Seeds of Evidence (9781426770838) (19 page)

“I need to know, Patricia, before I can help.”

“OK. I tell you. Barnes. Robert and Rhonda Barnes. They live on Seaview Avenue in Norfolk. Big white house. The number is 2317.”

“And what's your friend's name, the one who is missing?”

“Consuela Espinoza.”

“She lived in Norfolk, with you?”

“Oh, no. She go up . . . up north. Almost to Maryland. She send me a message maybe six, eight months ago. Give to a man I know who comes to Norfolk sometimes with the tomatoes. It says she get away and go now to a place I do not know. But he find her! I know Hector find her . . . and now . . . please, please help her! He is no good, this Hector. No good.”

“How do you know he found her?”

“I hear it. From people who come to the market.”

“And where does Hector live?”

“I do not know that. He drive truck . . . a big white truck, from Mexico all the way to here. But I do not know where he lives.”

When Kit hung up the phone she felt confused by and irritated at the interruption. What was she supposed to do with that information? Why did Piper have to call her at 11 o'clock at night? What could she do then? And how in the world could she identify a person with a name as common as Hector?

Kit tried getting back to her presentation. She printed some more files, created two new PowerPoint slides . . . but she couldn't let go of Patricia's phone call. So she fixed a pot of coffee and stepped out onto her deck as it brewed.

The night was warm and humid. Crickets and night insects clicked and buzzed in the weeds. The marsh and the channel were black, and from somewhere, Kit heard an owl hoot.

Puzzled both by Piper's phone call and her reaction to it, Kit stepped off the porch and walked down to her neighbor's dock. The neighbor's boat bobbed in the gentle waves of the channel. The horseshoe life preserver was hanging again on its hook, just where it had been when Kit had needed it for David.

She touched it. David. Where was he? She'd seen no sign of him at the house on Main Street. Someone from the police department had called her . . . David's kayak had been found, but they didn't know where he was staying. She'd given them directions, then tried to call him, but all she'd gotten was his voicemail.

In fact, she hadn't seen him for what . . . a week? More than a week. Where was he? And why did she want so much to talk to him?

Right now, smelling the salt marsh, looking out over the water, she was nagged by sadness, and tears came to her eyes.

She thought about how he'd helped her gather the acorns for her investigation, about the conversations they'd had all night, driving all that way to Wilmington, about his sense of humor and sheer masculinity. About how he'd talked—in Spanish—to Patricia, gaining her trust and discerning the basis in truth
of her story. David was sharp. He had good law enforcement instincts. He seemed compassionate. And he was . . .

. . . and then, she got it—in a flash, she knew the significance of Piper's phone call: what if the man who brought Patricia up from Mexico was also trafficking people into the peninsula? What if he had moved her beach child's mother into this area? Or the boy himself?

Could he have been trafficking people out on the ocean? Could the boy have become a problem? And who was this man, Hector? And why would someone traffic a mother and child in. Unless . . . unless, he'd tricked the mother, told her she could bring the child, then stole the child to be sold, to whom?

Kit stopped there, fresh anger surging within her.

She turned to go back inside and looked up, and there, above her house appeared a white cross. She'd never noticed it before. Moving right to get a different angle on it, she realized what it was: her neighbor across the street had a flagpole shaped like a mast with a yardarm. You could only see the top of it over Kit's cottage, and it looked like a cross. David's cross. She had doubted him. Dismissed him. But there it was. She closed her eyes. Tears began running down her cheeks. “God, I'm so confused. Please help me figure all this out,” she whispered, “my presentation, the case, and . . . and David. Everything, God. Just everything. I know I can't do this without you. But I'm so afraid . . . so afraid you'll let me down again. I'm so afraid.”

Kit smoothed her navy blue suit jacket as she waited for her boss in the conference room at the Norfolk FBI office. She touched the skin underneath her eyes, hoping no puffiness remained, hoping it didn't show the fatigue from staying up until 4:00 a.m. preparing her presentation. And the drive down
had been arduous—police activity along Rt. 13 had delayed her for nearly an hour. It was a good thing she had left very early.

She heard a noise and looked up, expecting to see Steve Gould and the Assistant U. S. Attorney, who Steve had invited to sit in on their meeting. But Chris Cruz walked in, spit-shined and polished. “I see you got the memo,” Chris said, tugging at the sleeves of his navy blue suit coat.

She smiled. “But you forgot the ruffled collar.”

He laughed.

Steve Gould followed seconds later. Behind him strode a short, intense man with small eyes and a pronounced cowlick, wearing a black suit, a white shirt, and a gray-striped tie, the AUSA, Kit presumed. “This is Mark Handley,” Steve said, confirming her guess. “Special Agents Kit McGovern and Chris Cruz.” His introductions prompted handshaking all around and then rustling as everyone took a seat around the conference table.

Steve gave her the go-ahead and Kit's stomach clenched as she passed out her handouts. Then she stood behind her laptop and started going through her PowerPoint presentation. As she progressively moved through her slides, she began to relax.

She told them about finding the boy's body on the beach, about the quantity of tomato seeds in his belly and the acorns in his pocket. She went through the findings of the botanist, and then presented the pictures of the live oaks and the farmhouse, and told them about the scar-faced man.

The squad secretary interrupted Kit's presentation, entering the room and handing Steve a note. He frowned as he read it. “A state trooper was shot to death early this morning on Rt. 13,” he said to the others.

“That must have been the police activity I passed on the way down!” Kit said. The crime scene investigation she'd passed
had completely closed southbound Rt. 13. Traffic had been diverted to the other side of the road, causing massive delays.

“Pulled over a white box truck with stolen plates and apparently the driver shot him and destroyed the dashboard camera.”

“Do they have the truck?” Chris asked.

Steve nodded. “They're just now taking it to the state police garage.” He took a deep breath and looked at Kit. “Continue.”

The men were looking at her expectantly. Kit tucked a stray hair behind her ear. She refocused on her own case. She told them about the gunfire from the boat on the open ocean, the scar-faced man and his aggressive behavior, mentioned the crews she'd observed working in the fields, the basics of tomato production on the Eastern Shore, and then finally brought in the information Patricia had provided her the night before: the indication that she and others had been trafficked into Virginia, forced into domestic servitude, and that at least one victim might have been abducted following her escape from her captors.

The AUSA began peppering her with questions. How long had the boy been dead? What did she think was the connection with her beach child? Why would traffickers move people over the water? What made her think that there was enough of a need for domestic servants on the peninsula to warrant trafficking? Why would an eight-year-old boy be part of this scenario, anyway? “I think it's far more likely that he was just an illegal alien and now his grieving parents just don't want to draw the attention of the law,” Mark said.

All the while, Chris Cruz sat with his hand touching his chin, as if he were lost in thought. Kit glanced at him from time to time, trying to read his mind. Finally he spoke. Dropping his hand, he looked at Kit. “What kind of vehicle was Patricia transported in?”

“A large box truck,” Kit said, and right away she saw where he was going.

Steve Gould tapped his pen on the table. He got it, too. He glanced at the AUSA, then looked at Kit. “You now have the names of the people who held this victim, right?”

“Yes,” Kit confirmed.

Steve nodded. “Start there. You agree, Mark? See where that leads?” Seeing the AUSA nod, he turned to Chris. “You give some hours to this. You work with Kit and see what we need—surveillance, subpoenas, whatever—to go after these people, Robert and Rhonda Barnes.”

Kit interrupted him, her heart pounding. “Steve, I think they're just the tip of the iceberg. I want to check out this operation on the peninsula. As Chris suggested, whoever was driving that box truck last night didn't want the trooper to see what was in it. It might have been drugs . . . but it could have been people, too.”

Her boss's neck reddened. “You haven't made the connection to my satisfaction. For all we know the trucker was carrying dog food.”

Kit thought fast. “Let me look into this C&R Enterprises. Let me check out why that guy driving their truck was so aggressive. See if there's a connection with the trooper who was shot. Let me find out who ‘Hector' is.”

“Sounds like you're not ready to leave the beach.”

His comment took Kit aback. Flustered, she groped for words. Surprisingly, Chris stepped in. “I see her point, boss. How about I work on this Norfolk couple, while Kit takes the lead on the peninsula?”

Steve grimaced. “All right. But Kit, if you hit a dead end, you're back here, understand?”

The scar-faced man could identify her green Subaru Forester, so Kit traded it in for her Bureau car, a dark blue Crown Victoria. Then she drove to her apartment, fixed coffee, and while it brewed, leafed through the stack of mail her neighbor Ellen had left on her counter.

Her heart nearly stopped when she saw the familiar handwriting on the pink envelope. Another card. Gee, thanks.

And maybe it was leftover tension from the meeting, or fatigue, or just sheer loneliness, but tears sprang to her eyes, and she bit her lip to keep the feelings at bay. Then she went to her bedroom, jerked open the closet door, and threw the card in the box with the others—many, many others, collected over the course of twenty-four years.

Kit grabbed what she needed from the apartment and left. Halfway across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge tunnel, she remembered the coffee.

Over the next two days, Kit visited the marinas in Wachapreague as well as the ones on Chincoteague and in Ocean City to see if they'd observed any unusual activity lately. She spent an hour with an emotionally engaged state police captain, furious at the loss of one of his own men.

“He called it in: he was pulling over a large white box truck for speeding at 2:00 a.m. on U.S. 13,” Captain Roy Grizzle stated succinctly. “The next thing we know, dispatch can't raise him. So our dispatcher sent another trooper to check on him. Meanwhile, a citizen calls in on a cell phone. There's a state police car, he says, on the side of the road, lights flashing, with no trooper in sight. Right behind a white box truck.