“Since both Mason Hyde and my mother were murdered, and my father has gone into hiding, do you think there could be other Resonant employees who disappeared or died under suspicious circumstances?”
“I hope not, but we’ll find out.” He quickly typed a text. “Letting Allison know all the names. She has enough and can put it all together for us. If she weren’t human, she would be AI. She’s brilliant.”
Jo sank back and stared at the screen as she scrolled. “I can’t find any references to Pop after the incident. Mom either. They could have been fired.”
“Lots of moving parts here. Employees come and go. Contractors too.”
“I get it. Even with over half a million people employed in the industry, many of them engineers. Physicists and the like.” The weight of this news pressed against her, weighing her down. “This must be what ‘before’ means.”
“Before?” He angled his head, lifting his gaze from the cell.
“Naomi said her brother knew my mother ‘before.’ And her garbled word makes sense now. She said ‘free.’ What if she meant the wordfreedom? To look up freedom. What’s another word for freedom?”
“Liberty. Before theLibertydisaster.” Cole said it for her.
“Yes.”
“And after?” he asked. “Might be another disaster if we’re not careful with what we’ve learned.” He leaned closer. “I think we’re onto something, and it’s highly volatile, dangerously explosive information.”
“We don’t have all the information. We just know thatsomethinghappened, and now we might know what it was. But there is obviously more to this.”
He nodded and started taking pictures of the information on the screens. Was that even allowed? Not that it mattered to Cole. Not to her either. They needed images of this stuff.
“We’ll ask for copies of everything, now that we have enough information to ask, but I don’t want to wait for it.”
Jo scrolled through and snapped images too.
“Is there anything else we need to know?” He stood and looked around with his protective, on-guard demeanor. “Because we probably need to get out of here.”
“I’d like to stay as long as possible. I don’t want to leave only to think of something I could have looked into. I’m going to read everything I can about this.”
Cole continued taking pictures. Looking over his shoulder. Watching the exits. He was getting nervous, and that was making her nervous.
Jo kept reading, and all of it made her cry. The tragedy, losing all those astronauts. Had Pop gotten fired? Mom too? Then she read about another tragedy surrounding the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Motor Project. One of their employees—the unidentified woman with Mom, Pop, and Mason in the picture she’d found in Michigan—had gone missing ...thirtyyears ago. Jo couldn’t breathe. Her name was Helen Martin. The man in the photograph—Troy Martin. Helen Martin was his wife. “She was missing,” she whispered.
Oh God,oh Lord ... thisis no surprise to you.
Her heart pounded erratically.
Mom found you,Helen. Mom found you because someone intendedfor her to find you.
But who was behind her disappearance? Who was behind sending Mom the skull?
Caught up in her devastating thoughts, she hadn’t realized that Cole was there, crouching next to her so that he was at eye level. “We’ve learned enough,” he spoke in low tones. “We need to hand this off to Sanders completely.”
“What? No. Why?”
Cole stood and started pacing. He scraped his hand over his mouth, rubbed it. The lights flickered. Cole froze.
Jo slowly stood. The microfiche screens went out.
And so did the lights.
34
Cole’s hackles raised as he reached for his firearm. Gripping it, he motioned for Jo to get down on the floor.
“Maybe she forgot we were here. That’s me just hoping,” Jo said.
