The Lost Girls

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Noah answered on the fourth ring. “Yes?”

He sounded rushed, so Lucy got to the point. “We have information from a nurse who delivered dozens of babies for Jasmine and a man named Raoul. Marisol disappeared after giving birth and hasn’t returned. She contacted a friend in Monterrey-the son of her employer-who disappeared last Friday, according to his father. That would be the day after Marisol left her baby at the church. We have his cell phone number, but I’m skeptical about giving him a heads-up that we’re looking for Marisol.”

“Why? He may know where she is.”

“Because she may run from the authorities. She’s scared, Noah. And after what happened to Siobhan on Sunday, I understand why. And honestly… why would he drop everything and come here to help her after more than two years? Without telling his father that he heard from her? Or calling Siobhan, who has made it her mission to find the girls? It’s just… I don’t know, my gut is telling me to tread carefully here. Loretta admitted to helping these people deliver seventy-two babies. Where are they? How many girls were used as breeders? What happened to them after they delivered? Were they killed or sent back into the sex trade? How many of these… these… breeder houses are around here? Marisol may have the answers.” She stopped herself. Her emotions were getting the better of her, and she had to get them under tight control or she would lose it. She felt that churning, deep down, that she was on edge.

She cleared her throat and continued matter-of-factly. “Loretta Martinez was assaulted last week after Marisol left. She couldn’t have performed the C-section on our Jane Doe in the morgue.” Eloise. “She’s on the way to the hospital. I don’t think she’s going to survive-she has extensive internal injuries and was self-medicating. But I want permission to put a guard on her door and, if she survives, to place her under arrest.”

“Talk to Villines, do what needs to be done. You’re on the right path. Villines called me a couple of hours ago, said it wasn’t urgent but wanted to talk. He might have information, but I’m sitting here waiting to talk to a judge and get an expanded warrant for that damn property management company. Hooper is on his way from Sacramento, and he’s already been a huge help with this legal bullshit.”

“Do I have probable cause to search Loretta’s house?”

“Yes, but we do this by the book. Jasmine is a lawyer. If we find anything on her and she thinks we obtained the information under duress or without a warrant, she’ll make our lives hell. I don’t want to blow this because we went the easy route.” He paused. “Did she let you into the house?”

“Yes.” Sort of. She hadn’t said no when Lucy came in.

Go away.

That wasn’t an explicit no. It was a gray area, and Lucy wouldn’t lie on the stand, but Loretta was self-medicating and very sick. “I think Loretta knows exactly where Ana de la Rosa is, or has a good idea. I want to question her as soon as the doctor clears her.” Or before, if Lucy could get away with it.

“Because she let you into the house, if you see anything in the open, go for it. But don’t tear the place apart. I’ll contact Lopez in the local RA and ask them to work on a warrant. You call Villines, get a guard on Martinez, see what information he has for us. Call Zach and have him run this Angelo Zapelli, as well as the father. He may be able to get a procedural warrant to trace his GPS. Then send me a nuts and bolts report. I gotta go, the AUSA needs me.” He hung up.

Lucy conveyed the information to Nate and sent an email to Zach about Zapelli. They left Siobhan outside and walked through the house, both of them wearing gloves. They looked carefully, but didn’t open drawers or toss any furniture.

This was an older woman. If she kept a record, where would she keep it? A journal? An address book? Lucy looked around for a desk. There was a small stationary desk in the dining room. She itched to go through the drawer, but she didn’t. Still, the desk was cluttered, and there were slots at the top of the desk, like an old-fashioned post office. Everything in the slots was in the open. She looked at the mail-bills, some paid, some unpaid, sorted in different slots. An address book-with names and addresses. She flipped through it, but nothing jumped out at her.

There was a book that appeared to be tax records, but when Lucy opened it, she saw that it was a list of dates with notations.

August 2 ~ 5:15 p.m. Boy 6 lbs 6 oz 20 in ~ Cristina

October 4 ~ 3:30 a.m. Girl 5 lbs 14 oz 19 in ~ Joy

December 24 ~ 2:10 p.m. Boy 7 lbs 12 oz 20 in ~ Marisol

There were other notations in each entry, as to the health of the baby and the mother. But Lucy couldn’t see anything. She had to get out of here. Clutching the book, she ran outside, into the humid air. But it was better than the house. Better than the death that surrounded it. Better than knowing what had been going on for more than two years.

Marisol. Elizabeth wasn’t Marisol’s first baby.

It could have been a different Marisol, except that Siobhan had been looking for the sisters for two years. Loretta had been delivering babies for two years. Twenty-five months, according to this book.

Nate came out of the house and said, “Hey, you okay?”

She nodded, unable to speak.

He was going to push it, so she cleared her throat and showed him the book. “Names, dates, births.”

He stared. “This is so fucked.” He put the book into an evidence bag, signed and sealed it. Something crossed his face

“Nate-”

“I was adopted,” he said suddenly.

“You know that is completely different.”

He stared at Loretta’s house, but didn’t appear to be looking at any one thing. “I found my birth mother.”

“If you don’t want to talk about it-”

He shook his head. “I love my parents. They were good people. They had my older sister-Jenny. She’s a biologist for a huge pharmaceutical company. Very smart and nerdy.” He smiled. “Anyway, she’s twelve years older than me. They tried for years to have another baby, but my mom had three miscarriages. Jenny had been a difficult pregnancy, I guess. They had been trying to adopt for more than a decade. They went through background checks, medical exams, psych exams-because they were good people. They did it the right way. And by the time they got approved, the counselor said that they may not end up with an infant because they were nearly forty.” He scowled. “They ended up going through a church-run group. All legitimate. My biological mother was sixteen, her boyfriend got her pregnant. She picked my parents out of over one hundred couples who wanted to adopt. She didn’t know their names, just saw their pictures, their facts, and letters that they each wrote about why they wanted to adopt.”

“They love you and wanted you.”

“I know that.”

“What happened when you found her?”

“I found her, I didn’t get a chance to talk to her. She died of a drug overdose when she was twenty-three in Chicago. She was pregnant at the time. I got the file from the coroner’s office a few years ago. After she had me she ran away from home, got mixed up with lowlifes, started doing hard drugs, and died from it after prostituting herself to feed her drug habit.”

Lucy had nothing to say. Nate wasn’t a big talker, and she hadn’t realized how difficult this case was for him. She’d only been thinking about herself, the fact that she couldn’t have children, that she’d been raped, not that other people had other stories no less powerful.

“I didn’t mean to dump that on you.”

“I’m glad you did-you needed to get it out.”

“You keep things bottled up, too.”

“But I have Sean to talk to. And you know, if you ever need to talk to anyone, we’re here.”

Nate smiled sadly. “I know. Thank you.” He cleared his throat. “There’s a medical bag on her chair-I didn’t go through it, but there may be DNA evidence that tracks to the missing girls. And I found this.”

Nate showed her a business card. It was high-quality card stock, blank except for a handwritten phone number. “We’ll trace this,” he said. “May not lead anywhere.”

Neither of them believed that.

Siobhan rushed up to them. “We are so close to finding Mari! And you’re dragging your feet. What are we still doing here? What’s going on? Shouldn’t we go to the hospital? Call Angelo? Something?”

Nate said, “We are doing this the right way. Do not call Angelo-we get a warrant to trace his phone and find out where he is, then hopefully we get to Marisol as well.”

“What? She’s not a criminal,” Siobhan said.

“We didn’t say she was,” Lucy said. “She’s a victim, but she’s also in danger. And I don’t want either her or Angelo to know that the FBI is looking for her. Not until we bring her into protective custody.” She put her hand on Siobhan’s arm. “Trust me, Siobhan. We know what we’re doing. If she is so scared of the authorities that she wouldn’t go to them to save her sister, that she would abandon her baby at a church, she’s not going to believe we’re here to help her if we talk to her on the phone. We find her, convince her. You can help with that, Siobhan. But you need to do exactly what we say.”

Reluctantly, she nodded. But she didn’t look happy.

Lucy and Nate met with Assistant Sheriff Adam Villines in his office.

“Thank you for coming down again, I know it’s a long drive,” Villines said after Lucy introduced him to Nate. “And I appreciate the heads-up about Loretta Martinez. How did you track her down?”

“Siobhan Walsh, the photojournalist, told us she received an anonymous tip.”

“Do you believe her?”

“No,” Lucy said. Nate raised an eyebrow. “I should clarify, I believe she received a credible tip, and I didn’t push her to tell me who it came from. I’m certain it was the reporter Noah and I spoke with earlier this week. They’re friends.” She’d dug around a bit last night when she couldn’t sleep and learned Siobhan and Eric Barrow were the same age and had both been raised in northern Virginia. It stood to reason that they had known each other since high school.

“Were you able to get a guard on Martinez?” Lucy asked. “Our resident agency is working on minimal staff right now, but Noah said they can take over tomorrow.”

“We can cover her for the next twenty-four hours. Are you putting her under arrest?”

“Most likely, but I’m going to wait to hear her prognosis and see if I can get more information from her. And jurisdictional issues are between you and my boss,” Lucy said. “I don’t care who prosecutes her or which facility she’s housed in. I just need her to talk.”

“I spoke with the hospital staff. She’s already in surgery. X-rays showed multiple hairline fractures on her ribs and internal bleeding. She was unresponsive by the time she arrived at the hospital. You very well could have saved her life by showing up when you did.”

“Luck.”

“Or divine intervention,” he said.

Lucy believed, but she didn’t have any sympathy for Loretta and didn’t know if she wanted her to survive… except to interrogate her for information. She felt cold, and the fact that she had no remorse for these cold feelings disturbed her.

She said, “You called Noah with information. He’s been at the courthouse all afternoon and since we were here he asked us to stop by.”

“You might think this is odd, but if you knew my brother-in-law, you would understand.”

“You’ve lost us already,” Nate said. “Your brother-in-law?”

Villines nodded. “Johnny. Johnny Honeycutt. He came to see me yesterday after classes-he teaches math and science at one of the local high schools. A good kid-well, he’s not a kid. He’s twenty-seven, but he’s my wife’s youngest brother and was ten when I got married, so I’ve always thought of him as a kid. He had some hypothetical questions that I don’t think were hypothetical. He wanted to know specifically what the law was regarding asylum for foreign nationals who were brought illegally to this country for the purposes of sex trafficking. Now, he didn’t ask the question flat-out, he talked around it, but that’s what he was looking for. He then saw the photos of Baby Elizabeth on my desk and the photo you brought me of the de la Rosa sisters. He left awfully quick. I called my in-laws last night and my mother-in-law said George and Johnny had gone out and she didn’t know when they would be back. Now, you have to understand my mother-in-law. She is as honest as the day is long. The most Christian of Christian women, but with a spine of steel. I pushed a bit, put on my cop attitude you could say, and she lied to me. Told me that they went to fix the tractor and left their cell phones in the house. I know for a fact that they couldn’t fix the tractor because Johnny told me the parts he needed were back-ordered. For my ma to lie? No-I didn’t want to believe it. But she did.”

Lucy asked, “Do they have information about Marisol or the other girls?”

“I don’t know. It was really weird. I would have gone out there last night, but it’s a goodly drive, and Johnny called me an hour later and said everything was fine. He hedged about the tractor, and then said he was going to stay at Ma’s for the night because he and Dad had a couple of beers. That, I would believe-Johnny and George can get to drinking while playing cards after dinner. But Johnny didn’t sound like he’d been drinking. He sounded… I don’t know, different.”

“Would you mind giving us their contact information?”

“Go easy on them. My in-laws are good people, salt of the earth. They would never break the law on purpose.” He paused. “I’d like to go out with you, if you don’t mind.”

“We’d like to talk to Johnny first. You said he’s a teacher?”

Adam nodded, glanced at the clock. “It’s after four, I don’t know if he’ll still be on campus.”

“Would you mind calling him and finding out?”

Adam picked up his personal cell phone and dialed a number. “Hey, Johnny, what’s up?… Are you still at school?… Why you going out to the ranch again?… Is Ma okay?… Fine… Yeah, sure. I’ll tell her.” He hung up. “Okay, he’s going back out to the ranch. Johnny is a good son, sees Ma and Dad at least once a week, but this would be the third time this week and it’s only Wednesday.”

“Lead the way, Deputy,” Nate said.