“Juvenile offender, mingled with a wrong clique in school.” There had been another girl who opened the safe. Carmen, her name was. “That was before we recruited her.”

“So she was doing some kind of secret mission?”

“More like a criminal activity informant to make up for jail time.” Jenny scolded dismissively.

The Hispanic girl seemed to have a fond impression of the brunette, “she was a pretty important informant at the time. Do you remember Gustavo el bazuca?”

Shane provided the history when Tina shook her head in confusion, “notorious rebellion militia ring leader. He threatened to take control over the Mexican government, which could cause a political crisis. We crippled his arsenal resource just in time. He had laid dormant ever since. His cult had crumbled pretty fast.”

“But how did it involve Bette?”

Carmen volunteered on the taletelling, “Bette Porter was an informant we planted in a cartel, which was benefiting from Gustavo’s agenda and in return buying arsenals from the States for him. She was at the bottom of the chain, nobody took her seriously, basically invisible. We were able to sabotage and leak fake informations through her, and eventually created a fallout between Gustavo and the cartel.”

“Then she quit.” Jenny blurted out again, her patience wearing low.

Tina ignored the grumpy woman, and inquired the reason why Bette had given up on this work and taken the risk to go back to the States.

“It didn’t go without an…avoidable complication.” Carmen’s next words were spoken heartbreakingly. “Mrs Maxine Porter, Bette’s mother, was suspicious that her daughter had gotten with some bad kids at university. She was absolutely right, except she didn’t know about us. We asked Bette to keep it from her mom.”

This revelation had effectively shut up Jenny, who bit her lower lip in sorrow too. She might have problems with how the brunette dealt with things, but she still sympathized her loss.

“Maxine followed her daughter that night, when the squabble escalated into a gun fight. El bazuca fled, Bette was a hotheaded twenty something, she wanted to catch him. And Gustavo was a mad man, he would not hesitate to kill whoever was standing in his way. But instead, his car hit Maxine.”

Painfully so, Shane added, “A mother would never let her child get hurt.”

“That’s the accident? That’s how Bette lost her mother?” Tina felt the unbearable tingles in her eyes and nose. She couldn’t start to imagine, how the brunette was feeling when she talked about life in Mexico, when she downplayed the tragedy to an accident, when her heart must be breaking but she pretended to be strong.

“It was devastating. Bette blamed herself for that, started to give up, doing drugs, destructing her correlation with her voucher.”

“Me.” Jenny pointed to herself, “I was Sarah Schuster.”

“She drifted away because she was angry, with us. We let her.” Carmen said with regret evident on her face.“Five years and not a word. And we were sure that she had evaporated, or worse, she had died.”

“How could she even reach you? She doesn’t know your names!” Tina glared at the trio reproachfully.

“It’s a required precaution, officer. I believe you understand that.” Shane remained calm and mostly unaffected. “She could’ve found us if she wanted. You did.”

“Yeah, too fucking late.”

The Hispanic girl felt terrible, that much was easy to tell by her concerned expression. She suggested that they lend help, and the three entered a heated debate about the conflict of interests.

“She left. She broke the terms.” Jenny still held a grudge over Bette’s indifferent treatment toward her.

“Well don’t you feel at least a bit guilty about it? We pressured her, we made the decision for her. We caused it.”

Then Tina got Helena’s call, then she was breaking down in front of three startled women. So at last, with a compassionate Carmen, a neutral-looking Shane, and a grudging Jenny, they hopped on the first plane to Chicago.