Yes, there was a creek here, with stones laid across it to ensure dry feet. And yes, the smell of wood smoke grew, as did signs of human occupation – a pair of folding chairs that looked as if they’d literally fallen off the back of a truck, with duct tape and a stick holding one leg together; a full black garbage bag with its neck tied shut; a heap of empty plastic gallon-size milk jugs. At least the place doesn’t reek like a toilet, she thought, grateful that she wasn’t picking up disgusting substances on her shoes.
The ground under their feet began to rise, and Mendez thought they were coming near the sandstone cliff in which the illegals had carved their dwellings. The trees grew thin, the path more defined, and suddenly Erasmus came to a halt before her.
“Hola, niños,” he called. “’Stoy aquí con mi amiga. Permiso?”
There followed a long and tense silence, during which Mendez’s fingers worked at the strap on her gun, and then an answer: “Vengan.”
She nearly dropped the flashlight in surprise: the voice was indeed that of a child, although she’d thought Erasmus had used the word as a priest would have: “my children.” She took her hand off her gun and warily followed the shifting outline of his robes.
A barrier had been constructed, jutting out of the sandstone cliff in an L-shaped wall made of splintered pallets, tree branches, and a sheet of warped plywood with tire tracks down its length, the whole held together with duct tape and twine. Just past the end of the patchwork barrier stood the smoking circle of a burned-down campfire; around its back lay the entrance to a cave dwelling, one that either had gone unnoticed when the previous lot had been destroyed or else had been carved anew. Light came from within, and the hiss of burning propane. Erasmus started forward, but she held his shoulder and pushed past him, peering cautiously at the hole hidden by the barrier. Her hand on her weapon again, she peered inside.
The cave’s three occupants, adolescents all, were standing in an apprehensive half-circle, separated from the adult intruders by an upended plastic milk crate draped with a square of cloth that had once been a pajama shirt. The girl on the right, tallest of the three, was Jasmina Torres. The boy on the left, small and dark, was Ernesto Garcia, a friend of Enrique Escobedo’s whom she’d interviewed along with two or three dozen other middle school students.
The boy in the middle, clothes dirty but chin up, was Enrique Escobedo himself.
The woman in Mendez wanted to vault the plastic crate and seize the boy in ecstatic relief, then turn on the other two and deliver a tongue-lashing they would not recover from fast. She wanted to dance and sing and yank out her cell phone to tell all the world he was safe, but the cop in her nailed her boots to the ground and sent her eyes traveling across the contents of the cave, to keep the kids dangling. It was, she had to admit, dry, neat, and surprisingly well equipped. Half a dozen of the plastic milk jugs, filled with water, were stacked against the wall, along with a plastic storage bin showing the gaudy wrappers of packaged food within. A stack of neatly folded bedding – a wool blanket, a mover’s pad, and a sleeping bag patched with duct tape – leaned against the storage bin, with a second propane camp light. Thought had gone into the hideout, and care – most kids would have dumped a pile of charcoal in the middle of the cave and lit it, suffocating to death by morning.
Mendez studied the impromptu tablecloth and wondered if it had been put there, and the cave tidied, just to impress her. A demonstration of their responsible behavior, perhaps.
Not going to work.
“You guys having fun here?” she said in a hard voice. “You playing at Peter Pan or something? The city’s spent a fortune looking for you, half of us haven’t slept in two weeks because we’ve been searching for your body, and your family is going nuts.” At the last accusation, the boy’s defiance hardened, and he glanced past her shoulder at the old man. His lack of guilt confirmed a suspicion.
“Your mother knew, didn’t she? That you hadn’t been kidnapped. That’s why she stopped phoning me every couple of hours, two days after you disappeared.”
“Mina told her,” the boy confirmed, gesturing at the girl. “I didn’t want her to worry.”
At that, Mendez lost it. “Why the hell didn’t you come to the police?” she shouted. “Why are you hiding out – ”
Click, as the penny dropped.
“You saw it, didn’t you? You saw Gloria die, and you’re afraid her killer will come after you.” It really wasn’t much of a leap of inspiration – this sort of thing happened all the time, in a community dominated by gangs, where one crime, or even an accident, could lead to an escalation of violence and retribution until eventually the police managed to wrap official hands around it all and smother it.
The boy nodded. His defiance suddenly melted away, and he looked small and scared. Mendez sighed, rubbed at her face, and decided to start over again.
“Okay, let’s sit down and talk about this.”
The three kids looked hugely relieved and settled onto their dusty pads. Mendez took the camp light off the table and put it on the ground, pulling the table back toward the entrance as a chair. She glanced around to see what the old man would sit on, but he was not there – leaving the police to their work, or maybe just a recognition that the cave would be stifling with one more body in it. Or perhaps he had some kind of Zorro complex, so that when his job was done, he would fade into the night.
“Digame,” she said. The boy was so eager to do so, his words tumbled in a rush of Spanish and English, with his friends contributing the occasional comment or clarification.
The first thing he wanted Mendez to know was that Gloria hadn’t really been his babysitter, although his mother paid her for staying with him when she was working nights. He was twelve and didn’t need a babysitter. But Gloria’s family was large and she was serious about getting into college, and she could work more easily in the silence of the Escobedo house, so they all pretended she was a babysitter.
Mendez blinked at the boy’s sense of priorities but decided to let him tell it as he wanted. She nodded solemnly, and he went on.
“So anyway, a little after eight, Gloria got this phone call on her cell. She got all funny when she heard who was on the line and took the phone outside so I wouldn’t hear, but she didn’t talk for long and wouldn’t tell me who it was. Then a little while later I was upstairs, getting ready for bed, and I heard this knock on the door, and I looked down from the window and there was this guy there, and I figured it was the same guy who’d called.”
“Why did you think that?”
“Well, she was angry when she saw him, and she wouldn’t let him in, and they went out in the yard and talked for a while, angry but in low voices.”
“Did you know him?”
“I’d seen him around once or twice. He’s big in one of the gangs, or at least that’s what someone told me. They call him Taco.”
“Go ahead.”
“Like I said, I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, not without opening the window and hanging out of it, but it looked like he wanted her to do something, and she wouldn’t. After a while, he got really angry and he hit her – not with his fist, with his hand, like a slap, but he knocked her back, and I was going to go down and make him stop, but he turned and walked away. But Gloria went after him and grabbed his arm just before he got to the car, and then he turned around really fast and I heard this bang, and Gloria fell. It took me a minute to realize what had happened, and I just stared at Gloria lying there and this Taco guy looking down at her. It was… I kept waiting for her to stand up, you know?”