“She didn’t go missing in your state, lieutenant. There was some national news coverage, but you’d have to be a diehard cable news crime watcher to even have glimpsed it. I looked at the old footage; it was basically a minute here, a minute there, nothing that would have stuck in anyone’s mind.”
Hank nodded. He knew all about how fickle the media could be when it came to crime. People who didn’t work in law enforcement never really understood just how much went on that no one cared about, whether because the victims weren’t interesting enough, weren’t pretty enough, or, in many cases, hadn’t been born white enough.
He took a moment and opened the Coke he’d gotten from the vending machine outside and took a sip, balancing the bottom of the can on top of the chair he was straddling. The girl sat on the bed with the tablet while the dog lay on his stomach, chin resting on the dirty motel carpet. The animal looked bored, which Hank preferred over those big brown eyes watching him every second he was inside the room. As hard as it was to believe, Apollo actually seemed to respond to the lack of tension by lowering his guard.
Dog’s smarter than most people I’ve dealt with.
“So that’s what Allie and I are doing all the way out here,” Lucy said. “We’ve been looking for Faith for the last eleven months. Trust me, we wouldn’t be here otherwise. No offense, but there’s not exactly a lot to do around here.”
“None taken,” Hank said. “So, this Faith girl. She’s a friend of you two?”
“No, we don’t know her.”
“Friend of the family?”
“No. Her mom just asked us for help.”
“So she’s paying you…”
Lucy shook her head. “No, you don’t understand. We’re helping her because she asked us to, and because we can.”
Hank didn’t respond right away. Yes, he understood what the sixteen-year-old girl was telling him, but he didn’t really understand it. In his experience, people didn’t pack up their lives and check into a seedy motel in the middle of nowhere just to help out a perfect stranger. And they certainly didn’t invest eleven months of their lives doing it.
Lucy was smiling at the confused look on his face. “We’re kind of independently wealthy. Well, Allie is, anyway. We don’t need the money.”
“How ‘kind of’”—he used air quotes—“independently wealthy are we talking about?”
“Enough that we can get information we’re not supposed to have.”
“Like my police records.”
“Uh huh,” the girl nodded. “And a lot of other things.”
“And the two of you are out here looking for a girl that went missing two years ago? What makes you think she’s even still alive?”
“Because Allie found her.”
“You said that before. How?”
“Allie’s very good at finding people. She once spent ten years tracking one person. I guess you could say she’s honed her skills even more since. It helps that she has money to spend this time, where before she had to dig for every scrap of it herself. Makes things even easier.”
“Still, two years is a long time, kid. I’ve been out there. People go missing all the time. Sometimes on purpose, other times not. They don’t usually show back up two years later.”
“Allie’s sure enough that she did what she did.”
“Which is what, exactly?”
Lucy picked up the tablet again, and Hank watched her fingers dancing across the screen. He barely knew how to peck at his old computer keyboard back when he had one, but to see the kid tap-tap-tapping up a storm reminded Hank just how old he was.
Way too old to be in a motel room with a kid and a dog, that’s for damn sure. What if someone shows up? How am I going to explain this?
Lucy finished and held up the tablet showing a picture of a blonde woman in slacks and a black jacket standing in the street. He could tell she was pretty, as if she had just stepped out of a photo shoot even though the shot was clearly taken from a distance and without the woman’s knowledge. There were buildings with Spanish writing in the background.
“This is Juliet,” Lucy said. “Or, it was Juliet three months ago.”
She flicked at the screen, then held it up again. The same woman, except this time she was wearing a black-and-white striped uniform. The glamour was gone, replaced by unkempt hair and angry, hard eyes.
“This is Juliet three weeks ago,” Lucy said.
“What happened to her?”
“She’s in a Mexican prison. I guess looking good isn’t a priority down there.” She put the tablet down. “Allie found a link between Juliet and Faith; then it took her a month to track the woman down.”
“In prison?”
“Well, she wasn’t in prison at the time.”
Lucy smiled, and Hank thought, Oh man, do I really want to hear what’s coming next?
“How did she end up in prison?” he asked anyway.
“Allie needed leverage. Some way to get Juliet to cooperate. So one day, while Juliet was staying at a four-star hotel in Mexico City, a drug-sniffing dog found a backpack full of heroin in her room.”
“She framed the woman?”
“Yes,” Lucy said without hesitation.
“Jesus Christ.” Hank stood up and began pacing the room. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Don’t get your panties in a bunch,” the girl said, and he thought she might have rolled her eyes at him behind his back. “Juliet is no saint. She’s been helping bad guys smuggle girls back and forth across the Texas-Mexico border. The woman is a real bitch.”
“And you have proof of that? Her criminal activities?”
“Of course.”
Hank calmed down and looked back at the girl, saw the confidence in her face, the look of someone who was one-hundred percent certain they were on the side of the angels. He didn’t want to tell her that he’d encountered plenty of people who had thought that way, except the evidence proved them wrong.
“Go on,” he said.
“After she was incarcerated, Allie visited Juliet and told her what happened, why she was just convicted of smuggling drugs and was never going to get out until she was an old lady. If she got out at all.”
“You’re serious…”
“As a stroke,” the girl said. Then, without missing a beat: “Why do you think Allie is out there right now traveling with two assholes while there’s a semitrailer hauling more girls to a place where everything they are, everything they will be, will be stripped from them now and forever?” The girl’s face grew dark. “Juliet put her in touch with them. Told them she was an old friend who could be trusted to replace her while she dealt with…personal issues.”
“They don’t know she’s in jail.”
“Not a clue. These gigs are always last-minute affairs — a day, maybe two days of lead time, which is why they always work with the same groups of people. They needed someone to replace Juliet, and Juliet recommended Allie. Or Alice, as they know her. Allie had to wait almost a month and a half for that call to finally come in, but she can be very patient.”
“And somehow all of this led your friend to robbing Ben’s Diner?”
“I don’t know what happened there,” Lucy said. “Maybe it was some kind of test. I don’t know for sure. But she recognized you from her research. Like I said, you don’t really look all that different.”
“Bigger,” he said, rubbing his gut.
“Just a tad,” she said, and pinched her fingers together.
He grunted and walked to the window, then looked out at the parking lot outside. He could see Lucy’s reflection in the glass, watching him closely from the bed, maybe trying to decide if she could trust him with the rest of her secrets. It was a good question, because Hank wasn’t sure he wanted to know the rest of it.