“She knew he would kill her one day. She told me, ‘He’s gonna kill me, Baby. Make sure he doesn’t get away with it.’ ”
His name was Baby Boy Mendez, legally. Rumor was that his mother hadn’t given him a name when he was born and never reported any other name she might have come up with before the city deadline. So Baby Boy stuck. Something about it made Jesamyn sad for him… that and the fact that he was just eighteen years old. He seemed much younger. But he wouldn’t be going into the child services system. And, if he wasn’t careful, the street would get him.
He moved in close to them, arms outstretched. He had a desperate energy to him, which caused Jesamyn to put her pad and pen down on the table behind her to keep her hands free.
“So what are you going to do about it?” he said, getting in their faces a little. “Just walk around asking a lot of stupid fucking questions, right.”
Mount put up his hand to move Baby Boy back a step. “You’re going to need to calm down, son. And step back. You’re in my space.”
Mount’s size intimidated even the toughest thugs they ran into. And Baby Boy just sank into the couch like someone had let the air out of him.
“No one’s going to help her,” he said, his voice catching. “You’ll nose around for a few days, then disappear. She was pregnant, man.”
“Mr. Mendez, Alonzo was beating your sister?” asked Matt.
“Hell, yes, he was beating her. How many times I have to tell you guys the same shit. Pregnant with his baby and he was still smacking her around. She just kept going back to him.”
“Is there any chance she took off to get away from him? That she went into hiding?” asked Matt.
Baby Boy looked at him angrily. “Not without me,” he said, his voice going shrill. “She wouldn’t leave here without me.”
“Okay,” said Jesamyn, holding up her hand in a calming gesture. “I’m sure that’s true. But if she had taken off, can you think of anyplace else she might have gone? Was there another boyfriend, close friend, a relative out of state?”
He put his head in his hands and shook his head. “We never had no one else, just each other and the little guy on the way, you know?”
Jesamyn noticed that he shifted between referring to his sister in the past and present tense, as if he were struggling with hope and despair.
“When was the last time you saw her?” asked Matt.
“Saturday night. I was heading out with my boys. She was staying home. The baby was making her tired. Alonzo kept calling, wanted her to go to the clubs. She kept telling him no, she didn’t want to. He kept calling. After a while, she stopped answering the phone. As I was leaving, I heard him say on the answering machine, ‘I’m bringing the Escalade to come get you, bitch. You best be ready.’ That’s how he talked to her, man. And she just took it.”
“No signs of struggle here at the apartment?”
“Shit,” he said, drawing the word out. “I already told the police all of this.”
“As I mentioned, in the absence of any solid leads on Rosario, we’re reinterviewing people to see if there’s something we missed the first time around,” said Matt.
The kid sighed heavily, frustration and anger coming off of him in waves. He leaned back on the couch.
“No, it was neat and clean the way she liked it. All the lights were out. The clothes she was wearing when I left were folded on her bed. I figured she just changed and went out to avoid a fight.”
“What was she wearing when you left?” asked Jesamyn.
“Some, like, gray baggy nightgown thing. Ugly as shit but she said it was comfortable.”
“Okay,” said Jesamyn, jotting it down. “Is there anything else about that night that you remember?”
“I remember thinking I should stay home with her. That’s what I remember,” he said, the tears rolling now. “I should have stayed home with her.”
He started to sob and Matt moved over to him, placed a hand on his shoulder. It was kind of a risky thing to do but the kid had no visible reaction. After a minute, he looked up at Matt.
“I haven’t seen anything on television about her, you know that? That pregnant white girl in California? You couldn’t turn on the television without seeing her face. I haven’t seen one picture of my sister anywhere. A Latina girl from the projects goes missing, no one cares.”
Matt and Jesamyn stood silent for a second. There was no use arguing about it; they all knew the truth.
“We care,” said Matt finally. And Jesamyn knew how deeply he meant it. She loved him a little bit for that.
You were good with him,” she said in the car, as they pulled out of their space. They’d come back to the Caprice, surprised to see that it hadn’t been vandalized in any way. Often when you parked a patrol car, marked or unmarked, in the projects you came back to find it covered with eggs or spray paint, maybe vegetables, whatever was handy.
“He’s a kid. She was basically his mother,” he said. “I feel for him.”
Baby Boy was the last of three reinterviews they’d done that afternoon and Mount was consistently kind and respectful, in spite of the abuse that was hurled at them. The next-door neighbor called them “pigs” under his stinking breath when they’d come to the door. A lot of cops would have reacted, but Mount kept calling him sir, speaking in that mellow way he had. Rosario’s best friend Angelica had taunted Mount about his height, wondering out loud if everything about him was so big. Mount had turned bright red but kept his respectful, easy manner. Jesamyn wondered, did it roll off of him or did he hold it inside?
“You’re a big softie,” she said, patting him on the knee.
The sun was hanging low in the sky, painting it a light pink and orange visible above the building tops.
“I gotta get moving,” she said, looking at her watch. “I told Ben we’d have dinner together tonight. Want to join us?”
“I’d love to, but I think I’m going to see what came back on that partial plate.”
She nodded. She knew Lily Samuels had never left his mind the whole afternoon. The case was with her, too, but not in the same way. It was weighing on Mount’s heart.
“Don’t sleep here again tonight, okay?”
He nodded. “I won’t.”
She didn’t believe him.
The search Matt ran on the partial plate and description came back with twenty-eight hits. Twenty-eight black SUVs with license plates beginning with H57 in the New York area. He made a quick scan of the list, plugged a couple of the names into VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program database administered by the FBI, and through the New York system. None of the owners came back with any warrants or criminal records. Nothing else obvious popped. The only thing that caught his attention was a black Navigator belonging to a Michele LaForge that had a couple of outstanding parking tickets. He pulled up her license photo, didn’t recognize her, but printed it anyway for the file. It was nothing; he knew that. He had nothing. Two weeks ago he could have followed up with every one of these people. Just poked around, saw what shook loose. Now, he’d be lucky if he could get to one or two a day over the next few weeks.
He rubbed his eyes when the computer screen started to swim. His frustration, the lack of sleep from the night before, and a totally shit day were taking their toll. It was time to go home.
“Sorry, Lily,” he said to her picture. He was wiped, no good to her or anyone. That was the thing about this job; you could just go and go until you dropped. You never felt right about going home to bed when someone was missing. You could never feel okay about just relaxing, chilling in front of the television, letting your mom cook you some dinner. You did it, you just never felt good about it. At least that’s how he felt. Jesamyn had something important in her life, Benjamin. Something that was equally important, more important than the job. She went home at the end of the day without guilt. He envied her that.