Vengeance Road by Rick Mofina

charm and “ that Matt Damon thing you got going in the looks department .” She wanted him to move to Cleveland and work at the Plain Dealer , or she’d offered to move to Buffalo because she yearned to have kids and settle down.
    He didn’t, so they broke it off and Gannon threw all he had into his reporting.
    Two years back, his talent was tested when a charter jet en route to Moscow from Chicago plunged into Lake Erie a quarter mile off Buffalo’s shoreline. Some two hundred people died.
    While the world press speculated that the cause was terrorism, Gannon found a Russian-speaking man in the Sentinel ’s mail room. They worked the phones and the Internet, locating the pilot’s brother who was living in St. Petersburg, Russia. Turned out the brother had received the last e-mail the pilot had sent but refused to share it. “ Think of the dead, their families deserve to know the answer. Think of the dead, their ghosts will haunt you ,” Gannon and the Russian-speaking Sentinel worker kept telling the brother before convincing him to give them the final e-mail. It detailed the pilot’s plan to commit suicide by crashing his jet because his wife had left him for a woman.
    The story was picked up around the world.
    It led to Gannon’s Pulitzer nomination. He didn’t win the prize, but he got a job offer in New York City with the World Press Alliance, the global wire service.
    His dream had come true.
    Then fate intervened.
    About a week after the offer came, his mother and father were driving to see an old friend about another tipthey’d had about Cora’s location. Even though she’d be close to forty years old, Gannon’s mother and father refused to give up searching for her.
    â€œShe may have children, we have a right to find her,” his mother said.
    They never made it. A construction worker who’d spent the afternoon in a bar slammed into their car.
    They both died instantly.
    Gannon blamed Cora.
    It was a horrible time.
    Gannon was in no shape to do anything and declined the New York offer. Why didn’t he leave afterward? Maybe he stuck around to be closer to the memory of his parents. Maybe he thought Cora would miraculously appear. Even now, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. In the end, the New York job never materialized.
    So where did he go from here?
    He eased his Pontiac Vibe to a stop at the edge of a park alongside Ellicott Creek. As the Vibe’s engine ticked, he sat behind the wheel staring into the night.
    Everything he was, everything he dreamed of, was on the line.
    In his heart he knew he was not wrong on his reporting of Detective Karl Styebeck’s link to Bernice Hogan’s murder. Call it fate, destiny or a cosmic force, but something had guided him to that meeting-room door that day at Clarence Barracks and pointed to Styebeck.
    But all he had left were more unanswered questions about the case.
    There was only one thing he could do now.
    He reached to the floor behind the passenger seat for his lantern flashlight. It had a new six-volt battery and an intense-focus beam. The light was strong.
    He left his car and headed for the woods. If he was going to search for more answers, the shallow grave where they’d found Bernice Hogan’s corpse was the place to start.

16
    J olene Peller’s body swayed rhythmically to the low drumming of big wheels rolling at high speed.
    As she floated in and out of consciousness, she tried to seize upon a way to claw out of the darkness.
    She needed to think. Think of what she knew.
    Her prison—or tomb—whatever it was, was still moving.
    She knew she’d been abducted.
    But who had done this? And why?
    Someone had bound her hands, gagged her and imprisoned her. She had muzzy memories—or was it a dream?—of someone removing her gag, feeding her bread, chocolate bars, giving her water. Giving her a plastic bucket for a toilet, ordering her to relieve