“Sure,” I said, and took the key.
twenty
Herlinda Lopez’s house in Oakland was already dark at half past eight at night, which was when I got there on foot, walking from the nearest BART station. At first glance, I thought maybe she and her kids had gone to bed quite early. Then I noticed that the geranium on the front step had turned brown, and the little strip of lawn was like straw.
The garage door had a row of narrow windows in it, just at sight level for an average man. I walked up the driveway, trying to amble casually as if I belonged there, then I stood on tiptoe to look in.
There was no car inside.
Maybe they were out. Maybe they’d never owned a car. It wasn’t as if I’d looked in the garage when-
“Can I help you with something?”
I turned. The woman watching me at the end of the Lopez driveway was short and dark-skinned, but not Hispanic. Her accent was East Indian, or something close to it.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m looking for the Lopezes.”
“You’re looking for them in their garage?” she said skeptically.
“Uh, not really,” I said, walking back down the driveway. “I’m not so much looking for them as for a friend of mine, Nidia Hernandez. Did you meet her while she was staying here?”
The neighbor shook her head.
“I thought the Lopezes might know where she’s living now,” I said.
“They don’t live here anymore. You’re not from this neighborhood, are you?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Mrs. Lopez went missing,” she said.
“Missing? When?”
“About two months ago.”
Two months.
She continued: “The kids went to live with someone else. The house has been empty awhile.”
I said, “Has anyone but me been around here, asking for Nidia?”
She said, “I didn’t even know there was somebody by that name living here. Even the police didn’t mention her.” Her lips thinned slightly in suspicion. “Who did you say you were?”
“Just a friend of Nidia’s. My name is Hailey Cain.”
“I have to go in now,” she said, nodding toward the house next door. “Be careful out here. It’s late to be walking.”
MacArthur Station was probably my favorite place in the Bay Area. It was BART’s main transfer station, a raised platform right in the middle of a tangle of freeways. From the platform, you could see the campanile of UC Berkeley, the Oakland hills, the towers that surrounded Jack London Square. You could do a lot worse with your evening than to spend a little of it at MacArthur Station, taking a breath and letting the world roll off your back.
Except I kept thinking about one thing: I sincerely hoped that all the shit that was gonna go down in the Lopezes’ neighborhood had gone down already, because if any of the guys from the tunnel came around doing cleanup work, and they talked to the neighbor lady, I’d laid it right out there: Hailey Cain, looking for Nidia Hernandez. Without that, the would-be assassins would have no reason to think I was still alive.
Sometimes I didn’t really think things through.
At home, I took the Finlandia out of my little refrigerator, cracked the seal, and drank. Then I called Serena and told her what I’d learned.
“I’m pretty sure Mrs. Lopez is dead,” I said. I was standing near the window, looking down at the street. “If she realized she was in danger and left town, she wouldn’t have left her kids in danger. I think the guys from the tunnel picked her up, found out what she knew, and killed her so she couldn’t warn anyone.”
“God,” Serena said. “This is getting serious, Hailey.” Like me nearly dying in Mexico and then later jumping her with a boning knife was all light sparring.
“What do you think she knew?”
“Well, where Nidia and I were going, for one thing,” I said. “I’d wondered how, if they were just tailing Nidia and me, they knew to get ahead of us and set up that trap in the tunnel. This answers that. Herlinda Lopez knew about the village.” I played with the drawstring of the blinds. “If Nidia told her something else, like what all of this is about, I still don’t know what that was. That’s the same guessing game we’ve been playing for days.”
I tipped my head back and drank again, the vodka cool and antiseptic on my tongue.
“You still there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was just thinking, this doesn’t make me feel good about cousin Lara being unaccounted for. Maybe she really did fight with her mother, but she knows the stuff Mrs. Lopez knew, maybe more, and recent events are proving that’s not a safe position to be in.”
Serena said, “Be careful, okay?”
“I don’t know how to do that and still find anything out,” I told her. “Being careful would be forgetting all about this. Either I’m going to do this or I’m not. In fact…”
“In fact, what?”
I drank again, then leaned on the window frame and looked down at the street. Cars shuttled back and forth, red brake lights flaring and fading. I said, “Maybe it’s best they know I’m out there looking for her.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“I have no idea who these guys are,” I said. “I could look for them the rest of my life and not find them, but if they come looking for me, that’ll streamline things, if nothing else.”
“Don’t streamline yourself into an unmarked grave, prima.”
twenty-one
What little there was to know about Herlinda Lopez’s disappearance, I learned from the San Francisco Chronicle.
She was apparently taken from her own garage, in her own car. The garage had a back door that opened directly onto the Lopezes’ small yard, and then another into the house. The investigating officers found that the door leading into the yard had been pried open, its cheap lock broken. A short time after that, Herlinda’s old crimson Toyota was found in a parking lot in a quiet, light-industrial area. The implication was that whoever had taken her had broken into the garage in the small hours of the morning via the yard door and simply waited for her to come through the house door to her car, which she’d done at five that morning, on her way to her bakery job. She had raised no cry when confronted, probably intimidated by a gun and aware that her children were still sleeping in the house. She apparently let her attackers drive her away in her car, then they transferred her to a second car in the parking lot, where the trail stopped.
There had been an unfortunately long lead time on the case, because her coworkers at the bakery had been patient with her failure to show up, assuming that responsible Herlinda must have had a good reason to be tardy. They didn’t call her home until ten, long after her kids had left for school through the house’s front door, never going into the garage or seeing the broken door there. No one knew she was missing until her daughter played the answering machine message at four that afternoon.
The accounts of Herlinda’s disappearance shed new light on the men who’d taken Nidia. My theory had been that they had waited to take Nidia in Mexico because it was too risky to try to kidnap someone from a dense urban area with lots of potential witnesses. That was true enough; the neighbor lady who caught me looking through the garage windows was proof of that. But with Herlinda, these guys had proven themselves capable of an urban kidnapping. That suggested that they hadn’t known where Nidia was until just before I came to get her. If they’d had time, they would have done the same job on Nidia that they’d done later on Herlinda.