The Lost Girls

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Adam Villines walked out onto the porch of Honeycutt’s house and told Nate and Lucy, “I have a general location of George’s phone.”

John came out of the house. “I’m coming with you,” he said.

“No,” Adam said.

“Adam, you don’t understand! This girl-she’s been through hell. And now three cops are going to storm her place? She’ll be terrified. She needs to see a friendly face!”

Lucy rose from the bench. She still felt queasy, but she was pulling herself together. “John, she will see a friendly face. Siobhan Walsh is a friend of mine. She’s been looking for Marisol and Ana ever since they went missing. She’ll be with us.” Lucy pulled the photo of Marisol, Ana, and Siobhan from her file. “This is Siobhan with the girls when they were younger.”

“But-”

Adam put his hand on John’s shoulder. They were both tall men, but Adam was broader and more muscular than his brother-in-law. “Johnny, stay with your parents tonight. Keep the house locked up, guns by your side, just in case. Call me if there is anything suspicious going on. And I give you my word, we’ll do everything to help those girls.”

John nodded, though he still looked unhappy. “Thank you, Adam.” He turned to Lucy. “Anything my parents and I can do, we’ll do. We don’t have a lot of money, but we have this property-a safe place for them to stay. Food. My mom was a school nurse for thirty-five years, she can take care of them. Their-special needs.”

The compassion she witnessed helped Lucy more than she could have explained to John or anyone. Here was a family willing to share everything they had to help someone they had just met. Not just Marisol, but them. Both the girls. The babies. The Honeycutts were the light in the world, a light Lucy desperately needed right then.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I’ll make sure Marisol knows.”

They walked back to the cars after John went back inside. Adam said, “He should have called me when he found her, I’m sorry.”

“She’s scared of authority, but he’s a good man. Don’t be hard on him-you have a good family here,” Lucy said.

“I do,” Adam said with pride. “They just should have trusted me.”

“They do. But you and I both know that not all cops are the good guys. And Marisol didn’t know if anyone would believe her, or even where she was. She knew there’s at least one bad cop in the neighboring county. It would be smart for her captors to bring in one man in uniform to intimidate the girls, so they would be scared to go to the police.”

Nate opened his door. “Where are we going?”

Adam gave them the street. “The phone company couldn’t pinpoint the exact address, but they gave us a radius downtown. There are several motels in the area, restaurants, some apartments and businesses.”

“If Angelo did in fact pick her up, he may have taken her to a motel. Let’s check there first, show both their photos.” Lucy turned to Nate. “Did Zach come through on Angelo?”

“No known record, at least in the US. Has a Mexican passport, and he used it to fly into Laredo on Friday afternoon.”

“He flew? It’s a what, four-hour drive or so?”

“About that,” Adam said. “So he’s been here since Friday.” He frowned.

Lucy nodded. “You’re on the right path, Adam-he knew she was missing before she called him.”

“She could have contacted him before Tuesday morning,” Adam said.

“That wasn’t my impression after talking to the Honeycutts. They seemed to think she hadn’t spoken to him in two years.”

Adam rubbed his face. “I’ll call in backup.”

“And I need to alert Siobhan. John is right, Marisol needs a familiar face, and she’ll trust Siobhan.”

On the drive back to Laredo, Lucy called Siobhan and told her to meet them at an intersection near the two motels. She didn’t give her any more information, though Siobhan had questions. She quickly got off the phone and called Noah. She filled him in on everything they had, and then gave him her theory. He was silent when she was done.

“I’ll run Zapelli’s name up the food chain. He may not have a record and he may not be flagged, but that doesn’t mean he’s not on someone’s radar. I’m on my way down.”

“To Laredo?”

“Hooper arrived and he’s working with the AUSA serving warrants and getting things done. I swear, that guy is just brilliant. White collar is over my head, and I’m the first to admit it. I won’t know what I’m looking at, and Hooper has done this for years. His specialty is human traffic laundering-his wife is an ICE agent and he’s made great inroads in tracking the money with her help in understanding the business of buying and selling humans. Besides, I’ve already pissed off half the office, why not piss off the other half?”

“Because it’s not like you. You’re the diplomat.”

He laughed. He sounded like he was in a much better mood than when they first were stymied by the law firm. “I try to be, but sometimes it takes too long. Keep me in the loop. I’m already on the road, I’ll be there in an hour.”

Fifteen minutes later, Noah called Lucy back. “We have a location on Angelo Zapelli.”

“That was fast.”

“He just checked into the airport in Laredo. Zach had put him on the watch list just five minutes before, and bam, we just got the notification. His flight leaves in forty-two minutes, I’m working on getting him detained, but get there as soon as you can.”

It didn’t take long for Lucy and Nate to arrive at the airport. Homeland Security had detained Zapelli and he sat in a small room. They stared at him through the one-way glass.

Angelo Zapelli was an attractive twenty-six-year-old with the suave good looks of someone with the perfect blend of Italian and Mexican genes. Lucy could see how the story unfolded-he’d showed Marisol attention, she was flattered and completely unschooled in flirting, and he used that. Got her to trust him, sold her into sex trafficking, covered it up… but she had trusted him. That meant not only did she not know he was the one who set her up, he had probably been doing it for years.

Siobhan had wanted to confront him, but Lucy told her over the phone to work with Adam Villines. “We traced the cell phone the Honeycutts gave her, she needs a friendly face.”

“You’re right. Okay.”

“I talked to Villines. Do what he says. He’s one of the good guys. If you find Marisol, call me.”

“You ready?” Nate asked Lucy when she hung up.

Lucy nodded. “If he’s really selling young women into the sex business, he’s not going to have any respect for me.”

“We can play off that.”

“He’s not going to give it up easily.”

“We have some leeway here. He’s wanted for questioning and attempting to flee the country.”

“He’ll say he didn’t know he was wanted for questioning.”

Her phone rang and she frowned at the interruption. It was Villines. “Yes, Sheriff?”

“We found his motel. They haven’t cleaned his room yet, and the motel is giving us permission to search. I also have two officers at the car rental kiosk working on getting the car before they clean it. We have a good chance-if our girl was in that vehicle, I hope to be able to prove it. Just wanted you to know.”

“Text me if you find anything useful, particularly if you can prove that Marisol was in the car or the motel. Have you found the phone?”

“Not yet, but I have one of my best guys on it and working with the phone company. They know it’s urgent, I will let you know as soon as I know.”

“Thanks, Adam.” She hung up and relayed the information to Nate.

The officer with the Department of Homeland Security who had detained Zapelli approached them. “We’ve put Mr. Zapelli on the no-fly list as your boss requested, and we have his passport. We also retrieved his luggage; it’s in a secure room with his carry-on.”

“Thank you,” Nate said. “We’re expecting Agent Armstrong shortly, if you can bring him here when he arrives.”

“I’ll notify the security office.”

Lucy said, “Nate, let’s search his bags first. I want to make him sit around, it’ll make him mad. Angry criminals tend to slip up.” They didn’t need a warrant because any bags that went through airport security were subject to search and seizure.

“This way,” the officer said and led them down a hall.

Zapelli had checked one medium-sized suitcase and had one laptop in a carrying case. The laptop was off. They would need a warrant to access the hard drive, and Lucy sent Noah that information. He seemed to be in a position to expedite these things.

They pulled on gloves and began a thorough search. The DHS officer asked, “Do you know what you’re looking for?”

Lucy didn’t answer. Nate made small talk.

Zapelli had several changes of clothes appropriate for the weather. He had excessive grooming products, including four kinds of mousse and gel, cologne, expensive shampoo and conditioner. His clothes had been neatly-almost obsessively-folded, and his dirty clothes were in a plastic bag-also folded.

Nothing jumped out at her. She stared at the clothing and toiletries. Nate put the contents of the laptop case next to them. “Receipts for gas, rental car, food, motel. The rental car traveled seven hundred twenty-one miles from when he picked it up on Friday to when he returned it this afternoon.”

“That’s a lot of miles,” Lucy said. She flipped through the receipts. There was a coffee receipt from a coffee shop across from the motel, gas in Laredo and Del Rio. “He was in Del Rio,” she said almost to herself. “He filled up Tuesday afternoon there. Only hours after Noah and I talked to Musgrove.” She took the receipts and made a story from them. He may have tossed a few, but there were enough receipts here that she could create a time line. What did he plan on doing, getting reimbursed from someone?

“He arrived in town early Friday afternoon. Checked into the motel, had lunch across the street.” She moved a few pieces around. “He had dinner in Freer that night. That would be the closest town to Our Lady of Sorrows.” There was nothing for Saturday, nothing to indicate whether he had returned to the motel; they would have to check with motel security-if there was any. “He ate with three other people on Friday,” she said, pointing to the items on the receipt. “He paid. Marisol had already left the house, they didn’t know where she was. She was traveling across open land until she stumbled into the Honeycutt barn.”

Nate slid over a receipt from five o’clock Monday morning. “This is a gas receipt near San Antonio.”

She had never heard of the small town, but she believed Nate. “So he comes to Laredo, goes to Freer because that’s where Marisol disappeared. Possibly back to Laredo, then to San Antonio at some point, probably Sunday.”

Nate moved another receipt. “He wouldn’t need to fill up his gas tank just driving from San Antonio to Del Rio, but he was nearly on empty when he filled up in Del Rio on Tuesday morning.”

“That’s a lot of driving around.”

“And the tank was nearly empty when he filled it up this afternoon before turning it in at the airport.”

“Del Rio to Laredo, halfway to Freer, back again?”

“Possibly. Maybe with another fifty or sixty miles in there somewhere.”

“If we assume he is the one who met Marisol after she called him on Tuesday night, he must have taken her someplace in a fifty-mile radius. The house outside Freer is empty, but we don’t yet have the files from the property management company.”

Lucy considered their options. “Noah and I only spoke to one person in Del Rio. Leo Musgrove. He was angry, thought we’d exposed him. Slimy bastard. But he’d originally moved the girls to the brothel. What if he works for Zapelli? Or Zapelli knew he was a loose end?” She sent Noah a message that Musgrove might have slipped town or that Zapelli may have talked to him on Tuesday. She moved the papers around. “He was back in Laredo at two p.m.-stopped at the Starbucks off I-35, I remember passing that on our way to Del Rio. Tried to convince Noah to stop, but he said I’d already had too much caffeine.” She almost smiled. Then she froze. “What’s this?”

She picked up two strands of long black hair that had been entwined in the buckle of the laptop case.

Nate pulled out an evidence bag, and she slipped the hairs inside. “If we can put Marisol with Zapelli, that gives us an edge,” Nate said.

“Let’s pretend we already did,” she said.

As they’d agreed, Nate took the lead. If Zapelli was who they thought he was, he would be more responsive to a male authority figure.

“Mr. Zapelli,” Nate said. “I’m Special Agent Dunning and this is Special Agent Kincaid. We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and we have a few questions for you.” He sat down and took out a pen and small notepad. Lucy sat next to him and focused on watching Zapelli for the small psychological cues that might help them steer the conversation.

Zapelli smiled at her a moment too long, then turned back to Nate. “Agent Dunning, I have been very reasonable with your authorities after I was detained in security. I have no idea why, my luggage had no paraphernalia, as I’m certain you uncovered when you searched it.”

“What was the reason for your visit to the States?”

“Just needed some time away from family and work obligations.”

“You told your mother that a friend called and needed your help.”

It was immediately clear that Zapelli had not expected that they would have spoken to his family. He covered quickly and said, “My mother is elderly. I couldn’t very well tell her I needed a break from her and her constant errands. I am an only son. I’m responsible for many things at my father’s business and at home. I gave her an excuse that allowed me to remain a good son.”

Nate nodded, made a note. “What did you do while you were in Texas?”

He shrugged. “The usual.”

“If you can please be more specific.”

Zapelli was suspicious and trying not to act it, Lucy noted. “Is there a reason why you’re asking me these questions?”

“Yes,” Nate said, and nothing more.

“And?” Zapelli pushed.

“And we’d like to know.”

Zapelli leaned back. “I don’t like the direction of this conversation.”

Lucy’s phone vibrated. She glanced down. Villines had sent her the Honeycutts’ phone records. Someone had called Zapelli Tuesday at ten-thirty a.m. and spoke to him for six minutes.

Nate gave Lucy a nod, and she said, “We have a record that Marisol de la Rosa called you yesterday morning. You spoke to her for six minutes. Ms. de la Rosa is now missing, and she told witnesses that she was meeting you at seven o’clock last night.”

Zapelli may be an arrogant and overly confident criminal, but he couldn’t hide his surprise that they had not only that information, but Marisol’s name as well. He glared at her, then covered, just not quickly enough.

“Marisol-the girl who worked for my dad? That was ages ago.”

“Yet you spoke to her yesterday.”

He didn’t say anything.

“If you didn’t speak to her, who did you talk to for those six minutes?” Lucy asked.

Zapelli turned to Nate. “Yes, I spoke to Marisol. She called me, said she was in trouble. I of course wanted to help. I offered to pick her up-my father has been greatly worried about her and her sister. They left, no notice, nothing. We assumed they went back to their village, but girls like them, they look for the easy way, if you know what I mean.” He winked at Lucy.

Through sheer willpower, she kept her poker face. Nate said, “When did you see her?”

“I didn’t. She never arrived. I waited for nearly an hour.”

“Where?” Lucy demanded. She bit her tongue. She was coming off too strong.

“At a four-way stop on Highway Fifty-Nine.”

“Don’t you think that was odd?” Nate asked.

“I did, but figured she was on foot. When she didn’t come, I assumed she’d gone back to whatever sugar daddy she came to the States with. Like I said, those kind of girls are predictable.”

“Why were you in Del Rio yesterday morning?” Nate asked, completely changing the subject to throw Zapelli off-guard.

It did, just for a minute. “Visiting a friend.”

“Name?”

Zapelli shook his head. “I don’t know what you hope to find, but I think we’re done. I need to get home, my father needs me to help run his business.”

“You’re not leaving,” Nate said.

“You can’t detain me.”

“You’re a material witness in an ongoing investigation.”

“I told you, I didn’t see Marisol.”

“We found strands of long black hair on your laptop case. We’re testing it now,” Lucy said, “and my guess, it belongs to Ms. de la Rosa.”

He stopped talking. Right then and there. “Either arrest me or let me go.”

“Very well,” Nate said. “You are under arrest.”

“Why?”

“We don’t need to give you a reason right now. We can hold you for up to seventy-two hours just because you’re an asshole.”

“I want a lawyer.”

“I was just getting to that point.” Nate read him his rights.

Zapelli grew increasingly frustrated. “This is bullshit,” he said.

“You may exercise your right to remain silent now,” Lucy said.

He lunged for her. It happened so fast, Lucy almost missed it. Nate didn’t. He was up and between Zapelli and Lucy so fast she barely saw him move. Nate didn’t say a word; his expression spoke volumes. Zapelli froze.

“Turn around,” Nate said in a low voice. “Put your hands on the back of your head.” He got out his cuffs.

“You can’t do this,” Zapelli said. “I’ve done nothing. This is bullshit, and you know it. I don’t know what that bitch has been saying about me, but I’ve done nothing. I came here to help her. That’s all I did.”

“Did? So you did see her?” Lucy asked.

“That’s not what I said!”

“Yes it is. You helped her how?”

“I don’t have to answer your questions without a lawyer!”

“That is correct,” Nate said. He searched the guy after he cuffed him.

“They already did that!” Zapelli said.

“Procedure,” Nate replied.

The process humiliated Zapelli, making him turn red and even angrier. Angry criminals talked.

“You’re all screwed,” Zapelli said. “None of you will get out of this alive.”

Nate pushed him against the wall. He held him there without much effort. “Is that a threat?”

Zapelli scowled.

Nate held on to him and said to Lucy, “Grab the recording, I want to make sure his threat is loud and clear for the judge when we arraign him. Threatening a federal officer is a felony.”

“Yes it is,” Lucy said.

Nate turned Zapelli over to two DHS guards and said, “He gets one call, to his attorney, and that’s it. You have a cell in this place, right?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Put him in it, do not let him out unless I or my boss, Noah Armstrong, authorizes it.”

“Yes, sir.”

They waited until Zapelli was gone. “I wanted to break his neck,” Nate said.

“He didn’t slip much. Nothing that we can use with a judge.”

“He threatened us. That’s good enough for me to arrest him. I didn’t even raise my voice.”

“You never do.”

Villines called. “Kincaid? We hit the lottery. The rental car has a GPS system and guess what? Our number one suspect used it extensively. I’m sending you the printout of everywhere he’s been since he picked up the sedan.”