Foster Justice (25 page)

T
he sign said: Amarillo: 50 miles. Beaumont to El Paso: 1046. Welcome to Texas.”

Managing not to roll her eyes at the typical Texas braggadocio, Mercy Magdalena Rothschild pressed slightly on the accelerator, impatient to get this interminable trip over with. A new BMW M5 convertible was a great way to cover the miles, but it was still a very long way from Washington D.C. to the booming metropolis of Amarillo, Texas.

‘Emm' as her best friends called her, was not looking forward to her destination or to her tasks, but as soon as she saw this job posting she knew she had to apply. For Yancy.

But the fact that she had another mission in coming to this border state besides her new job as Historic Preservation Trust Officer in D.C. never left the back of her mind. An unapproved mission even her parents didn't know about, but one thing she'd learned in her very expensive ten years of higher education: how to do research.

Even of the criminal variety.

Even of the missing persons variety.

But thinking about Yancy and Jennifer would only bring the tears, never at bay very long, back to her tired eyes, and on this long and winding road, she couldn't afford that. Trying to distract herself, she shuffled to that very Beatles tune on the iPhone connected to her sophisticated iDrive in the car's onboard computer system.

The song, one of her favorites, still wasn't distraction enough, even when she sang the lyrics she knew by heart.

She broke off when she reached the part about the road leading to “your door.” Yeah, like she'd meet someone in Texas. To say men didn't get her was putting it mildly, but their rejection had a universal ring, as different as all five of them had been.

One of them had even declared plaintively, “You're just weird, you know? And why do you use such big words?”

Because words are the font of knowledge and life, you dullard, learn a few, she'd wanted to say, but had held her tongue until the door closed behind him.

Emm sighed, doubly depressed now. Her eyes burned behind her sunglasses, but the ache had nothing to do with the bright spring sun. Yancy had been missing for six months, nine days—she glanced at her watch—and thirteen hours. Jennifer longer than that. She'd never forget the knock on the door at her tiny efficiency that night almost exactly six months ago.

The D.C. detectives who'd taken the missing persons report had stood there, looking uneasy. “Ma'am, we have news about your sister and her daughter. May we come in?”

In her matchbox living room they'd laid it out to her. The reward she and Yancy had posted for information leading to Yancy's missing daughter Jennifer had, he told her, finally yielded a clue. Yancy had, as usual, been hell bent and determined to follow up on her own. Emm, embroiled in her orals for her PhD, had begged her to wait. Then Yancy had disappeared, too . . . .

Of her own volition, before she even completed her orals, Emm had traveled the D.C. metro area to the low-end bars Yancy favored, handing out and posting flyers for both women. Mother and daughter strikingly resembled one another and Yancy had been a teen mom, so she was only in her late thirties and looked a decade younger.

Finally, three months after Yancy's disappearance, nine months after Jennifer had been taken, one of the flyers yielded a tip. The night cook at a seedy little café in downtown Baltimore was coming off duty at one in the morning, and he'd seen a woman who matched the picture of Yancy being forced into a big black sport truck with Texas plates. Her scream was choked off as she was forced into the front seat between the man who snatched her and the driver. He gave a description of the man who grabbed her but never saw the driver.

When the detectives asked why he hadn't come forward earlier, he gave the usual spiel about being afraid of being deported, but when the señorita—that was you, Ms. Rothschild, they'd told her—had pleaded for information, he overheard and felt guilty. Besides, he wanted the reward to send back to his family in Mexico.

“But what exactly does this mean?” Emm had asked. “Yancy was taken to Texas? What about Jennifer?”

The detectives seemed uneasy. The younger one had looked away, but finally the older detective answered quietly, “We had an urgent message from Yancy asking us to call, saying she had a lead on her daughter's whereabouts. We were working a dual homicide and by the time we called her back, her phone went straight to voice mail.”

Emm had wearily rubbed her tired eyes. “So? And I was preparing for my orals so she didn't even call me to tell me she was going after Jennifer. What does that have to do with her being missing, except prove we'll all incompetent, self-absorbed assholes?”

They let that slide. The older detective continued, “We think your sister got too close, that she must have stumbled across the northeastern source of the human trafficking ring. And they . . . took her too.”

Or worse. Emm heard what they didn't say.

“At least that's what we think if the eyewitness is correct. So we combed surveillance footage all over D.C.'s major arteries for a similar truck with Texas plates. We found several matches heading south on the interstate but that's a lot of plates and none of the registered owners match the physical description given by the witness. In the meantime we've informed the Texas authorities and were told there's a high end snatch and grab ring with national reach culminating in West Texas. They bring in the . . . their . . . their . . .” He cleared his throat.

Emm inserted quietly, “I think the term in your nomenclature is merchandise.”

He looked relieved and nodded. “Anyway, they bring them from all over the nation through Texas to the border. We still haven't figured out how they smuggle them across. The Texas Rangers are heading the task force along with the Border Patrol. We've given them all the information we have but will still work the case from this end as well.”

Emm had to clear her throat because as she asked the question, she dreaded the answer. “What are the . . . .the merchandise . . . used for? Surely Yancy is too old for, for . . .”

He opened his mouth, swallowed, and then looked away.

She closed her eyes, biting her lip to stifle a moan. She was a trivia and science buff. The average American citizen might not be aware that slavery was worse than ever now in the technological age, partly because of the anonymity of the internet, but she knew the statistics. She also knew the vast majority of the kidnapped women, especially someone as beautiful as Yancy, were forced into prostitution. She was almost forty, but looked twenty-five. After being taken more than nine months ago, Jennifer was probably nothing like the vibrant young seventeen-year-old she'd once been. But she was young and adaptable and would have found a way to survive.

But Yancy? Her wild, irrepressible older sister wouldn't tolerate boundaries, or orders. Once on the inside, assuming she'd been taken by the same people, she'd risk her life to find her daughter. And she would not take well to captivity.

“What can I do?” she whispered over the tears she was restraining.

“I know this is difficult, but keep handing out flyers, ask everyone your sister knew if she had any Texas connections, maybe try to find out why she was in that part of Baltimore. We'll let you know if we get any more leads. Let us know immediately if you get any new information, no matter how insignificant.” Both men gave her sympathetic smiles and left.

And that had been that, at least for the last three months. As she finished her demanding doctorate, in her spare time Emm had talked to everyone she could think of: classmates, friends, acquaintances, tenants in her sister's apartment building, old bosses, old boyfriends. No one knew why Yancy had been in downtown Baltimore or of anyone who drove a big black Texas truck. The trail ran cold for the detectives too, until finally they were off to another big case and they quit contacting her. Just another missing woman, and since she was Emm's half sister, Yancy wasn't even a Rothschild.

Now, three months later, back on the long lonely road to nowhere, Emm glared around at the sere landscape too tough to yield more than mesquite and cactus. Maybe Yancy was already dead, maybe Emm was on another foolish crusade, as her father had scolded her. Maybe her sister was buried in this wasteland . . .

Emm removed her sunglasses to dash angrily at her eyes, pressing harder on the accelerator.

So far, despite all the pressures she was under, she'd been good, exceeding the speed limit only when she could see for miles or she had another speeder to follow. She looked around, even over her shoulder, and the landscape was so open she could see horizon to horizon. Nothing. She was dying to try this new baby out. She knew the effort her father had expended to give his only natural daughter this hundred thousand plus vehicle, partly his way of voicing his regret that his wife was a self-absorbed alcoholic who had long ago lost interest in her older daughter's fate. As sales manager for a BMW dealer, her father made good money and had been able to get a screaming deal on this car, but the only Rothschild inheritance he had was a silver dollar collection given to him by a remote relative. And the name, all too often, had been more of a burden to Emm than a boon. People assumed she had money and that she was cold and snooty because of her unusual grasp of the English language. Wrong on both counts.

Yancy had even less money since her own father had passed when she was a child, and their social climbing mother was not happy about her willful older daughter, who refused to get a steady job or go to college. But Yancy and Emm had always been close. And Jennifer. . . the tears threatened again as she remembered her beautiful, blond, green-eyed niece. She tried to picture her as she likely was now, a dead look in her eyes, forced into short, tight dresses and hooker make up.

Emm's foot twitched at her unhappy thoughts, pushing down until the speedometer passed the conservative eighty, only five over the limit, the speed she'd tried very hard to maintain since she hit the Texas state line. She knew the expensive red sports car and her New York plates made her a delectable morsel to the typical Texas highway patrolman's ravenous appetite for revenue.

She looked around again. Clear. Emm would never admit it, but her mouth was dry and she couldn't attribute the slight shaking of her hands to the long trip because she'd deliberately scheduled the last leg at a leisurely pace so she'd be fresh for her meeting. She was properly dressed in a sensible gray suit, sensible shoes, with her hair sensibly tied back, her usual camouflage for field work. She was a woman in a world of men, and she'd learned long ago to downplay her considerable good looks. Especially in a place as conservative as Texas, west Texas, to boot. The most conservative part of Texas, and the last bastion in the increasingly progressive state of the rugged individualist.

Badly needing her usual stress reliever, Emm gave up her battle, What was the big deal, anyway? Speed was her only vice. Not the oral stimulant, never, but the automotive version was almost as addictive. She had the twelve speeding tickets to prove it. Her insurance was astronomical, but nothing invigorated her as much as the wind howling through her hair and the roar of a powerful exhaust cheering her on. This car was meant for speed and she only had about thirty miles left to her destination, so it was now or never. She'd earned her favorite high and the thoughts about Yancy made every nerve in her body jangle with the need for action.

The needle hovered at a mere eighty-five now, ten over the limit. She took a last careful look around but this section of road was too open for a speed trap. The needle on her M5 convertible didn't bobble when she pressed on the gas—in one gentle arc it went from eighty to one hundred in about two seconds. The engine was so smooth, the throaty growl was entirely too civilized. The sleek German machine wasn't even challenged. Feeling one of her hair pins fly free and not caring, Emm pressed harder on the accelerator.

Finally the engine roared back as if to say, “That all you got?”

Laughing, having the best time she'd had since graduation, Emm pressed harder still—110, 120, man this baby could fly.

The wail of the siren was faint at first. She'd glimpsed something black and big and shiny out of the corner of her eye as she streaked past a gate in a long row of white fencing, but she'd discounted it as a rancher's truck. She looked in her rearview mirror and stifled a groan, immediately taking her foot off the gas pedal. A siren wailed and she saw a blue and white light flash from a side of the SUV's roof. The light had obviously been attached only when the driver saw her zip past, so this cop was not a typical highway patrolman.

The neat little speech about how big Texas was, and no, she really didn't know she was going that fast, her Beamer was a new graduation present, went out the window with her deep breath. “Good going, Emm,” she said to herself. “No one's more hard nosed than an undercover cop.” She pulled to the side of the road, got the registration from the glove box, and took her insurance card and her New York driver's license from her purse.

In her side mirror, she watched the man approach. He was tall, over six feet, with iron gray hair she could just glimpse under his expensive Stetson. Black, of course, to match his black jeans. His shirt was white, a dress shirt crisp with starch, sort of like his spine. His eyes were covered in mirrored shades but there was no mistaking his glacial tone. “If you want to race that fancy little import, I can give you the address of a race track in Lubbock. Do you have any idea how fast you were going and all the lives you endangered, including mine, as I was about to pull out of my driveway, by driving like that?”

“I'm sorry, officer, I was just in a hurry to get to Amarillo. You know, I'm like that bumper sticker: ‘I'm not from Texas but I got here as fast as I could.'” He'd stopped at her open window now and perused her documents, glancing between her driver's license photo and her flushed face. Her hair pins had long ago lost the battle, and her brown mane shot through with blond and red highlights was tangled. She took off her sunshades so he could see her eyes. She blinked. “See, blue? Just like it says. I promise I'm not here to commit murder or fraud . . .” So far her attempt at charm was an abysmal failure. His mouth was beautifully shaped, meant for laughing, but she couldn't get it to even twitch. She'd been out of the dating scene too long.