I quickly unzipped the bag. My eyes widened. Inside, I found a collection of my father-in-law’s old IDs, all of them from his twenties. Passport. Driver’s license. Student IDs. Gym IDs. None of them identified him as Joe Dobson. They all said Daniel Gibson. Even though I’d been processing this all afternoon, seeing these items up close took my breath away. This was all real and so damn hard to believe. I also found a few IDs for his father, Bruce Gibson. And then I took out several small photographs. Most of them were of Greta, the mystery woman. Several were of both my father-in-law and Greta together. One of the photos I found particularly curious. Greta was standing inside a big building, wearing black capri pants and a gray SMU sweatshirt with a brown backpack over both shoulders. But it was the huge emblem on the glossy floor beneath her that really caught my attention: Central Intelligence Agency, United States of America. CIA? Was Greta standing inside a Langley building here? Was she taking some kind of fun college tour? Or could Joe’s ex-wife have actually been CIA? I flipped it over but found nothing written on the back.
In the very back of the bag, I found a folded-up old newspaper clipping and unraveled it. El Paso Times. I noted the date was from two weeks after Daniel Gibson and his father had both died in the plane crash. The article’s headline: Prominent Businessman Found Dead. The article talked about how businessman Eduardo Cortez, founder of a Mexico City–based company called Grande Distributors, had been found dead inside his car just a few miles inside the US border. The scene was gruesome because Cortez had been beheaded. Police were investigating. The article went on to talk about how Cortez was well known around El Paso because his successful company had a local office with several warehouses that employed dozens of people.
Eduardo Cortez and his company were part of the two boxes of legal files Joe had stored away all these years. Why had my father-in-law kept this newspaper article? Was the businessman’s death related to the plane crash, and was this why Joe had changed his identity and disappeared? Was this somehow connected with what had just happened to my father-in-law in Matamoros and with Ethan Tucker in Dallas?
A familiar but unexpected voice from the office doorway shook me.
“What are you doing?”
I looked up, found Taylor standing there with her face bunched up. I had been so focused on this new material that I hadn’t even heard her enter the house. I felt a sudden panic inside. The banker’s bag was open right in front of me, the newspaper clipping still in my fingers. How would I explain any of this to her?
“Hey,” I replied, my voice unsteady. “What . . . what are you doing here?”
“Well, with my mom at the house, I thought I’d come over to see if I could help you. Why’re you in here? The office is a wreck. What’s going on?”
Again, I felt the panic surging. How was I going to get out of this? There was no way I wanted to tell Taylor about any of this right now. Not with her father’s funeral service only two days away. I wanted to at least get her past that difficult event before unloading all this onto her. Plus, I was still holding on to hope that I’d find something to make sense of all this craziness and somehow exonerate her father’s actions. Opening the door on this tonight meant pulling her into a dark world where her hero father looked very much like a liar and a fraud who might have even been having an affair with his ex-wife. The thought of telling my wife all this ripped at my heart.
I steadied my voice. “I, uh . . . I got an email tonight from Craig Kinney, your dad’s financial adviser. He wanted to know if I had come across some passwords on a couple of your dad’s financial accounts. I told him I’d see what I could find.”
“So you tore apart my dad’s office?”
I felt her eyes boring into me. She was suspicious. This was all about to come undone on me if I didn’t put on a good show for her right now. “Well, once I got started in here, I couldn’t stop myself. I got all emotional looking through your dad’s stuff.” I thought of a distraction. “Take a look at this, babe.”
I pulled out the drawer with all the homemade cards Olivia and Nicole had made for Joe over the past seven years and set it on top of the desk. She walked over and began examining them. As I’d hoped, the sight of the cards from the girls immediately swept her attention away from me. I took that moment to discreetly return everything I’d discovered inside the banker’s bag without drawing her attention. And then—making like I was tidying up the desktop—I casually placed the banker’s bag in the center drawer and closed it shut, hoping Taylor would never even ask me about it.