A Girl Apart

by Russell Blake

  Leah didn’t like the reporter’s cagey responses, which contained little she could use without corroboration. It must have shown on her face, because Saldaño leaned closer to her, invading her space, and whispered, his breath sour from coffee, “You might start at 1986. Search the archives for…unusual stories. He would have been in high school then. The trail starts there.”

  “That’s it? I came all the way down here for a shaggy dog story about satanic rituals in Mexico, with absolutely nothing to back it up?”

  He frowned at her. “Perhaps I overestimated your talents from your article. I thought you wanted to get to the bottom of this.”

  “I do. I want to know the truth. But you’ve given me nothing.”

  “You talked to the bartender. To the whore. And now to me. I’m sorry if I didn’t hand you everything wrapped up with a bow. You’ll have to do some of the work yourself. I’ll get you what I can, but it will be up to you to flesh it out. He is a partner with the cartel here. His business interest in Juárez is a front for them to launder money, and he uses his connections to kill. Look hard at his dealings and you will see the truth. That is all I can tell you.” He hesitated. “I will try to send you something shortly from a blind email account that can help you nail him. It is the best I can do.”

  “When will you send it?”

  “When I can. But a word of caution: be careful with your research. The network runs deep, and Moore is as smart as he is dangerous.”

  Saldaño walked away, leaving Leah in a state of shock. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but the meeting had been surreal.

  Was it possible? Could Moore be a monster who was using the country’s lack of law and order to slake some twisted thirst for blood? She’d read about serial killers who escaped detection for years – high-functioning, intelligent, charismatic murderers who killed for the thrill of extinguishing life. Was Moore one of them?

  She waited until the reporter had disappeared from view before slinging her purse over her shoulder and walking in the other direction.

  He’d given her a place to start.

  El Paso. 1986.

  Chapter 25

  Gabriela was finishing up a haircut on a young woman when Uriel entered her shop. The entire salon was no more than ten feet by twenty, with a rinsing bowl at the far end, two chairs facing mirrors on one wall, and the door and a picture window on the other. He’d called her earlier, but she’d been too busy with customers for him to do anything but give her a basic outline of what he needed. She’d told him to come over after her last appointment of the day, right before two.

  Leah had emailed him the list of the latest victims from the last six months, and Uriel had the file in his phone. He’d also printed it out at the hotel for Gabriela and brought it with him. Juárez was a big town, but the factory sector was only one part of it, and because of the location of her shop, most of Gabriela’s clientele was drawn from the workers. It made for long days and weekend hours due to the low pricing she had to maintain to attract them, but she had a strong business and all the customers she could handle.

  It amazed Uriel that women who made a hundred and change a week would spend twenty dollars on a styling, but like many things about the female of the species he didn’t understand, he didn’t devote much time to dwelling on it. His monthly cut ran seventy pesos – roughly three and a half dollars – and he was in and out in twenty minutes. Short on the sides, a little longer on top, and money left over in his pocket for dinner. That he earned many multiples more than the women who paid six times what he did for the same service was one of the paradoxes he encountered regularly and, if nothing else, was certainly Gabriela’s good fortune.

  Gabriela finished with the appointment and the woman departed, leaving them alone in the shop. She went to the door, flipped the sign to Closed, and locked the deadbolt before moving to a broom and dustpan in the corner and cleaning up the area around her station.

  “I looked at the list you sent,” she said as she swept hair into a pile.

  “Thank you. I’m sorry to impose on you.”

  “If you think it will help your sister, I’m willing to try to help. She doesn’t deserve to be in jail. She’s no guiltier of killing anyone than I am.”

  “I’m glad you see it that way.”

  “That the police don’t is worrisome.”

  “I know. I’ve thought of little else since they arrested her.”

  She finished her cleanup and dumped the collected hair into the trash. “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll do what I can. I thought I recognized a few of the names. I’ll call some clients and see if they know them. It’s a smaller world than you would think at this end of the city.”

  “That was my hope.”

  Gabriela looked him over. “Have you eaten?”

  He shook his head. “Haven’t had much appetite.”

  “The least you can do is take me to lunch, then.”

  He tried a smile, but it was pained. “You read my mind.”

  “I know a good place nearby. Do you have a car?”

  “No. I flew from Guadalajara.”

  “Then we can take mine.”

  The lunch spot was a cavernous restaurant that featured rotisserie chicken and pork ribs grilled over a mesquite fire. They ordered food and beer, and as they waited for their meals, they discussed Uriel’s sister’s plight. When he was finished giving her a summary, she laid her hand on his.

  “If you’re going to make any progress, you need a private investigator, Uriel. I have a client whose husband is with the police, and he moonlights as one. I’ll call him and ask him to run the list of names. It will be way faster than me doing it the hard way.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Uriel acknowledged. “I wouldn’t know where to begin finding a PI.”

  Gabriela scanned her phone screen and nodded. “I’ve got her number. Hang on a second.” She dialed and spoke to the woman and then to the husband, who was off for the weekend. Gabriela handed Uriel the phone, and he talked with the man for a few minutes, agreed on a rate, and jotted down an email address for the list to be sent to. Uriel handed the cell back to Gabriela when he was done, and she thanked her client and disconnected.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “He said he can go into the station and start on them today. I’m sending the list now,” he said, entering the email address and pushing send. “You heard me tell him the urgency of the situation. Hopefully he won’t decide to take a siesta before he does it.”

  “If he finds anyone, what’s your plan from there?”

  “This journalist I’m working with is going to give me a list of questions to ask. I’ll call and tell them I’m investigating the missing girls. Hopefully they’ll talk to me. I assume they will if they want to see their loved ones found.”

  “And if they won’t?”

  “I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

  She frowned. “Not much of a plan.”

  “I haven’t had a lot of time to think it through, what with everything that’s happened. All I know is I have to do something to help my sister.”

  Gabriela’s expression softened. “You’ve really been body slammed the last couple of days, haven’t you?”

  “It gets worse,” he said, and told her about the house being ransacked. When he finished, her eyes radiated alarm.

  “Oh, Uriel, I’m so sorry.”

  “You had nothing to do with it.”

  Their food arrived, and they both pecked at their chicken unenthusiastically. Gabriela kept sneaking looks at him, and halfway through his bird, he set down his fork and met her gaze.

  “What, Gabby?”

  “It’s…it’s just been so long since I’ve seen you, and now it’s with everything falling apart. You know there were many nights where I dreamed that we’d meet up again, and that everything would be different, that things would fix themselves, and…and the past wouldn’t affect the future. I know it was naïve. But now,
seeing you, it’s just…difficult.”

  Uriel blotted his mouth with a paper napkin. “I know. I thought about you a lot too. We had some good years, didn’t we?”

  “We were both so young, though. And you weren’t destined to stick around this hellhole. You had better things to do,” she said, unable to keep the bitterness from showing.

  “It wasn’t that. When my mom moved back to the States and I got the scholarship…I had nothing left to stay for, Gabby.”

  Her eyes were moist when she raised them from her plate. “You had me.”

  He swallowed hard. “I needed to get out when I could. And remember, we were fighting a lot at the time…”

  “We always fought. So what? Find a woman who doesn’t fight with you and you’d be bored out of your mind within a week.” She paused. “I know you were angry at your father, but I really thought you’d be back for breaks when school let out. Again, it was naïve, but I did.”

  “Not just angry. What he did to my mother, how he treated us, was inexcusable.”

  “He was a man, Uriel. An imperfect one. In the end he gave you his name. Isn’t that enough?”

  “He broke my mother’s heart and treated her miserably. And as a child I hardly saw him. He was always with his real family, never with us – except once a year for a week’s vacation when he pretended to be the honorable father figure. It was obvious we were just…we were a nuisance, and I was an accident that happened. He made that clear enough with his behavior. You don’t forget that. Ever.”

  “Yet your mother stayed in contact even after you shut him out of your life. She may not have forgotten, but she forgave him.”

  “She was a sentimental fool for doing so. That doesn’t mean I am.”

  “It’s none of my business, but I think you’re being too hard on him. He spoke highly of you whenever we talked, and I know he was proud of you turning out as you did.”

  “No thanks to him.”

  Gabby gave him an odd look and resumed eating. Uriel had lost his appetite and contented himself with another beer while she finished her plate.

  “So what now?” she asked.

  “I was going to go back to the house and see if I can find someone to help clean up. It’s a mess.” Uriel signaled for the bill and the waiter jogged over with it.

  “You want some company?”

  “I’ve already taken up too much of your day, Gabby.”

  Her chocolate eyes studied him for several moments. “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want to help, Uriel.” Her voice caught in her throat. “Unless you’d rather be alone.”

  He realized in his self-absorption that he’d misread her and offered a smile. “I’d love it if you could come. The house is full of ghosts. I’d rather not be there on my own. Maybe you can find someone who wants to make some money cleaning up the wreckage?”

  She returned the smile, but couldn’t hide the melancholy she felt behind it. “I probably have a phone full of women who would fight for the chance. Money’s tight around here, Uriel. Worse than ever.”

  “Then let’s head over there and I’ll show you the damage.”

  She nodded and slid out of the booth. “That bad?”

  “You have no idea.”

  Chapter 26

  El Paso, Texas

  Leah made it across the border without incident and drove her car to her apartment. Her aunt was waiting for her when she walked up to the gate, wringing her hands as Leah approached. She looked at Leah for a moment before speaking.

  “Out all night, I see,” her aunt said.

  “Don’t start, Aunt Connie. I was on a story.”

  “A story,” she replied. “I see. Aren’t those the same clothes you were wearing yesterday?”

  “I didn’t see you yesterday.”

  “I saw you through my window.”

  “I need to get some things and go into the office, Aunt Connie. I have a lot of work to catch up on.”

  “Your clothes are all rumpled, Leah, and your hair… And again you were too busy to call. What were you really up to?”

  Leah didn’t snap at her. “I was mugged while on assignment, Aunt Connie. They took all my money. So if you don’t mind, it’s been a rough night and I’d like to go take a shower, change, and get to the office, not explain myself to you like I’m thirteen and broke curfew, okay?”

  Connie looked horrified. “Mugged? I knew something like that would happen! That’s what I kept telling you. Leah, I know you’re an adult, but maybe you shouldn’t be living alone. How would I explain something like this to your poor mother? Maybe if we got one of the larger units–”

  “I didn’t get mugged in the apartment,” Leah explained, keeping her tone reasonable. “It was a freak thing. And I’m fine. I just need to take a shower.” She wondered how bad it could be to live in her car rather than with her aunt.

  “If you’re sure you’re okay…I will say I’m disappointed that you never find it in your heart to call me and let me know what’s going on.”

  “My phone died from being on all night, or I would have.”

  Her aunt had no comeback for that, and Leah hurried to her unit. At this point, Leah lacked the energy to engage anymore and didn’t want to say anything she’d later regret.

  Leah showered quickly and attempted some damage control with some base and mascara, but the result was poor, and she gave up after a hurried try. She was just going in to the Examiner, after all, and on a Saturday there would only be a skeleton crew working to put out the weekend edition and nobody in the newsroom, all the articles put to bed before the reporters had left on Friday. A junior editor would pull timely stories off the wire and fit them into place on the front page, but beyond that, Leah would have the office to herself and could focus on researching Moore and the Mexican reporter’s abstruse clue about 1986.

  She stopped at an ATM, withdrew the maximum in cash, and continued on to the Examiner, whose lot was empty except for the vehicles of the weekend shift. Leah let herself in the front door and mounted the stairs to the newsroom, each step heavy as she considered that come Monday she might be finished at the paper.

  Her desk was exactly as she’d left it, the envelope still atop the scattered papers, and she slung her purse across her chair back and sat down. The PC booted up at a snail’s pace and she browsed through the assignments again in case she’d missed anything at all of interest. Unfortunately, no.

  Once she was online, she did a search for local news circa 1986 and found herself staring at thousands of results. That obviously wasn’t going to work, so she thought about ways to narrow it down. Leah did some quick math in her head. Moore would have been sixteen or seventeen, depending on the month – about a junior in high school.

  She changed the search field to include high school and still got hundreds of stories. Apparently news had been as slow then as now, and the papers had filled their pages with accounts of game scores, scholarships, academic achievements, and proms. Leah tapped in the word crime as a further search item, and the results filled only half a page.

  The first article was about a pair of high school kids who’d died in a car crash with a drunk driver after a party. Leah couldn’t see any relevance, so she scrolled to the next link. This one went to a story about high school vandalism that concluded the world was going to hell in a handbasket due to the lack of honor among the student population.

  The next stopped her cold. Four members of the football team had been accused by a local girl of gang-raping her and beating her to a pulp. Leah read the article carefully, but no names were mentioned since the team members were all minors.

  Her breath quickened when she did a search for online yearbooks, and she found the high school in question, scanned in by one of the alumni. She turned to the sports section and found photographs of the various teams – basketball, baseball, wrestling…and football.

  Which had apparently been wildly popular in 1986, judging by the number of boys pictured, some of them with longish an
d bouffant hair like bad outtakes from a Prince movie.

  There, in the sixth picture, was the starting lineup of the team – and Warren Moore’s smirking mug stared back at her from across the ages.

  “Damn,” she muttered, and clicked back to the search results. The last article was a wrap-up of the first, indicating that all charges against the football players had been dropped when the girl who’d accused the players recanted her story and refused to testify. Leah sat back and stared at the screen. “He got away with it.”

  More searching for the names of the boys involved, or the girl, proved fruitless. Leah rooted in her desk for change, found some, and walked to the soda machine, thinking. If there was nothing online, there was only one way she might learn the identities of the boys – one she was hesitant to pursue.

  Back at her desk, she withdrew a telephone book from her bottom drawer and dialed a number.

  “El Paso police,” a voice answered.

  “Yes. Detective Rollins, please.”

  “Let me check to see if he’s on today. Who’s calling?”

  “Leah Mason.”

  “One moment.”

  There was no music on hold, just a rhythmic beeping every five seconds. After twenty of the tones, Rollins came on the line.

  “Leah! What a nice surprise. And on a Saturday, no less. Does this mean you finally decided to take me up on my dinner offer?”

  Len Rollins had been trying to get a date with Leah since she’d come back to town, but as much as she liked the man, there was nothing about him she found attractive, so she’d continued to put him off. He was good-natured about her excuses, but persistent, and every interaction involved not-so-subtle reminders of his interest.

  “I wish. I’m knee-deep in a story and up against a deadline, Len. And I could really use some help.”

  “What do you need?”

  “There was a rape case brought against four boys that was later dropped. They were all on the Coronado High School football team. It involved one victim.”