“A jury convicted Maurice Battle too.” Leo turns, but stays next to the door. “Mr. Battle sat in prison for thirty-nine years for a crime he didn’t commit before our agency took on his case and found someone like you who helped prove his innocence. Wait. No. Not like you. You won’t help us.” He puts his back to us again like he’s going to leave.

“Is that what you do?” she asks. “Free innocent people?”

“It’s one of the things we do.”

“And you think the boy—her brother—who was convicted of Cassandra’s murder is innocent like that other man?”

He faces us again. “Without a doubt. We just need the proof, and I think you have it.”

She looks up at me. I can’t breathe. I grip the railing of her bed, willing her with everything in me to agree to help us. She’s our only real hope. Every other lead we’ve had so far isn’t enough to bring before a judge to reopen Beau’s case.

“Please,” I beg. “Five and a half years. That’s two thousand and eighty-nine days—including today—he’s sat in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. He’ll never get those days back, but you can help us give him the rest of his life back.” I don’t even care that I’m crying. I’d get on my knees if it would get this woman to help us.

“Two thousand eighty-nine days,” she whispers.

“Please.”

She holds her hand out toward Leo. It shakes. “Bring that book back here.”

Leo returns to her bedside and opens the binder again, laying it on her lap. He slips his hand into mine. When I look at him I see tears in his eyes. He wipes mine away with the backs of his fingers.

Mrs. Wheeler turns the pages. I watch her face for any reaction, any sign of recognition. If we can find that officer, we can find out why he didn’t report what Mrs. Wheeler saw. She’s the only one who can put someone other than my brother at Cassandra’s apartment on the day of her death—a deliveryman. Her missing statement could be the something we need to take to a judge.

If we can get Damien LeFeaux to admit he lied about seeing my brother that day the DA’s case takes another hit. There would be no witness putting Beau there at the time of Cassandra’s death.

We also need to find this deliveryman. He could be a potential witness or even the killer himself. This small, frail woman has done more in the past five minutes than I’ve been able to do in more than five years.

She turns the pages, taking her time, examining each photo as though memorizing it. I can’t move. I keep waiting for her to point to a page and shout, “This guy! This is the one!” But she keeps turning the pages slowly, methodically. I don’t look away from her. I don’t want to miss the moment she blows the whole case wide open.

And then she gets to the last page.

Her watery brown gaze rises to mine. “I didn’t see him.”

Chapter 30 Leo

Cora walks out. I’d go after her, but Mrs. Wheeler is looking up at me like she might cry. I don’t think I’ve got the words to reassure her. I can see how badly she wants to help, how much I made her want to help with my bullshit speech about freeing Beau. I pat her pale, wrinkly hand and mumble something about how grateful we are that she tried.

“Do you think she’ll be okay?” Mrs. Wheeler asks.

“Yeah.” Eventually. Possibly.

She leafs backward through the binder as slowly as she did the first time she looked through it. I study the pages with her. Now that Cora’s not in the room there’s really nothing else to look at. She pauses on a page with a newspaper clipping about the murder Cora printed out from the Internet. I recognize the front of Cassandra’s apartment building cordoned off with police tape. There are a number of uniformed and plainclothes officers in the photo. A crowd has gathered. But none of that is the center of the photo or the accompanying article.

Two officers wrap up Beau, who is struggling to get past them. I almost don’t recognize him. His hair is longer, sure, but that’s not why. There’s something fundamentally different about him from the man I met several weeks ago. He’s rougher, harder, and a lot less sure of himself now. I try to imagine what happened to Beau happening to me. If someone murdered Cora in the cruelest, most brutal way imaginable and then I was convicted for it…I don’t know how he wakes up every day carrying that. How has he not gone insane missing her?

Mrs. Wheeler struggles for a closer look at the photo. I hold it up for her.

“Do you see something?”

She points to a drawer in the tray table. “Get my magnifying glass.”

I find it and hand it to her. I adjust the binder to the right height for her.

She peers through the magnifying glass. “I should’ve done this sooner.” She gestures upward. “Turn on the overhead light.”

I do as she asks. A part of me wants to go get Cora, but I don’t want to get her hopes up like she did last time.

“Is there another picture like this?” Mrs. Wheeler asks.

I flip through the binder. “Here.”

This one is a different angle from the street, looking up. The door to Cassandra’s apartment is open. A bunch of people stand around. I never realized how many people showed up at crime scenes. There are reporters too, like the one who took the photo we’re looking at.

Mrs. Wheeler runs her magnifying glass over it, then looks up at me. “Are there any more?”

I find the third and what I know to be the last photo from that day. She does her magnifying-glass thing again, this time slower, and it’s like my heartbeat has slowed too. She stops moving and holds the glass over one spot in the pic. My arms are killing me, holding the binder all this time, but I don’t care.

She slides a finger between the paper and the glass. “There. Do you see that?” She leans back so I can have a look.

I’m not sure what she’s talking about. “The guy in the blue shirt?”

“No. The one in front of him with his face turned away. All the pictures of him are like that. I wasn’t sure because he does a real good job of blending in and hiding most of his face, but I’d recognize that ugly tie anywhere.” She taps the page with her finger. “That’s the detective who interviewed me.”

“Detective? You said it was an officer who interviewed you.”

“Same thing, different clothes.”

“I’m not sure they’d see it that way. And he doesn’t appear anywhere else in the book?” I flip back to the pages with the detectives who were involved with the case. “Are you sure it’s not one of these guys?”

“It’s not one of those guys.”

I take out my cellphone thinking I can do a search, but I forgot I’m in Mexico and my cell service doesn’t translate.

We have an almost match. Maybe if I jogged her memory a little it might help.

“What else do you remember about him besides his tie?”

We chat a little more, but she’s not able to give me anything else on the detective, so I change tactics.

“What company was the deliveryman from?” I ask. “Was it UPS, FedEx, the U.S. Postal Service…?”

She shakes her head. “No. It was that one with the arm-in-arm logo. Always reminded me of snakes.”

“Postal Pronto?”

“That’s the one.”

“Do you remember approximately what time he made his delivery?”

“Around four o’clock. Which was weird because usually they delivered to our complex around seven. I remember it being four because my favorite talk show came on. I guess that’s why I only saw him leave.”

“Wait a minute. You didn’t see him arrive with the package, you only saw him leaving?”

“Yes.”

“So he could’ve been there for hours before that. I know it’s been a long time, but do you remember what time you woke up that day?”