Ross knew his chain was being yanked, but he still had to know. “Dammit, what happened?”
José stopped at the door and turned to face his boss. “They tore the church down, and one of the old women died. A year later, a gas leak in the new church reached the candles as the alcalde was praying. They only found pieces of his body.” José steadied the tray again. “With no church as its center, the village died with the old women. Only a few paisanos live there now, and they say they hear the whispers of the dead every night where the old church stood.”
“Is this when you crossed the border into the United States?”
“Sí, a few months later.”
Ross waited, but José was silent, obviously reflecting. The sparkle had faded from his eyes, leaving them somber.
Ross demanded, “Okay, you old buzzard, spit it out. Your little stories always have a moral. You should have been named Aesop.”
“Even in Mexico City, one of the largest cities in the world, it is the old buildings that are the heart of the city,” José said simply. “It is so easy in this country to tear things down . . . but do we give up a little of our spirit with every broken brick?” He exited.
For the dozenth time, Ross reflected that José was a wise old soul for a man in his early sixties. What Jose said could be extrapolated to include the Sinclair buildings, but they were hardly the center of Amarillo, and they certainly weren’t holy. Besides, the decision wasn’t just his. . . . He turned to the catering quote he had for the reunion, wishing he could turn away from his sexual urges as easily. He really had to give that widow he sometimes “dated” a call. . . .
When she got back to her hotel room and checked her e-mail, Emm was glad to see the message from Burt, the structural engineer. She reviewed his proposal, noted he’d copied Sinclair, and e-mailed both of them back that two days from now would be fine to do the examination, provided Ross Sinclair approved the time and materials listed on the proposal. Emm was surprised to see that confirmation had come almost immediately from Ross.
Because she was pretty sure he didn’t do personal e-mails at work, she figured he must be at his ranch computer. She tried to envision him, lord of his domain in that big, lonely house, feeling a pang of longing to fill it with their mutual laughter. She squelched the impulse, logging off her computer and shutting it down. Just business, she told herself. Two days to the actual survey, probably about a week to get the results, perhaps another day to write her own findings and present them to the family. By then, she’d heard, much of the Sinclair family would be in Amarillo at their annual reunion. She made a mental note to request an actual time slot from Ross, as he’d already suggested she speak to all of them.
As she slipped into her teddy, yawning, she reflected that she’d be back in Baltimore within a couple of weeks. She waited for a sense of relief, but it didn’t come. West Texas had grown on her. The hot spring days yielding to soft nights in the sixties, the flat prairies offset by red outcroppings. The glorious sunsets, colors deeper and more intense than any she was accustomed to because of the residual dust in the air. Ross had recommended she take a guided tour of Palo Duro Canyon before she left, and she just might do that. Usually after a full day like this one, she’d fall asleep quickly, but this time she tossed and turned, finally snapping on the TV, but she barely listened to the late-night talk show.
The true source of her restlessness stood a bit over six feet in custom cowboy boots and an expensive Stetson. Once she left here she’d likely never see Ross Sinclair again, and the knowledge haunted her.
Idiot! she scorned herself. You just landed the job you’ve been dreaming about since you were a child and you go and get yourself enamored of a Texas lawman, one who’s never been married to boot. She had to smile at her own accidental choice of words, but the smile faded quickly as another, far less pleasurable image, came to mind.
Yancy . . . Jennifer. She couldn’t get the thought out of her head that both of them were either dead or wished they were.... If she left here, where the trail was most likely to lead across the border, she’d probably never see them again either. Two victims lost in one of the most heinous and yet hardest to solve crimes in the entire world. The cartels were, despite their brutality, business enterprises. They operated on a risk-reward basis, like every other business, and sex trafficking was high reward and low risk. Not only were the victims hard to trace but the revenue stream the women produced lasted for years.
Knowing how Yancy would struggle against such debasement, Emm closed her eyes and whispered yet another fervent prayer that the information sharing she was doing with Dr. Doyle and Ross would yield a hot lead. And Curt? Emm frowned and beat her pillow. Surely her suspicions were wrong. She’d been his friend for over five years and knew him for a gifted writer with an instinctive nose for news. Yet she couldn’t forget that he drove a Porsche 911 Carrera and lived in a penthouse in one of the nicest parts of San Antonio. And she knew for a fact that, like most dailies, the San Antonio paper for which he wrote most often struggled with declining circulation and dwindling ad revenue, and had been forced to lay off staff and even cut salaries and perks.
While she couldn’t trace his bank accounts, she might be able to trace his movements. His car was very distinctive, and the last time she’d seen him in Baltimore he’d driven it up from Texas. She could call the Baltimore cops and ask them to run his plate through all the surveillance databases to see if there were any hits near downtown Baltimore at the time Jennifer and, later, Yancy, disappeared, or the other two girls from Baltimore, for that matter.
Feeling better now she finally had a plan, Emm dozed off after snapping off the TV. Dreams came to her, as they usually did, and they were troubled ones, vividly depicting Yancy and Jennifer chained to beds with faceless men laboring over them, and more standing in line. In her nightmare, a scream pierced their cries of despair, and her viewpoint shifted to another bed, where another woman was held down by a heavy Latino man. At first she couldn’t tell who it was, but he finally moved aside and she saw the victim’s face . . . The scream reverberated in her dream, and only when she knocked her head against the headboard did she hear her own scream as she started awake.
Shaking, she got out of bed and went into the bathroom to bathe her flushed face, telling herself over and over that it was just a nightmare. Must be that late cup of coffee she’d had.
But the water didn’t help much. Nightmare or not, the victim’s face was all too familiar: her own. Trying to shake the visceral fear, telling herself she didn’t believe in omens, Emm snapped the lights off and got back into bed. It was a long time before she slept.
At about the same time, Yancy gave her sexiest smile to the men outside Jennifer’s door, but they were unmoved. They were among the cartel’s oldest and most loyal soldiers and stared at her blankly when she lifted a bag filled with toiletries, letting them look inside. “I’m just bringing her some cosmetics she asked for. Just a minute?” It wasn’t time for her usual visit, but Arturo was gone again on appointments, and she’d managed to filch a few pills from the woman who supplied the drugs to the brothels. Jennifer needed them, and she needed them now. Arturo’s son Tomás had just returned from a long business trip to the States and they’d not seen much of him in the last few days as he stayed in his room with Jennifer, but he’d finally surfaced to go into the city.
The guards fingered through the female pots and tubes. She’d slipped the three pills into one of the compacts and hid a sign of relief when they didn’t open it. “We will give them to her.”
“Uh, yes, but I need to ask her about something. She wanted a new pair of shoes for the fiesta, but I need to see her dress to match it properly.”
The two men shared a look, eyeing her up and down. The upcoming fiesta was a very big deal to the entire household, with many of the far-flung cartel members in attendance, and Arturo had told his staff to be sure the two Yanqui women were dressed for the occasion.
One guard spun his fin
ger in a circle, and she obediently did a 360-degree turn. The other patted her down, lingering a little too long near her breasts, but she pretended indifference as she’d become so adept at doing, when she really wanted to kick his balls up so high he’d have a most unsightly new Adam’s apple.
The older man, obviously the shift leader, gave her a last warning look and took a set of keys from his pocket to unlock not one, not two, but three locks. Yancy’s heart sank as she realized they’d added a new dead bolt since her last visit five days ago. That meant only one thing—Jennifer had tried to escape again. Dammit, didn’t she realize she only made them watch her more closely?
“Cinco minutos,” the leader said, opening the door and shoving her inside with the bag.
The room was so dark Yancy had to stand there and blink before her eyes adjusted. “Jenn?” she said softly.
She heard a stirring of the covers, and then even in the dark room she caught the shine of her daughter’s beautiful golden hair. She crossed quickly to the bed and snapped on the bedside lamp.
Jennifer’s mascara had run and she rubbed her eyes, smearing it further. “What time is it? How’d you get in?”
“I told them I needed to see your dress for the fiesta so I could figure out the best shoes to buy you next time I go into town. Always use as much truth as possible. . . .” Yancy quickly dumped the cosmetics out and opened the compact, showing the three small pills. “Here, let me get you some water—” She hurried to the bathroom, but by the time she returned a few seconds later, Jennifer had downed not one but two of the pills, so desperate that she’d swallowed them dry. “Jennifer, you shouldn’t overdose on these damn things. You might spot, and Tomás would know what you’re doing.”
“I don’t care, I hope he kills me,” she said dully, lying back on the pillows. “All I want to do is sleep.”
Yancy saw that Jennifer’s dinner tray was untouched. She sat down on the side of the bed and took her daughter’s hands, squeezing them tightly. “Jenn, you have to hold on. I think we might both be able to slip out during the fiesta. There’s no way they can watch us as closely with so many guests. We just have to be smart about it. We can hide in someone’s trunk as they’re leaving. I’m working on it now.”
“Then where do we go? With no money and no friends?”
Yancy bit her lip. “Once we make it to the city, we can go to the US Embassy. I have a couple of jewels I can barter, and so do you.”
“And you don’t think Arturo and Tomás will have every single vehicle stopped and searched when we disappear? You know half of the Mexican authorities are on his payroll. Once they get us back . . .” Jennifer began crying again, burying her face in her pillow. “I’m so tired . . .” she murmured, and then she was asleep again.
Yancy realized she’d taken Xanax from the pill bottle beside the bed. Tomás, the bastard, gave her the meds to keep her quiet when he was gone, and she feared her gifted, honor student daughter had become addicted. It was better than cocaine, she tried to tell herself, but her eyes welled up despite her best intentions.
Yancy stroked her daughter’s bright head, tears falling hotly. She was having a hard enough time controlling her own fear and hatred; how could she keep Jennifer strong enough to escape when she herself was only holding on by a single emotional thread? Then the door opened. Yancy wiped her eyes on her sleeve and turned with a blank smile. “I’m coming.”
The older man eyed the pill bottle beside the bed, the sleeping girl, and Yancy’s tearstained face. Something that might have been sympathy flashed in his eyes. Yancy saw it, realizing he must have a daughter of his own, but she also knew he’d never betray his jefe. He merely jerked his head at the door. Yancy scuttled, only then realizing she’d forgotten to look at Jennifer’s fiesta dress.
As she went downstairs, she saw Arturo enter the hallway and look up at her.
She faltered, recognizing that expression, but merely went down the stairs with that hip-swaying gait he liked. She kissed his cheek, asking him about his meetings, as a good mistress should.
He shrugged. “You saw your daughter without permission? Your meeting with her is not for several days.” Arturo smiled slightly, as if it was no big deal, but she knew that smile shielded a keen, active mind that was always assessing, looking for betrayal or advantage.
Yancy’s fallback with him was the same one that had saved her from many a beating or being auctioned off to the highest bidder: guarded honesty. “I’m sorry, but you know how worried I am about her . . . Do you think maybe we could cut back on her meds?”
His smile became rueful. He shrugged elegant shoulders. “My son insists, and she is his. . . .” He trailed off.
Yancy said bitterly, before she could stop herself, “Puta.”
His smile dropped away clean, as if she’d sliced it off his face. “I’ve been too lenient with you, mujer. You want to see how a puta is really treated?” Grabbing her by the hair, he pulled her into the living room and slammed the door. He ripped her dress down to her waist and shoved her scant bra up to suckle harshly at her nipples, bumping his erection into her as he shoved her back on the couch. He fumbled at his pants.
Usually, she suffered his attentions with feigned enjoyment, but this time worry for Jennifer and fear that her delicate dance was about to come to a violent end combined to make her temper flare. Teeth bared, she leaped back up as he unzipped and kicked him in the shin with her stiletto. She would have preferred hitting him higher, but even in her anger she knew better than that.
His high cheekbones flushed with either rage or lust—she didn’t know or care—and he caught her foot in his hand and used it for leverage, shoving her off balance over the plush arm of the couch. He tilted her hips up, moved her scrap of underwear aside, and took her there, more brutally than she could remember, calling her puta all the while. And to her horror, she heard him chuckling as he did so, and realized her defiance had only inflamed him.
She hated him then, as never before. She tried to shove him off, but he was far larger and stronger, harder than he had been in some time, and finally she subsided.
But this time she made no pretense of response.
This time, with every brutal stroke, she counted the ways she would kill him when she had Jennifer safe.
CHAPTER 7
Emm was still asleep the next morning when her cell phone rang. Yawning, snapping awake from yet another bad dream, she grabbed it. “Hello . . .” She cleared her husky voice and tried again. “Hello.”
A brief silence on the other end was broken by the rich male chuckle she recognized. “I always knew you were a dilettante.” Ross waited. As usual, he was goading her.
She bolted upright. “What do you want?”
“Cranky before we have our coffee, are we?”
How did he know that? She looked at the clock beside the bed and was shocked when she saw it was almost eleven. “I didn’t realize it was so late. I couldn’t fall asleep last night.”
“I can call back later.” Now he sounded genuinely contrite.
She put her feet on the floor. “No, I need to get up anyway and finish some docs for my boss. What can I do for you?”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday and I’ve decided to take the day off. I was . . . wondering if you’d like to go with me to meet a couple of my friends. I think you’d like Jasmine . . .” He sounded almost hesitant, unusual for the arrogant Ranger captain.
She was touched and wary at the same time, but she was so eager to see him again that she agreed before she realized it, “Sure. When and where?”
“I’ll pick you up at eleven in the morning. My friends, the Fosters, have a ranch outside town and they’ve invited me—that is, us—for lunch. They have a new baby boy I thought you might enjoy meeting. See you soon.” He hung up.
Emm slid the bar across her phone, disconnecting the call. She stared into her sleep-puffy face in the mirror, her heartbeat accelerating at the knowledge she’d soon be seeing him again, and this time in an
entirely social setting. What happened to his maxim, “Just business?”
Idiot, why didn’t you tell him no? And why the heck was he even asking her to such an intimate luncheon with what were obviously some of his best friends?
That entire day crawled for Ross, but in between administrative tasks such as disciplining one of his men, assigning two others to new cases, and adding new DEA-sourced evidence to the human trafficking case file, he couldn’t stop thinking about Emm. He’d invited her to join him for lunch on impulse, partly because he knew Jasmine and Chad would finagle a meeting if he didn’t, but also partly for a far more basic reason: He had to see how she was around little Trey.
Despite what he’d told Jasmine, Ross badly wanted kids. His father was still sharp as a tack well into his seventies, but Ross knew he needed to start a family soon if he wanted one at all. And he still did...
Most women were instinctively nurturing, but Elaine had been sadly lacking in that area, even going so far as to inform him she wasn’t sure she wanted kids. That had accelerated the knock-down, drag-out fight that led to their breakup, but as devastating as it had been at the time, now he was glad he’d not been caught in a doomed relationship; plus his unhappiness had partly led to his first trip to Texas.
Now, over twenty years later, another pampered rich girl had quite literally roared into his life in a 100k sports car driving 125 miles an hour. Since she’d revealed her sensual side in her hotel room, he’d started wondering—could she be the only woman since Elaine he could contemplate spending his life with? The thought scared him, but something drove him to find out anyway. She came from an even richer, more influential family, but her sincere concern for her niece indicated she must have a close relationship to the girl. Yet bearing and raising an infant and being an aunt to a teenager were two different things, so he’d decided to go through with this little test.
Sinclair Justice Page 10