She smiled and nodded. “Your son is a future soccer player.”
“Baseball,” Tavio said.
He turned and went toward the bathroom, his heart pounding and the look on his face far from the joy of the moment. He pulled the cigarette package from his jeans pocket and proceeded to tear it up into little pieces. He lifted the lid to the toilet and the confetti of paper and cellophane fluttered into the bowl.
He flushed and the bits of paper swirled downward. Tavio was shaking then, hoping and praying that what he was thinking would not be true.
Could Michael have done this?
That night Tavio Navarro couldn’t sleep. With Mimi curled up next to him, he tried to stay still and not wake her. She was a light sleeper and needed her rest. Every day she woke up at 4:30 to make her husband’s lunch before she left for the school cafeteria where she worked preparing breakfast and lunch, then off to classes at Tacoma Community College. Mimi Navarro worked hard. They all did. As Tavio stared at the ceiling, he reminded himself that there was nothing but worry to be gained by making assumptions about someone. Although he’d never had the kind of brush with the law that his brother Michael had experienced, he’d been looked at with suspicious eyes in the past. He figured it was always the other guy’s problem, not his. If they wanted to think poorly of him because of his light brown skin, black hair, the accent in his speech, so be it. He could not stop them. He couldn’t explain what they could never understand: He was just like them.
And yet he was thinking the worst of his brother. He was thinking, just maybe, he had had made a terrible mistake, a mistake like he’d made once before… times one million. A mistake that would send them out of the country
That summer there had been several high-profile cases in nearby Seattle in which illegals had committed some crime only for the authorities to discover that they’d already been deported once. One man ran over a girl pushing a grocery cart across a busy roadway. Another man had raped a woman. Both cases had drawn considerable fire and ire from anti-immigration proponents because the offenders had used the legal system for nothing short of a ride back to their homeland after committing a serious crime. They barely even waited for the dust to settle before they’d returned to the U.S.
Tavio wanted only to raise his family in a place of opportunity. He followed all the laws, he paid his taxes, and he even employed other workers. He was living the American dream.
Michael, he feared, was another matter. Michael was six years younger, had a slighter build, and was different from his brother in every other way. Tavio thought hard work was the answer to every problem. Michael wanted to party and live a life of no responsibility. He liked hip-hop, not mariachi. He liked tequila, not beer. He liked girls who were younger than him-girls who were lithe and pretty.
Like the one Tavio had seen on TV.
“I’d like to get me some of that, bro,” he said when they were watching a news report about a missing Tacoma girl.
“She’s too young,” Tavio said.
“Young feels good to me, Tav.”
“You said you were going to date someone your own age.”
“Those girls are all used up.”
Mimi came in the room just then.
“You are a pig,” she said, giving her brother-in-law a cold look. She put down the laundry basket and started folding hand towels. “Pig,” she repeated.
“I don’t get many complaints,” Michael said, almost at once knowing that he’d said the wrong thing.
“What about Catalina?” Tavio asked.
Michael jumped up from the sofa. His jawline had tightened and his eyes flashed anger.
“Are you always going to bring that up? When am I going to be able to put that behind me?”
It was a fair question, but Mimi didn’t bail him out by saying so. She continued to fold the laundry, barely glancing at her husband.
“You want to talk about it, do you?” Tavio asked Michael.
“I want you to forgive me. It wasn’t my fault. You know that. I am your brother. You are supposed to be on my side.”
Tavio reached for the remote control and turned off the TV.
“I will always be on your side,” he said. “Even when you are wrong. You are my blood, Michael. But that doesn’t mean I won’t worry about you and worry about the things you have done.”
Mimi looked up. “Yes, Catalina will always be a worry.”
Michael put his hands up in the air and stomped out of the room.
Tavio nodded at his wife.
“You said what needed to be,” he said, turning the TV back on. “Catalina was a good girl.”
There were dozens of photos pasted on a board in the Tacoma Police Department’s cold case room. Grace Alexander wasn’t officially part of the cold case unit. But she found herself in that space whenever a conference was called on a major case.
Her eyes always landed on the board, first on her sister’s high school portrait, and then up two rows to the picture of the little girl who was the first of the many unsolved cases that would forever hold the attention of the department.
Ann Marie Burr was her name. Ann was just nine. She vanished in the night from her Tacoma home a half century ago and was never seen again. Just gone. It was as if the little girl had gone to answer the door and just followed her abductor into oblivion willingly.
Grace didn’t want to be the sister of a Bundy Girl-the cop with something to prove. Though that’s just what she was. She never said a word and she never allowed her eyes to linger on that scoreboard of unsolved homicide. She refused to remark upon the juxtaposition of Tricia’s photo and little Ann’s.
CHAPTER 10
Catalina Sanchez was a lovely teenager with a cascade of black hair that she let wave down her back, never constricted by a ponytail. She was only nineteen when her body was found alongside a riverbank near Selah, an eastern Washington farming community known for apple, pear, and cherry orchards. The police did a poor job investigating the case. Not so much because she was an illegal migrant worker, but because they were so short staffed. Catalina had the misfortune to die when budgets were so tight that if cases weren’t solved within say a week, they were shuttled off to a file room and into oblivion.
What police detectives did know was that Catalina had been raped before she was bludgeoned with a river rock and left for dead. They swabbed her vagina for semen and took scrapings of the skin caught under her red- painted fingernails. All was tagged as evidence. The detectives also noted how she had defensive wounds on her wrists from being pinned down. Her skull was fractured. Blunt-force trauma was the cause of death. Homicide was the manner of death.
The Navarros knew Catalina. She was a girl from their village who had come to the United States with her family about a year after they did. She was just a kid then, of course, but even so, it was plain to see that Catalina Maria Sanchez was a true beauty in the making. Michael Navarro fixated on her. He pestered her over and over for a date, and finally, she said yes. He was giddy with excitement over the prospect of going out with her. He’d planned to take her to a nice place for dinner in Yakima and on a moonlight walk along the river. For the occasion, he bought a bottle of tequila and a brand-new shirt-pale blue fabric with mother-of-pearl buttons. It was western style, something that Michael knew Catalina had admired whenever she saw a ranch hand wearing that kind of garment.
“Handsome cowboy,” she’d say. “Not a pretender, but a real one. That’s what I like.”
It had rained hard the night of Catalina’s disappearance. Precipitation was scarce on the Eastern side of the Cascades in Washington state. Later, when he thought of what happened that night, Tavio Navarro would
