We put the Delgados’ belongings in the Braceros’ truck and used the bed sheet they’d been wrapped in to hog-tie the three thugs. Guillermo propped the Braceros up in the shade of a big creosote bush, and taped a cowboy hat he’d found in the truck onto the head of the guy in the most westerly position.
“I’m sure someone will find you by tomorrow.”
“You’re going to pay for this, cabrón,” Lamas warned.
“I know.”
The Delgado family insisted upon leaving the water with them, too.
The keys were still in the ignition. The family piled into the bed of the Braceros’ black truck and Guillermo and I took the cab.
“Are you sure you don’t want the girls up front here?” I asked. The mother smiled shyly and waved away my offer. She pulled a heavy tarp over their heads so passing patrol cars couldn’t see them easily.
“What should we do with them?” I asked Guillermo when we reached the highway.
“Make sure they’re safe tonight. After that…” He shrugged and turned south toward Nogales and his parked Camaro. Guillermo planned to stay with the Delgados and I would drive his car back to Tucson. Now that we were back in an area with a strong wireless signal, I retrieved my cell phone from the backpack and turned it on. Six messages.
“They could stay with me at Bonita’s house until they’re ready to move on,” I said, waiting for the first message to play. I’d have to tell Deke about the Braceros trying to take the Delgados’ little girl. It may tie in with the killings and with that child’s seat in Carlos’s car. But I wasn’t going to call him until the Delgados were well away and couldn’t be threatened with deportation.
Guillermo stayed quiet while I listened to the recordings. Four were from Raisa, each asking me to contact her. Another was from Detective Treadwell that was more formal in speech pattern than I’d ever heard him before. He wanted me to call, too.
The sixth message was from Raisa again. I listened to it twice and then held the phone to Guillermo’s ear. “Jessie? Where are you? Call me immediately.” There was a pause before she continued. “Detective Sabin got the search warrant amended to include Bonita’s car. They say they found a map. A map where you marked the crime scene. That was enough to get them a subpoena for a DNA sample.”
There was another pause in the message.
“Jessie, they’re talking about an arrest warrant.”
“Looks like we’ll be taking our new friends to my house instead,” Guillermo said.
We got the Delgado family settled in at Guillermo’s apartment. It was the first time I’d been there and the permanency of the place surprised me. There were shelves of hardbound books in hand-crafted wooden cases, framed posters on the walls, and a set of plates and glasses for eight in the cupboard.
“How long have you lived here?”
“A year or so.” He saw me eyeing the matched set of silverware. Not expensive stuff, but modern and sleek. “I brought most of the stuff up from Nogales. I was…with somebody down there.”
“She didn’t want it?”
He started a sentence but didn’t get more than “she” out when he changed his mind.
“No.”
We made chorizo and scrambled eggs for the exhausted travelers. Little Magdalena helped me spoon sliced peaches into bowls for dessert. After dinner, while the family bathed and Guillermo cleaned up the kitchen, I made a run to Target. Lightweight cotton pants for Mrs. Delgado and the girls, canvas sneakers for all four, plus long-sleeved shirts and hats to protect them from the sun. I added two sturdy backpacks to replace the wrapped bed sheets, and a professional-looking first-aid kit.
The girls were already asleep when I got back. Guillermo and Mr. Delgado were making plans.
“I can take them over to the central valley,” I offered.
“Not smart. The police are probably already looking for you.”
He was right. We agreed that he would give the Delgado family a lift in the morning. The parents yawned and joined their daughters in the second bedroom’s double bed.
Guillermo and I headed out for the last errand of the day: getting rid of the Braceros’ truck.
“Where shall we leave it?” I asked.
“How about South Fourth? If we leave the keys in it, it should be gone in no time.”
I agreed and followed his car. We took side streets and I obeyed the speed limit. This was not a night to give a policeman a reason to ask for my ID. I parked the truck on a quiet block, wiped the areas I had touched, and returned to his car.
“It should be gone within the hour.”
Traffic was light on the way back to his house. We made as little noise as possible coming in, but Mr. Delgado still stuck his head out of the bedroom door to make sure everything was okay.
“Can I spend the night, too?” I asked. “I don’t think my place would be a good idea right now.”
Guillermo took my hand and led me into the bedroom. The sheets were cool and smelled like him. I rolled against his back and draped an arm across his chest.
“I have friends in Phoenix, so I’m going to start there with the Delgados,” he said, changing the subject. “But if I take them all the way to California’s central valley, I won’t be home until late.”
“Carlos took one of the children,” I said to his back. “We’ve got to find out what happened to her.” My heart broke thinking about her terror.
“We’ll find out. Carlos would have made sure she was safe.”
Unless the Braceros got to him first, I thought.
Guillermo and the Delgado family were gone by sunrise. I waited until eight o’clock to call Raisa on her cell phone. She’d either be on her way in to work, or already there and desperate for a cigarette on the sidewalk.
“Where are you?” she said. “No, wait, don’t tell me. If I don’t know, I can’t tell the police.”
“I got your messages. What did Detective Sabin say?”
“He’s got you in his sights. You were with Carlos’s girlfriend when she got blown up. Your fingerprints were found on the post next to his dead body. You had the place marked on a map.”
“I don’t care,” she exhaled deeply. I was right about the smoke break. “Just tell me, is the DNA test something I have to worry about?”
“Maybe.” I paced from the front door to the kitchen.
“Good Kind Christ, Jessie. We can explain away the map. They don’t know who made that marking, it was found in your sister’s car, yada yada. But the fingerprints? And DNA? You’re in deep shit this time.”
“Hypothetically, if my DNA matches something in the garage—like the blood on the floor, for example—can’t they tell how long it had been there? We can prove that Carlos was dead days before that blood got there.” I retraced my steps to the living room, and grabbed a loose cushion from the couch.
“Maybe. But all that’s for after they test the DNA and match it. You’re going to have to give them a sample.”
I wadded up the pillow and threw it back on the couch. “I will.” Just not quite yet. I needed time to show the cops that there was another way of looking at this.
“Is there a warrant out for my arrest?”
“Not yet. But as your attorney, I’m telling you to turn yourself in for this test.”
“And as my friend?”
She paused. “I’ll buy you as much time as I can.”
I needed a car that wasn’t associated with me, so I called my brother at the fire station. “Can I use your car while you’re on duty today? Mine’s in the shop.”
“Why don’t you use Bonita’s?”
“Battery’s dead.”
Martin wasn’t making this easy. “No, it won’t hold a charge. I’ll stop and pick up a new battery while I’m out.”
He agreed.
I smoothed out the pillow I’d crushed during my conversation with Raisa and locked the front door behind me, then hoofed it a half mile to the nearest bus stop. When I arrived at the fire station, Martin was just sitting down to breakfast.
“Don’t get up! I’ve got some errands to run. I’ll get the car back as soon as I can.”
“I don’t get off till tomorrow night. Do you need it that long?”
“I don’t think so, but thanks for the offer.”
I turned the key and the old Subaru bucked and shimmied to life. It was nice to know it was available for the next two days. I might need it. I headed to Guillermo’s cousin’s house.
The university neighborhood was coming alive with both pedestrian and car traffic. Miguel’s tiny stucco house didn’t have a driveway or a carport and I had to drive around the block twice before I found a place to park.
There were two steps up from the sidewalk and then another two to the front porch. I knocked on the screen door and it rattled in response. Miguel opened the wooden door behind it a crack, letting just one eye check out his visitor. His shoulder and chest were bare. Without a word, he opened the door and allowed me in.
“I’ve come to trade,” I said, offering him the knife I’d bought in Quartzsite.
“That thing’s a piece of shit.” He reached for a wrinkled blue T-shirt on the floor and pulled it over his head.
“Yeah, but it can’t be traced.” And as far as I knew, the only blood it had on it was from my fight with Ricky Lamas in the desert.
“I can take care of myself.” He fingered the handle of the blade in the hard leather pouch on his belt.
“I need your knife.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Then I can’t give it to you.” He turned away. I noticed a stack of thick textbooks on the linoleum table. Locke. Bacon. Descartes.
“You’re studying philosophy?” It was the last thing I would have expected from a man who had so implacably slit the throat of another. But then again, it was pretty unlikely training for the killer I’d become, too.
He managed to blush through brown skin. “Yeah.”
“You want to be a teacher someday? A professor at some fancy college? That’s not going to happen if you get picked up with that knife.”
“It’s over, Jessie. They killed one of ours. We killed one of theirs. We’re even now.”
“You think Chaco’s going to take it that way? You think Guillermo’s satisfied now?”
He turned, picked up the book on Francis Bacon, and thumbed it open. “‘A man that studies revenge keeps his own wounds green.’” He still had a taste of the barrio in his accent.
“‘Revenge is sweet and not fattening.’ Alfred Hitchcock,” I countered.
He smiled but didn’t move to hand over the knife.
I reached for his arm and he stiffened. “Miguel, it’s for Carlos. You’ve got to trust me. It won’t come back to you.”
He finally gave in. “All right. Take it. But I’m not taking that butter knife of yours. I’ll get another one.” He drew the knife from its sheath and handed it to me.
I tucked it into a pocket in my purse.
Back in the car, I took Miguel’s knife and depressed the lever near my thumb. A black blade shot out of the front, razor sharp on both sides, with a wavy line of serrations on one edge. It was shorter than the knife I’d tried to give him but looked twice as deadly. He’d made a good attempt at cleaning it, but there—under the cross guard and inside that hidden channel—was what looked like a spot of dried blood. It would have been enough to hang him. I hoped it was enough to hang somebody else.
I wiped any prints off both the blade and the handle, then used a Kleenex over my thumb to depress the lever one more time and retract the blade.
There were a couple of ways I could plant this knife on the Braceros. Maybe I could get it inside the black truck we’d stolen yesterday, and then get the cops to tow the truck in for some violation. If the truck was still there, of course. I wished that I’d come up with this idea before we’d abandoned the damn thing on South Fourth.
I circled the block four times, hoping that I’d misremembered a landmark or a cross street. The truck was gone. Damn, our open-door policy had worked too well.
There was another, more difficult option, and for that I needed Guillermo. He wouldn’t be back for hours, but there was something else I could do in the meantime.
Felicia’s notebook had listed the details for six day-care centers funded by Darren Markson in Tucson and Nogales. I no longer believed that Markson was a saint who was paying for the day-care centers out of the goodness of his heart. And if the Braceros were tied in with him in stealing or selling children, I’d bet those facilities were somehow involved.
The oldest of the facilities was out by the airport. I parked the Subaru next to a blue Taurus in the lot. The day-care center looked like an elementary school that was short on classrooms and long on recess. Sandboxes, swings, and slides dotted one corner of the dusty yard like Christmas gifts in the Sahara. There was a blacktop basketball court and a soccer field with chalked sidelines drawn into the dirt. Two picnic tables with umbrellas were the only places to rest rather than run.
All the kids in the yard looked like Latinos, but the massive woman watching them was black.
“I’m interested in enrolling my little one,” I called to her. “Is there someone here I could talk to?”
She fanned herself with a People magazine. “I don’t know if we have any more space, but Mrs. Pogue is inside. You can ask her.”
I followed the sidewalk to a metal door in the dun-colored building. There were bathrooms marked BOYS and GIRLS on the right, and two window-walled offices on the left, then the hallway opened into a big gathering room/play area. The first of the offices was dark, with the blinds pulled down, but light and voices came from the second.
“You’re going to have to keep them a little longer,” a woman said.
“That’s not possible. The children—” Another woman’s voice sputtered to a stop when she turned in my direction. “May I help you?”
“What are you doing here?” Emily Markson said.
Emily occupied one of the two guest chairs in the office. I couldn’t see past her to see the other person.
“You know her?” the older woman on the other side of the desk asked. She was middle-aged, with thin lips, gray-rooted blond hair, and the posture of a dictator. She tapped her forefinger on the desk with impatience. The nutritionist I’d worked out with at a gym in Phoenix would have diagnosed those white lines across her nails as a liver problem. My mother would have said that each white line indicated a lie.
“She works for that car navigation company—HandsFree or something,” Markson said. She didn’t seem particularly unhappy to see me, just surprised.
“No she doesn’t,” the third woman said. “She’s the journalist who came to interview me. Remember, Em? I told you all about it.”
Damn. What was Aloma Willard doing here, too? And how could I be both a journalist from Tucson and a HandsOn operator from Phoenix?
“Hi, Mrs. Markson. Mrs. Willard. What a coincidence. I was just following up on your husbands’ charitable work building these day-care centers—for a magazine article.”
“You’re a journalist? But I thought—” Mrs. Markson started.
“I left HandsOn. This is a new job. Sorry to interrupt you. I’ll come back when it’s more convenient.” I backed out faster than I’d come in.
“Make an appointment next time,” the woman I assumed was Mrs. Pogue called after me.
I raced back outside and ducked around the corner of the building, still keeping an eye on the Taurus in the lot. They didn’t know my brother’s car; hopefully they would assume I’d gone.
Emily Markson and Aloma Willard came out ten minutes later, their voices low but urgent. Markson shrugged off Willard’s grip on her elbow, spinning her away. The fight continued after they got in the car, first with pointed fingers and steely glances, then finally reconciliation of a kind I hadn’t expected. Aloma Willard reached across the front seat and took Markson’s face in her hands. She spoke directly and softly to her, brushing Markson’s cheekbones and eyebrows with a gentle finger. Then she leaned forward and kissed her slowly on the lips.
Guillermo had a bench and a full set of weights under the ramada at the back of his house and I made good use of them, although I still couldn’t do anything like a squat with the tear across my calf.
Had I totally misread the adultery I’d imagined when I saw Paul Willard leave the Marksons’ house at dawn? Who was Emily Markson having an affair with? The husband? The wife? Both?
I was still feeling the burn in my biceps when Guillermo pulled into the driveway.
“Where did you leave the Delgados?”
“There’s a church in Phoenix associated with the same group Eldon and Polly Dallas belong to. As long as the church members can say they didn’t help anyone get across the border, and they don’t know for sure that they’re here illegally, they can help them.”
“Are the Delgados still going to try for the San Fernando Valley?”
He shrugged. “Maybe. They’ll stay in Phoenix a few days, then make a decision.” I hoped they’d find someplace safe. The life of an undocumented worker wasn’t easy, whether it was in the fields or in the back room of a restaurant.
“Do you know where Chaco lives?” I asked, changing the subject. I knew where the Bracero leader’s uncle’s house was, and where he drank, but not where he slept.
“I think Esteban does. Chaco moved up here to Tucson about six months ago, but still hangs out in Nogales most of the time. Why?”
“I need to get into his house.”
“Are you nuts? We killed one of his men, Jessie.” He opened the refrigerator then shut the door, not finding what he wanted. I handed him my half-full bottle of cold water and he drained it in one gulp.
“I’ve got a way to put Chaco right in the cops’ crosshairs, but I’ll need that address.”
He shook his head. “Too dangerous.”
“Not if he’s not there.”
“Then I’ll go.”
“Look, the cops are already after me. There’s nothing I can do about that except turn their attention to someone else. I don’t want that someone to be you, to have them thinking you had something to do with Carlos’s death. Go see your mother. She needs you right now. I’ll be fine.”
He sighed. “Let me make a call.”
A few muttered moments later he had the answer. “He’s got a place in the Tucson Mountains.”
“But he’s probably down in Nogales right now, right?”
“Friday afternoon? I guarantee it. He’s drinking and getting ready for Friday-night business.”
I hoped he was right.