Nevertheless, she was anxious to get back to work and the unresolved case. She promised herself that if Gladys Mercedes was alive, as she believed, she would find her before the end of the year. Secretly, she had resolved that the mother and daughter would spend Christmas together. At times, however, a lot of questions hounded her. What if the girl had been corrupted by the kidnappers and was taking part in criminal acts? Or, on the contrary, what if they had treated Soledad well, and she didn’t know that she had been abducted, and she rejected her real family? That isn’t your task right now, she said to herself. Your job is to find her. But she couldn’t get those types of ideas out of her head.
She arrived at the police station early and, not long after, Fernandez came in with a cup of coffee. They didn’t waste much time making small talk about what they had done during the holiday. Both were eager to get back on organizing the clues. Maria began by getting him up to speed on what she had found out about Alberto Gonzalez:
“Look, Fernandez, for the moment I don’t think we should waste any more time looking into him. We’ll only look into things if the falsified documents or robberies in his uncle’s house and business lead us to Manuel Garcia and Soledad.”
“Yeah, you’re right. In any case, it’s going to be really difficult to find out when and how these two entered the US since they could’ve been able to use countless aliases.”
“That’s why we should concentrate on the events that happened after Garcia’s death. Don’t you think? I’ll call the woman back who babysat for Sole during that time.”
“And I’ll call her old teacher in Tampa. I’ll also follow up with the two or three people that had left us a message after we sent out the sketches.”
“I have some people that I need to check with too.”
Maria finally got in touch with Odalys in New Jersey. She had received the sketches and confirmed that they indeed were of Soledad and her daughter.
“Look, I can’t be sure about the man because I hardly ever saw him. I think he only came by once to pick up the girl because Soledad was late getting home from work.”
“And do you know where she worked?”
“Let me see if I remember…it’s been a long time…it had something to do with sewing… I don’t know if it was in a factory or in a store where they did alterations. She sewed very well. She made some lovely dresses for the girl.”
Maria was persistent with her questions. She wanted to know if she remembered which district she worked in, if she knew which neighborhood they lived in, if she had saved their old phone number, if she had any bit of information at all that might help her.
“I honestly would like to help you because I’d love to know what happened to them, but after her husband died in the accident, it was as if they vanished. Look, the only thing that comes to mind is that a neighbor’s daughter plays that sport where you pass a black and white ball with your feet. What do you call it?”
“Soccer?”
“Yeah, that’s it…fútbol is called soccer here because ‘football’ is something else… Once she went with her school to play I don’t know where, I think in North or South Carolina, and she came across Sole. It was like four or five years after they left here.”
“And Sole also played soccer?”
“Yeah… I think so.”
“And this neighbor of yours, does she still live nearby?”
“No, they moved a long time ago, and I’ve also lost track of them too…”
“Well, if you remember something else, anything at all, if you find a phone number, a picture, anything, call me. Can you promise me that?”
“Of course, you can count on it.”
Duquesne dialed one of the phone numbers in Manhattan that she hadn’t reached the last time. Mrs. Jonathan didn’t speak Spanish, but she had recognized the sketches that had been circulating in the press. She was now retired, but she had taken part in the investigation of the accident in which Manuel Garcia had died.
She told Maria that the details of the accident weren’t entirely clear. The ferry had hit the pier just before docking, and the man was leaning on the railing, so he fell into the water on impact, hit his head, and died instantly. At first, it seemed that the captain was to blame because they found some beer cans, but the blood test showed that he wasn’t intoxicated.
They wanted to interview the widow, but she had left without a trace. Little by little, the case became cold. In an attempt to find her, they checked with the Social Security office to see if she had filed a claim, which would have been within her right since she had a young child, but there was nothing pending in the system.
“Also, I called a friend of mine and asked her to look in the archives, and I was able to get Manuel Garcia’s social security number for you. I thought that might help you.”
Maria thanked her profusely, although she was more interested in finding Soledad and her daughter than investigating the dead husband’s past.
She decided to make one last call before contacting the Social Security office.
She talked to Altagracia Pena, a Dominican woman who was over eighty years old. According to what she told Maria, she had been Soledad’s friend from work. She confirmed the same story of how she had left without saying goodbye or collecting her last check when her husband died. They sewed together in a factory. There were undocumented immigrants who they paid in cash, but Soledad had her green card and was on the payroll. They had even made her a supervisor.
Maria asked her the name of the factory. The woman tried to remember.
“Hmm, it’s been a long time…the business was named after the owner, a Latino last name. Rodriguez Shoes and Apparel…or Perez, or Lopez…a common last name…perhaps Martinez…”
The Dominican woman pointed out the metro stop where she got off and the streets that she had to walk.
“But the factory closed a while ago…there’s nothing left of it. There was a big fire about fifteen years ago. I had just retired. Anyway it was at night and no one was inside…”
It seemed to Maria like all of the clues were dead ends. She was about to see where Manuel Garcia’s social security number would lead her when she saw Fernandez running toward her, waving his arms and repeating:
“I think I found Sole!”
Sure enough, a second conversation with her teacher in Tampa and other calls to the high school where Sole had been a student had yielded some results. The contacts at the high school had emailed the diploma of Soledad A. Garcia, who had graduated on June 4, 2010, along with her address and phone number from the school directory.
“Let me guess. They’ve moved away, and no one knows where they are?”
Fernandez nodded.
“But it’s a good clue, Maria, because they’re also looking for the colleges that she applied to… We’re going to find her, you’ll see.” He encouraged her and took a sip of the cold coffee that was left in the white Styrofoam cup.
Chapter 24
Days 30 and 31—Tuesday and Wednesday,
December 1 and 2, 2015
Maria and Fernandez worked nonstop, obsessing over each clue. As they had imagined, Manuel Garcia’s social security number belonged to a person who had already passed away, and it didn’t lead them to much. However, with the help of some friends, they had managed to get the FBI to use their digital facial recognition system, and they found out that Manuel Garcia’s real name was Bruno Marron (alias El Oso), and that he had a criminal record for fraud, bad checks, and robbery, but no violent crimes. Also, the FBI records included an investigation into his links with the Cuban government, but it had been closed when he died. Maria thought that maybe that explained how he knew what the Mariel refugees wanted to hide and, more importantly, his ability to falsify Cuban documents.
Aldo del Pozo had provided Maria with a list of four people who remembered the couple in Fort Chaffee. Two of th
em confessed that he had arranged for them to get copies of their college transcripts.
“Look, I don’t know if they were falsified, but the signatures and grades matched the real ones. I didn’t think twice about using them because they were proof of my degree and allowed me to continue my career. They cost me a lot. Luckily my father had been here for a while, and he paid him,” a woman who had been able to finish medical school told Maria.
Another told Fernandez a similar story and said that he had paid five hundred dollars for the transcript. El Oso hadn’t tried to extort them in either case. The detectives concluded that maybe these documents were legitimate and that the man had been able to get them from the Cuban government.
Fernandez looked for colleges that had women’s soccer teams thinking that perhaps Sole had received a scholarship to play for one of them. He was surprised to see that there were more than three hundred teams. He patiently searched through the websites of each team, each of the player’s names, and the team pictures, inspecting every one of their faces in case the girl had changed her name. If she had graduated high school in 2010, obviously it would make sense that she would have already finished her four years of college. The first thing that the young detective discovered was that college websites don’t emphasize their women’s sports teams. He indignantly told this to Maria. There were photos of various teams online, and some from prior years when Sole may have played, but they didn’t have names. He had to look through them face by face in order to see if anyone looked like her. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Additionally, they weren’t even sure if she played soccer, much less that she had played in college. It was only a hunch based on the information from her friend in New Jersey who had seen her in the Carolinas.
By eight in the evening, the two detectives were exhausted and decided they would start up again in the morning.
Fernandez tried to lift Maria’s spirits:
“Sometimes, when you stop thinking, a new idea appears out of nowhere. That happens to me every time.”
She nodded and went to the gym even though she was worn out. Sometimes working out helped her sleep better and wake up with a new perspective, as if ideas appeared from her subconscious while she slept.
Sure enough, after talking briefly with David and her father and taking a shower, she went to bed without even eating dinner.
The next morning while she drank her coffee, watched CNN, and read The Miami Herald, she received a text from Fernandez.
“Good clues from Sole’s high school.”
She got to the police station as fast as she could. Fernandez was already at the computer, rechecking photo after photo. He explained that the school had given them the names of the colleges to which Sole had applied, although they didn’t know which one she had attended.
Maria kept on making calls and looking for clues, but was unsuccessful. It was almost noon when Fernandez waved her over to his computer.
He showed her a photo of the 2011 soccer team at Notre Dame. He enlarged it and zoomed in on one of the young women.
“What do you think?”
“It’s her, Fernandez, it’s her.”
Maria noticed that the building was made of gray bricks, just like the one in Sole’s grandmother’s dream. She didn’t believe in those types of things and chose not to tell her partner.
“Let’s call the university immediately. She should have already graduated, but I’m sure they’ll have her address.”
They called the alumni office and sent emails, but the staff only agreed to look for her information and talk with their lawyers to see if they could share it.
Fernandez continued his search online until he found the 2012 Notre Dame roster. At first, he was worried when he didn’t see her name. The woman who he believed to be Soledad Garcia wore number fifty-six, which corresponded to an Alexis Smith. Had he been wrong?
He asked Maria to come over once again. They enlarged the photo. They looked at all of the sketches they had of the girl. They also compared them with the photos they had of her sister Elena. Each time they became more certain that they were dealing with the same person.
“Let’s do the easy thing. Let’s look for Alexis Smith on Facebook.”
They found her but, without sending a friend request, they only had access to minimal information. She had graduated from Notre Dame, was living in Tampa, was married, and had a young daughter.
“Do you think it’s the same woman?” Maria asked aloud.
“Well, if she got married it’s logical that she would change her last name. The high school diploma said Soledad A. Garcia, and we know from the newspaper article that Sole’s middle name was Alexandra, so maybe she decided to go by Alexis,” reasoned Fernandez. “It makes sense that she would be in Tampa if she lived there before…”
“But not if her mother’s alive. They’ve been bouncing around from place to place for years,” speculated Maria.
“And what if her mother’s dead? That hadn’t dawned on us because she wouldn’t be that old, but as they say ‘in order to die you only have to be alive.’ ” As soon as he said that, Fernandez started looking for obituaries for women named Soledad Garcia. He was surprised to find five in the last six years. Two were in Miami and were about women over eighty years old, so he discarded them. The third was about a young woman who had died in a car accident two days before her eighteenth birthday and high school graduation in Arizona. The fourth and fifth made him think: a sixty-year-old woman in Tampa who had died in 2010 and, the other, a fifty-one-year-old who had passed away the following year in South Bend, Indiana. Both could be the one they were looking for, but the obituaries gave limited information.
Meanwhile, Maria had been tracing Alexis’s steps at Notre Dame and in Tampa. An hour later, she went to look for Fernandez at his desk, her eyes full of that special sparkle that they got when she felt close to solving a case.
“Come take a look…”
She showed him a photo that she had found in the Notre Dame newspaper from the day of Alexis Smith’s graduation. A young girl whose face could only be partially seen was hugging her. Dressed in her cap and gown, the graduate was carrying the little girl and smiling at the camera. The article described how, despite having taken care of her mother during her cancer and later her death and having given birth to her own daughter, all within the first two years of college, Alexis had graduated with honors.
Maria had also tracked down the records of residential properties in Tampa and discovered that Nicholas and Alexis Smith had bought a house only a few months previously. Neither had a criminal record, and Maria showed Fernandez a photo of the house where they were living.
“It’s incredible what you can find online these days. You should’ve seen how it used to be…” Maria commented to her colleague.
“Don’t pretend to be an old lady…and don’t change the subject. Are we sure that it’s her? What do we do now?”
“I’d like to go see her, but we have to talk to Larry first.”
They both ran directly to their boss’s office.
Chapter 25
Days 32 and 33—Thursday and Friday,
December 3 and 4, 2015
The previous day, Lawrence Keppler had been out of the office all day in meetings on criminal activities in the county. By mid-afternoon, he had contacted his assistant and asked her to call together all officers for a meeting at nine in the morning.
Maria and Fernandez knew that they’d have to wait before they could speak with him and request authorization to travel to Tampa.
Keppler came into the conference room with a bulky black folder under his arm and accompanied by Captain Rios. The meeting had something to do with a workshop on new equipment and the most advanced technology that they were about to start using soon. They were on a coffee break when Keppler’s and Rios’s cells rang in unison. Both answered at the same t
ime, and then they left the room to be able to hear better. They returned right away.
“I’ve just been informed that one man is dead and two others injured,” Keppler said when he came back into the room.
Seconds later Rios entered:
“The man they shot this morning over a parking place just died.”
Keppler and Rios cancelled the meeting. The captain left quickly and Keppler started assigning tasks to various officers.
Without realizing it, Maria and Fernandez had become a team and they were sent to the crime scene. They knew they had to follow orders and that the case of the girl that they believed they’d found would have to wait. When they arrived at the house in the northwest part of the county, it was surrounded by yellow tape, as was typically the case. The photographer and the coroner were already inside, next to the body of a young man lying on the floor with a hole in his chest and a large bloodstain. Outside, paramedics treated two young women for minor injuries while they waited for an ambulance to take them to the hospital. One of them was crying inconsolably. She was the victim’s wife. An older man, who turned out to be the girls’ father and who had also been inside the house during the episode, was trying to comfort her.
Maria made a gesture to Fernandez for him to question the other girl, and she tried to calm down the widow and her father so that they could tell her what had happened. The woman took a deep breath, dried her tears with the back of her hand, and began speaking.
“It was my fault… How could I have opened the door for them? Who would think that they would do such a thing at ten in the morning?” she exclaimed and began crying again. Maria waited a few seconds.
“What happened next?”
“The one that I saw was pretty young. He even looked familiar from the neighborhood, and he told me he was selling some chocolate to raise money for his baseball team. I love chocolate, and when I returned with the two dollars, I opened the door. The boy wasn’t there anymore. Three other guys in hoodies came in, and they pushed me down. Then, my sister Alicia started screaming, and they threw her against the entranceway table, which is glass, and it broke. My husband heard the noise and came running in, the poor thing, armed with a broom. I imagine he thought we needed to clean up the glass…but it happened all so fast, and they shot him. They told us to give them all the jewelry and money that we had. I was terrified and couldn’t move, and my sister was bleeding from the glass wounds. Then, my father came in and struggled with one of them. Alicia and I began screaming. I think the neighbor heard us and called the police. It looks like they got scared and left without taking anything. It would’ve been better if they had just taken everything and not killed my husband. We were newlyweds and so happy,” the woman mumbled and began sobbing again.
The Miracle of Saint Lazarus Page 13