Sinclair Justice

by Colleen Shannon

  “Very well.” After they arranged a time and location to meet, Abby waved briskly, got back in her car, and drove off.

  Comically, Curt shuddered. “Wow, that’s one fearsomely intelligent woman.”

  “Is there such a thing as being too intelligent?” Emm walked up the steps and reached out to open the door, but he bolted up and beat her to it. At her jaundiced look, he shrugged sheepishly.

  “Guess not.” When they entered the foyer of the Ranger offices, he took a deep breath.

  She sensed his unease. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m bracing myself. Sinclair and I are acquaintances. We’ve even played golf together. But my last message from him was, well, rather . . . curt.”

  Emm was still digesting that when Sinclair exited his office. She recognized that starched spine and cool gaze, but she wasn’t sure whether his disapproval was aimed at her or Curt. After she explained her connection with Curt, she added, “We thought we might shanghai you for an early glass of wine. Curt has information to share about some evidence he’s collected from South Texas.”

  “Not exactly collected,” Curt said hastily when that cool gaze turned on him. “I was included in a press briefing on the Valley papers, but it’s all public knowledge.”

  “Then I’ll be informed as well,” Sinclair pointed out.

  “Eventually. It might help to have the information now, especially if Dr. Doyle is collating all the data.”

  Sinclair frowned. “How do you know that? I literally just retained her.”

  “You can blame that on me,” Emm inserted. “We ran across one another outside, and when we saw the boxes, well, they were marked evidence. . . .”

  Now that glare turned back on her. “Which you are to stay away from, correct?”

  Emm intended to count to ten, but she only made it to five. She lowered her voice to be sure only Sinclair and Curt could hear her, but her tone was no less severe. “Look, Mr. Sinclair, we’ll get much further if we work together. Surely you’ve figured out by now I’m not the type to stand around and do nothing when someone I love has been kidnapped and probably forced into a despicable trade. I am excellent at research.” She rummaged in her capacious bag and pulled out a thick sheaf of papers, holding it up for Sinclair to see. “This is the Texas Human Trafficking Prevention Task Force report from December 2012. The final recommendations are summed up in the words of Attorney General Eric Holder.”

  Clearing her throat, Emm read from the first page of the report’s conclusion: “‘Human Trafficking is not just a global problem. It’s a national crisis—one that every parent, every teacher, every policymaker, and every law enforcement official must work to understand—and must help to address.’”

  She crammed the report back into her purse and stabbed a thumb into her chest. “Policy maker, that’s me. While protecting historic resources is not strictly speaking being a first responder, we have had cases where we’ve dealt with immigrant and human trafficking victims in abandoned buildings and had to coordinate with other federal agencies.” When she saw the disagreement trembling on Sinclair’s tongue, she took an aggressive step forward and raised her voice. “And the attorney general of the United States, while not my direct superviser, is certainly somewhere in my chain of command . . . and yours.”

  Sinclair looked at Curt as if pleading for support, but he seemed to have a strong interest in the plaques on the wall.

  With a rueful laugh, Sinclair held up both hands in surrender. “Shall we agree to a mutual information sharing? With the understanding that whatever intel we exchange not leave our little trio.”

  Emm frowned. “I have to let the Baltimore detectives know what’s going on. I promised them I would.”

  “Can you at least trust me with that much?” Sinclair groused. “It’s part of my job to keep other agencies in the loop . . . My God, what a control freak.”

  This last was muttered, but Emm heard it. She had to bite back her response that he was the one who’d taken total control of her in her own hotel room last night, but the memory colored her cheeks. When his eyes narrowed a bit, she turned toward the door. “Very well, then, shall we find a quiet spot for a glass of wine?”

  “Let me get my hat,” Sinclair muttered, marching back to his office.

  Curt eyed that starched spine, then lifted an interested eyebrow at Emm.

  “None of your business,” she preempted the very reporterlike question she saw him about to utter about the sparks flying between her and Sinclair. “I’ll see you at the bar.”

  On the short drive back downtown, Emm gripped the wheel tightly, hoping that among the three of them they could stumble across something, anything, that would lead to Yancy and Jennifer. For the umpteenth time, she uttered a silent prayer for the safety of her sister and niece.

  On the outskirts of Mexico City, Yancy Russell patted the heads of the three Rottweilers she’d long ago befriended, tossing them the dog biscuits she’d filched from the kitchen. This secluded estate, on the hills outside Mexico City, was such a fortress that it had taken her months to learn how to circumvent its defenses. The corner of the vast gardens was the only place invisible to the electronic eyes surveying the entire compound. She only knew this because she’d saved her pocket change, doled out to her every week by her “benefactor,” Arturo, to bribe one of the security techs who periodically came in to maintain and tweak the equipment. One of them, an aging expat American hippie with a guitar tattooed on his forearm, had been susceptible to her smiles and wiles. When she could duck her own constant companion, aka jailer, several times she’d joined him in the kitchen for fajitas and mojitos.

  The kitchen staff had long ago turned a blind eye to her little rebellions against Arturo, for in that way she was no different from the innumerable beauty queens, models, and barrio girls who became the mistresses of various cartel leaders. Their careers were short, dictated by their youth and beauty, and to a woman they utilized every female guile at their disposal to milk jewels, designer clothes, cars, apartments, and even trust funds from their benefactors.

  Yancy, the servants of the vast mansion agreed, was older and smarter, though still very lovely. If she wanted to share a drink with the other help, it was a small transgression in a kingdom where food tasters and armies with advanced tactical training were the favored vassals of the patron. She was just a Yanqui cast out from her own wealthy family who was lucky the patron had been at the merchandise drop when she came in and had taken a fancy to her. It was said he’d noted her resemblance to the pretty blonde his son had snatched for himself months earlier, and he’d been titillated to think of the fun he and Tomas could have with a gorgeous American mother-daughter combo.

  And, since in the last five months or so Yancy had never tried to escape or, from all the eyes and ears on alert wherever she went, even tried to use a phone other than the restricted one they allowed her, her jailers had relaxed enough to leave her alone occasionally. Besides, as she herself had told Arturo on more than one occasion, she’d never leave Jennifer behind. Because Jennifer had tried to escape several times, and slit her wrists once, she was kept under constant armed guard. Yancy was allowed to see her on supervised visits once a week.

  And that visit was tomorrow, and was the reason for her risky maneuver. Yancy patted the dogs again, hitched her tight red silk dress above her thighs, kicked off her heels, and climbed up the brick wall. She’d always loved rock climbing, and from a distance this wall looked too smooth to scale, but there were breaks where the mortar was loose, and with the stakes so high, she had no choice but to chance it.

  She slipped once, scraping a knuckle as she scrabbled to hold on, but using the upper-body strength she maintained by calisthenics in her room when she was alone, she topped the wall, dangled her legs down the first six feet, and dropped the remaining four feet to the asphalt road. She knelt down, staying in the shadow for a moment to get her bearings between the cameras watching the road and the wall. She ignored the slight wo
und on her hand, aware that it was still bleeding—Arturo had been slow to get her very expensive meds for her in the last month or so, and she hadn’t been able to take them consistently. The little money she’d saved would have to go toward the pills for Jennifer, which were also expensive and hard to get in Mexico.

  She confirmed there were no cars in sight and then darted across the road. She rounded the corner and went through a small copse of trees to a tiny clearing, expecting the little red Fiat to be there, where it always was. Her heart sank when she saw the empty clearing. What now?

  While she stood there debating, she heard a very smooth, powerful engine approaching the bend. Crap; she recognized that sound. Only an armored Rolls-Royce Corniche could sound that quiet and powerful all at once, which meant Arturo had returned early from his meeting.

  Her heart pounding, she ducked behind a tree until she heard the electric gates open, and then she tore back across the road, using a stump to vault herself as high as she could toward the top of the wall. She scrambled down the other side and high tailed it toward the back door that led to the kitchen, plucking a few roses from the lush grounds on the way. She stuck her dirty feet into her red stilettos, glad she’d selected pumps so her soles were covered, and entered the kitchen, calling for a vase.

  She wrapped a paper towel around her hand to staunch the blood, but it was still welling up. As she arranged the flowers, she heard her name being called in that mellow basso voice that in other circumstances she might have yearned to hear. “In the kitchen!” she called back in Spanish. His English was broken at best, another reason, she was sure, he’d selected someone proficient in Spanish as his latest mistress.

  Arturo entered, smiling indulgently when he saw her trimming rose stems, but his smile faded when he saw the bloody paper towel on her hand. He took her hand and removed the towel to look at the small wound. “I’ve told you before to have the maids cut the flowers for you, precisely for this reason,” he scolded. He gently wrapped a fresh paper towel around her hand, pressing on her cut to try to staunch the blood. His dark brown gaze, which could go brandy hot with lust and the next instant take on the cold glare of a snake, traveled down her form, pausing on a couple of snags on the tight silk.

  She ducked her head over her task, muttering, “They never get the right ones. I snagged my dress on the bushes. I was going to change before you came, but you’re early.” She put the last rose in the vase with her free hand and stepped back, eyeing her handiwork as she pulled gently away from his touch. She’d learned early on that resistance only made him more brutal.

  He slipped the towel off her hand. The blood had slowed to a dot. “Good. I will send María into town for more of your medicine. You’re out?”

  She nodded, cupping his cheek with a faux tenderness and gratitude he seemed to take as genuine. At least so far.

  Mollified, he embraced her, muttering, “Pobrecita, idiota,” and kissed her ruthlessly on the mouth. She did what captive women have been doing since time immemorial: She stifled an urge to kick him in the balls and kissed him back, running her hands through thick hair graying at the temples.

  She had one imperative: to survive one more day and to protect her daughter until they could escape . . . And with her second breath she gave a plea to the only other person on the planet who really loved her and Jennifer. “Emm, I hope you haven’t given up on us. . . .”

  In downtown Amarillo, Emm, Curt, and Ross sat near the back of the dark little bar, each nursing a glass of wine. The exchange of information had begun slowly, with Emm sharing what she’d learned in the library. “Girls had been disappearing in Maryland long before Jennifer, and I found at least one victim who was originally from the Baltimore area but was found in the Texas Panhandle . . . Baltimore could be a hub for this particular group.”

  Sinclair shared what the lab had deduced so far from the warehouse of confiscated items. “We traced clothes, purses, shoes, even some of the makeup, but other than your sister’s custom weed pipe, most of the things were cheap knockoffs sold in any city in the nation. We’re trying to trace them but haven’t found anything of interest yet.”

  “So that’s why you hired Dr. Doyle?” Emm asked.

  “Partly. It’s a massive amount of evidence and I just don’t have manpower enough to thoroughly vet everything. She’d also already been retained by the DEA to assist with the Los Lobos cartel on the drug-smuggling end of the spectrum, so it just made sense to share her fee.”

  Curt’s eyes narrowed. “You think this Los Lobos gang is the one behind the human trafficking in Baltimore?”

  Sinclair shrugged. “I can’t make that connection yet, but we have confirmed they’ve broadened their focus in the last few years to include trafficking.”

  “How do you know that?” Curt asked.

  Sinclair hesitated, his eyes taking on an icy sheen in the dim glow of the shaded lamps. “Off the record?”

  “I told you I wouldn’t print any of this,” Curt protested.

  “Yeah, well, you said that before I found my name and one of my operative’s names broadcast all over Texas in your glad rag.”

  Curt sipped the last of his wine and placed it just so on his napkin, his bright head bent but a flush coloring his cheekbones.

  Looking between the two men, Emm intervened. “My niece and sister won’t care who gets credit for what . . . if they’re even still alive. Our only chance of finding them is to work together . . . Please . . . Can you tell us how you know the Los Lobos cartel is in the human trafficking trade?” She focused on Sinclair.

  He shoved his half-finished wineglass back and said shortly, “Surveillance picked up a semi crossing back into the US from Mexico. ICE agents found a false bottom in it that was empty, but there were traces of human hair and no drug residue whatever. The driver was a known accomplice of the Los Lobos gang. We arrested him, but he’s refused to talk even under threats of life imprisonment, which, frankly, we probably can’t make stick without more evidence. We can’t deport him because he’s a US citizen.” He saw the words trembling on Emm’s tongue and held up his hand. “Of course we took samples, but in most cases these girls are young, with no record, so we don’t have DNA on them to cross-reference anyway.”

  “Yancy has a record. Disorderly conduct, possession, even a shoplifting charge when she was younger,” Emm pointed out. “It’s possible they took samples on her last arrest.”

  Sinclair nodded. “I know, it’s in her file. If we get any matches, we’ll know at least where she went across, but this semi was searched just a month ago, long after she and your niece disappeared.”

  “And were you able to trace ethnicity on any of the . . . hair fibers?” Emm hated the word merchandise, and victim was equally stark. “I know DNA tracing has advanced hugely in the last five to ten years.”

  Sinclair nodded. “We found seven fibers, two of one vic, the other five across the spectrum in ethnicity: Irish, English, Scandinavian, American Indian, Hispanic, Jewish.”

  “In other words, the hairs could belong to just about anyone in the US,” Emm said.

  Sinclair nodded grimly.

  Curt asked, “Were you able to trace when and where the driver came across the first time?”

  “Of course. He checked out with a full load of manufacturing equipment for a new factory in Sinaloa. The agents who cleared him vaguely recalled the vehicle and driver. Both said they heard zip from the cargo bay, smelled nothing, and the dogs didn’t alert anyone.” Sinclair fiddled with his napkin in a nervous way uncharacteristic of him, which Emm realized spoke volumes about his state of mind. “Tests indicated the occupants of that cavity were so drugged they were undoubtedly comatose, so they couldn’t make a sound. And any scent the dogs might have picked up on was disguised by cans of paint and chemicals, part of the shipment. It was also the type of truck with built-in vent fans that are on continuously.”

  Emm pictured a stifling cargo hold, pitch black, with barely enough air to breathe, and women�
��no, girls—bouncing against one another, the hell of where they were still better than the hell of where they were headed. She looked down to disguise her tears as she thought of what Yancy and Jennifer must have done in the last year to survive. If they survived . . .

  Sinclair’s hand on top of hers was comforting in a way she couldn’t think about right now, but she knew she needed a clear head, so she equally gently withdrew her hand from his. Again, Curt looked curiously between them.

  “All right, I suggest we all take a week to work the case and then see where we are,” Emm proposed.

  Sinclair just looked at her, but she knew him well enough by now to read disapproval behind that opaque stare.

  “I’m not doing anything but research. Heck, it’s no different from what I do in my job, or what I had to do to get my PhD.” When he still looked at her, she snapped, “If you want to stop me, there’s only one way.” She crossed her wrists over the table in front of him.

  “Don’t tempt me. A few weeks in lockup would do you good.” He stood so quickly the table leg scraped on the floor, but he only picked up his hat and pinned her with a gaze that was very clear now, and pure threat. “There’s a reckoning coming between the two of us, whether either of us likes it or not. Watch your step, because Rangers are pretty touchy about people interfering in their investigations.” Smashing his black hat on his head, Sinclair stalked out of the bar.

  This time, Curt ignored her don’t-ask signal. “Why don’t the two of you get a room and get that part of this equation settled?”

  Emm glared at him, tossing down enough cash to cover the tab. In another measure of Sinclair’s unusual behavior, she realized he’d forgotten to pay for his drink. “Don’t be crude.”

  “Hey, babe, I’m a reporter. I see what I see. And I’ve never seen Ross Sinclair so off balance because of a woman.”

  Emm stood and grabbed her car keys. “It’s not me, it’s the case.” She stalked out, trying to ignore the scornful sound he made in her wake.