Dedication

  For Eileen Key, my writing mentor, my friend, my sister in Christ. Your departure has left a hole in my heart. Breathe easy now, sweet friend. One day we’ll talk books again near God’s heavenly throne. I can only imagine how many books He has in His library. We’ll read them all!

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  A Note from the Author

  Discussion Questions

  About the Author

  Copyright

  One

  Jackie Santoro checked her smartwatch for the fifth time. She needed to leave now.

  She waved to catch her best friend Estrella Diaz’s gaze. The City Council District 1 chief of staff stood next to her boss, Councilman Diego Sandoval, who was in deep conversation with the library foundation board chairman a few feet from the stage. Estrella offered a discreet fist pump. Jackie grinned and gave her a thumbs-up in return. Then she pointed at her watch.

  Estrella nodded and cocked her head toward Sandoval. That meant she would shoo him and his entourage toward the doors shortly. Part of Estrella’s job consisted of keeping him on message and on schedule. The woman loved being in charge and she loved being chin deep in local politics.

  So far everything had gone like clockwork. Elected dignitaries, city officials, and citizens who’d plunked down their hard-earned money to watch a debate between a climate-change activist and author and an it’s-all-a-hoax proponent crowded the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts.

  The next step in this elegant special event waltz belonged to Jackie, who created programming as part of her position as adult collections coordinator at the Central Library. The library foundation had agreed to sponsor a more intimate reception for the authors, dignitaries, and VIP donors at the library only a dozen blocks away, and they were running late.

  Adrenaline pumped through Jackie’s veins and left a metallic taste in the back of her throat. Event planning added spice to a job she loved. It also kept her from sleeping much.

  Intent on a quick getaway, she strode toward the back of the hall. Best friend number two, Bella Glover, waved from the reserved media seating. Jackie waved back. She’d scored tickets for herself and her friends to the Spurs game Saturday night. She could critique the Express-News reporter’s story while the Spurs clobbered the LA Clippers. Spurs fans were nothing if not optimistic.

  A steady stream of patrons stood and edged toward the center aisle. A low murmur swelled to the sound of hundreds of people all talking at once. Soon they’d be in front of Jackie, impeding her progress from the parking garage and on the narrow, one-way downtown streets of San Antonio.

  “Great job, Jackie. Looks like your boss was wrong.” Sandoval’s constituent services director, Tony Guerra, sauntered up the aisle toward her. “Climate change opponents can coexist amicably in the same space. And so can city manager and city council staff.”

  “Thanks, but it took a whole host of partners to make this happen. And it’s not over yet.” Jackie stuck her hand on the door lever that would release her to the Tobin’s massive lobby.

  She liked Tony, which was a good thing since he’d asked Estrella to marry him. However, he wore his political ambitions like an obnoxious neon-pink tie.

  “I have to go. I want to make sure there are no last-minute snags with the reception. Then it’s back to fine-tuning the altars for the Catrina Ball. It’s only a week away, and I’m behind because of the debate.”

  “You never let up, do you? Are we still on for the Spurs game tomorrow—”

  A powerful force knocked Jackie from her feet.

  Her skull banged on the hardwood floor.

  Sharp projectiles pelted her face in a painful ping-ping.

  What’s happening?

  Estrella? Tony? Bella?

  Muffled screams and even her own moaning seemed strangely distant. “Estrella? Tony? Bella?”

  If they answered, Jackie couldn’t hear them. She dragged herself onto her hands and knees. Glass and sharp metal pierced both. She forced open burning eyes.

  Heavy black smoke shrouded the hall. Metal and debris like deadly confetti showered her. She raised her arm to her forehead to protect her face from the remnants of folding chairs and electronics.

  Warm blood dripped from her nose. The acrid taste of smoke and fear collected in her mouth. Her stomach heaved. Her pulse pounded so hard dizziness threatened to overcome her.

  No, no, no. Do not pass out. People need help.

  Shrieking alarms bellowed.

  Water, like torrential rain, poured from above. Rain, inside? Her ricocheting thoughts made no sense. Jackie shook her head. Neither the smoke nor the clanging in her brain subsided.

  Sprinkler system.

  The smoke had triggered the sprinklers.

  Where there’s smoke there’s fire. The old cliché ran circles in her mind like a children’s nursery rhyme.

  Estrella’s mama and papa would never forgive Jackie if something happened to their sweet daughter. Mercedes and Mateo always saw Jackie as the instigator of trouble. And they were usually right.

  Ignoring pain and panic, she crawled forward. Sharp metal bit into her skin. Where were her shoes?

  Finally she encountered a warm, writhing body. “Tony?”

  “What happened?” He struggled to sit up. Blood poured from an open wound on his scalp, his nose, and a cut on his lip. “I have to get to Estrella and Diego.”

  He might have yelled, but Jackie could barely make out the words. She leaned back on her haunches. “You’re hurt. Does anything feel broken?”

  “No, but I can’t hear anything.” He wiped at his face. Blood streaked his once crisply starched white shirt. “Why can’t I hear?”

  “It’ll pass. We have to get everyone out.”

  With a groan, Tony leaned over and vomited on the floor. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Okay, let’s go.”

  “Everyone out. If you can walk on your own, evacuate.” One of the contract security guards hired for the debate loomed over them. “The bomb squad is on the way. Go, go.”

  “We’re fine. We’ll help get the others out.”

  “Negative. Get out, there could be more bombs.”

  Bombs.

  That word came through loud and clear. It hit Jackie with the force of a second explosion. People were hurt. People might be dead. People she cared about.

  She grabbed Tony’s arm and together they managed to stand. Around them others dragged themselves up. Frantic, bloodied faces with numb, shocked, baffled expressions. Screams and moans mingled in a horrible, muffled cacophony.

  A woman knelt beside a man. She pressed her jacket against one leg. “Hang in there, hang in there.” She repeated the phrase like a mantra to block out his agonized shrieks. “You’re okay, you’re okay.”

  A man carried a young teenager in his arms. Both her legs were mangled and bloody. “She needs help.” Dazed, he seemed unaware of the blood pouring from a jagged wound on his arm. “Somebody, she needs help.”

  “Get outside. Help is on the way.” Jackie guided him toward the door. “Take care of yourself.”

  People stumbled into her. She staggered and kept going. God, please.

  A few more yards. She squatted beside a man’s body facedown on the floor. He groaned, pulled himself to his knees, and crawled away. Oh God.

  A few more feet.

  There.

  Jackie closed her burning eyes and opened them. “Oh Estrella.”

  “No, no, no.” Moaning, Tony pushed Jackie aside. “Mi amor, I’m here. I’ve got you.”

  He collapsed next to her still body. Her lovely cocoa-brown eyes were wide and surprised in death. Blood matted charcoal-colored curls that surrounded her head like a jostled tiara. Her mouth was open as if caught in a perpetual oh no.

  “Por favor, answer me, mi corazón.”

  “Tony, let me.” The grotesque smell of death in her nose, Jackie swallowed against vomit in the back of her throat. Her stomach rocked. It took every ounce of strength left in her body to raise her hand. She touched Estrella’s throat and found no pulse. “Mi amiga.”

  “No.” Tony shoved Jackie away. “She needs a doctor. Get a doctor. Hurry.”

  Jackie fell backward in a heap next to the woman who had gone with her to a Britney Spears concert in the fifth grade. Estrella colored Jackie’s hair with henna before her
first date. She held Jackie’s ponytail while she retched into the toilet after her first keg party. She managed Jackie’s student council campaign for president her senior year in high school. She held Jackie’s hand at Daddy’s funeral.

  Tony’s sobs sounded more like screams. Jackie fought the urge to scream with him. She clasped her hands over her ears. God, God, God, God. You brought Jairus’s daughter back to life. And Lazarus. Why not Estrellita?

  A run-of-the mill doctor couldn’t bring back this woman who had celebrated her thirtieth birthday Memorial Day weekend. One moment she was arguing social justice issues like the path to citizenship for Dreamers. The next she lay shattered and still, in the aftermath of a bomb, alongside her boss.

  Part of the councilman’s face was missing.

  Jackie rubbed Tony’s back. “She’s gone on ahead of us, Tony. She’s dancing with Jesus right now.”

  Estrella’s unflinching faith offered the one silver lining in this dark, unfathomable moment.

  Tony wiggled closer. She put her arm around his shoulders and held on as if they could buoy each other up on a storm-lashed sea. They were both drowning.

  “Get out, get out.” An SAPD officer in bomb gear lurched toward them. “Evacuate now.”

  “I’m not leaving her.” Tony struggled to free himself from Jackie’s grip. “I’m staying right here with her.”

  “We have to go.” Jackie released him.

  “Sweet dreams, my friend.” She kissed Estrella’s still-warm forehead and gently closed her eyelids. “We have to go, honey, but we’ll make sure they take good care of you. We have to help the police find who did this.”

  Find them and make them pay.

  Two

  Only a coward would look away.

  Jackie fought the urge to rip her gaze from the body bags on gurneys in the triage tent set up on Municipal Auditorium Way across from the Tobin Center. The bomb squad had cleared the building without finding another incendiary device, and the removal of bodies had begun.

  One, two, three, four, five. Five body bags. Estrella occupied one of those bags awaiting transport to the Bexar County medical examiner’s office. By now crime scene investigators had photographed and videotaped her body from every angle. An ME investigator had done a preliminary review of her body and injuries. The final indignity of an autopsy still awaited her. Who were the others who faced the same ignominious procedures?

  Head down, cell phone to his ear, Tony stood next to Estrella’s gurney. The bandage on his brown forehead shone white. His face was red and swollen from crying. His free hand patted the bag every few seconds as if to comfort his fiancée.

  Bella hovered close by. Whether as a friend or a reporter remained to be seen. Life became even more complicated in the aftermath of an explosion that ripped their lives into tiny pieces and scattered them across eternity.

  Only a coward would refuse to look. Just as only a coward would detonate a bomb in a crowded auditorium.

  Focus. Jackie tightened her grip on an elderly woman who wore a pink suit splattered with blood. Together they hobbled on punctured bare feet to the triage tent. The woman kept saying the blood didn’t belong to her. She was fine, she said, but she wasn’t. The gash on her rouged cheek needed attention.

  An EMT took the handoff with a murmured thanks. He held out a blanket. “You look cold.”

  It would take years to shake this chill. Jackie settled the blanket around her shoulders and headed back into the fray. They wouldn’t let her inside the building, but she made the rounds to the other victims who’d been deemed able to wait while the more critically injured were transported to area hospitals. She offered them what little she could—a kind word, a hug, a blanket, a cup of hot coffee made by Victim Assistance.

  She pulled the blanket tighter, turned, and bumped into City Manager Jason Vogel. His normally perfectly coiffed black hair stuck out in tuffs on what had always struck her as an absurdly oversized head. The knees of his navy pinstriped suit were torn, his tie askew, and his hands caked with blood. His lips were blue. His teeth chattered. “Do I know you?”

  Technically he was her boss. Ultimately all twelve thousand-plus city employees worked for him.

  Jackie introduced herself. They’d met numerous times at library special events, but he couldn’t be expected to remember all of the employees in his charge, especially in the aftermath of a traumatic event.

  “Sam Santoro’s daughter, I remember now.”

  Even a bomb with multiple fatalities couldn’t erase that fact from Vogel’s mind. The man had had the audacity to attend the funeral as if he’d forgotten his role in her father’s untimely demise.

  “A lady is a lady no matter the circumstances.” Her mother’s voice shouted in her ears. “Only Jesus is perfect. Forgive, seventy times seven.” “Yes, sir.”

  He nodded, but his gaze shifted over her shoulder toward the command center set up by Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and shared by the FBI, San Antonio Police Department, and Homeland Security Investigations. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, sir. Are you?”

  Surprise flashed across his face. He probably thought his Teflon coating made him Superman. Couldn’t a lowly librarian see that? “Of course. I have to go. Take care of yourself.”

  “You too, sir.” It was nice of him to stop long enough to say the words. He managed a city of 1.3 million citizens, and ultimately he was responsible for their safety. “Here, take this blanket. You’re freezing.”

  His hands remained at his sides. Jackie arranged it across his beefy shoulders. “It’s okay, I’ll get another one. Go.”

  “People are dead.”

  “I know, sir. Do the police have any idea who did this?”

  “Lots of ideas. All conjecture.” Vogel reached for the blanket. His hands were shaking. “Rest assured, we will get whoever did it. My wife could’ve been killed. Bill was my friend . . .” His voice trailed away.

  Chief of Police Bill Little? “Is the chief—?”

  “I have to go.” He brushed past her and trudged, head down, toward the command center.

  “This is all your fault.”

  Jackie whirled at the familiar, shrill voice. Meagan Nobel. Her immediate boss. Meagan’s black silk blouse gaped open, revealing a lacy camisole. Either the explosion or a fall had ripped her tight, narrow skirt up to midthigh on the right side. Her shoes were intact but one heel was missing, so she meandered toward Jackie in a hip-hop, drunken fashion. “This debate was your idea. It’s your fault.”

  “What? What are you talking about?” Jackie staggered back from Meagan’s pointed forefinger with its long nail lacquered in blood red. Her tone blasted the words for everyone in a one-block radius to hear. “Are you hurt?”

  “Oh no, I’m fine and dandy.” Meagan swiped at a straggling strand of red hair that covered her hazel eyes. “Milton is dead. Dead. You said it would be fine. You said it would be a great fund-raiser. I told you it was political dynamite. I never thought it would be actual dynamite.”

  Milton Schaeffer, San Antonio Library Foundation board chairman and number-one donor recruiter, lay in one of those body bags.

  Her fault. All her fault. Jackie threw her hands up, but she couldn’t stop the spewing words. Would Mercedes and Mateo Diaz hold her responsible for their daughter’s death too? Was she responsible? “His wife . . . is his wife okay?”

  “Injured. On her way to University’s trauma center right now. The downtown hospitals are full.” Meagan projected her ire with such velocity, a fine spray of spittle landed on Jackie’s face. “Thank God the director is at an ALA conference this week. At least he’s safe. Wait until he hears about this. What was I thinking to trust you with this?”

  “I never thought—”

  “Of course you never thought. We had our hands full with the Catrina Ball next weekend, and yet you bulldozed your way through every objection because you want what you want and you’re always right and you have no respect for the opinions of others. You love the limelight. You’re never satisfied with simple signings by local authors. You want the big names, the controversy. ‘Intellectual discourse,’ you said. ‘Civilized conversation,’ you said. All along you wanted to make a big splash. You never should have become a librarian.”

  Of all the accusations spewing from Meagan’s mouth, only the last sentence held no kernel of truth. Meagan stopped abruptly. Even she knew she’d gone too far.