself outside the nursing home. She’d never had anything like that happen in her life. She’d thought that she was dying. Even Hannah had never seen her so broken. Emmy couldn’t understand why she was okay that Jude had borne witness. The woman was a stranger. Emmy knew almost nothing about her, and yet she had trusted Jude with her life.
And now she was leaving.
“Almost done,” Jude said.
Emmy cleared her throat. “How do you know about all this stuff?”
Jude kept typing. “In the old days, computers didn’t just work when you plugged them in. We had to figure out how to fix them ourselves.”
