“Daddy?”
The man was distracted. It took him a few seconds to realize his daughter was standing at his side. Quickly, he clicked on his website, effectively covering the page he was looking at. He pulled his gaze away from the computer screen and turned to the child. She stood there barefoot and in yellow pajamas. His heart swelled when he saw the look on her face—pure adoration.
She was such a daddy’s girl. Always had been. He had never tried to persuade her not to be one. Neither had his wife. She was a smart woman. She loved her designer clothes, her mansion, and her Mercedes too much to ever complain. Besides, the one time she had, she’d ended up in the hospital. She’d told the paramedics she’d tripped. She was a good wife.
And now that he’d paid for assorted plastic surgeries, she was the wife he’d always dreamed of having on his arm when he walked into fancy charity events.
The big boss, el jefe grande, had told him it was important for him to make himself a prominent member of San Diego’s wealthy upper crust. He did so by forking over enormous donations, mostly to organizations having to do with children. The friends they had made the past decade—and kept at arm’s length—figured he had inherited the wealth. With a last name like Carnegie, they were forgiven for their mistake. Which was exactly why he’d changed it the second he became an American citizen.
He’d started out in the slums of Mexico City as a boy named Jose Garcia who ran errands for the drug lords. But fortune had smiled on him when he’d seen a gang member stealing from the cartel. As a reward for reporting it, he’d been taken to meet the boss.
Thirty years later, the big boss was the most powerful man in Mexico. Jose Garcia, the boy who had dug in the trash for scraps of food, was now Joe Carnegie. A man who ate at the finest restaurants, owned a Rolex, drove a jaguar, and lived in the wealthiest San Diego enclave.
And the proudest father who ever lived. His daughter, Adele, was the most beautiful, precious thing in his world. He lived for her. He would die for her. He had killed for her. And he would again. Everything he did was for her future. A little blonde American girl who had no idea that, as a boy, her father had eaten maggot-covered mangoes to keep from starving.
Now, looking down at his daughter, he vowed to protect her from this knowledge with his dying breath.
“Hi, sweetheart,” he said enthusiastically. Only a linguist would catch the faint accent in his voice. He smiled and scooped his daughter up into his lap, pressing her close to him, burying his face in her clean hair.
“You smell lovely. Did you take a bath?”
The girl smiled and nodded. “Mummy let me use her bath oil.”
“Oh, did she? Well that was nice of mummy. Why don’t we take you shopping, and you can buy all the bath oils your little heart desires!”
She giggled and then put her head against his side. “You read my mind! I love you so, Daddy.”
“I love you so.” For a second tears pricked his eyes. “Are you ready for me to read you a bedtime story?”
“Yes,” the girl said. “That’s what I came to tell you. You read my mind! You are a mind reader!”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I am.”
He made a funny face, and the girl erupted in giggles. He stood and she put her small hand in his. “Come on. Let’s go. Can you read more of The Lion Wardrobe?”
“Oh, yes, I’ve been waiting all day to find out what happened to Aslan.”
“Oh Daddy, me too!”
Twenty minutes later Garcia was back in front of his laptop. After looking to make sure nobody was around—even though he’d left Adele asleep and his wife in front of a Real Housewives episode, meaning that even if the house were on fire and flames were licking at her bed covers, she wouldn’t budge—he opened his laptop. He clicked on the page he’d hidden earlier. It was camera footage from a subterranean basement. The floor plan was identical to the kitchen where he now sat. Except there wasn’t a bar, and there weren’t any knives or other sharp objects.
And the kitchen in the sub-basement beneath him had its own ventilation system he could control on his computer. It had been built as a bunker but he’d put it to other uses the past few years.
The camera in the kitchen revealed three dark-haired girls sitting at the bar stools with bowls of ice cream before them. In the shadows stood a wiry man. When the girls were done eating and had obediently washed their bowls and put them in the dishwasher, the man stepped out of the shadows and called one of the girls over. He said something to her, and she nodded and left the room.
Garcia clicked and another camera feed filled his laptop. This showed the girl in a bedroom reaching for a small backpack. She looked around the empty room and then took a small, folded-up piece of paper and stuck it under the pillow on one of the other beds. Then she returned to the kitchen.
There, the wiry man gestured for her to go through a doorway. The girl didn’t look at the other two girls. She stared down at her feet. The other two girls began to cry and tried to grab her, but an elderly woman with gray hair tied back in a severe ponytail appeared and grabbed them both by the shoulders. She pointed a bony finger, and the two girls slunk toward a couch. The woman flicked on a TV. When one of the girls tried to look behind her at the door, the older woman held her bony finger out again.
At the bar counter, Garcia switched feeds again and watched as a pickup truck pulled out of the home’s garage and lumbered down the street. Only then did his shoulders relax. He reached for his phone and made a call.
“Wire the money. The exchange will be made within the hour.”
After he disconnected, he punched in another number, keeping his eyes trained on his laptop screen. The older woman appeared on camera, answering a cell phone. He spoke to her and stayed on the line as he watched her walk into the bedroom and retrieve the piece of paper from under the pillow.
“Read it,” he said.
“llama a la polícia.” Call the police.
“Destroy it.”
After he watched the woman shred the paper and then flush the pieces down the toilet, Garcia rose and started the kettle on the stove. Before he carried his cup of tea up to bed to read over briefings, he made one last call.
“Have you found her?” he asked.
The answer was no. He pushed down his fury. The girl had been a special order. And not for some wealthy American couple who couldn’t conceive. This was something else. This order came from the top. And instead of handing her over during a clandestine meeting at a desert truck stop, he had been directed to take her outside of town to the Santa Fe Resort.
A meeting that was thwarted when his coyote failed. Once the coyote found the girl, he would be punished. Garcia couldn’t afford to have fuck-ups on his team.
And besides, he needed to send a message that if you fucked up, you signed your own death warrant. The only problem was that right now the coyote was his only lead on the girl’s whereabouts. As much as he wanted the man dead, he had to be patient.
The boss had said the client would be at the resort for three more days awaiting delivery. Garcia knew firsthand you couldn’t get a room at the place for anything south of a thousand dollars a night. He wondered if that was what this was about—an uber-wealthy buyer? But it seemed more than that. There was something about the girl that made her more valuable than the rest. Something personal to the big boss. Garcia didn’t know what it was, but he was going to find out. After all, it never hurt to have a little leverage. Just in case.