He ran his fingers through her hair, his lips still on hers in a kiss that went from tender to passionate with one flick of his tongue. Cal leaned over, pinning her head to the pillow as a moan left his throat to fill her mouth. She fought to control the kiss just as a device across the room started buzzing, and Cal groaned. “That will be Roman.”
“You’d better get it.”
Cal climbed from the bed, and the loss of his heat was palpable. Feeling so bereft quickly scared her more than facing down The Miss.
Cal finally hit the button to end the buzzing.
“Secure two, Whiskey.” It was Mina’s voice this time.
“Secure one, Charlie.”
The team all had code names from the alphabet that matched the first letter of their name. Roman was Romeo, and Mina was Whiskey since her real name was Wilhelmina. They opened any communication with their code phrase, so if the person on the other end was compromised, they didn’t put the entire team at risk.
“Did I wake you?” Mina asked when the camera flipped on.
“Just woke up,” Cal said, and Marlise noticed him subconsciously straighten his T-shirt. Everyone looked to him when they needed guidance and reassurance, and the way he switched into work mode in the blink of an eye meant he knew it too. He just needed to own it.
“I may have found something,” Mina said without further preamble.
Marlise was off the bed and standing behind Cal immediately. “Did we get a hit on her picture?”
“No. We got a hit on the conversation you recorded in Spanish.”
“Which one?”
“The long one that you risked your life to record. It was just before the fire. Your subconscious must have told you it was important. I translated the whole thing, but I’ll give you the highlights.”
Cal grabbed a pen and paper and waited for Mina to speak.
“She kept referring to the other person on the phone as papá, which means dad in Spanish.”
“That’s weird,” Marlise said, joining them at the desk. “She always told us she was just like us and didn’t have any family. That was her whole shtick about girl power.”
Mina pointed at the camera. “That’s why it caught my attention so quickly. At first, I thought she was talking to a client. Sometimes they wanted to be called daddy.”
Marlise and Mina simultaneously gagged and shuddered at the memory of those men.
“But that’s not the case?” Cal asked, somehow knowing they both needed to be redirected.
“I don’t think so.” She picked up a piece of paper to read. “Everything is ready. I’m prepared to do what needs to be done to get out of this hellhole.” Mina paused and then said, “That was loosely translated.”
Cal and Marlise smirked at each other while Mina continued.
“My best girls are ready for the challenge. It’s time to expose the agent. No, Dad, I’ll take care of her myself. You don’t need to come here. Stay far away from Red Rye, or this deal goes bad. You have taught me well, and I will not fail. This is our last contact until we reach the desert.”
“The desert,” Cal repeated, and Mina nodded.
“That was all she said about location, though Charlotte already confirmed they were living in a desert somewhere.”
“A state that meets the border?” Cal asked.
“Honestly, it could be any of those, but we have a place to start. That narrows it down to Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. All about the same driving distance that Charlotte mentioned.”
“Three states are a smaller hole to hunt than six, but we need more,” Cal said, tapping his finger on the desk.
Marlise stood up and started to pace. “The other conversation she had in Spanish didn’t reveal anything?”
“No, but she was talking to the same person. That one was quick, but she said they’d hit the jackpot, and she had to move if they wanted to collect.”
Marlise paused on her way past the screen. “Jackpot is a street name for fentanyl.”
Mina tipped her head for a moment. “You’re right. The conversation was so innocuous and rushed that I didn’t link that when I listened. She was excited and talking fast, which made it harder for me to translate. I sent you the transcripts of both conversations. Read them over, and I’ll do the same again. Call me when you’re done.”
The screen went dark, and Cal opened his encrypted phone and handed it to her. “You read it and tell me if you can pick out anything. You lived with her. I didn’t.”
The short conversation wasn’t as innocuous as Mina thought it was. “She also mentions Cactus, a street name for peyote, Red Rock meaning methadone, and Beans meaning ecstasy. If she’s referring to drugs, they’re moving the hard stuff around.”
“More likely her women were moving it.”
“And when you move those kinds of drugs around, women disappear.”
“Anything else?” Cal asked. Marlise knew he was trying to keep her focus on The Miss and not the missing girls. Those girls didn’t deserve what happened to them any more than she did, and Marlise would be the one to vindicate them.
“Well, we know her dad, whether he is her real father or someone else, was funding her time at Red Rye, and set her up in the new town, wherever that may be. They were using the women as drug mules in Red Rye, possibly with or without the knowledge of The Madame, and she piggybacked on The Madame’s operation to build her own.”
“But we still don’t know where she is.”
“Where’s that list of cities we made last night?” she asked, handing him the phone and grabbing the pad he held out. She read off the cities to him. “Oklahoma City, Dallas, Fort Worth, Albuquerque and Phoenix were the cities where they did the most business. That matches up with the three states that sit on Mexico’s border. If her ‘dad’ is south of the border, it would make sense she’s in one of those states. I would pick someplace around Albuquerque.”
“Tell me why,” he said, ready to write on his notepad.
“It’s the most centrally located to the other four cities. If The Miss is somewhere in New Mexico, her reach to the other cities is like a satellite,” she explained, holding her arms out. “East or west, and she reaches one of the cities she used to send the Red Rye girls for dates. She probably kept those clients when The Madame went down because The Madame didn’t know they were drug dealers. She was only seeing the escort side of the business.”
“Possible,” Cal agreed. “I’ll call Mina back.”
Once Mina and Roman were on the line, Marlise explained what she’d read and her thoughts on where The Miss could be.
“That’s excellent linear thinking, Marlise,” Roman said, bringing a smile to her face. “It’s a place to start.”
“Did Charlotte say anything more since we left?” Cal asked, clearly frustrated by their lack of progress.
“She’s trying, Cal, but The Miss has them so isolated that she doesn’t know much. Even when she flies them out, they’re blindfolded until they’re on the plane, and the plane has no windows. They fly into small airports, but it doesn’t matter if the women know what city they’re in by then because they’re already away from home base.”
“I’m going to be real with you, Mina. We may not be able to locate her. Secure One is good, but without a starting point, no one will find her. We may have no choice but to draw her out, capture her and then find the women.”
Roman and Mina glanced at each other before they nodded. “That’s what we were thinking too. Drawings of cacti don’t help us find a madwoman.”
“What?” Marlise asked, leaning on the desk to stare intently at the two people on the screen. “Drawings of cacti?”
“Yeah,” Mina said, leaning out of the camera angle for a moment. “Charlotte is trying to help by drawing pictures of what she was able to see around home base.” Mina held up a pad of paper with a pencil drawing. “It’s like pods that stem off the main house.”
Marlise studied the image Charlotte had drawn. It was surprisingly intricate and was easy to picture sitting in the middle of the desert somewhere. The middle house was a large camping trailer, and sitting at angles like sunrays were smaller ones.
“She told us that each of the smaller pods,” Mina said, pointing at Charlotte’s rounded campers she had colored silver, “house two women.”
Marlise counted quickly. “There are fourteen pods.”
“Which gives us a good idea of how many women are working for her,” Roman said. “But that still doesn’t matter if we can’t figure out where this pod group sits.”
“Wait, what’s that?” Marlise asked, pointing at a drawing at the back of the image.
“One of the cacti she drew,” Mina said. “I have a better image. Hang on.” She shuffled through some papers and then held up another drawing. “Charlotte is an amazing artist,” Mina said. “She helped us with several things we needed laid out here, Cal.”
Marlise registered Cal’s nod, but her focus was on the paper that held images of several different but intricate cacti. “That one!” she exclaimed, pointing at the paper on the screen.
Mina turned it around. “What one?”
“The big one. It’s a saguaro cactus.”
“A what now?” Cal asked, turning to her.
“A saguaro cactus. The kind you see in old movies that look like trees. They’re tall and have arms that come up like branches,” Marlise explained excitedly.
“We’re on the same page,” Cal said calmly and with great patience. “Why does that one stand out in your mind?”
“They only grow in one place in the country! The Sonoran Desert.”
“How do you know this?” Roman asked, leaning into the camera.
“I’m from Arizona, Roman! It’s one of the first facts you learn about your home state. If you see a movie with a saguaro cactus, you know it was filmed in the Sonoran Desert. Charlotte said it’s scorching where they are, and the Sonoran Desert is the hottest one in both Mexico and the United States.”
“You’re saying that The Miss is hiding somewhere in Arizona?”
“Not just somewhere, Roman. The Sonoran Desert is less than two hours from the Mexican border.”
“You don’t think she crossed the border and is in Mexico?”
Marlise shook her head almost immediately. “Not with the girls. She’d have to have passports if she tried to enter legally or a safe route to travel by foot across the border, and those don’t exist. If she had gone by herself, I would say it’s possible, but not if she has that many girls. She stayed on this side of the border to run drugs. Not a question in my mind. Mina, would you pull up an image of a saguaro cactus and run it down to Charlotte? Ask her if that’s the one she intended in the drawing. We’ll wait.”
Mina nodded and took off, leaving Roman to stare into the camera. “I’m impressed, Marlise.” His tone said he was genuine. “That was some great deducting skills. All we saw in those drawings was too much ground to cover.”
“This is still a lot of ground to cover. The Sonoran Desert extends into California and down into Baja, but I know The Miss. She never took a girl any further west than Phoenix. She’s in Arizona.”
“How big is the desert in Arizona, mileage-wise?” Cal asked. “Do you know?”
“It extends above Phoenix to the north, the border on the west and about Tucson to the east,” she said without hesitation. “It’s still a lot of ground to cover, but I would concentrate on the area near the southern border. If she’s running drugs and they’re coming from someone in Mexico, she would want to be close. Hell, she might even cross the border legally with a passport and bring the drugs back herself.”
Roman raised a brow. “I have some friends south of the border. I’ll get the image to them and see what they know. It’s risky on her part to use a passport, but we still have to check on the off chance she did.”
Mina came back into the room and plopped down in the chair. She must have sprinted to get to the med bay and back that quickly. “Charlotte said yes. Those are the cacti she saw around their camp.”
“I cannot believe that a woman with no law enforcement training managed to home in on a woman hell-bent on being a ghost with nothing more than a picture of a cactus. Mary, I’m in awe,” Cal said, wearing a grin. He wasn’t kidding around. She’d impressed him, and her heart soared.
With her head held high and her shoulders back, she smiled too. She suspected the feeling she had inside her chest was pride. “I want this to end so you can all be free again. Until we find her, we can’t even rid ourselves of The Madame.”
“What is the news on the trial?” Cal asked Roman, who was still on the screen.
“The trial is on hold. The defense is working hard to convince the judge they need to move forward, but so far, they’ve failed. The judge put everything on hold for two weeks. She has sequestered the jury but allows family visits in the hotel while supervised. At the end of the two weeks, I suspect the trial will go on, with or without Marlise.”
“We have ten days left of those two weeks?” Cal asked, and Mina nodded. “Then we’d better get a plan in place and execute it before we run out of time. We’ve been here too long and need to get out of this town before bad characters stop by and hurt innocent people. I’m giving Mary point on this one. Are you guys in agreement?”
“Me?” Marlise asked in shock. “Why are you giving me point?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Thus far, you’ve been the one to find all the little crumbs The Miss didn’t know she dropped. You know her and her habits. I’m putting my bets on you being the one to locate her and bring her down.”
“I am too,” Mina said with a wink.