There were a few questions, but the assembled force seemed eager to hit the streets. Villines made the assignments, even sending two officers to Del Rio to check out the place Zapelli was parked overnight. He finished by saying, “If you find these girls, contact me immediately. Siobhan Walsh, the photojournalist, personally knows them and she can help facilitate their cooperation so they know we’re here to help.”
Lucy glanced at Siobhan, who was standing in the back of the room. Siobhan looked like she was running on fumes. Lucy had assumed that Siobhan had seen bad stuff as part of her job. Lucy had seen many of her photos—poverty and pain interspersed with beauty and love and the simple life. The Sisters of Mercy primarily worked on helping poor villages learn to care for themselves in the basics of hygiene, agriculture, building homes, medicine. But in that, there was death and poverty and tragedy, like the mudslide that had killed half the people in the de la Rosas’ village. To Lucy, that would be emotionally and physically devastating, yet what was going on here seemed to overwhelm Siobhan, and Lucy didn’t understand why.
When Villines was done, Lucy approached her. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, but Lucy didn’t believe it.
“What is it?” she pushed.
“Why didn’t she call me? Why didn’t she come to me for help? Didn’t she know I would drop everything, fly from any corner of the world, to help her?”
Lucy didn’t know how to respond. All she could say was, “She believed Angelo would help her. She probably was in love with him, trusted him. She was wrong. You don’t know what she’s been thinking over the last two years. But—she kept your locket. She put it around her baby’s neck. That means something.”
Siobhan nodded, but her eyes were a million miles away.
Noah said, “Let’s go. Siobhan, wait for us here.” She didn’t answer, but let them go.
Lucy followed Noah out. “Where’s Nate?”
“He went with Villines. You and I have two places on our list. Villines gave us a deputy who knows the area.”
A young deputy walked up to them. He had the darker skin of a Mexican-Indian and the long black hair to match. “Deputy Ezekiel Medicine Crow. Call me Ike. I’m a rookie, but I was born and bred here in Laredo. I can get you anywhere.”
Noah handed him the map Villines had given him. “These two places. Closest one first.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I know this address,” Lucy said. “This is Loretta Martinez’s house.”
“It’s the first stop he made before going to Freer on Friday,” Noah said.
“He may have been the one who beat her up. I just assumed that she was attacked after Marisol escaped.”
“You didn’t ask?”
Lucy shook her head. “It was a bad assumption. She denied being beaten, said she’d fallen, and I was looking for information about Marisol.”
“We’ll drive by, see if there’s anything else there, then hit the second place.”
There was nothing useful at Loretta’s house. It was clear no one had been back since the paramedics took her in. Villines had reported that she was still in critical condition, but Lucy didn’t know the status of her injuries or if the surgery had been successful.
The second place was a warehouse outside of town that Zapelli had visited right before he went to the airport. It was isolated at the end of a long line of large square buildings, half seemingly abandoned, some with faded FOR LEASE signs, the others a hodgepodge of services: an auto-body shop, a moving company, a printing press.
“We have no way of knowing which he visited,” Lucy said. The GPS puts him in this general area, but not in an exact spot.”
Ike said, “Most of these businesses have been shut down for years. We had some problems out here with gangs, and there was a meth lab running in one of the empty buildings for about eight months before the DEA shut them down, but nothing recent.”
They got out and looked around. Talked to the businesses that were open, showed his photo, but no one claimed to know Zapelli.
Lucy was going to suggest they inspect the empty buildings, but Noah put his hand up and answered his phone. “We’ll be right there.”
He hung up. “That was Villines. They found some of the girls. It’s bad.”
* * *
They were at a house halfway between Laredo and Del Rio. The word house was kind. There was what first appeared to be an abandoned warehouse with several trailers and four large, malnourished guard dogs on the other side of the chained-off yard. By the time Lucy and Noah arrived, they’d been tranquilized and Animal Control was taking them to their facility. A fire truck was parked outside as well as two ambulances. Villines’s team searched each building. Spotlights had been brought in, and every vehicle had its headlights shining into the fenced area.
Villines approached them and said, “The trailer is on the brink of collapse. We cleared the place—none of the suspects we’re looking for are there, but we have five women inside. Two are obviously pregnant; the other two are traumatized and in shock. One is deceased. There are no neighbors, there’s nothing in a five-mile radius.”
A paramedic came out of the trailer and approached Villines. “Sheriff, the fire chief says there’s a gas leak, he wants the women cleared out immediately. But the trailer is listing, we have to do this carefully and with minimal personnel. I’ve sent for two more gurneys, they should be here ASAP.”
“Is the gas leak intentional?” Villines asked. “Were they attempting to kill the women?”
“I can’t say. It’s probably because the structure is in such awful condition. There’s no water, no power, I don’t know where the gas is coming from because there isn’t service to the house, but it could be a faulty line.”
Siobhan arrived with one of Villines’s deputies. “I need to help.”
“You will,” Lucy said, “when we get the girls out. We need a triage area away from this structure.”
The paramedic nodded. “We’re already set up on the other side of the fire truck. We have two paramedics and two EMTs on site, another ambulance is on its way, and the coroner.”
He left to talk to the fire chief.
“Was that bastard Zapelli here?” Siobhan asked. “Left those women in these horrid conditions?”
“They were likely moved after Marisol escaped,” Lucy said. “Except for Eloise and Macey, who were left in Freer.” She wanted to talk to Loretta again and search her house thoroughly. There had to be a better record of those seventy-two births than the book Lucy found. How many different women … where they delivered … where they were sent after they gave birth. Lucy wanted to know that they found everyone, that no woman had been left behind to endure more pain and suffering and loss.
“Who died?” Siobhan asked, her voice quivering. “It’s not—Marisol? He killed her, didn’t he?”
Lucy turned to Siobhan. “We don’t know. Go over to the triage area and wait, you can help translate, and they’ll want to talk to a woman.” Or not talk at all. Lucy hadn’t wanted to tell anyone anything after she’d been held captive and raped for two days. She didn’t want to talk about it. She still didn’t, eight years later.
Lucy glanced at Nate, and he nodded and led Siobhan away. Lucy turned to Noah. “They planned to come back,” she said. “Two pregnant women? That’s money for them. They wouldn’t just leave them here. The other house was clean, sterilized. This place?” She shook her head.
“They had to move fast. Maybe they didn’t have another location. Plus, this place is easy to get to on the back roads, no freeways, no neighbors. Temporary.”
“And you said you didn’t know Texas.”
“I can read a map. I’m a quick study. In fact, there’s a road that goes almost straight from Freer to here, bypassing Laredo altogether.”
“I don’t see Zapelli staying here. He was far too neat, too fastidious.”
Noah looked at the time line that Villines and Lucy had prepared. “He was here Monday night for thirty m
inutes, then again Tuesday morning for forty or so minutes. You said he filled up his tank in Del Rio, correct?”
“Tuesday morning.”
“We need to track down Leo Musgrove. Want to bet Musgrove called him to tell him we were asking questions?”
“I won’t take that bet. The motel he stayed at is less than a mile from the bar we cornered Musgrove in.”
Two paramedics were carrying one pregnant woman out on a board because the gurney couldn’t fit through the narrow, rotted door frame. A deputy came out escorting a petite young woman who was able to walk. She wasn’t pregnant—at least, she didn’t appear to be.
Lucy watched as the paramedics and deputies brought out each of the girls.
The last—the last living girl—was very pregnant. The fire chief carried her out himself and put her on a gurney. “Medics! Stat!”
Siobhan was watching closely and cried out, “Ana! It’s Ana!” She ran to the edge of the fence as the paramedics came through.
“Siobhan—let them work.”
Ana’s eyes were full of fear, but they rested on Siobhan as if she were seeing a ghost. “Siobhan?” she whispered. “Siobhan?”
She began to cry. Siobhan took her hand. “Thank God, thank God, you’re alive.”
“We need to get her to the hospital, stat,” the paramedic said. He gestured to her legs as he carefully put a blanket over her.
Her right leg was broken. The swelling and bruising were severe.
“I want to go. Please,” Siobhan said.
Lucy said, “She’s a translator, knows this girl.” She showed her badge to the paramedic.
He nodded. “We go now.”
Lucy watched as Siobhan left with Ana in the ambulance.
Noah came up to them. “Villines and I are going to check on another property—see if you can talk to the girls before they’re transported.”
He left, and Lucy walked over to where the two girls who weren’t obviously pregnant were being treated by a lone paramedic. The two ambulances had already left. She said in Spanish, “We’re getting you help. A doctor.”
The paramedic was fluent and had put them both at ease. They were crying, but one of them said in English without any trace of an accent, “I want to call my mom.”
“Where are you from?”
Tears streamed down her face. “I—I’m from Houston. I ran away last year with my boyfriend. And … and it got bad. He … he hit me. And then … he left. And I was pregnant and my mom … my mom told me if I left with him never to come home.”
“Honey, mothers are forgiving. What’s your name?”
“Abby Bridger.” She drew in a deep breath. “I-I just want my mom.”
“How did you end up here?”
“I thought … I thought if I had an abortion everything would be better. I could go home, beg my mom to forgive me, never tell anyone. I went to a clinic and they put me under and I woke up somewhere else.”
“When was this?”
“February. And … and I had my baby last month and I wanted her so badly and begged them not to take her, but they did.”
“Why didn’t they let you go?”
“I don’t know, I didn’t ask, I didn’t want to go, where would I go?” She squeezed the hand of the girl next to her. “It’s all my fault.”
“Abby, none of this is your fault. None of it, okay?” Lucy took her other hand, the one that wasn’t clutching her friend. Both girls were staring at her with wide, dirty eyes. “These people forced you into this, terrified you, hurt you. Took your baby. Kept you prisoner. They will pay for it.” She took out a photo of the house in Freer. “Is this where you were staying?”
Abby nodded. “Since April. First we were someplace else, but it burned down. I think they burned it down on purpose. And then we were there. Until…” She stopped talking.
“Until one of the women ran away with a baby.”
“They took us all, except Eloise. Did you find her? Is she okay? She was so worried about her baby. She’s very sick.”
Lucy softened her voice. “Eloise died. I’m sorry. We think her baby survived.”
“No. No!”
“We’re looking for Marisol. Her sister Ana was here—have you seen her?”
She shook her head. “No one has come for us. They were looking for Marisol.”
“Abby, I need you to be strong. You’re going to the hospital. There will be a police guard there to protect you—to protect all of you. But honey, we need you to tell us everything you know. We need everything you know about these people, what they said and did and who they are. We need more information to stop them.”
“Will—will you call my mom? Explain everything to her? Tell her I’m sorry?”
“Yes—but Abby, the first thing you need to do is remember this. Remember it forever: This is not your fault.”
The paramedic took the girls together in the third ambulance and Lucy watched it drive off. Nate said, “One of the deputies confirmed that the dead girl isn’t Marisol.”
Lucy wanted to be happy about it, but she was so weary.
“I want to show you something.” He handed her a photocopy of Loretta’s book. “We didn’t have time to go through it, but I noticed something. You pointed out that Elizabeth wasn’t Marisol’s first baby.”
“I’m assuming that both Marisols in the book are the same person.” Lucy flipped through the pages. “Jasmine and her people picked immigrants—legal or illegal, it didn’t matter—who didn’t have family connections because they would be the least likely to go to the authorities. Or runaways like Abby who had lost hope.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t know as a fact, just an educated guess based on what we’ve seen already. I thought Macey was an outlier because she was Caucasian, until Abby. Did you notice that the baby boy was Macey’s second delivery? Just like Marisol.” She frowned.
“That’s what I wanted to show you. The dates.”
She stared. Marisol was the third delivery in the book, and the last. Marisol had given birth six months after she’d disappeared from Monterrey.
“That bastard.”
“You’re thinking what I’m thinking.”
“Zapelli. Marisol was pregnant in Monterrey. Want to bet it was his kid? That’s why she trusted him. How could a father sell his girlfriend and his unborn child into the sex trade?”
“Lucy, you know as well as I do that he probably killed her when he picked her up Tuesday night.”
“Then dammit, I want to bury her body.”
* * *
She flipped through the copy again. The babies were few and far between—some of them months—during the first year. The program must have become lucrative because more than half the seventy-two babies had been born in the last nine months. She took some quick notes. “Nate, there were fourteen girls pregnant at one time just last month—including Marisol and Ana. The house in Freer only had eight beds. There must be another place. More girls.”
“Hopefully not like that trailer.”
“I think the trailer was a way station. They had to put them someplace, they were angry because Marisol had not only escaped, but had taken her baby with her, and in doing so brought down the authorities. Eight beds—” She gestured toward the trailer where the deputies were bringing out a body bag. “Five girls here. Plus Eloise, Macey, and Marisol.”
She paused. “Zapelli had to have known about this baby ring, and when Marisol told him she was pregnant, he sold her—and her baby.”
“Then why did she call him?”
“Because she didn’t know that he’d done it. I don’t think Loretta knew, otherwise she would have rubbed it in—she complained that Marisol went on and on about Angelo saving them. And he was the person she trusted the most to call when she escaped.” Shouldn’t she have seen the truth? Maybe not. Zapelli was a slimy bastard, but maybe he had a charming side. Marisol and Ana were girls from the country. They might not see the wolf in sheep’s clothing.<
br />
After finding Marisol, there was nothing Lucy wanted more than to see Angelo in prison. And Marisol would help put him there.
That may give her some satisfaction. Some peace.
Death is the only peace. Would it have given you peace if Adam Scott had been arrested? Prosecuted? Living behind bars? Hardly. You killed him because he was evil and would have raped and murdered again and again until he was dead.
She couldn’t go there. Not now. Not when her emotions were so … jumbled.
Nate picked up his phone. “It’s Noah,” he said to Lucy. “Noah, you’re on speaker. Lucy’s here.”
“We traced the Honeycutt phone to a house just outside Laredo, fifteen minutes south from the trailer. I sent you the address. As deputies attempted to reach out to the occupants, they fired shots. Put on your vests if you haven’t already done so—we have one cop in critical condition and they have multiple hostages.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
By the time Lucy and Nate arrived at the standoff, the entire block had been evacuated and a dozen police cars, including a SWAT tactical van, were parked around the perimeter. Noah and Villines were both on the phone, and the head of the Webb County SWAT was speaking into a loudspeaker.
“Mr. Dobleman,” SWAT said, “please pick up the phone so we can discuss the situation.”
Silence.
Noah put his phone down. “We don’t know how many hostages they have, but there are at least three gunmen,” he told Lucy and Nate. “We’re trying to resolve this without any more bloodshed.”
Villines said, “My deputy is going in for surgery right now—he made it that far, he’s going to pull through.” He spoke it as if speaking it would make it so. Lucy hoped he was right.
Less than an hour had passed since the first shots had been fired at the two deputies who had initially approached the house. Zapelli had never driven his rental car to this place, but the phone the Honeycutts gave to Marisol had pinged to this neighborhood. The deputies had been going door-to-door.
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