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is—there’s no nice way to put this—a Mexican drug lord. A few months ago, he decided he wanted her—she’s his only child—so he put out a reward for whoever brought her to him in Mexico.”
    “That’s pretty scary. Who’s the father?” Sam asked.
    “His name is Anthony Navarro,” Mallory told him.
    “Navarro is her father?” Sam frowned. As a former FBI agent, he knew the name well. “He’s real bad news.”
    “So we hear. Emme was hoping Chloe would be safe here, but a few weeks ago, someone gave Navarro a tip that they were here in Conroy. He sent someone to look for her. Only the quick thinking of a member of Father Kevin’s parish saved Chloe from possibly being whisked away to sunny Mexico. We think the threat has been deterred for now, but who knows?” Mallory shrugged.
    “We’re hoping that he’s looking elsewhere,” Trula added. “But none of us are willing to take any chances.”
    “Navarro is definitely not one to mess with,” Sam told them.
    Trula’s chin set solidly with reserve and she began to crack eggs into a bowl with a bit more vehemencethan Sam suspected might be necessary. “No one is taking that child from her mother.”
    “What Trula means is that no one is taking that child from
Trula.”
Mallory added. “She and Chloe are like best buds now. I pity the fool who tries to abduct that girl now. Hence the move onto the grounds here.”
    Trula sniffed. “It was Robert’s idea.”
    “After you planted it,” Mallory noted.
    “Emme works long hours. Someone needs to watch Chloe when she comes home from school,” Trula countered.
    “She could have hired a babysitter,” Mallory pointed out.
    Trula fixed her with a glare, and Mallory smiled as if she’d been expecting the reaction.
    “We all agreed that Chloe has to be protected,” Mallory told Sam. “And we all agreed there’s no safer place for her than here. She goes to all-day preschool at Our Lady of Angels so Kevin keeps an eye on her there, and Robert has beefed up security here at the house as well.”
    “Which he needed to do anyway,” Trula said. “This big house and all these acres of grounds—for a while all he had was a puny little alarm system. Now, I’m not one to be paranoid, but when you’re Robert Magellan, you need to take some precautions. I’m glad he finally hired some guards and had the fencing and the alarms upgraded like I’ve been telling him to do for the past two years. I hate to think badly of my fellow man, but ever since Beth and Ian disappeared, and we didn’t know if they’d been abducted …” She shivered.
    “How’s the search going?” Sam asked.
    “It’s going,” Mallory replied. “No news. I’m thinking it’s going to take some creative thinking on their part to find that boy.”
    “It was creative thinking on Susanna’s part that found the car in the first place,” Trula reminded her. “If Robert didn’t need her to run his life, he could hire her to work on cases. She’d make a crack detective.”
    Sam watched Mallory open a cupboard and sort through a shelf of mugs until she found one that apparently pleased her. She filled it with coffee and returned to the table where she sat and added cream and sweetener. He craned his neck to read the writing on the mug. ELVIS HAS LEFT THE BUILDING .
    What, he wondered, was up with all the mugs?
    “You met Susanna Jones last week as you were leaving. She’s been Robert’s personal assistant since before he even had his own company. Since the police put the case on the back burner, Susanna spent nearly every weekend traveling the route Robert’s wife would have taken to get back home from her sister’s in Western Pennsylvania. She took every side road, every mountain road, every hill and valley between here and Pittsburgh, until she found the place where Beth’s car had gone off the road and down the side of a mountain into a ravine where it couldn’t be seen from the road.” Mallory shook her head.