Page 173 of Buried Too Deep

“You need to go home and sleep, Molly,” Burke ordered her from the phone.

“I will,” Molly promised. “I want to hear what Antoine has to say first.”

Antoine flew down the stairs, his eyes bright. “I have it. Jack left records on his hard drive.” He stopped short and stared at Cora. “Dammit. I’m sorry.”

“Let’s take a little break,” Val said. “I think we need some chocolate. I happened to bring some cupcakes with me and Delores brought beignets from Café du Monde.”

Cora squared her shoulders. “Maybe later. I need some aspirin, and then I want to know what Antoine’s found. It’s time to end this.”

The Garden District, New Orleans, Louisiana

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 11:30 A.M.

Antoine set a single laptop on the table. It seemed strange for there to be only one, Cora thought. Usually he had three.

She gulped down some aspirin with the glass of water Delores offered her. Her head was killing her. “Thank you.”

Delores ran a hand over Cora’s hair, only possible because Cora was sitting down. If she’d been standing up, Delores wouldn’t have been able to reach.

“They’ll figure it out,” Delores promised. “And you won’t be alone.”

“Thank you.” She put the glass on the table and folded her hands, bracing herself. “What did the photos give you, Antoine?”

Antoine looked a bit manic. “Everything. Well, everything on that old computer of your father’s. The photo of you as a newborn was number one. Once I had that, I could figure out the order of the other photos and got two separate passwords. The password to the hard drive was the two letter and number combos, like we thought. And the other eighteen characters were the encryption password which allowed me to read all the files.”

Phin took Cora’s hand. “Fine, Antoine. Now tell us what you found. You’re giving Cora an even worse headache.”

“I’m sorry, Cora. I got excited. So, there were three files on the partitioned drive.” Antoine held out a sheet of paper. “The first was a letter addressed to your mother.”

Cora took it, her hand trembling. The paper was shaking too hard for her to see the words. Her heart swelled when Phin took it from her hand, holding it so that she could read it. She truly wasn’t alone in this. Drawing a breath, she began to read.

“ ‘My dearest Priscilla. I knew you’d figure it out! You must have found the letter in my desk drawer and then the rest of the puzzle pieces. You’ve always been the smarter of the two of us. So…if you’re reading this, I must not have come home.’ ”

Cora pressed her hand to her chest. It hurt to even think of her father writing this. “ ‘You’ll be angry with me, and I guess you have that right. I hope someday you can forgive me. I’ve tried to help people, to make the world a better place. Hindsight being twenty-twenty, I probably should have left the work to someone else. In a nutshell, I’ve been helping people escape abusive situations, helping them start over. It started innocently enough. One of my frat brothers—PN—told me that a woman we were friends with back in college was being beaten by her husband. I dated her for a while, long before I met you. I couldn’t let her be beaten up if I could help, so PN and I helped her. She became our first job.’ ”

What little hope Cora had retained simply fizzled. “PN. Patrick Napier.”

“So Patrick was his partner?” Phin asked. “Not his killer?”

Antoine wobbled his hand. “Hard to say. Let her finish.”

Cora drew another breath. “ ‘PN and I started helping other people, mainly women like our friend who needed to escape abusive husbands. PN does the background research and he makes their new IDs. He has an eye for photography and can forge a signature.’ ”

Cora swallowed. “Your dad, Jack Elliot,” she whispered, thinking of the signature on each of the letters she’d received. Squaring her shoulders, she forced herself to read on. “ ‘I manage the money, setting up new accounts for the people we relocate. I set up an account for myself, too. If you’ve gotten this far, you probably found the poem I left you. The first letters of each paragraph are the password to another document which has the account number. If you haven’t discovered it, here it is again.’ ” She read off the Swiss account number. “ ‘At first everything was going well, but recently it’s been falling apart. I’ve told PN that I want out. If you’re reading this, either an abusive spouse has killed me, or PN has. I started suspecting him a few months ago. Two weeks ago, that came to a head when the husband of one of my clients shot at me.’ ”

She looked up. “Jarred Bergeron.”

“Keep going,” Phin murmured, hugging her to him with his free arm.

Not alone, she thought again. “ ‘We had a third partner, TR. He was a cop and the source of most of our clients. He found the people who needed help and passed their names to PN and me. TR did the heavy work, getting people out and transporting them. On a few cases, he needed another pair of hands and I helped him. I say ‘was’ because TR is dead.’ ”

“TR was a cop?” Burke asked through the speaker. “Do we know his name?”

“I haven’t had a chance to search for him,” Antoine said, “but I will. There’s more. Cora?”

“ ‘We worked together for three years, each of us living in a different city in Louisiana. We took care to never be seen together and were careful in how we communicated. Things started to go out of control when we took a job placing a young man who was supposedly running from his family because he’d inherited his grandfather’s millions and the family was trying to kill him to get the money. This job didn’t come from TR. It came from PN. He said he’d met the guy through a chat room. This guy on the run paid us a lot of money to get him out of the country.’ ”

“I don’t like where this is going,” Val said grimly.

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