Her heart started thumping loudly in her ears as she looked in all her mirrors. She was on a busy street, mid-morning traffic still thick. She couldn’t distinguish any vehicles, nothing looked familiar, she saw no one giving her undue attention. She took deep breaths to force her heart rate to slow. It worked. Two years ago, she might have had a full panic attack, but it hadn’t happened in a long time, and she wouldn’t let it happen now.
The car directly behind her was a gold minivan with a female at the wheel and a teenage boy in the front seat. There were other kids in the rear. Behind the minivan was a shiny dark-blue foreign sedan. She couldn’t make out the driver. In the lane to the right was a white cargo van with a Hispanic driver wearing a work cap with the same logo as the van. A plumbing company.
Starbucks was two blocks up on the left. She’d planned on going through the drive-through, but that would trap her. She considered going straight to FBI headquarters, but if someone was following her, they wouldn’t put themselves at risk. She wanted a glimpse, an idea of who was behind her. She decided to circle the block a few times and park on the street outside the coffee shop.
She pulled into the left-hand turn lane and waited for the light. The white van passed, as well as the foreign sedan. It was a new Honda with tinted rear windows. The driver was female, but her head was turned as if she was playing with the radio. All Lucy could get was that she was Caucasian or light-skinned Hispanic. There was no license plate on the back, simply the advertisement for the dealership where the car had been bought.
The minivan was behind her, and another sedan behind the van. The mother honked and Lucy realized the light had turned green. She turned, drove past the corner Starbucks, and went down two blocks. The minivan turned into the Starbucks drive-through. The second sedan—a dark-green American model—followed Lucy.
She turned left again. So did the green car. She turned right. So did the green car.
She was in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Modest, middle-class homes, some in bad need of repair, lined the narrow street. She turned right at the stop sign and found herself on a dead-end road. Damn, damn, damn. She didn’t know San Antonio well enough yet.
But the green car didn’t turn right. It turned left, went down the street, then pulled into a driveway.
Lucy slowly turned around at the end of the dead-end road and drove past the green sedan. An older man, in his sixties, was walking up the broken front walk carrying a small suitcase. A little boy ran out the door, no older than four, and greeted the grandfather with a hug around the legs. His mother stood in the doorway while the boy half carried, half dragged the suitcase inside.
“You’re paranoid,” Lucy told herself as she made her way back to Starbucks.
She parked on the street nonetheless. She might be cautious, but she wasn’t paranoid. Someone had been following her. Not anymore—she didn’t have the same creepy feeling on her skin, but someone had been staring while she’d been driving from St. Catherine’s.
Who else knew about Michael’s relationship with Father Flannigan? Had Jaime Sanchez or one of his people staked out the place, hoping to catch the boy there? Had someone recognized her from the sweep? Her visit to St. Catherine’s had been spontaneous. Her office and Donnelly knew she was going to visit the Popes, but she’d only had the strange feeling after leaving St. Catherine’s.
She walked inside, looking at every car on the street and in the lot. Nothing jumped out as familiar. The minivan pulled out of the drive-through and back onto the street. She went inside and ordered, then stood against the wall and looked at the people sitting and waiting. No one looked familiar. No one was giving her undue attention.
She took her drink and muffin and returned to her car. She headed back the way she’d come, toward St. Catherine’s. If someone was staking out the place, they may have returned.
But before she arrived at the church, her phone rang.
It was Donnelly. “Where the hell are you?”
She bristled at his tone. “I have a lead,” she began, but he cut her off.
“Jaime Sanchez kidnapped Isabella Borez. Kidnapping trumps your lead.”
CHAPTER 13
Because the interagency sweep was technically over, operations had moved from SAPD to the San Antonio DEA regional office. Brad Donnelly was in his element, and everyone seemed to get out of his way as he ushered Lucy through the bureaucracy of getting temporary credentials and setting her up in the conference room he’d taken over to hunt for Sanchez.
Ryan was there and gave Lucy an odd look—if he was going to say anything, Donnelly didn’t give him a chance.
“At two this morning, Bella’s sister CeCe got her out of bed. The foster parents heard the girls arguing downstairs, then Bella cried out. Karl Grove told his wife to call nine-one-one while he came downstairs in time to see Jaime Sanchez running through the back gate carrying Bella over his shoulder. CeCe was trying to keep up. Grove caught up with her, but Jaime disappeared in an old Ford sedan, partial license plate S-one-seven-W. He thinks the last two letters were the same, an L or T or F.”
“How did—” Lucy began, but Donnelly cut her off.
“CeCe had a hidden burner phone, police found it under her mattress. We have no idea how she got it, who gave it to her, if she had it with her things and it was missed in the search, or what. There was a deleted message our tech people pulled out, sent from an untraceable burner phone at midnight.” He handed Lucy a printout from the message, which had been in Spanish and also translated.
Turn off outside lights. Unlock back door. Be downstairs with B at 2.
“Let me talk to her,” Lucy said.
“Can’t. She has a court-appointed advocate. She’s in juvenile detention right now, she’s already been interviewed and isn’t saying anything. In addition to the phone, she had a homemade shiv she’d made out of a toothbrush—just like they do in prison.” He shook his head, as if to say he was both stunned and not surprised at the same time. “She attempted to stab Mr. Grove when he caught up with her on the street, but he caught her wrist in time and sustained only minor injuries.
“Based on his statement, Bella didn’t want to go with Sanchez.” He pounded his fist on the table. “Dammit, I should have put them in protective custody.”
There was a knock on the door and Donnelly barked out, “What?”
The door opened and an agent escorted Jennifer Mendez in. “This is CPS Officer Mendez,” the agent said, then stepped out.
“Great,” Donnelly muttered.
“I need to know what’s going on,” Jennifer said. “I haven’t gotten a straight answer from anyone.”
“The FBI is handling the kidnapping,” Donnelly said. “That’s not DEA’s purview.”
“That’s bullshit,” Jennifer said. “A seven-year-old was kidnapped by a violent criminal and you’re passing the buck?”
“Maybe you can answer how CeCe Borez got a burner phone? Aren’t you supposed to search your wards?”
Jennifer bristled but didn’t back down. “They were searched according to procedure, but we don’t strip-search minors who aren’t in detention. You should have had an officer on the house if you even suspected that your drug dealer was going after his nieces.”
The veins in Donnelly’s neck throbbed but he didn’t comment. Lucy felt for him. He was beating himself up, and now Jennifer was adding to it.
Lucy said, “We increased patrols in the neighborhood, but Sanchez must have been watching. He saw a window of opportunity and took it.”
“How do I know you didn’t lead him there?” Jennifer turned to Lucy.
“What?” Lucy had no idea what Jennifer was talking about.
“The Groves operate a safe house. We’ve never had problems. You walk in Sunday morning and Sunday night one of their charges is kidnapped. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.”
Ryan slowly leaned forward. “You’ll need to watch your next words very carefully, Ms. Mendez.”
Je
nnifer seemed to realize what she’d implied, and backtracked. “What I meant was—”
“I know what you meant,” Lucy said, “and I can assure you I wasn’t followed to the Groves’s house.”
“How can you be so sure?”
It wasn’t easy explaining to someone about Lucy’s intense awareness of her surroundings, so she didn’t. “I am. We don’t know that anyone was followed. We do know that CeCe had a burner phone, and she alerted Sanchez. She may have told him.”
Donnelly frowned. “There were no incoming or outgoing calls on the burner phone. Only the messages to CeCe.”
“GPS on the phone?”
“No.”
Jennifer said, “Who knew where they were?”
Ryan interjected, “We should be asking you the same thing.”
“If you’re implying—”
“I’m not implying,” Ryan said.
Lucy put her hands up before this got out of control. “We have to assume that there’s someone with access who gave Sanchez the information. Either at CPS or at a law enforcement agency.”
Donnelly shook his head. “Only a handful of people knew on my end, but we can’t assume that it was an inside leak. I know how CPS operates. Everything is in their database. It wouldn’t take much to hack into the system.”
Jennifer opened her mouth, then closed it. “I’ll talk to my boss and see if the IT people can trace any unauthorized access to the files. But I think you’re grasping at straws.”
“We’re all on edge,” Lucy said.
Ryan said, “We have a debriefing at FBI headquarters in less than thirty minutes.”
“I’d like to be there,” Jennifer said. “Is that going to be a problem?”
“No,” Donnelly said before anyone else could. “Meet us there. I need a minute with my team.”
He waited until she left, then sat down, his head in his hands. “This is fucked. I wish—”
“Brad,” Lucy said, “wishing isn’t productive.”
“Do you know that Mendez is clean?” Ryan asked. “Maybe she’s on Sanchez’s payroll.”
Lucy didn’t buy it. “It would be very stupid of her to leak information about her own CPS wards.”
“Or very smart. Because it looks stupid.”
“I didn’t get that vibe from her,” Lucy said.
“Her name has never come up in any of my investigations,” Donnelly said, “but I’ll put Nicole on it. I’m not going to wait for Mendez to talk to her boss. We’ll light a fire under CPS and get them to look for security breaches on their end, send over one of our cybercrimes experts if we have to.”
“You should also run a background on Mendez,” Ryan said. He looked at the clock. “We’ve got to go.”
“Just—give me a minute. I’ll meet you there.”
Donnelly walked out.
“I need to talk to Brad,” Lucy said. “I’ll get a ride with him over to headquarters.”
“What’s going on?” Ryan asked. “Donnelly’s rep is solid, but he’s losing it. I don’t think he’s slept since the sweep, and he’s taking a time-out when the SSA of Violent Crimes is expecting him at a debriefing?”
“He knows Jaime Sanchez better than anyone on the team. He’ll be there.”
“Watch yourself with him,” Ryan said. “I know cops. He’s going to snap.”
“He knows he’s on edge. Cut him a little slack on this, Ryan.”
Ryan didn’t comment. Her partner was suspicious, and the most important thing on a task force like theirs was trust.
“Don’t be late,” he said to her and left.
Lucy asked one of the agents outside the conference room where Donnelly had gone, and he said he thought the locker room. She hesitated, then stepped inside.
“Brad,” she said quietly.
“This is the boys’ room,” he said without looking at her. He was facing the wall, head down, hands above his head.
“Casilla wants us in for a debriefing. We need you there.”
“I should have known Jaime would try something like this. There’s been something off about this whole thing from the beginning, but I have no idea what it is. It’s making me crazy trying to figure it out.”
“Finding out he’d imprisoned kids—”
He cut her off. “It’s not just the boy in the basement.”
“I have a lead on Michael.” She didn’t tell him it was old—fourteen months old. It was more than they’d had two hours ago. “If we find Michael, he can lead us to Sanchez. I’m almost certain of it. I have to convince Casilla that I’m right. You can help with that, and then we both get what we want. We save Michael, find Bella, and put Sanchez in prison.”
“I should have put them in protective custody. I should have protected them myself! Is this your way of saying I told you so?”
“I don’t do that.”
He grunted and leaned against the lockers, head down, his hands still fisted above his head.
“They’re family,” she said. “I don’t think he plans to harm her.”
“Jaime Sanchez is violent. You read his file. He fucking beat us. It doesn’t matter that those girls are his nieces. He’s not his brother George.”
“You’re right. But hurting them is his last option. Right now he thinks he’s winning. He has Bella.”
“Why? Why her? Why not CeCe who was helping him?”
“I don’t know. Leverage? She’s easier to control?”
“It makes no fucking sense to take a kid when every cop in southern Texas is looking for him.”
“Brad, he won this battle. So we go at him from another direction. Shake every tree. You said from the beginning that something big was going on and Sanchez was at the center—you focus on that.”
“No one is talking. They’re too scared, and not of us.”
“We talk to Mirabelle, find a way to convince her to help.”
“Maybe she’s in on this,”
“I don’t think so. Maybe—”
Brad cut her off. “The logical reason for Jaime to take Bella is to keep his sister in line. He has her daughter, not us. We have no more leverage. He does. She talks, her daughter dies. Every time I think Why Bella, that’s what I come back to.”
Lucy’s stomach burned. Brad’s scenario made sense.
“We have to find a way.”
“You’re pulling at straws, Kincaid.”
“I never thought you would be defeated.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I’m going to take a run at her. I don’t need your permission, Brad, but I want your blessing. If you’re right and she’s scared of what Jaime might do to Bella, we’ll know. She could let something slip. Or maybe I can convince her that she needs to help us to save her daughter.”
Again, he remained silent.
“It’s one more angle,” she continued. “You have every law enforcement agency looking for him. The border patrol has been alerted. You took down his supply house. If you were him, what would you do?”
Brad thought for a moment. He’d calmed down after his outburst, and Lucy was relieved. He was a good cop, but far more emotionally involved in this case than he should be.
“I’d lay low. Regroup. Send my most trusted allies out to do my work for me.”
“And you know who those are, right?”
He nodded, for the first time excited about a possibility. “Stick to them. Talk to them. Haul them in if there’s a warrant.”
“Exactly. Disrupt his process. Force him to show himself. Force him to make a mistake.”
“We have some leads on the next shipment—which is supposed to be the big one. But nothing solid. We don’t know where it’s going to cross, or how. Truck, car, plane, foot.”
“Foot? From the border?”
“Best way to do it. Small quantities brought in through couriers.”
“The boys,” Lucy said before she realized she’d said it. “Like Michael.”
Brad’s eyes widened. “That’s it. It’
s why he’s been so successful. He has young boys hauling his heroin across the border. They’re under the radar. They’re American. They’re not going to be treated the same as if they’re teenagers or adults.”
He paced in front of the lockers. “They can blend in, practically carry the drugs in the open because they’ve found a way to not be inspected, something. Bribes. Holes in the system. They could move hundreds of pounds of drugs, especially if they rotate—” He stopped.
“What?”
“Until we find Michael we don’t have anything on them. I can’t prove this. No one is talking, Jaime Sanchez is in the wind, and now we have a missing seven-year-old.”
Two uniformed cops came into the locker room and glanced at Lucy. “We’re done,” she said with a slight smile. She turned to Brad. “We’re going to get him. It starts with Michael.”
“I hope you’re right. Because I’m telling you, Kincaid, I’ve met my fair share of thirteen-year-olds who would shoot me in the back without remorse.”
* * *
The FBI conference room was half full when Lucy arrived with Donnelly. It was clear that nearly everyone knew him and greeted him warmly. She spotted Jennifer sitting at the far end of the table, away from everyone else, looking out of place, her chin up. Every cell in the woman’s body was screaming Stay away and Lucy wondered what her story was.
Donnelly immediately approached Casilla. “I’m sorry we’re late, Juan, but can I have a minute alone?”
“Of course. Ryan, start the debriefing. Nate, Kenzie, and a team from the cyber unit who specialize in child abductions need to be brought up to speed. They’re on the task force now, use them.”
Lucy didn’t know what Brad wanted with Juan, but she followed Ryan’s lead and sat near the head of the long conference table.
Ryan ran through the status of Jaime Sanchez and Bella Borez quickly. “The cybercrimes unit already has the burner phone that CeCe Borez used, and they’re tracing it. The girl is distraught and refuses to talk. A child psychologist is working with her, but we’re not holding out hope. It’s clear that she’s been in contact with either her uncle or an intermediary.”
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