returned to their posts guarding the two entrances to the house.
Rafe checked out the front of the house, noting the wide window that opened onto the gravel drive. The back door led to a deck from which a long stretch of stairs wound downward to a dirt embankment and a copse of slender pines. The entire back wall consisted of floor to ceiling glass windows and the view through the glassed wall was spectacular, but he wasn't interested in that.
'What's the girl's name and how old is she?' Isabella asked as she added sugar and cream to her coffee.
'Esperanza. Says she's thirteen, speaks English very well,' Slater answered. 'She's exhausted.'
'Was she injured in the fracas?' Rafe asked from his position by the window.
'Took a bullet to the upper shoulder and she's sore, but it's not serious,' Slater replied.
'What's going to happen to her?' Isabella asked. 'When this is all over, I mean.'
'After we get the information, she'll go back to Mexico,' Rafe answered, not meeting her eyes, knowing the girl would go back where she came from, but there'd be no happy ending for her. 'Hopefully, she has a family still waiting for her.'
'Hopefully, she wasn't sold into slavery and prostitution by that same family,' Isabella snapped.
Rafe ignored the anger in her eyes and directed his question to Slater. 'Has she said anything yet?'
Slater nodded towards the behemoth Deputy Harris and tapped his own chest. 'The four of us – you can see we're not dainty men. I was waiting for Bella. I think a woman will work better with the girl.'
Rafe wondered how Slater had managed to find a good safe house on such short notice. Good location, isolated, gravel to alert vehicle approach, and only a few trees to hide someone coming up on foot. 'Whose place is this?'
'Friend of a friend of a friend, who's vacationing in Italy. This is their second home, completely untraceable.'
'Good,' Rafe grunted. 'The girl's in there?' He gestured towards the hall to his left where he could see several closed doors.
'Second door on the right,' Slater answered, glancing at his watch. 'She should be awake soon.'
As if on cue, the door swung open and a young girl, looking scarcely twelve, barefoot and sleepy-eyed, wandered to the end of the hall. She was skinny and dirty, but Rafe could tell she'd be a beauty when she was older, wide round eyes surrounded by long, sooty ashes, skin the color of sun-kissed copper, and a look of sadness on her face that would break a man's heart.
Isabella approached Esperanza, introduced herself, and asked if she'd mind talking to her. The girl glanced at the two men first, and drawing her brows together, finally nodded before turning back to the bedroom. Isabella followed.
An uncomfortable silence descended as Rafe joined Slater at the table. Rafe could see Harris positioned by the patio door and assumed the other two deputies were posted at the front.
'I guess it could be Nevada County,' Slater said, apropos of nothing, after a few minutes of silence.
Rafe looked over in surprise. 'The leak? You think?'
Slater shrugged. 'Not really.
'But part of it could be,' Rafe speculated. 'The Nevada hit was awfully fast.'
'That's what I was thinking.'
Rafe raised his eyebrows. 'Shared responsibility? Multiple leaks?'
'Something like that.'
'So the Nevada hit was a Nevada leak,' Rafe concluded. That sounded right to him. 'Law enforcement?'
'How could it be anything else?'
'And Lupe?'
'Your confidential informant in L.A.?' Slater asked. 'That one had to be a DEA leak, don't you think?'
Rafe hated the idea, sure no one in L.A. could've tied Lupe to him. They'd been rigidly cautious. Still… 'Shit, looks like it.'
'We can't take any chances with Esperanza's life,' Slater warned.
Rafe glanced down the hall to the closed door behind which Isabella was getting details on the hit from the girl. 'No, no risks.'
Another few minutes passed while Rafe alternated between looking out the large glass window that filled the entire southeastern wall and the closed bedroom door down the hall.
Suddenly another comment, completely out of the blue, came from Slater. This one floored Rafe. 'Are you sleeping with her?'
Rafe choked on his coffee. 'What the hell?'
He guessed that Slater hadn't missed the careful avoidance Rafe and Isabella had maintained – the tension between them, not touching, eyes sliding off the other's – so he wasn't as completely surprised by the question as he should've been.
'Oh, but it is,' Slater said in a matter-of-fact voice, 'my business, that is. See, Bella's like a little sister to me. I don't want to see her hurt.'
At least that cleared up the relationship between the two of them. 'Are you so certain I'll hurt her?'
Slater leveled him a hard look. 'Maybe, maybe not. I'm here to make sure you don't.'
'All she needs is another brother.'
'Yeah,' Slater laughed. 'And it's not like Bella can't handle herself.'
'She's pretty tough.' Rafe smiled in memory, mopping up the spilled coffee with a paper towel.
'Still… she's not so tough in her heart.'
Slater was referring to Isabella's lost and probably dead sister Maria.
'Yeah,' he conceded.
The microfiche records were surprisingly easy to access in the state archives. Twenty years ago the story caused quite a media blitz. Young Mexican immigrant family. The father a migrant worker, the mother domestic help, but they managed to educate their seven children. The girl Maria was her class valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and the first family member to go to college.
Then she'd disappeared on a graduation trip to Mexico with three of her best friends. The three remaining girls were no help in providing the police with details about how Maria had vanished. But Santos was fairly certain he knew exactly what had happened to her.
After a few months the newspaper coverage waned and eventually dwindled to nothing. By the time the girl was really dead, there wasn't even an anniversary article in the local paper.
Maria Anna Torres had lasted five years at the cruel hands of Diego Vargas.
Santos pulled the worn photograph out of his jacket pocket and held it up beside the grainy newspaper photograph on the microfiche screen. The resemblance was unremarkable, although both girls had long, dark hair and wide black eyes. Both were Latina, but the girl in the newspaper photo wore a white graduation cap and gown. In Santos' picture, she was thinner, bare shouldered, and heavily made up.
But he had no doubt the two pictures revealed the same girl. The resemblance to Isabella Torres was uncanny, and the details of the disappearance and presumed kidnapping of Maria Torres matched what Santos remembered from twenty years ago.
He shut off the machine and placed the photo back in his pocket. Every moment of the transport of the cargo was etched in his memory more vividly than the long, slow death of his own father in the village plaza in
Santos was not a man to indulge in regrets. A man must do whatever is required to survive – and to thrive. But, by God, he wished he had slit the girl's throat instead of handing her over to Diego Vargas. He told himself that if he had known what would happen to her, how the few nights would become months and the months become five long years, he would never had brought her to Reno.
Never left her in the hands of such a man.
But Santos was a young man then, voraciously hungry for the many things that Diego Vargas could offer
