The Girl in the Glass Box

by James Grippando

  “Let’s go fly a kite,” said Jack.

  “Yay!” shouted Righley. “Can we bring Mommy?”

  “Yes, Mommy’s allowed.”

  “And Max, too?”

  Max was their golden retriever. “Let’s ask him if he wants to come.”

  Righley whispered into Max’s ear and reported back immediately. “Max says yes. He thinks kites are fun.”

  And delicious, no doubt. “Okay, Max can come.”

  They piled into the SUV, Righley strapped into her car seat behind Jack, and Max with his big head sticking out the window behind Andie’s headrest.

  Righley was Jack and Andie’s only child, and she’d been angling to fly a kite at Matheson Hammock Park since her fourth birthday. Her party had been at the park’s picnic area, and it also happened to be a perfect day for the kite boarders to launch from the narrow strip of beach on Biscayne Bay. Righley and her friends had watched from shore and loved everything about it: the music that played from the vans while surfers set up their rigs; the cool wet suits; the colorful kites that soared into a cloudless blue sky, sending the surfers skimming across flat seas and flying into the air like feathers caught in the breeze.

  “Kites!” said Righley, as Jack steered into the parking lot.

  A woman in a neon-pink wet suit was doing about thirty knots, twenty-five feet above the bay, before splashing into the shallow blue-green waters.

  “You don’t think Righley’s under the impression that she came here to do that, do you?”

  “If she is, it’s your fault,” said Jack.

  Andie was unlike any woman Jack had ever known, and not just because she worked undercover for the FBI. Jack loved that she’d been a Junior Olympics mogul skier before blowing out a knee, that she wasn’t afraid to cave dive in Florida’s aquifer, and that in her training at the FBI Academy she’d nailed a perfect score on one of the toughest shooting ranges in the world.

  “I resent that,” she said with a smile.

  Righley was her mother’s daughter and was of course hugely disappointed to find out that she would be flying a kite with her feet firmly on the ground, not soaring into the air with Max on board. They went for ice cream at the concession stand to make things better. Jack and Andie watched from the picnic table as Righley introduced Max to a new friend.

  “Are you going back to Macclenny this week?” asked Andie.

  “Hope not.”

  “How long is that case going to last?”

  Jack knew what she was really asking. The understanding that made it possible for a criminal defense lawyer to marry an FBI agent was that she didn’t tell him which clients to defend and he didn’t tell her which crooks to investigate. But Jack’s pro bono work was in a different category: his working for free hit them both in the wallet.

  “Hard to say,” said Jack. “My client is getting a raw deal, but I have an idea on how to turn things around fast.”

  “Anything you can tell me about?”

  Jack’s ice cream was melting fast. He changed hands and let Max the vacuum cleaner lick the soft serve from his vanilla-cream-covered fingers. “I might take this to the media.”

  “Why do you think that’s a good idea?”

  “Because I don’t think a woman should be considered a convicted felon under U.S. immigration law for having an abortion after getting raped. And I think that makes a pretty compelling news story. Don’t you?”

  “Yes, if it’s true.”

  “I believe her.”

  “Wow. A lawyer who believes his client. That should be more than enough to make you the lead story on every fake-news website out there.”

  Jack didn’t bother telling her about McBride. What happened or didn’t happen in his office at Café de Caribe was a classic he said, she said scenario.

  “I hear you,” said Jack, which Max apparently understood to mean “Here, boy.” With one swoop of Max’s tongue, the rest of Jack’s ice cream cone disappeared.

  The need for corroboration weighed on Jack’s mind, and after five years of marriage, Andie was pretty good at reading him. After getting their fill of kite flying, Andie drove Righley and Max home. Jack took an Uber to visit Julia’s sister.

  Cecilia was in Miami legally, but her two roommates were not. They lived in a vintage-sixties neighborhood where every house on the block looked virtually the same, a ranch-style shoebox painted either beige or yellow. Some still had the original jalousie-style windows—a burglar’s best friend—which accounted for the prisonlike security bars on each window. There was not a blade of grass anywhere. Front yards were paved or bricked over, like used-car lots, to accommodate more cars and more people than a two-bedroom, one-bath house was ever designed to handle. Backyards were nonexistent. Narrow side yards between houses were several inches deep in loose pea gravel, on which the crunch of footfalls in the night warned the undocumented of an ICE raid.

  Jack and Cecilia sat on folding lawn chairs on the stoop outside her front door. Jack had called earlier with a heads-up that he wanted to talk about Julia’s sexual assault, and the only place out of Beatriz’s earshot was on the stoop.

  “Julia is seven years older than me,” Cecilia said. “She was married and Beatriz was eight years old when all this happened, but I was still living at home.”

  “When did you find out about it?”

  “After she got arrested.”

  “I didn’t mean the abortion. I meant, when did you find out that she had been sexually assaulted.”

  “I know what you meant. The first I heard anything about a sexual assault was when Julia got arrested for having an abortion.”

  “I take it she didn’t report the assault to the police.”

  “No.”

  “Which doesn’t mean much,” said Jack. “Even in this country most sexual assaults go unreported. I imagine the number of unreported assaults is even higher in El Salvador.”

  Cecilia didn’t reply.

  “Where did your sister have her procedure?” asked Jack.

  “I don’t know. Someplace not safe. She was bleeding when she checked herself into the hospital. That’s how she got caught. A nurse in the emergency room turned her in. The police came out and took her to jail as soon as the doctors said she could leave.”

  Jack tried to imagine such a dilemma—the choice between staying home and risking death or going to the hospital and risking arrest. “Did she tell anyone at the hospital that she was sexually assaulted?”

  “As far as I know, she didn’t tell anyone until she was in jail.”

  Jack detected a hint of skepticism. “Somebody must have believed her if the prosecutor agreed to no jail time.”

  “That prosecutor took a lot of heat.”

  “Do you mean from the Church?”

  “The Church, the courts, the lawmakers—you name it. Most people thought Julia said she was raped just to stay out of jail.”

  “What do you think, Cecilia?”

  “You’re asking about my sister.”

  “That’s why I want to know what you think. Julia’s credibility is going to be an issue in her case, starting with the abortion and continuing all the way through her former employer’s accusations of theft. Do you believe Julia was telling the truth when she said she was sexually assaulted?”

  She shifted uncomfortably in her lawn chair. “What do you want me to say, Mr. Swyteck?”

  “I just want your honest answer.”

  She glanced over her shoulder, as if checking to see if her niece was listening, then looked Jack straight in the eye. “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s the most honest answer I can give you.”

  Chapter 12

  Hugo’s knees buckled, and he dropped to the cold Mexican-tile floor. The pain was unlike any he had felt before, the kind of pain that came from two nights without sleep—and hours of electric-shock interrogation from one sadistic monster.

  “God, have mercy,” he prayed, as he inspected the burn marks on his bare chest.

 
Hugo spent his days locked in a windowless room about the size of a closet. In fact, he was pretty sure that it was once a janitor’s closet, as it still smelled like cleaning fluids. He ate there, slept there, and marked the passage of time by counting the meals he was served. Nine so far, so three days, he figured. The only time he got out was when a guard took him down the hall to the bathroom. They rarely even bothered to blindfold him. The Zetas were in so tightly with the local police that they didn’t seem to care if their hostages could identify them.

  Hugo heard the jingle of keys outside the door. “In the corner,” the guard said.

  Hugo went to the far corner and sat, which was the routine. The guard opened the door and placed a bottle of water on the floor. Another temporal indicator: day four, he presumed.

  The guard ordered him to face the wall, which he did. Then he tied Hugo’s hands behind his back and led him down the hall. Another hostage was being escorted from the bathroom when they arrived. Hugo had counted nine other hostages this way, including a pregnant woman. He had yet to see the silver-haired Ecuadoran woman and her teenage granddaughter from the cattle truck, and it sickened him to think of where they might be.

  The guard untied his hands and opened the bathroom door. The stench had nauseated Hugo the first time, but he was getting used to it.

  “Two minutes,” the guard said.

  Hugo entered. The guard left the door open and stood right outside in the hallway.

  Los Zetas made the journey through Mexico a Latin American migrant’s worst fear. They grabbed headlines with brazen atrocities, like the massacre of 265 migrants who were buried in mass graves in the northern state of Tamaulipas, or the disappearance of 43 college students in the southern state of Guerrero. Sensational media coverage fueled the gang’s kidnap-for-ransom industry, striking so much terror in the migrant community that even the poorest families of Honduras or El Salvador somehow managed to come up with thousands of dollars in ransom to spare their loved ones from rape, torture, and violent death.

  Hugo took all of his two minutes, if only because the small window in the bathroom was his only view of daylight. The guard fastened his hands behind his back but didn’t take him to his closet. The guard blindfolded him, and Hugo knew what that meant. Prisoners were blindfolded only for a trip to the “party room.”

  The guard led him down the hallway, and with each step the music—coming from somewhere—got louder. When they stopped, it sounded as if they were standing right outside a dance club.

  A shrill scream rose above the music, and it was clear that no one was dancing.

  The guard opened the door, yanked off Hugo’s blindfold, and pushed him to the floor. Hugo slid to the corner, where two other men were seated on the floor with their backs to the wall. A group of men at the counter raised their beer bottles and cheered Hugo’s arrival.

  “Got the Salvadoran again,” the guard said. “The one you asked for, El Lobo.”

  El Lobo. The wolf. Hugo recognized him as the man with the assault rifle who’d paid off the Mexican police. He’d swapped out his rifle for a semiautomatic pistol.

  “We’ll get to him,” said El Lobo. His piercing gaze shifted to the man seated on the floor next to Hugo. “What’s your name?”

  “Paco.”

  “Your turn.”

  Paco climbed to his knees, pleading. “No, please!”

  “Crank up the music!” El Lobo told his men.

  Music was part of the ritual. It was Hugo’s impression that these savages enjoyed the macabre incongruence of party music and the shrill screams of torture victims.

  “My family will pay!” Paco said, groveling. “I’ll give you the phone number.”

  He shouted out a string of digits, and one of El Lobo’s thugs wrote it down.

  “Call them,” said Paco. “You’ll see. They will pay fast!”

  “Of course they will pay,” said El Lobo. “And when they hear you scream, they will pay more. Put him on the grill,” he told his men.

  “No!”

  The grill was a metal table in the center of the room. The men grabbed him, stripped him naked, and threw him on the table. One man took his ankles and another took his wrists. They stretched him the length of the table and strapped him down tight, as if placing him in a medieval rack. A fat guy stood at the foot of the table with a length of hardwood handy, ready to swing it at Paco’s arches like a baseball bat if he resisted in any way. Another guy with a wild look in his eyes—definitely on drugs—tended to the electric transmitter on the small table near the victim’s head. He smiled perversely as he connected the wires, one by one, to the victim—to his chest, his abdomen, and finally his genitals.

  They called him El Electricista. The Electrician.

  “Just dial that phone number,” Paco pleaded. “There’s no need for this!”

  “Bueno,” said El Lobo. “You better hope they answer.”

  El Lobo punched the numbers on his phone. Paco was so nervous that Hugo could hear him breathing across the room. El Lobo broke the silence, speaking into his cell phone in a bright and cheery voice.

  “Hello, I’m calling with some excellent news about our friend Paco.” He held the phone for Paco. “Keep it short.”

  “It’s me, Paco! I’ve been kidnapped. Just do what these men say! Please, just—”

  El Lobo pulled his cell away. “Stay on the line,” he said into the phone.

  “Don’t hurt me!” said Paco.

  El Electricista laughed as he forced metal beads down the prisoner’s throat—electrodes that would make the voltage cut like lightning through his insides.

  “Swallow!”

  Paco obeyed.

  At the turn of the dial the current flowed. Paco’s entire body tensed and then quivered. There was suddenly a bizarre symphony of howling from El Lobo’s men and the bloodcurdling screams of a man who probably wished he was dead.

  “Find us some money,” El Lobo told Paco’s family, and he ended the call.

  El Lobo walked across the room to Hugo, placed his boot on Hugo’s leg, and then bore down directly on one of the burn marks from the electrode. He’d undergone the treatment on his first day at the ransom hotel—or was it the second? It didn’t matter. Hugo tried not to show how much it hurt.

  “Rest up, my Salvadoran friend. You’re back on the grill in ten minutes.”

  El Lobo walked away.

  The hostage beside Hugo had reached his emotional limit. “Ay,” he said, his voice quaking. “We should have just done like the others and paid that stupid truck driver the extra money.”

  “No.”

  “What did it get us? Now we have to pay ransom.”

  “I will never pay,” said Hugo. “I will never give them a phone number.”

  “We will, or they will kill us. We will end up like those college students,” he said, referencing the forty-three who “disappeared” in Guerrero.

  “No,” said Hugo, his resolve only strengthening. “I will kill them. One by one, I will kill every one of them. And I will escape.”

  The man chuckled without heart. “And after this miraculous escape, where will you go, Hugo?”

  “Miami.”

  “Miami?” the man said with bemusement. “What’s in Miami for a man from El Salvador with no clothes and no money?”

  “The most beautiful Salvadoran woman in the world.”

  “Really?” the man said with another mirthless chuckle, clearly not believing any of it. “What’s the name of this beautiful woman?”

  Hugo looked past the grill, gazing into the fog of the middle distance. “Julia,” he said. “Her name is Julia Rodriguez.”

  Chapter 13

  How a Monday-morning flight to Jacksonville could cost more than business class to Paris was beyond Jack. Rather than fret over airline economics, though, he burned a few more frequent-flier miles and, for good measure, scrimped on the Jacksonville-Macclenny leg, snagging a great deal on a rental car that was only slightly smaller than the Ba
rbie convertible Righley got for Christmas. He was with Julia in the Baker County Facility attorney visitation room by midmorning.

  “Didn’t expect you back so soon,” said Julia.

  “Me neither,” said Jack.

  Cecilia’s “I don’t know” response to the sexual assault question didn’t sit well with Jack. He wanted to do all he could for Julia, but any crimp in her credibility could put her beyond the help of any lawyer. That was the simple reality of a deportation hearing. He laid it out that bluntly for her, because he had to.

  “Are you saying I have to prove I was raped?” she asked.

  “Right now, you have two strikes against you. One, a felony conviction under the law of El Salvador and, two, McBride’s accusation that you stole his wallet. If we can convince the immigration judge that you had an abortion because you were raped, I believe he will disregard the felony conviction, even though the statute has no exceptions. But if he doesn’t believe you on that, he won’t take your word over McBride’s police report. ICE wins. You’ll get out of here only when you’re deported.”

  “I get it. But how am I supposed to prove something that happened six years ago in another country?”

  Jack hesitated. He’d interviewed and cross-examined scores of crime victims in his career. There was no template. A question that might mean nothing to one victim could send another to dark and unimaginable places.

  “Walk me through the case in El Salvador. How did you convince the prosecutor that you were sexually assaulted?”

  “I don’t want to go through that again.”

  “I understand.”

  “I don’t think you do.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. I hate when people say they understand when they can’t possibly. Let’s see if I can do a better job of explaining where I’m going with this, all right?”