She shook her head to clear it, trying not to think about the first time.
That hadn’t ended well.
Leah checked her email and saw nothing urgent and, after a final scan of her desk, gathered her purse and messenger bag again and made for the door, tossing a salute to Talbert through his office window as he berated some unfortunate over the phone, her mind replaying the unusual message and wondering what could be so sensitive that Sánchez needed to discuss it with her in person.
Chapter 3
Leah arrived at the mall as the local high school marching band was finishing its performance in the relentless broil of the late summer morning, the sun a blinding orb in an azure sky devoid of clouds. A new parking lot with thirty or so vehicles scattered around the periphery shimmered from the heat, and a handful of minor dignitaries stood by a ribbon, looking like they’d rather be anywhere else on the planet.
She killed the engine and stepped from the car. The swelter assaulted her as she made her way to the gathering. The toot of a tuba and snap of a snare drum signaled the end of an uninspired rendition of The Yellow Rose of Texas played to a crowd of largely bored unemployed laborers, taking advantage of free lemonade and snacks, plus a huddle of beaming band member parents who clapped like they were attending a Broadway premiere.
The mayor offered a smattering of applause before stepping to the ribbon, accompanied by a local beauty queen in a ball gown wholly inappropriate for the outdoor event, and what Leah guessed was the developer – a lanky, tanned man with the look of a golf pro who dabbled in real estate between tournaments. The man grinned at the gathering, displaying a full set of blindingly white teeth that would have been the envy of a Kardashian, and launched into a speech about community, diversity, opportunity, ultimately finishing with a rousing plea to the Almighty to bless this proud undertaking. Leah had to bite her lip to keep from rolling her eyes. It was a frigging strip mall, not the Sistine Chapel, but to hear his oration it was the eighth wonder of the world.
The mayor, his brow beaded with sweat, his suit inadvisable given the temperature, went next, and his speech was thankfully short. When he was done, Miss Armadillo or whatever handed him a pair of oversized scissors and he cut the ribbon strung across the doors of the grocery store that was the anchor tenant, and more applause signaled that the festivities had reached their dizzy crescendo.
Leah circulated among the few shop owners who stood beside their storefronts like dazed night creatures exposed to light, waiting with banners announcing grand opening sales and promising unbelievable discounts. She made small talk and got a few obligatory quotes she could have invented while in the john, and after taking down their names, put away her notepad and felt for her cell phone.
The Mexican line carried a hum of static, and the ringing warbled tremulously in her ear. It was answered by the same voice that had left the message for her, a scratchy baritone that sounded challenging with just a single syllable.
“Si?”
“Mr. Sánchez? León Sánchez?”
“Yes,” Sánchez said, switching to English.
“This is Leah Mason. You left a message for me earlier?”
“Ah, Miss Mason. Of course. Thank you for calling me back.”
Leah waited, hoping he would get to the point before she melted in the sun. She cleared her throat expectantly. “Sure.”
“As I said, I read your article with great interest. It presented many of the questions we’ve all had about the case of the missing girls,” Sánchez said, his English oddly formal. “I was instrumental in the investigations that led to the prosecutions being brought, but was never satisfied with the resolution.”
Leah’s ears perked up. “You were with the police?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“You mentioned that you’d like to meet?”
There was a long pause, and Leah felt a bead of sweat trickle from her hairline and work its way down her spine.
“If you can, yes. I have information…I can’t discuss it on the phone, but if we can meet somewhere today…I have a file you must see.”
“A file?”
“That’s all I can say.”
“Why me? Why don’t you take it to one of the papers down there?”
“No one cares. They are all corrupt. Nobody here would print this story. It would be killed immediately.”
Leah considered his words, her curiosity piqued. “Can you come to the U.S.?”
“That would be difficult for me. It would be better if you could come to Juárez.”
The thought of crossing the border didn’t thrill Leah. She’d been enough times to hate the place, and hadn’t been back in years. Bad as she thought El Paso was, Ciudad Juárez was a whole different level of despair and poverty, and she had little interest in subjecting herself to it if she could avoid it.
“I don’t know, Mr. Sánchez. I have a pretty full day,” she said, eyeing the throng in front of the grocery store dispersing now that the free show was over.
“I can assure you it would be worth the effort. This…it is the story of a lifetime. No exaggeration.”
“Can you be more specific?”
Another long pause. The faint humming on the line buzzed in her ear. A jet soared overhead on takeoff, and she winced and jammed a finger in her other ear, straining to hear the Mexican’s response.
“It is not safe to talk over the phone.”
Leah sighed. Fine. Part of her job involved melodrama, and this guy was pouring it on thick. But there was something in his voice and his cautious words that commanded attention. He didn’t sound like a kook. She’d spoken to her share of nut jobs, and this was…different. Serious.
“I can be there in an hour and a half, tops. I have to get my passport, and I’d rather walk across than take my car and hassle with insurance. Is there someplace near the border we can meet?”
She could hear his breathing. “Yes. A cantina. Mi Ranchito. It is in the town center. Any taxi here can take you. They will all know the place.”
“Mi Ranchito,” she repeated. “Too far to walk from the bridge?”
“I’m afraid so. But a short ride.”
She glanced at her watch. “Want to say…one thirty?”
“Or two. I must get the file.”
“Fine. I’ll see you at two. How will I recognize you?”
“You won’t have to. I have seen your picture on the Internet.”
Leah disconnected and stared doubtfully at her phone. Going to Juárez when she was supposed to be covering the mall shindig was crazy, but her gut said that Señor Sánchez was the real deal. When he’d said that he had the story of a lifetime, she’d actually shivered. If he was pulling her leg, he deserved an Oscar, because she believed him. And if he’d been part of the original investigation of the girls, the mystery file might hold the key to breaking the story wide open.
God knew she needed a break – one big bombshell that could put her back on the industry radar rather than spending a career covering minor celebrity weddings and missing pets, tormented by the Wicked Witch of the Southwest.
Her heart beat faster as she slipped behind the recalcitrant car’s wheel and started the engine. She might have been thrown a few curveballs, but she was still at bat, and as long as she could swing, she was doing what she’d always wanted for a living, even if it was from the armpit office of the local fish wrap. The Juárez murders had been shocking and brutal, and her revisiting of the story had struck a chord. If she could follow it up with something nobody had ever seen before, it could be what she’d been dreaming of ever since her disastrous departure from the Herald.
Leah hurried home, thankful that her aunt was now closeted away with the AC blowing, watching her soap operas and crocheting more doilies that nobody wanted. Inside her apartment Leah ferreted around in her nightstand drawer and found her passport, issued when she’d moved to New York with visions of traveling the world in pursuit of the stories lesser reporters didn’t dare cover. Now its
unstamped, blank pages were just another reminder of how far she’d fallen since then. She slid it into her back pocket, changed into a clean top, and was out the door with just enough time to grab a hasty lunch and walk across the bridge at the Paso Del Norte border crossing.
The Puente Internacional was dense with pedestrians trudging over the dry riverbed that delineated the Mexican border. The fifteen-minute walk in the heat of the day felt like an hour’s forced march, and when she passed through the Mexican customs building, she sighed in relief. Leah stepped from the immigration checkpoint into a dusty haze of Juárez exhaust and contrasted the antiseptic U.S. side to the chaotic pandemonium of Mexico, with vendors hawking every manner of snack and junk to anyone who would listen and cars growling past, blaring their horns as tempers frayed in the heat. A sweating one-legged man with copper skin and clown makeup on his face juggled bowling pins by a line of taxis, his dog beside him with a party hat affixed to its head and a tip basket clenched in its jaws. Leah deposited a dollar into the basket, mainly for the dog’s sake, and continued to the head of the queue.
The cab driver knew Mi Ranchito and, after they negotiated a price, swung into traffic with suicidal abandon, Banda music screeching from the car radio.
“Do you have air conditioning?” Leah asked from the backseat.
“Oh, no, señorita, I’m sorry, ees broken. But the breeze is fresh from the windows, no?”
Leah shook her head. “No.”
“Ees no very far. You will see.”
The cantina was a seafood restaurant with garish pink paint and a palapa roof. Leah paid the driver and ducked into the shade of the interior. Only a few tables were occupied, all by locals, and a young waiter led her to a corner beneath a ceiling fan that afforded slim ventilation. She checked the time, ordered a soda, and thanked the universe that she only had twenty minutes to wait before Sánchez was due.
Two hours later she paid her bill and stalked to the entrance, where the waiter had called her a taxi. She’d tried Sánchez’s number three times, with no answer, and had ignored a call from Margaret a half hour earlier, not wanting to deal with it. Leah fumed at having been suckered into a wasted trip as the cab wended its way back to the border. She’d squandered precious time she didn’t have on the empty promise of the story of a lifetime that had turned out to be a hoax.
Chapter 4
El Paso, Texas
Leah checked the trace of mascara beneath each eye in her rearview mirror and slid her glasses back in place before easing from behind the wheel and climbing out of the Malibu. She’d made it back from Mexico and returned to the office only to run into Margaret first thing, who’d predictably wanted to know why she hadn’t responded to her calls. Leah had told her that she’d run out of battery. Margaret had looked only half convinced, but had only asked that Leah not leave work until she’d written her piece on the mall opening, which had taken Leah all of twenty minutes to churn out.
She’d foregone any research after work and gone home to freshen up before a dinner she had been dreading: her old boyfriend Bill had been pestering her for weeks to go to a trendy new restaurant near the El Paso Museum of Art, and she’d finally acquiesced just to shut him up. It had seemed harmless enough at the time she’d agreed, but after a day like she’d had, she wanted to do nothing more than climb into a quart of ice cream in front of the TV, not make small talk with an ex who’d never been a great fit in the first place and who, although he claimed to value being “just friends,” she worried would be trying to pressure her into more.
Leah brushed her bangs out of her eyes and walked to a red canopy over a darkened doorway. Bill was standing inside, and she turned so his greeting kiss landed on her cheek. If he was disappointed, he didn’t show it. The maître d’ escorted them to a square koa wood table with contemporary low-back chairs and waited while they sat before presenting them with two aluminum clipboards with a single sheet of menu attached to each.
An emaciated waiter with a severe bi-level dyed black haircut and a moue of ennui for greeting looked them over like a banker considering them for a loan.
“May I get you started with something to drink? Cocktail? Wine?” The young man paused. “Beer?” he asked, pronouncing the word with distaste.
“I’ll take an Amstel Light,” Leah said after scanning the list of beverages at the bottom of the menu.
“Me too,” Bill said, and the server nodded slightly and flounced away.
Leah ran down the column of entrées and selected poached salmon. Bill went for a filet, and when the server reappeared with two sweating bottles of beer and poured them into tall glasses, they ordered. The young man eyed them unblinkingly before sighing as though disappointed by their choices.
They watched him depart with their clipboards, and Bill held his glass aloft for a toast.
“It’s good to finally have a chance to see you one-on-one, Leah,” he said.
“Cheers right back atcha, Bill,” she replied with a half-smile.
He took a long pull of beer and set the glass down. “Didn’t see you all day.”
“I was covering a mall opening for Margaret.” She hesitated before continuing. “And I had to go down to Juárez to chase down a lead.”
Bill’s mouth dropped open. “Juárez? Why there? Was it something about your story?”
Leah nodded and told him about the call. When she finished, he was frowning.
“You shouldn’t have gone. It’s dangerous as hell, even now that the worst of the cartel wars are over.”
“It’s not like I was trying to buy a couple of kilos, Bill. It was just a cab ride and a fruitless wait in a stifling hellhole.”
Bill shook his head. “I’m surprised Margaret asked you to do that.”
Leah looked away. “She didn’t exactly tell me to.”
His eyes narrowed and he studied her. “So this was you going off on your own?”
“I’m researching my story, Bill. You know, the first installment of which got the paper more visibility than it’s had in years? That story?”
“About the Juárez murders. Which involves killers, last time I checked. And which your piece hinted are still out there. So tell me again how going to Juárez, where they’d be, to meet some anonymous voice on the phone was a good idea?”
“You have to follow up leads, Bill. It’s what reporters do.”
“Not at this paper. You’ve been watching too many movies. What reporters, real reporters, do if they want to keep their jobs is what their bosses tell them to do.” He paused. “Didn’t New York teach you anything?”
Leah’s face hardened. “That’s not relevant, Bill, and you know it.”
He held up his hands in a sign of surrender. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that…well, you went off on your own that time, too. It didn’t work out the way you planned, did it? And that wasn’t even murder or anything.”
She controlled her breathing and willed away the anger she felt rising in her gorge. Her face flushed and she placed her napkin on the table and stood. “I’m going to use the ladies’ room.”
“Leah,” Bill began, but she shook her head.
“Leave it there, Bill. I’ll be back in a few.”
He opened his mouth to say something, but appeared to reconsider it. Leah made for the restrooms at the rear of the restaurant, past chic urbanites doing their best Manhattan impressions with varying degrees of success.
The thought slowed her. Bill had a point – but the wound was still raw, and it wasn’t his place to rub her nose in it. She knew she’d crossed a line when she hadn’t obeyed her boss’s instructions to drop the investigation. When her digging brought the world down around her, it had been too late for regrets, and she’d found herself out on the street with no job, no money, and no prospects.
And now she was back where she’d started, only worse. She’d been in the big leagues but had screwed it up and was now starting over with a suitcase full of ugly baggage and a reputation to live down. It
didn’t help that her old colleagues at the Examiner seemed to be reveling in her fall, even if they didn’t show it. Schadenfreude was human nature, and she understood it, even when she was the target of it.
She shouldered through the bathroom door and saw with relief that it was empty. Speakers crooned a reggae acoustic guitar version of a nineties grunge song, and she imagined its author spinning in his grave. Leah smoothed her blouse and studied herself in the mirror, taking stock and not loving what stared back.
Why had she even agreed to dinner? She and Bill had been on again, off again for the year before she’d turned in her notice and moved to New York, but since her return he’d been obvious about wanting to give it another try. He wasn’t bad-looking and made decent money as the top ad rep at the paper, but she knew him well enough to want someone more compatible. She hadn’t hit such a bottom that she was willing to go back to something she’d walked away from for good reason.
She hoped she didn’t hurt him when she made clear it wasn’t going to happen, and then decided she didn’t really care if he got bent or not. She wasn’t the one doing the pursuing, and they were both adults.
Leah adjusted her slacks and tried a smile at her reflection. Satisfied with her composure, she took a deep breath and nodded. They would have a nice dinner, chat about crap neither of them cared much about, and then she would go home alone, Bill hopefully having received her message loud and clear.
She checked her phone for messages and, seeing none, pushed back into the dining room, where beautiful people bantered about meaningless trivia while some monster was snatching helpless teenage girls only cigarette-flicking distance away.
Chapter 5
The Examiner offices smelled like coffee and doughnuts when Leah arrived for work two days later. The prior day she’d spent most of her time researching the Juárez story while Margaret was busy in her office with the computer tech trying to coax more life from her system, and Leah had given her a wide berth and left with the rest of the staff at precisely five. This morning she had a headache from insufficient sleep and too much convenience store caffeine, and she wanted nothing more than to keep her head down and go unnoticed.
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