Nate came out of the house and said, “Hey, you okay?”
She nodded, unable to speak.
He was going to push it, so she cleared her throat and showed him the book. “Names, dates, births.”
He stared. “This is so fucked.” He put the book into an evidence bag, signed and sealed it. Something crossed his face
“Nate-”
“I was adopted,” he said suddenly.
“You know that is completely different.”
He stared at Loretta’s house, but didn’t appear to be looking at any one thing. “I found my birth mother.”
“If you don’t want to talk about it-”
He shook his head. “I love my parents. They were good people. They had my older sister-Jenny. She’s a biologist for a huge pharmaceutical company. Very smart and nerdy.” He smiled. “Anyway, she’s twelve years older than me. They tried for years to have another baby, but my mom had three miscarriages. Jenny had been a difficult pregnancy, I guess. They had been trying to adopt for more than a decade. They went through background checks, medical exams, psych exams-because they were good people. They did it the right way. And by the time they got approved, the counselor said that they may not end up with an infant because they were nearly forty.” He scowled. “They ended up going through a church-run group. All legitimate. My biological mother was sixteen, her boyfriend got her pregnant. She picked my parents out of over one hundred couples who wanted to adopt. She didn’t know their names, just saw their pictures, their facts, and letters that they each wrote about why they wanted to adopt.”
“They love you and wanted you.”
“I know that.”
“What happened when you found her?”
“I found her, I didn’t get a chance to talk to her. She died of a drug overdose when she was twenty-three in Chicago. She was pregnant at the time. I got the file from the coroner’s office a few years ago. After she had me she ran away from home, got mixed up with lowlifes, started doing hard drugs, and died from it after prostituting herself to feed her drug habit.”
Lucy had nothing to say. Nate wasn’t a big talker, and she hadn’t realized how difficult this case was for him. She’d only been thinking about herself, the fact that she couldn’t have children, that she’d been raped, not that other people had other stories no less powerful.
“I didn’t mean to dump that on you.”
“I’m glad you did-you needed to get it out.”
“You keep things bottled up, too.”
“But I have Sean to talk to. And you know, if you ever need to talk to anyone, we’re here.”
Nate smiled sadly. “I know. Thank you.” He cleared his throat. “There’s a medical bag on her chair-I didn’t go through it, but there may be DNA evidence that tracks to the missing girls. And I found this.”
Nate showed her a business card. It was high-quality card stock, blank except for a handwritten phone number. “We’ll trace this,” he said. “May not lead anywhere.”
Neither of them believed that.
Siobhan rushed up to them. “We are so close to finding Mari! And you’re dragging your feet. What are we still doing here? What’s going on? Shouldn’t we go to the hospital? Call Angelo? Something?”
Nate said, “We are doing this the right way. Do not call Angelo-we get a warrant to trace his phone and find out where he is, then hopefully we get to Marisol as well.”
“What? She’s not a criminal,” Siobhan said.
“We didn’t say she was,” Lucy said. “She’s a victim, but she’s also in danger. And I don’t want either her or Angelo to know that the FBI is looking for her. Not until we bring her into protective custody.” She put her hand on Siobhan’s arm. “Trust me, Siobhan. We know what we’re doing. If she is so scared of the authorities that she wouldn’t go to them to save her sister, that she would abandon her baby at a church, she’s not going to believe we’re here to help her if we talk to her on the phone. We find her, convince her. You can help with that, Siobhan. But you need to do exactly what we say.”
Reluctantly, she nodded. But she didn’t look happy.
Lucy and Nate met with Assistant Sheriff Adam Villines in his office.
“Thank you for coming down again, I know it’s a long drive,” Villines said after Lucy introduced him to Nate. “And I appreciate the heads-up about Loretta Martinez. How did you track her down?”
“Siobhan Walsh, the photojournalist, told us she received an anonymous tip.”
“Do you believe her?”
“No,” Lucy said. Nate raised an eyebrow. “I should clarify, I believe she received a credible tip, and I didn’t push her to tell me who it came from. I’m certain it was the reporter Noah and I spoke with earlier this week. They’re friends.” She’d dug around a bit last night when she couldn’t sleep and learned Siobhan and Eric Barrow were the same age and had both been raised in northern Virginia. It stood to reason that they had known each other since high school.
“Were you able to get a guard on Martinez?” Lucy asked. “Our resident agency is working on minimal staff right now, but Noah said they can take over tomorrow.”
“We can cover her for the next twenty-four hours. Are you putting her under arrest?”
“Most likely, but I’m going to wait to hear her prognosis and see if I can get more information from her. And jurisdictional issues are between you and my boss,” Lucy said. “I don’t care who prosecutes her or which facility she’s housed in. I just need her to talk.”
“I spoke with the hospital staff. She’s already in surgery. X-rays showed multiple hairline fractures on her ribs and internal bleeding. She was unresponsive by the time she arrived at the hospital. You very well could have saved her life by showing up when you did.”
“Luck.”
“Or divine intervention,” he said.
Lucy believed, but she didn’t have any sympathy for Loretta and didn’t know if she wanted her to survive… except to interrogate her for information. She felt cold, and the fact that she had no remorse for these cold feelings disturbed her.
She said, “You called Noah with information. He’s been at the courthouse all afternoon and since we were here he asked us to stop by.”
“You might think this is odd, but if you knew my brother-in-law, you would understand.”
“You’ve lost us already,” Nate said. “Your brother-in-law?”
Villines nodded. “Johnny. Johnny Honeycutt. He came to see me yesterday after classes-he teaches math and science at one of the local high schools. A good kid-well, he’s not a kid. He’s twenty-seven, but he’s my wife’s youngest brother and was ten when I got married, so I’ve always thought of him as a kid. He had some hypothetical questions that I don’t think were hypothetical. He wanted to know specifically what the law was regarding asylum for foreign nationals who were brought illegally to this country for the purposes of sex trafficking. Now, he didn’t ask the question flat-out, he talked around it, but that’s what he was looking for. He then saw the photos of Baby Elizabeth on my desk and the photo you brought me of the de la Rosa sisters. He left awfully quick. I called my in-laws last night and my mother-in-law said George and Johnny had gone out and she didn’t know when they would be back. Now, you have to understand my mother-in-law. She is as honest as the day is long. The most Christian of Christian women, but with a spine of steel. I pushed a bit, put on my cop attitude you could say, and she lied to me. Told me that they went to fix the tractor and left their cell phones in the house. I know for a fact that they couldn’t fix the tractor because Johnny told me the parts he needed were back-ordered. For my ma to lie? No-I didn’t want to believe it. But she did.”
Lucy asked, “Do they have information about Marisol or the other girls?”