Sinclair Justice

He finished scribbling a ticket and handed her a small board so she could sign. Reluctantly, she did so, stuffing the ticket into her purse without looking at it. “What have I done that’s so awful? I was only trying out my new car, and no one’s even passed us since we’ve been sitting here.” She got out of the car. She didn’t like the way he towered over her, so when he moved to put the cuffs on her, she stuck her hands behind her back. “Let me go. Please? I promise not to exceed the limit again.”
Until I make it out of this Podunk state . . .

“Lady, I have a feeling you exceed every limit there is, but that’s the judge’s problem. You’ve already made me write my first speeding ticket in at least ten years.” He pulled a cigar out of his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth, chewing on it as if he badly wanted to light it.

“We all have our temptations,” she said pointedly, eyeing the vivid label, which she recognized as a very expensive brand because her Rothschild grandfather, Edgar, smoked the same one. When she tilted her head curiously, eyeing him with bright blue intelligence, he took the unlighted cigar out of his mouth, put it back in his pocket, and continued calmly, “Your hands, please.”

Also by Colleen Shannon

 

 

Sinclair Justice

Colleen Shannon

LYRICAL PRESS
Kensington Publishing Corp.
www.kensingtonbooks.com

All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

Table of Contents

To my critique buddies: Majorie, Judy and Veronique. It was fun,
gals, here’s some of your handiwork.
Miss you.

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

Managing not to yawn at the needless reminder of how large this state really was, Mercy Magdalena Rothschild pressed slightly on the accelerator, impatient to finish this interminable trip. A new BMW M4 convertible was a great way to cover the miles, but it was still a huge distance from Washington, DC, to the booming metropolis of Amarillo, Texas.

Emm, as her best friends called her, was not looking forward to her destination, or to the tasks ahead, though as soon as she’d seen the job posting for historic preservation trust officer, she knew she had to apply. But the fact that she had another mission in coming to this border state never left the back of her mind. An unapproved mission even her parents didn’t know about. But there was one skill she now excelled in after ten very expensive 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 the Beatles tune of the same name on the iPhone connected to the car’s onboard computer system.

The song, one of her favorites, still wasn’t distraction enough even when she sang the lyrics about a long and winding road leading to someone special’s door. She broke off in midrefrain. Yeah, like she’d meet someone in Texas. To say men didn’t get her was putting it mildly, but their reaction was consistent, as different as all five of her prior boyfriends 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 as the door closed behind him.

As her song list cycled into another optimistic tune, Emm sighed, doubly depressed now. Her eyes burned behind her sunglasses, but the ache had nothing to do with the bright spring light. 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 her door at her tiny efficiency after eleven p.m. almost six months ago.

The Baltimore detectives who’d taken the missing persons report 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 laid it out to her. The reward she and Yancy had posted for information leading to Yancy’s missing daughter Jennifer had finally yielded a clue. Yancy had, as usual, been hell-bent and determined to follow up on her own because her younger sister Emm was embroiled in oral exams for her PhD. Then Yancy had disappeared, too. . . .

Of her own volition, before she even completed her orals, Emm had canvassed the downtown Baltimore bars Yancy favored, handing out and posting flyers for both women. Mother and daughter strikingly resembled each other: both naturally slim blondes. Yancy had been twenty-one when she’d had Jennifer, 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 remembered 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 sports truck with Texas plates. Her scream was choked off as she was jammed into the front seat between the man who’d snatched her and the driver. He gave the detectives a description of the man who’d 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 looked away, but finally the older detective, Sergeant Ruiz, answered quietly. “Three months ago we had an urgent message from your sister 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 wearily rubbed her tired eyes. “So? I was preparing for my orals, so she didn’t even call me to tell me she was going after Jennifer. What does the phone call have to do with her being missing?”

“We think she 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 he didn’t say.

He seemed oblivious to her doubts, going on calmly, “At least that’s what we think if the eye witness is correct. So we combed surveillance footage all over DC’s major arteries for a similar truck with Texas plates. The cook didn’t recall the number. We found several matches heading south on the interstate, but none of the registered owners match the physical description given by the witness. In the meantime we 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 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 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 is the . . . the merchandise used for? Surely Yancy is too old for, for . . .”

He opened his mouth, swallowed, and then looked away, for the first time showing some genuine regret. The younger detective reached out to pat her shoulder, but under a sharp look from his partner, he froze and his hand dropped back to his side.

Emm 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 now, in the technological age, partly because of the anonymity of the Internet, than ever before in human history, but she knew the statistics. Recent UN estimates pegged the worldwide trade in human flesh at $32 billion and rising.

She also knew the vast majority of the kidnapped women were forced into prostitution. Yancy was beautiful, and though she was thirty-nine, 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 probably too valuable to greatly mistreat.

But Yancy? Emm’s wild, irrepressible one year older half 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,” Ruiz suggested. “Try maybe to find out why she was in that part of Baltimore. We’ll let you know if we get any more leads. Inform us immediately if you get any new information, no matter how insignificant.”

“And you’ll apprise me of any new leads?”

Ruiz’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Of course.” Both men gave her sympathetic nods and left.

And that had been that. Three months passed, but neither detective had called her, even when her old friend Curt Tupperman, a freelance investigative reporter for several well-known papers, wrote a follow up article on the kidnappings. He broke the story, saying that various agencies believed the Baltimore area to be the East Coast beginning of the pipeline they speculated ended in the border town of El Paso or Del Rio, with stops in Dallas and Amarillo.

When Emm called Ruiz to ask for more information about the pipeline, he didn’t call her back. Wondering why he’d stonewall her, Emm finished her demanding doctorate. In her spare time, she talked to everyone she could think of: classmates, friends, acquaintances, tenants in her sister’s apartment building, old bosses, old boyfriends, including Curt, who had dated Yancy for two years and seemed upset when Yancy broke it off about six months before she was taken.

No one knew why Yancy had been in downtown Baltimore or of anyone who drove a macho Texas truck. The detectives were obviously off on another big case. Yancy was just another missing woman, and since she was Emm’s half sister, she wasn’t even a Rothschild.

Now, three months later, on a 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 swipe angrily at her eyes, pressing harder on the accelerator.

So far, despite all the pressure she was under, she’d been good, exceeding the speed limit only when she could see for miles or had another speeder to follow. She looked around, even over her shoulder, and the landscape was so open she could see from horizon to horizon. Nothing. She was dying to try this new baby out. She knew the effort and expense her father had expended to give his only natural daughter this hundred thousand dollar–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 dealership, 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; 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, only a year apart, had always been close. And Jennifer . . . the tears threatened again as she remembered her beautiful, blonde, blue-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 makeup.

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’d hit the Texas state line. She knew the expensive red sports car and her Maryland plates made her a delectable morsel to the typical Texas highway patrolman’s ravenous appetite for revenue.

She looked around again. Clear. What was the harm in letting her hair down a bit? She was properly dressed in a sensible gray suit, sensible shoes, with her hair sensibly tied back, her usual camouflage for fieldwork. She was a female 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 was the most conservative part of the state, the last bastion of the rugged individualist.

Badly needing her usual stress reliever, Emm gave up her battle. Speed was her only vice. Not the oral stimulant, but the automotive version, which was almost as addictive. She had twelve speeding tickets to prove it and had already lost her license twice, getting it back at great cost. 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.

Besides, she reasoned to herself, this car was meant for speed and she only had about thirty miles left to her destination.... She’d earned her favorite high after twelve years of tough academic work.

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 M4 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 entirely too civilized. The sleek German machine wasn’t even challenged. Feeling one of her hairpins 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 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 Maryland driver’s license from her purse.