Rafe raised his eyebrows. "Shared responsibility? Multiple leaks?"
"Something like that."
"So the Nevada hit was a Nevada leak," Rafe concluded. That sounded right to him. "Law enforcement?"
"How could it be anything else?"
"And Lupe?"
"Your confidential informant in L.A.?" Slater asked. "That one had to be a DEA leak, don't you think?"
Rafe hated the idea, sure no one in L.A. could've tied Lupe to him. They'd been rigidly cautious. Still… "Shit, looks like it."
"We can't take any chances with Esperanza's life," Slater warned.
Rafe glanced down the hall to the closed door behind which Isabella was getting details on the hit from the girl. "No, no risks."
Another few minutes passed while Rafe alternated between looking out the large glass window that filled the entire southeastern wall and the closed bedroom door down the hall.
Suddenly another comment, completely out of the blue, came from Slater. This one floored Rafe. "Are you sleeping with her?"
Rafe choked on his coffee. "What the hell?"
He guessed that Slater hadn't missed the careful avoidance Rafe and Isabella had maintained – the tension between them, not touching, eyes sliding off the other's – so he wasn't as completely surprised by the question as he should've been. Shit! They'd really complicated the case by what they'd done last night. "None of your goddamn business!" he growled in warning.
"Oh, but it is," Slater said in a matter-of-fact voice, "my business, that is. See, Bella's like a little sister to me. I don't want to see her hurt."
At least that cleared up the relationship between the two of them. "Are you so certain I'll hurt her?"
Slater leveled him a hard look. "Maybe, maybe not. I'm here to make sure you don't."
"All she needs is another brother."
"Yeah," Slater laughed. "And it's not like Bella can't handle herself."
"She's pretty tough." Rafe smiled in memory, mopping up the spilled coffee with a paper towel.
"Still… she's not so tough in her heart."
Slater was referring to Isabella's lost and probably dead sister Maria.
"Yeah," he conceded.
The microfiche records were surprisingly easy to access in the state archives. Twenty years ago the story caused quite a media blitz. Young Mexican immigrant family. The father a migrant worker, the mother domestic help, but they managed to educate their seven children. The girl Maria was her class valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and the first family member to go to college.
Then she'd disappeared on a graduation trip to Mexico with three of her best friends. The three remaining girls were no help in providing the police with details about how Maria had vanished. But Santos was fairly certain he knew exactly what had happened to her.
After a few months the newspaper coverage waned and eventually dwindled to nothing. By the time the girl was really dead, there wasn't even an anniversary article in the local paper.
Five years.
Maria Anna Torres had lasted five years at the cruel hands of Diego Vargas.
Santos pulled the worn photograph out of his jacket pocket and held it up beside the grainy newspaper photograph on the microfiche screen. The resemblance was unremarkable, although both girls had long, dark hair and wide black eyes. Both were Latina, but the girl in the newspaper photo wore a white graduation cap and gown. In Santos' picture, she was thinner, bare shouldered, and heavily made up.
But he had no doubt the two pictures revealed the same girl. The resemblance to Isabella Torres was uncanny, and the details of the disappearance and presumed kidnapping of Maria Torres matched what Santos remembered from twenty years ago.
He shut off the machine and placed the photo back in his pocket. Every moment of the transport of the cargo was etched in his memory more vividly than the long, slow death of his own father in the village plaza in Real de Cantorce.
Santos was not a man to indulge in regrets. A man must do whatever is required to survive – and to thrive. But, by God, he wished he had slit the girl's throat instead of handing her over to Diego Vargas. He told himself that if he had known what would happen to her, how the few nights would become months and the months become five long years, he would never had brought her to Reno.
Never left her in the hands of such a man.
But Santos was a young man then, voraciously hungry for the many things that Diego Vargas could offer him.
Chapter Twenty-nine
In the bedroom Bella sat in a corner in a wicker chair while the girl Esperanza crouched on the bed, her slender legs drawn up to her chest, her arms folded around them. Bella had never seen anyone look so hopeless in her life, and her heart wrenched with sympathy at the thought of what the girl had gone through.
Careful not to touch her, Bella moved to the edge of the bed and lowered her voice into a soothing tone. "Can you tell me what happened, Esperanza?"
The girl hunched her shoulders and stared at her feet.
"Sheriff Slater tells me you speak English. ¿Puede usted hablar inglés?" Can you speak English?
"Si," the girl mumbled.
"Bueno." Bella smiled reassuringly. "Can you tell me how you came to be in the van with the other girls?"
"Son todas muertas," Esperanza whispered instead of answering the question. They're all dead.
"Lo siento mucho. I'm very sorry." Bella scooted her chair closer to the bed. "Where are you from?"
"Toluca." So far south in Mexico. How did she end up here in northern California, Bella wondered?
"Were you kidnapped?"
The girl wet her dry lips. "Sí, some men came to my village near Toluca and took four of us. Several girls were already in the van. When we arrived in Tijuana, the rest of the girls were there."
"How did you get across the border?"
"No sé." She shrugged and picked at the threads on the bedspread. "But it was night and the roads were very bumpy, like dirt roads. Perhaps the ladrones found a place that was not patrolled carefully."
"Did you see the faces of any of the men who took you?"
She shook her head and looked embarrassed that she couldn't give better information. "Solamente los conductores." Only the drivers.
"What about when you stopped. Did you see anyone else?"
Esperanza scrunched her face and concentrated. "In Tijuana, there were two other men. Muy grandes. They spoke English most of the time."
Bella pulled a photo six-pack from her briefcase and spread the pictures on the bed. "Do you recognize any of these men?"
"¡Mí Dios, sí! I will never forget his face." She pointed to the picture of Diego Vargas. "He was in Tijuana. He forced the girls into the van."
Bella felt a shiver of excitement run through her. She'd made a clear identification of Vargas. "What else can you tell me about him?"
"He is a very bad man."
"What happened?"
"Once we had crossed into the United States, we stopped somewhere, I do not know where. One of the girls was very young, perhaps ten or younger." Esperanza began crying and swiping at the tears with dirty fingers, leaving long smudges on her smooth cheeks. "He took her away for a very long time."
Bella felt a chill begin at the bottom of her spine and travel upwards to her neck.
"When they brought her back," Esperanza whispered, "she was bleeding very badly. She died shortly after."
Bella tapped the photo of Santos. "What about this man? Do you recognize him?"
Esperanza took the picture and held it close to her face. "No, I have never seen this man."