Praise for the novels of Rick Mofina

  Someone Saw Something

  “A taut, harrowing read, with explosive twists and turns combining with genuine, heartfelt moments of one family confronting their worst nightmare and fighting back.”

  —Lisa Gardner, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “It’s a family’s worst nightmare. A child is missing and his parents are left with unimaginable choices and the threat of long-held secrets being exposed. Mofina expertly weaves together an anguishing story of a family’s trauma with a propulsive, twisty thriller that pays off to the very last page.”

  —Alafair Burke, New York Times bestselling author of Find Me

  “Focusing on the family’s agony and quest for the truth puts the reader directly into the story, and the final payoff is terrific.”

  —Jeff Ayers, advance review for firstCLUE

  Everything She Feared

  “Everything She Feared moves like a raging river. This is a thriller not to be missed!”

  —Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “Rick Mofina has penned a creepy, heart-pounding page-turner. Simmering with unrelenting tension and family secrets; Mofina mines the darkest corners of the human heart and explores the age-old question—is evil born or made? A gripping, chilling thriller from beginning to end.”

  —Heather Gudenkauf, New York Times bestselling author of The Overnight Guest

  “Everything She Feared hooked me from page one and didn’t let go. An intriguing premise coupled with masterful storytelling and a well-plotted mystery made it impossible for me to put it down. Compulsively readable with twists and turns right up until the stunning conclusion. I loved it.”

  —Amber Garza, author of A Mother Would Know

  “A propulsive, page-turning thriller; I couldn’t put it down. I was immediately immersed in the different perspectives, all realistic and fascinating characters whom I couldn’t help but root for. Mofina has successfully written The Bad Seed for the twenty-first century, with even more twists and turns.”

  —Flora Collins, author of A Small Affair

  RICK MOFINA is a former journalist and bestselling author of more than thirty crime fiction thrillers that have been published in nearly thirty countries. He is a two-time winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence, a Barry Award winner, and a multiple finalist for the International Thriller Writers Thriller Award and the Shamus Award, presented by the Private Eye Writers of America. Library Journal calls him “one of the best thriller writers in the business.”

  RICKMOFINA.COM

  Someone Saw Something

  RICK MOFINA

  This book is for Laura, Mark and Angus

  For a moment the lie becomes truth.

  —Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

  Contents

  Prologue

  DAY 1

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  DAY 2

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  DAY 3

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  DAY 4

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  DAY 5

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  DAY 6

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  DAY 7

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments & A Personal Note

  Prologue

  Several years earlier

  THE DEAD STARED open-eyed to the sky.

  Women, men, children, mouths agape, their faces breaking the earth’s surface in macabre portraits, their bodies entombed in mud. Over here, a leg and shoeless foot protruded. Over there, a hand reached heavenward.

  Corina Corado and the other journalists said nothing, taking pictures and video of the horror that stretched into a curving, gruesome river of death, dotted with branches, overturned cars, a bus, and an altar and crucifix from a church, Christ’s face in torment.

  A breeze carried the stench.

  Bodies had started to decompose; birds pecked at remains. Corina and the others moved carefully through the mudslide’s aftermath.

  She was with NNN, the Newslead Now Network. A week earlier she’d been in El Salvador with Jed Gonzales, the camera operator, finishing a feature on immigrants and another piece on the country’s volcanoes.

  With her assignments in Central America completed, Corina was happy to be going back to New York, back to her husband and daughter to start her overdue vacation. Anxious to leave before the storms that were expected for the region, she was standing in line to board her flight at the airport in San Miguel when Ken McKee, an assignment editor, called her from New York.

  “A hurricane’s hit Nicaragua, in Chinandega,” McKee said. “Your visas are still valid. You and Jed are our closest crew. We need you on-site, filing ASAP.”

  Miraculously, Chinandega’s airport, using generators, had remained operational and they got a flight into Nicaragua. Upon landing they’d hired a car and driver and begun sending reports via satellite links.

  The storm had churned into the region with winds upward of 160 mph, knocking out much of Chinandega’s electricity, smashing buildings and tearing off roofs. The rains caused flooding, turning streets into raging rivers, sweeping people away, dragging houses and cars in rushing waters choking with debris and sewage. The known death toll neared three hundred. Rescue and relief efforts were launched, aid was dispatched.

  Corina and Jed reported for several days, filing stories and updates nonstop. Most of the world press was in Chinandega when the rumors trickled in that the hurricane’s rains had caused massive mudslides inland, in northern Madriz. There were accounts of people disappearing in seconds as the slides wiped out entire towns and villages in the hill country.

  News crews scrambled to get there.

  Corina and Jed, along with a TV team from Buenos Aires, a reporter and print photographer from a Barcelona newspaper, and a radio reporter from Lima, shared the cost to charter a helicopter to get them into the hardest-hit remote section of Madriz. But government officials stepped in—they wanted to seize the media aircraft for relief and rescue around the city. The press was being intimidated by an increasingly controlling regime. Corina and the others had argued that it was vital to show the world the true extent of the storm’s damage, to draw international aid. The officials finally allowed the press flight into the area, provided it deliver a shipment of medicine, food and water, and ferry survivors to a crisis aid camp near the Honduran border.

  They lifted off.

  Corina gazed at the lush forests, swollen rivers, hills and valleys blurring below. Looking down, she withdrew into her thoughts. She’d reported on disasters like this in India, Japan, the Philippines and Brazil. Now in Cent
ral America, her recently completed stories in El Salvador evoked memories of her parents. How, as young newlyweds, they’d struggled after an earthquake in Guatemala and risked everything for a better life by coming to America where Corina was born.

  Like her mother and father, Corina pursued her dream, working hard, becoming a foreign correspondent with a global news network based in New York. There, she met and fell in love with Robert, a widowed engineer, who was raising his young daughter, Charlotte.

  “I’m warning you—” Corina had smiled over dinner in Manhattan after accepting his proposal and ring “—ours won’t be an ordinary life.”

  “I can live with the extraordinary,” Robert said.

  Being dispatched around the world had, at times, challenged their home life, with Corina missing anniversaries and recitals, and having to sing “Happy Birthday” to Charlotte from Afghanistan, via Skype. Still, Corina and Robert not only made their family work, they both wanted a second child. But it wasn’t easy, and that was heart-wrenching for them. Corina miscarried twice and was crushed when her doctor told her that getting pregnant again was near impossible.

  They were considering fertility treatments, and other options.

  All they could do was keep trying and keep hoping.

  That’s why Corina was anxious to be on her way back home. Then the hurricane hit Nicaragua. Sitting on the helicopter, twisting her rings, she swallowed her guilt at being so selfish. Amid all the suffering she’d witnessed, all the horrible tragedies that filtered through her so she could deliver the news to viewers in America and around the world, all she could think of now was her aching desire to have a child. That’s what Corina was thinking when their helicopter landed in a remote corner of Madriz and she stepped into the latest version of hell on earth.

  Moving with caution, she and the other reporters spread out, surveying uprooted trees, jagged chunks of houses, a roof, a door, a wall, a tractor, a stove, a refrigerator and beds. The force of the torrent stunned them into a funereal silence, punctuated only by the clicking of the Spanish photographer’s camera, and the Lima radio reporter, gripping his microphone, whispering his eye-witness account for listeners in Peru.

  Corina could hear him saying how this tiny, remote community had vanished in moments, becoming a cemetery, making one think of Pompeii.

  As Jed and the TV camera operator from Argentina videoed the scene, Corina continued alone, deeper into the devastation. She passed more overturned cars, more appliances, a bicycle, a bed, a rocking chair, a doll and framed family photos.

  But no survivors. No signs of life.

  Only the screeching of the birds and the buzzing of flies.

  Corina froze.

  Amid the cawing she’d heard a different sound.

  A soft moan.

  She moved toward it, changing direction, listening intently until she came upon a woman. A young woman, alive and all but encased in the mud, which had hardened like concrete. Only her arms and upper body were free. Streaks of mud and lacerations laced her face. Skin had been torn away in patches from her shoulder by the force and abrasiveness of the slide.

  At first glance, the woman appeared to be praying to the heavens, but when her eyes flicked open and found Corina’s, she groaned.

  “Por favor. Por favor.”

  The woman was holding a baby, wrapped in a blanket.

  “Por favor.” The woman pleaded to Corina. “Salva a mi hijo. Por favor. Llevar a mi hijo.”

  Shouting to the others, Corina dropped to her knees to aid them, taking the baby.

  “Por favor. Salva a mi hijo. Por favor. Llevar a mi hijo.”

  Holding the baby to her chest, Corina felt it move.

  The baby was alive.

  DAY 1

  1

  CHARLOTTE TANNER WAS complaining that her mom—her stepmother, actually—was ruining her life.

  “Corina doesn’t get it. She freaked out. Dad freaked, too.”

  Charlotte and her friend Harper were at an outside patio table at Bell Ritchie’s, a café on Amsterdam Avenue in the Upper West Side.

  “Because Vince is twenty-one?” Harper said.

  “So what if I want to see an older guy? I should be able to date who I want. I’m seventeen.”

  “You won’t be seventeen for months.”

  “Whatever. I’ll be leaving home for college soon. Corina should let me live my life.”

  “Vince is hot.”

  “Yeah, plus, unlike the boys at school, he’s mature. I think Corina’s afraid I’ll get pregnant.”

  “She knows you’re on the pill?”

  Charlotte didn’t answer, as the barista had emerged and, with a ceramic rattling, set two lattes on the table next to their phones. After thanking their server, Charlotte said: “It’s like she thinks Vince is beneath us because he’s got a regular job and lives in the Bronx. That just makes him real.”

  “Did they give you the under-our-roof-our-rules speech?”

  “Oh yeah, and they keep saying there are laws in this state about a ‘man’ dating a minor.” Charlotte raised her cup for a taste of coffee. “This is good.”

  “So, are you going to keep it going with Vince?”

  Charlotte’s phone rang. It was Corina.

  “Speak of the devil,” Charlotte said, then answered.

  Corina’s face appeared on-screen, her office windows behind her. She’s always at work, Charlotte thought.

  “Hi, Corina.”

  “Hi, honey, I know this is your free afternoon, but something just came up.”

  “What?”

  “We need you to get Gabriel at school and bring him home.”

  “Isn’t Dad getting him today?”

  “That was the plan, but he’s still in Philadelphia—delayed with a last-minute meeting. I can’t get Gabriel either, and it’s too close to dismissal for the car service.”

  “But Harper and I just got here. We just ordered.”

  Charlotte turned her phone toward Harper, who waved. The café’s stylized banner was visible on the awning’s edge behind her.

  “Hi, Corina.”

  “Hi, Harper.” Corina smiled.

  Charlotte turned her phone back to herself.

  “I’m sorry to ask this,” Corina said, “but Bell Ritchie’s is just a few blocks from the school. You’re right there and dismissal is at three.”

  “That’s like now. Can’t one of the other parents get him or something?”

  “You’re closest. We’d like you to get him.”

  “Fine.”

  “Thank you, honey. I’ll alert the school.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Charlotte paid for the lattes, hugged Harper goodbye and left the café annoyed because Corina’s request to get Gabriel felt like another intrusion, another exercise in control. College was now less than a year away. She couldn’t wait to leave home, to be on her own, to get away from all this.

  No, that’s not entirely true.

  Distant sirens echoed and horns blasted nearby. Charlotte’s attention shifted down the street to where contractors were renovating a house. Farther down the street, movers were loading furniture onto a truck. Someone’s leaving. Sadness rippled through her now as she trudged past the multimillion-dollar row houses along the tree-lined street.

  Raising her phone, Charlotte scrolled to the photos of her birth mom, Victoria. So beautiful. Charlotte’s memories of her were vague. She died when Charlotte was four. Then when Charlotte was seven, her dad married Corina, and three years later they adopted Gabriel.

  Corina had really been the only mother Charlotte had known. She was a good mother. Charlotte called her mom or mother sometimes, Corina other times. Yes, they argued. But the bottom line was they loved each other. Charlotte respected Corina, was awed by all the crap she’d endured with her job and all she had accomplished. She was proud to tell people that Corina was her mom. And Gabriel was a sweetheart. He called her “Charlie.” Dad called her Charlie, too. Even Corina did, sometimes. But she loved it best from Gabriel. He was her buddy. Her little bro. Dad was Dad. Like Corina he was always working, and he was even more stressed lately.

  I don’t know why. It’s like a part of him is broken, deep inside, keeping him distant. Is it his work, or something else? Whatever he’s carrying, he’s keeping it hidden.