RAY FOUND HIMSELF back at Lucia Navarre’s house sooner than he had expected.
The DNA lab had been able to get to the hairs he’d brought back almost immediately. They didn’t have time to run enough tests to narrow down the identity of the donors—if they were even in the system—but they did manage to discover one significant fact.
Hair that had been yanked from a head was often missing the follicle, which was the best source of nuclear DNA. But the shaft itself contained mitochondrial DNA, passed down from the mother. And the mitochondrial DNA located in the two distinct hair samples Ray had found in Lucia’s brush showed that the people to whom those hairs had been attached had the same mother.
She answered the door almost immediately. “You again?”
“Me again,” Ray said. “Sorry to trouble you so soon, Ms. Navarre, but I’m afraid that you weren’t straight with me last time.”
“What do you mean? I told you every—”
Ray cut her off. “You didn’t tell me that your brother either lives here or stays here sometimes.”
“What brother?”
“The one whose hairs were in the hairbrush in your bathroom.”
“You said you were taking my hairs.”
“I’m afraid I wasn’t specific about which hairs I was taking. But I did ask your permission, and you granted it.”
“Not for that.”
“It’s done,” Ray said. “The point is, you weren’t honest with me. If Ruben Solis is your brother, then you’ve got to trust me, because he could be in a great deal of danger.”
She eyed him for several long moments. “How do I know? That I can trust you, like you say?”
“You don’t have much choice,” Ray said. “I could turn you over to the LVPD or Immigration.”
She visibly flinched when he mentioned Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Her reaction did not come as a surprise. “I haven’t . . . I’m not . . .”
But Lucia couldn’t finish her sentence. She sucked in a couple of deep breaths and then backed away from the door a few steps, turned her back to Ray, and buried her face in her hands. Ray followed her inside and closed the door.
“I’m really not here to make your life difficult,” he promised her. “I just want to find Ruben, before it’s too late. If you come clean with me, I’ll do everything I can to help you both. That’s all I can offer you.”
Without looking back, she led Ray into her tiny living room. She collapsed onto a plaid fabric-covered chair with arms so worn Ray could see the wood beneath the cover. Ray stepped behind a sofa mostly occupied by two big bags of clothing that had probably recently come in from a Laundromat, and studied the bookcase full of odd little art pieces. Up close, he could see that the figures had distinctive personalities: one redheaded woman was playing an accordion made of folded paper, with a painted smile on her face. In another, a heavyset man made from a crushed soda can drooped in a chair while wire children scampered around him.
There were grooves in the floor of each box, which he hadn’t noticed before. “Do these figures move?” he asked.
“There’s a key in the back,” she said. “You wind it up.”
“May I?”
“Sure.”
He took the one with the big, sad man off the shelf. The key in the back looked like something from a music box. When he wound it, he felt tension build. He released the key, and the wire children circled around the aluminum can man in a stuttering dance.
“That’s impressive,” he said. He looked at the others, probably thirty in all, and they all had similar tracks for the figures to move on. “Did you make these?”
“Ruben did.”
“He’s very skilled.” He almost added “with his hands,” but he caught himself in time. He put the box back on the shelf. A stray thought flitted through his mind—that someone who could make these could also construct a bomb. But there was no earthly reason to link this case to the attack on Dennis Daniels.
Lucia breathed in and looked toward the ceiling. She was afraid of something, but was it him? Afraid for Ruben? Or just afraid in general, living with perpetual fear, like many undocumented people? “All right,” she said. “It’s true. I don’t have any papers. Only the thing is, I’ve lived here all my life, almost. Ruben, too. Our mother brought us here when I was, like, four and Ruben was just a baby. Then she got busted and deported. She left us here so we’d have a chance for a better life. She was going to come back again, but before she could, she got sick. She died down there, and my aunt Esmerelda raised us here. She couldn’t get us papers because she wasn’t a parent or a legal guardian, but she took care of us like she was.
“I finished high school, and went to community college. I got an accounting degree, and I figured there would be a career for someone like me, who was smart and ambitious. A country as big and rich and wonderful as the U.S. should have room in it for me, shouldn’t it?”
“It seems like it should,” he said.
“Seems like. But I work as a maid for a few families that don’t have much more money than me. Enough to hire someone to clean their houses, but not, like, rich people. I have more education than most of my clients. But I can’t use my degree, because none of the big companies want to hire me.”
“You are undocumented,” Ray reminded her. “That’s always going to be a problem for legitimate employers. I’d think there would always be a place for a skilled accountant, but that’s a significant strike against you.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” She came across as angry but resigned. “Still, it’s better living here, even this way, than going to Mexico. My mother was the only family I had down there, and Esmerelda was her only sister. I would be lost there.”
“What about Ruben?” Ray asked.
“Same goes for him. He wasn’t even two yet when we came here. He doesn’t remember anything about Mexico. He just wanted to build his boxes, and now there’s an art gallery at the Marrakech that wants to sell them. They sent Ruben a contract. But it came this week, and he hasn’t been here to sign it.”
“Where is he?”
Lucia looked at him for the first time since she had let him inside. Her eyes were deep-set and haunted. “I don’t know.”
“How long has he been missing?”
“A week, I guess. I was afraid maybe he was deported, but I don’t have any way to check. Still, if he was, he would call me when he got to Mexico.”
“Let me ask you this—was he very sick? About three years ago?”
“Yes!” Lucia said. “He was. He had to get a . . .”
“He got a blood marrow donation.”
“That’s right! How did you know?”
“It’s my job to know. What was the matter with him?”
“It was . . . something plastic.”
“Aplastic anemia?”
“That’s right. He had to get these blood transplants all the time. He always looked so much better after one that I thought he was well.”
“But it didn’t last, did it?”
“No. He kept on getting sick again. Finally he needed a bone marrow transplant, or I was going to lose him.”
That matched what Belinda Jones had told him. “How could he afford the treatment?”
“There’s this community center in the neighborhood, the Friends of the East Side Community Center. Mickey Ritz, the guy who runs it, he tries to take care of people. He arranged some money, when Ruben got sick. That paid for his treatment, and the place that provided the marrow took care of that end.”
“The Indigo Valley Blood Center, right?”
“I think.”
“So he got his medical needs taken care of, even though he had no papers.”
“That’s right. That’s part of why I love this country.”
Ray’s emotions were torn. The money that went into Ruben’s care might have gone to a citizen. But he and Lucia had been raised here, educated here, and Lucia seemed as patriotic as anyone he’d met, maybe more so because she understood the flip side, what might be waiting for her if she were ever forced to leave her adopted nation. Was there a right side of this situation? Or just a question of degree, of one thing being slightly less wrong than another?
Ray’s Hippocratic oath told him that making sure Ruben’s aplastic anemia got treated was the less wrong option. He was a law enforcement official as well as a doctor, and he was a taxpayer. But he had grown up as a military brat, born in South Korea and raised on bases around the world. He had been a boy without a country, American in name only, his fellow citizens the people in uniforms and the families who stood behind them. He knew something of what she must have felt as a girl, coming to this strange land, and the outsider status she still lived. Besides, the clinic he volunteered at treated people without regard to citizenship.
“What about the husband you mentioned earlier?” he asked. “Was he even real?”
“He’s real,” she said. “Sometimes I wish he wasn’t.”
“You couldn’t get citizenship through him?”
“He was illegal too. He took off. I don’t know where he went and I don’t care.”
“Okay, let’s get back to Ruben. You have no idea where he is?”
“Not where.”
That was a dodge. “What do you know?”
Lucia chewed on her right index finger, looking away from Ray again. She wanted to tell him, but she was scared. Terrified, more accurately.
“Come on, Lucia. I’ll find out one way or another. You know that, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Tell me what you know.”
“Okay, fine. Only you can’t ever say it was me, all right?”
“I can’t promise that. Depending on what you tell me, you might be asked to testify in court.”
“Then I’ll be deported for sure.”
“Possibly. Or possibly the district attorney would be able to make some sort of arrangement. I don’t know, that’s not my field. All I do know is that Ruben’s in trouble, and if keeping quiet would help him, he would be home already.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s true.”
“So tell me.”
“Okay, there’s these smugglers, this gang. Coyotes. They brought one of our cousins over, a few years ago. We helped make the arrangements, helped pay them. I guess that’s how they knew who we were, knew that we didn’t have papers. Once they know, they don’t forget. Some families I know, undocumented, like us—they approach the family, and tell them that if they don’t pay them off they’ll turn them in to Immigration. If the family resists, they’ll abduct a family member and the price goes up. They already know we won’t go to the police. They want the ransom money from family here or back in Mexico, they don’t care.”
“And that’s what happened to Ruben? They took him?”
“I think so, because they came to us and said they wanted five thousand dollars to keep quiet about us. We don’t have money like that.”
“But some families meet their demands?”
“You have to understand. Ruben and me, we don’t have anybody in Mexico, but a lot of people do. The families in Mexico, they depend on money from here that people send back home. To them, five thousand would be a fortune—but to pay it, any way they can, would be better than not paying and losing the money being sent back every month.”
“Only you don’t have people to send money to.”
“That’s right. And because we don’t, we don’t have people who can scrape the ransom together for us.”
Ray was almost afraid to ask the next question. “This gang—what do they do with the people they abduct? If they don’t get the money?”
Lucia’s voice quavered as she answered him. “The first thing is, they’ll cut off a hand, and send it to the family. That’s the last warning. They leave one hand so the person can still work. When a family gets that in the mail, usually they can find the money.”
“Have you received one of Ruben’s hands?”
“No. But every day, when I get the mail, I worry that it will be in there.”
“What next?”
“Sometimes the person dies, after their hand is cut off. Sometimes the money comes in and they let him loose. You see people, men mostly, around the neighborhood with one hand. But if the person dies, then they hide the body somewhere and dump the hand. When a hand is found, word spreads, so we are all worried all the time that we’ll be next.”
And they were, Ray knew. She hadn’t heard about Ruben’s hand yet. Which probably meant Ruben was dead, that his hand had been left out in the street somewhere as a warning to others, and the dog had found it before any people did.
The trouble was, he had to tell her. The time had come. If he kept it from her now, it would be dishonest, and any trust he had built up would be shattered.
“I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, Lucia.”
Her hand went back to her mouth. When she bit down on the finger, it reminded Ray of the dog gnawing the hand, and he had to try to block that image from his mind. “What?”
“One of Ruben’s hands has been found. His left one.”
“Oh, God, no!” Tears ran from her eyes, soaking her cheeks. She let them flow, unhindered, and spoke through her sobs.
“I’m very sorry. That’s how I found you in the first place.”
“And you know it’s his?”
“We haven’t been able to match the DNA to him yet. But it’s his, I’m quite sure.”
“So . . . so he’s dead?”
“I don’t know. I hope not. It might be too late, but the more I can learn about this gang you mentioned, the better our chances are of finding him in time.”
“I don’t know anything about them.”
“You said they approached you.”
“That’s right, but they come to you. They don’t leave a business card or anything like that. You don’t find them, they find you.”
“I need more than that,” Ray said. “I’ve got to have something to go on.”
“Why? What’s the point? If they left his hand someplace instead of sending it, then he’s dead!”
“Maybe he’s not dead yet. And if he is, then at least you’ll know. If we can find them, we can arrest them, stop them from doing this to other families. Isn’t that worth it?”
“It won’t bring Ruben back.”
“If he’s already gone, then nothing will bring him back. All we can do is try.”
“But I don’t know who they are! Or how to find them.”
“Where did they grab Ruben?”
“From here,” she said. “I came home from cleaning a house and he was gone. He must have fought like a tiger. The place was a mess, furniture every which way, some things broken.”
“And you didn’t call the police?”
“Like I said, when you don’t have papers, you don’t call the police.”
“I understand. Where did the struggle take place?”
“Here. Right here, in this room. He must have answered the door, and when they tried to grab him, he came back inside. They came in after him.”
“But you cleaned up?”
“That’s right.”
“Do you mind if I look around?”
“I just said I cleaned up.”
“And I recognize that you’re a professional housecleaner. Still, you’d be surprised at what people can miss.”
“Be my guest. If it’ll help find Ruben, you do whatever you want.”
“I can’t guarantee anything,” Ray said. “But it can’t hurt, and it might help.”
“I’ll have to go outside, get my field kit. Then I’ll try to make it fast.”
“Faster the better.”
“I know. Ruben might not have much time left, if he’s still out there.”
The whole thing was a long shot. If they only dumped the hands of those who died from the process, then it was long since too late for Ruben. But if something else had happened—say they had removed the hand, then decided there was no point in mailing it because they had already ascertained that Ruben had no family to raise the ransom—there might still be a chance.
It was a chance Ray had to take.
He returned from the vehicle with his field kit. Getting down on hands and knees was painful. But if she had missed anything in her clean-up job, it would likely be small, and close to the floor. Nothing he found could be used as evidence in court, because the scene hadn’t been secured in the interim. That didn’t mean that there weren’t clues that might point to Ruben’s abductors, though. Crime scene investigation served multiple purposes, and this could be one of the most crucial.
The floors in here were hardwood, with carpeting that didn’t quite reach all the way across. Ray started at the edge of the carpeting, then moved to the baseboard along the bottom of the wall. He moved slowly, tweezers and a magnifying glass in his hands.
As he had told Lucia, he found things she had missed. The first was blood that had leaked between floorboards and turned blue-green when he swabbed with tetramethylbenzidine. TMB was only a presumptive test, and the presence of blood would have to be confirmed, but it was a good start. Once it was confirmed, the identity of the person who had shed it would have to be determined.
“Did someone bleed over here?” Ray asked. “That you know of?”
“I found blood on the floor when I came in that night. I cleaned it with floor cleaner and bleach. You found some?”
“Yes.”
“I scrubbed and scrubbed.”
“People often do,” Ray said. “Especially when they’re trying to hide it from us. They’re rarely successful.”
He went back to combing the floor. He turned up some tiny fibers that looked, at first glance, to be a polyester-cotton blend. Tangled with those, which he had to draw from beneath the baseboard, were two tiny, sparkly metallic disks. He bagged them and kept looking. The next thing he found were minute bits of what looked like skin, little flakes of tissue that might have been scraped off in the fight. He put these in a paper envelope. They’d be tested back at the lab, along with everything else. If they had come from one of Ruben’s attackers and not from the victim, they might help locate him.
Ray searched for another twenty minutes, but found nothing else that appeared pertinent. “Thanks for your cooperation, Ms. Navarre,” he said.
“Did you find anything that might help?”
“I’m not sure yet, but maybe.”
“I hope so. I’m worried.”
“I hope so, too.” He didn’t mean to be short with her, but he wanted to rush back and get the trace and DNA techs going on what he had found.
He didn’t want to have found Ruben Solis, only to have lost him. Somewhere out there, a man needed to be reunited with his left hand, even if it was too late for him to use it again.