He passed a file to Rafaela, his eyes scouring her blouse for a loose button as she leaned over to take it from him. He truly made her skin crawl.
She opened the file. There was a missing person’s report and a photograph.
‘This girl is missing. Her parents are very concerned,’ he said. ‘It’s probably nothing. No doubt she is with some boy she has met. I’m sure we all know how young women can behave at that age. Anyway, the consulate are very concerned, too, so I told them that even though a missing person is hardly a priority, with everything that is happening now, I would assign one of my top people to investigate.’ He smiled again. She felt sick. ‘Someone whose integrity could never be questioned. Someone of the highest moral standards.’
‘You think something has happened to her?’ she asked, wanting, needing to hear the lies pour from his mouth.
‘I don’t think so. But who knows? There are so many criminals out there, bad people. We know that better than most. We have to deal with them every day.’
She smiled back at him. ‘Yes, we do. Very bad people.’
He gave a little nod, his sign that the meeting was over. She got up and walked out. She could feel his eyes all over her every step of the way.
In the corridor, she opened the file again. It was as much as she could do not to laugh. This was perfect. This was how they operated. They gave the case to someone whom everyone, the Americans included, knew was beyond reproach, not because they wanted the girl found — hell, they could do that with a phone call — but to give the appearance that they did. Smoke and mirrors. Deception. Double talk. But perhaps this time they had been too clever for their own good. She was looking for the girl in any case, but now she had their approval. They were counting on her not being crazy enough to find her. Maybe they were right. Or maybe they were wrong. By doing her job and finding a girl whom important people did care about then perhaps she could secure justice for all those whom no one cared about.
And if she was wrong about that she could be wrong about the Americans. As her boss had told them when he had returned from his management training across the border, ‘There is no such thing as a problem. There is only an opportunity in disguise.’
Forty-two
Every time the door opened, Julia flinched. She couldn’t help it. It was the sound. The groan it made as it shifted on its hinges. She knew it would stay with her for a very long time — if she lived.
The older man was standing over her, legs apart, chest stuck out.
‘Julia,’ he said. He was Mexican and his words held the accent but his English was good.
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. ‘Yes?’
‘I am going to take off these handcuffs now, okay? You can go to the bathroom, take a shower, clean yourself up. But I want you to know that if you try to run there is nowhere for you to go. There is no way you can escape until I decide to let you go. Do you understand me, Julia?’
As he said that, she felt like she might cry. Her throat tightened and tears gathered in her eyes. It was the thought of home, of being free from this nightmare. She fought it. She didn’t want him to see her break down. She hadn’t broken down when it was happening. She had taken her mind somewhere else and it had worked. She had been aware of what they were doing but she hadn’t felt present. ‘I understand,’ she said.
‘That’s good, Julia. Because if you behave and do what we say then maybe you’ll be able to go home. But first we have to get you cleaned up.’
He knelt down and freed her arms and legs. She noticed that he was very deliberate about where he placed himself when he clicked each shackle. He stayed out of range of a kick or a punch. Her ankles and wrists were bruised and swollen. She had lost all feeling in her feet hours before. She wiggled her fingers and rubbed the sensation back into her feet and calves.
‘That’s okay, take your time. There’s no rush,’ he said.
Eventually, she felt she could stand. Putting her palms on the floor, she started to lever herself to her feet.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Let me help you.’
He put his hands under her armpits and lifted her. She recoiled a little at his touch, but as soon as she was standing, he let her go.
‘Will you be okay on the stairs?’ he asked her. So polite. So solicitous. The situation was so surreal that part of her expected to wake in her room in the resort.
As she took the stairs he stayed behind her. His presence seemed reassuring rather than threatening. At the top, the door was wedged open. She began to walk along a corridor. Halfway down, he tapped her elbow. She half turned. He held out a pair of sunglasses. ‘If you have been in the dark too long, the sun can hurt your eyes,’ he said.
She took them from him and put them on. The corridor darkened but not by much. He directed her through a door into another corridor. They passed a large room, the door open, sunlight blazing through a window. He was right: she would have been blinded without the sunglasses. She felt a breeze, then heard something that brought a lump to her throat. Outside a bird was chirping, running up and down a warbling set of scales. She realized that while she had been in that room she had heard nothing from outside. No birds. No footsteps. Nothing. It must have been soundproofed.
Past a bedroom there was another door. He darted ahead of her and opened it into a large, tiled bathroom. ‘There is a lock on the inside,’ he said, ‘so you can have some privacy. But please remember what I said. There is no escape unless you follow my orders.’
She walked past him and into the bathroom. There was a tub and a separate shower, a washbasin and toilet, even a bidet. The tiles were green, yellow and red. The door closed behind her. Without thinking she walked back to it and turned the key. She had gone from one locked room to another, but this time she had secured the door herself.
As she ran a bath, she sat on the toilet and thought about what the man had said. If she did as they said and didn’t try to escape, she might be released. He had sounded so sincere when he had said it. She hadn’t thought to question him.
Forty-three
Walking into the small resort hotel, Rafaela had to steel herself for what lay ahead. For those who never knew the fate of a loved one, hope obstructed healing. As the days passed, hope itself became twisted and cancerous, an emotion that turned in on itself. Rafaela had seen it more times than she cared to remember. It was a cliche, but not knowing what had happened to someone you loved was the worst part of an abduction. With human remains came certainty. And certainty gave grief a starting point. That wasn’t to say that someone who lost a child was ever free of the pain, they weren’t, but knowledge of what had happened during a loved one’s final hours was almost always preferable to what the imagination conjured.
Of course, Julia’s family were only at the beginning of the road. Hope was there, and hope was real. They still had that glimmer of light in the darkness. It was Rafaela’s job to convince them that the best way of keeping it burning was to do as she asked. And she was about to ask them to do the one thing that went against every single parental instinct. For now the best thing they could do was nothing. No press. No public plea. No drawing attention to their plight. All it would do was make Julia’s survival less likely — assuming she was still alive.
Julia’s parents and a young man from the US consulate were sitting outside in the sun as the hotel staff scuttled around their table, trading anxious glances. It wasn’t just that a guest at the resort had gone missing — presumed abducted: it was akin to having wealthy relatives visit, when their worst suspicions about how you lived were confirmed and your dirtiest secrets were laid bare before them.
Julia’s father was a tall, lean man in his fifties with a shock of white hair and frameless glasses. The girl’s
