Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (36 page)

Mariana’s eyes grew wide. She seemed genuinely caught off guard, and that surprised Cat. She’d assumed the woman had seen the girl in examples of child-abuse material, and that’s why she had reacted that way.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” the lawyer said. “But again, unless there is something relevant to my client, I’m afraid you’re wasting your time.”

Alvarez continued. “Ms. Medina, these ladies say they showed you an image of a girl, in a painting. It was on their phone?”

No answer, so she prodded further. “You remember, don’t you.”

Mariana looked at the lawyer, who nodded.
 

Finally, she answered. “Yes, I remember this woman showing me the picture.” She gestured toward Granny Grace.

“They tell me you looked as if you recognized the girl. Was that from other pictures you’ve seen?”

“No.”

Cat felt frustrated that the woman continued to lie.

Alvarez pushed her. “Let me remind you that we need you to tell the truth. You don’t want us to call you to the stand in court, have you swear on the Holy Bible, and then have to lie again there.”

“I’m telling the truth,” Mariana said. “I was not reacting to seeing that girl in other pictures.”

Cat could feel Alvarez’s breathing pick up next to her. “But you’ve seen the girl, then? In person?”

Mariana looked at her lawyer, who did not seem to know any longer what this was about.

“They already know, anyway,” Mariana said, gesturing toward Cat and her grandmother. “Serena said so. They want to blackmail her with her past. After what she’s accomplished! It isn’t fair.”

“Ms. Medina,” Alvarez said. “I’m afraid you’ll have to explain. I don’t understand.”

“It’s Angie!” Mariana cried. There were tears in her eyes. “Angie Ramirez.”

Cat broke in even though she was supposed to stay silent. “The girl in the picture is Angie Ramirez?”

“Yes. She dyed her hair red back then. Grade school. Even then she wanted to be someone else.”

Cat explained Serena Jones’s hidden childhood roots to Alvarez. And as she did, the same thought occurred to both of them, as they said in unison to the woman, “Did you know about the child pornography?”

“I don’t know what that is about, or what it has to do with Angie.”

“How do you know this… Angie, er, Serena Jones?” asked Alvarez.

“She is my cousin. She came back to Del Rio last year and asked me if I wanted to escape, to come away with her. But I had no skills. She wanted me to live off her, let her pay my way while I go to school, but I didn’t want her charity. So I’m her maid. It’s the only thing I know how to do.”

There was a pause as they absorbed what she said, including Mariana’s lawyer, who seemed irritated to have been out of the loop on this information. He remained silent, which, judging by his facial expression, did not come naturally to him.

“I don’t understand,” said Mariana. “Is this a mistake? I don’t know anything about child porn. Please, I want to see my cousin now.”

“Her parents…?” Alvarez asked.

“Addicts,” the woman said. “Angie did not have a happy home.”

“What about you? Couldn’t your parents take her in?”

The woman looked away. “I didn’t have a happy home either.”

Alvarez was quiet a moment. Cat figured the sergeant was debating how much to divulge to Mariana Medina. Then Alvarez took a deep breath. “Ms. Medina, I am sorry to have to tell you this, but the girl in the picture they showed you is the same girl who appears in images of child-abuse material known to law enforcement.”

Mariana’s hand went to her mouth, and she shook her head. “No, it can’t be. Serena said she got away…”

She broke down in tears.

They gave Mariana a break from the questioning and brought in Serena next, but only after she held counsel with her lawyer. They also ran some tests on the photographs to determine whether or not the redheaded girl could really be Serena Jones as Angie Ramirez.

“Ms. Jones, I can imagine how difficult this must be for you,” said Alvarez once they were seated.

“I will cooperate as much as I can,” said Serena. “But I hope you understand that my privacy has been seriously violated. That makes me a victim again, do you see that?”

“I’m very sorry, Ms. Jones,” said Alvarez. “But I hope you understand that our intent here is to catch the psychopaths who took those pictures of you back then, not to mention whoever’s still selling them.”

Serena closed her eyes. “I cannot believe this. You can never escape, can you? It keeps dragging you back.”

Alvarez placed a manila folder on the table. “These are the photos, Serena. You do not have to look at them. But you can if you want to be sure they are you. We’ve examined them using software, and we’ve concluded that they could be you, but you must have had plastic surgery. You’d also have to be wearing colored contacts.”

Serena ignored the folder on the table in front of her. “All of that is true. I’ve had my nose and chin altered. And my natural eye color is hazel. My father was white, my mother born in Chihuahua. And my cousin told you I dyed my hair red when I was just a girl. That’s when the photos—” She broke off.

“Thank you for that,” Alvarez said. “I’m very sorry to ask you to revisit such a painful time in your life. And I hate to ask you this, but we’d like you to remove your contact lenses.”

“Are you asking me to prove what I don’t even want anyone to know?”

“I’m sorry,” said Alvarez. An attendant brought in a plastic contact case, a mirror, and a bottle of saline solution and set it on the table.

Serena stared at them. “I can’t do this.”

Her lawyer spoke up. “Surely you’re asking her to do too much.”

“I’m sorry,” Alvarez said. “But we need to be sure.”

Slowly, Serena reached for the contact case, squeezed saline into the tiny cups, and then leaned over the mirror to remove her contacts. Her eyes went from brown to that washed-out hazel. Cat gasped, recognizing them from the girl in the painting—and in her dream that night in New York. She had seemed like a ghost girl, yet here she was. Cat felt admiration for her, to have recovered so much from the girl she had been, captured in those terrible photos and then in Pennington’s dream and Mick’s art.

After Alvarez took a few photos of Serena without her contact lenses, she waited while Serena put them back in.

 
“What can you tell me about how those photos…came into being?”

“With my parents’ blessing,” Serena spat out, still wiping saline from around her eyes with tissue from a box Alvarez retrieved from a corner of the room. “They needed the money. For drugs. They didn’t care what those creeps did to me. ‘It’s just pictures of you, Angie,’ my so-called mother said. ‘Like you’re a model.’”

Alvarez got Serena’s whole story over questioning that took several hours. There wasn’t much she could tell them about where the photographing took place or who did it. She said she believed she was drugged and raped at that time as well, but the truth of it had been hard for her to fully piece together, which she did through years of therapy sessions.
 

“I don’t want a damned soul to know about my history,” Serena said at the end. “Now I’ve helped you with these details, but I don’t know what use they are to you. Those monsters back in Del Rio didn’t have anything to do with the murder of Donnie Hines. And you’ll never catch them. It was so long ago. They’re long gone, maybe dead by now. I should know; I’ve gone back.”

“Did you go looking for them?”

“Yes. I even learned to shoot. I brought a gun with me! I don’t know what I would have done if I’d come across those pieces of shit. But I found nothing, the place where it happened had been demolished, a Taco Bell built in its place. I found nothing. Except my poor, half-literate cousin, who was still worth saving. You probably think I’m terrible for keeping her as a maid, but right now, that’s what she can do. It’s like she has to repeat her whole education over again, you know? Because the first time, she learned nothing in those barrio schools.”

There was a pause as Alvarez let that sink in.
 

Cat took the opportunity to ask what she’d been wondering the whole time.

“How did you escape from Del Rio?”

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Mick spent an entire afternoon down at the Miami police station torturing himself with images of Serena Jones. She was a media darling, a real personality who’d been photographed in public throughout South Florida, at marketing events for her La Luz line of beauty products, at fundraisers and galas, and by paparazzi catching her out at the clubs with celebrities and other members of her nouveau-riche set. He saw now what he would never have been able to see before: the resemblance she bore to the redheaded girl in his painting.

He had to mentally alter her chin, nose, and eye color, but he could see it now. He wished he’d been able to see it before.

It made him wish he’d killed Pennington James. To think the photos that poor excuse for a human being had locked up in his safe were Serena as a young girl living through some unimaginable horror. At least he’d made it so that Pennington would never hear out of his left ear again. That was something. And the man’s defense attorney had advised him not to press charges on Mick for it, as no jury in South Florida would likely convict Mick for what he’d done.

But there was no redheaded girl to save, because she’d already saved herself.

Mick was okay with that.
 

The thing was, after all the pain and suffering, he still didn’t really know who killed Donnie.

Cat and Pris were looking into something having to do with Ernesto, and now the Feds were involved as well. Cat tried to explain to Mick about something called the “darknet,” and listening to her talk about it made him feel really old and out of touch. His grand-niece had cozied up to the FBI agent from the Miami field office, and the two of them had geeked out on each other over the technology behind it all. Mick glazed over when they started flinging acronyms around. He didn’t know his FTP from his PSP. At least he had FBI down.
 

He watched Pris making a valiant effort to ride the crest of things as well, and while she certainly fared better than he did and held her own in conversations with Cat and the others, he sensed she might be feeling her age, too, especially since she had a decade on her li’l brother.

Mick was glad they kept him around. He had to admit he liked using the computers the FBI brought in, as they were a dozen times faster than his own. Alvarez thought the FBI would come in and kick everybody out who wasn’t official, but on the contrary, the agent leading the charge said he liked to have “all hands on deck.”

Roger Strickland claimed to be a synesthetic, which, he explained to Mick, meant that the wires between his senses often got crossed. “The number five is red,” he announced, by way of example. “But three is green.”

Pris took to him, and Cat really bonded with him. They were, surprisingly, closer in age, as Strickland was some kind of boy genius who’d graduated from Quantico at twenty. Mick could sense that Cat saw in Strickland someone she could learn from.

But it was Cat, and not the boy genius, who came up with the prevailing theory they were now in a tizzy to prove, and that was that Kristoff Langholm was the biggest, baddest, child porn-distributing motherfucker that had ever lived.

Kristoff. Fucking. Langholm.

As Mick understood it, Cat first began thinking in that direction when her grandmother sensed that Ernesto lied about handling art transactions for the Langholms. Grace’s hunch was correct; the FBI found evidence that Ernesto handled quite a few art transactions for them in a highly unregulated market, many of them now appearing questionable from a tax standpoint. After that, it was Serena Jones who became the linchpin in the case. And that damned tenacious woman didn’t even know what kind of monster he was, or might be, if Cat’s theory was correct. Serena thought of Kristoff and his wife Carrie as surrogate parents.

Mick heard the recording from Serena’s interrogation, which wasn’t on “tape,” anymore, he noted, but on computer. He could see Serena’s voice on the audio meter bob up and down as she talked. Strickland had him listen to it in case it triggered anything he’d forgotten to add, any details about Langholm. Mick liked that about Strickland, that he thought every detail could be relevant to the case. It reminded Mick of the way he used to paint, his chance operations, where any drip or smudge could become a new pattern or way of movement for his brush. Nothing was insignificant.

On the audio recording, Cat asked Serena how she’d escaped from Del Rio, and that was a curious story.
 

“There was this businessman who would come to town,” Serena said. “He was so…cultured. Not like the thugs we knew. He was buying old buildings, pretty ones with fancy columns, beautiful old tiles, even chandeliers that were busted and forgotten. This man saw the beauty in them. He bought them from the owners and restored them.”

“That was Kristoff Langholm, wasn’t it?” Cat said.

“Yes. He’d be in town for long periods of time, sometimes with his wife, Carrie. I got to know them because I worked at the hotel, cleaning rooms. I was trying to escape, you see. I’d left my parents’ house and was sleeping in the hotel, in the back with the other maids.”