Ripping Abigail, a Quilted Mystery novel

by Sullivan, Barbara

  Fortunately for us we went with the subtle stitch-in-the-ditch, because as it turned out we were dead wrong about Abigail’s quilt.

  Chapter 65

  Matthew Lyon’s LIRI Journal

  Saturday, Nov. 1, 8:21-9:30 pm, dictated in Los Gatos neighborhood of Pinto Springs

  We found two gang houses right off the bat, driving down Vista Verde through the middle of Los Gatos, or Little Mexico. They were the ones that looked like a junk yard crossed with a garbage dump. Vatos with their pants falling off eyed us suspiciously from the front yard of one; the second house looked vacant. We noted the locations and drove on, figuring it best to wait for Harks and his team.

  Las Pifia Park on the west side of Little Mexico is another hangout that Harks should send a few of his men to.

  My attempts to light a fire under the local authorities had stalled. My man in San Diego, fellow ex-marine now in law enforcement, might come through. I told Will that I thought the stonewalling stank of…I don’t know what. But two days to issue an AA for the first Indian girl and the second forced by media attention? Something’s not right. Beardsley better make Abigail’s happen, and soon.

  Will asked if I was sure she’d been kidnapped. I don’t know. But I’m assuming the worst for now. We’ll decide what to tell mom if we find she’s shacking up with some guy, though according to Lewis, the only guy he’s seen her with is a chubby 13- or 14-year-old who looks like he’s got more estrogen than testosterone flowing.

  Harks called around nine as we were cruising Los Gatos, noting what gang houses we could ID. He said he was still on the road from LA and gave us a lecture, via speaker phone, on the state of the gang nations.

  The Crips came first, in the late 60s in LA, the Bloods formed in reaction to them. Crips may be short for cripple—one of the early members had a bad leg. They’re a loose affiliation of some 200 gangs, as often at war with each other as with the Bloods and Chicano gangs. The gangs don’t mix ethnicity much, though there are a few Asian Crips gangs.

  The binding tie was the ‘hood. As with politics, all gangs are local.

  By the early ‘80s, the Crips were big into the drug trade, PCP, amphetamines, pot. Getting into crack was hitting the big time for them. But by the late ‘90s, they were looking for more turf, and sex-trafficking looked good to them, according to Harks. Forcing vulnerable girls and women into prostitution made good money.

  Harks reminded us that gangs were about security, money and status for their members; they act as a slum-government for those with little hope of employment and no interest in the system, who see status as fancy cars, beautiful women and money to spend.

  “We see the gangsta going down. They see the gangsta living it up—if only for a while,” he said. Gangs also become a government of the caught—prison gangs, where the guards let the bad guys do what they want to each other, sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they think it’s a just reward. Prison’s a breeding ground for domestic and international terrorists, Harks said.

  He meant the Mexican Mafia. La Eme. Founded in ’57 in the state prison in Tracy. Their prime symbol is 13 in its various forms—Roman numeral, number, a blend of the two, three dots. M is the 13th letter of the alphabet.

  La Eme brought in weapons gang members only dreamt about before. Drugs were the income stream, murder was the means of enforcement and kidnapping women for sex was both reward and income stream. Women are even lower on the gang totem pole than the wannabes, according to Harks.

  He hopes we’re dealing with a local gang that’s gone really bad. He’s afraid we’re dealing with international terrorism in the form of the Mexican Mafia, Los Hidalgos, aka MH for Miguel Hidalgo, leader of the Mexican War of Independence.

  Los Hidalgos are the main gang running female slaves below the border. They control the Mexican drug and sex slave traffic in many border towns, especially Tijuana. A veritable stone’s throw from Pinto Springs.

  Harks said he figures there’s too many users, too many suppliers, too much money and too easy communication to stem the gang tide, then signed off.

  In the middle of all this, Will had gotten a phone call from Beardsley so we pulled over and he stepped out of the truck to take it. Beardsley had crapped out. It was 9:30, Abigail had been missing since noon. She could be anywhere in the hemisphere by now and nobody was officially looking of her.

  Chapter 66

  Gloria’s mangled approximation of English led us off. We’d expanded and now conversation could begin. Gloria’s need was greatest.

  Between interpreting her Cyrillic and anxiously awaiting Andrea’s pejorative outbreak—an alphabet bomb would be dropped, I was sure of it, before the night was over—my brain was itching.

  Add in the nerve-jangling call of the identity crisis bird Anne, Who-who, am I? Well, you get the picture—I was gunning for a king-sized headache.

  Suddenly little Andrea proclaimed she was boiling and dramatically stood and whipped off her mannish jacket.

  Boiling? You could ice skate on my back, but then, the windows were behind me.

  Of course, it was a ruse, so she could show off her raised tats. Last month I’d been introduced to Andrea’s latest artistic work: four raised tattoos of religious symbols. At least Christianity was on her front, her chest to be exact. The other three were one on each shoulder and one centered high on her back. It made my spine itch. I wasn’t sure whether to bless myself or fall to my knees and go prostrate facing Mecca. At least they had mostly healed. No more oozing, raw meat look.

  “What? No new embroidery this month,” Elixchel quipped.

  “Embroidery?” My third stupid utterance of the night. Just wait for Pete’s sake, explanations are bound to come. Elixchel enlightened me.

  “That’s what she calls this deliberately tortured art, Embroidered Tats. You do know she works part time in a parlor, don’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Andrea sat down, done with her modeling and educated us.

  “I like the raised art. It accents certain areas of the tat. So I have my artist hammer me—use a heavy hand when applying the dye—so I’ll keloid.

  “I keloid naturally anyway, so when I want a flat tat they have to use a very tiny needle with no hooking at the end—it’ll get bent if it’s been used before or handled badly. Can even happen in the packaging.”

  “So you deliberately scar your body?” Anne.

  Andrea said, “Well, a tattoo is a scar, isn’t it? The trick is to apply the tat so just enough scar tissue forms to hold the pigment forever. These are 3D or raised tattoos.” She pointed at her chest with a delicate finger. I was reminded what a contrast Andrea was; so small and feminine on the outside, so masculine on the inside. “Some people call them hammered, because the tat artist uses his hand like a hammer. But I like to call them embroidered. Catchy, no?”

  “Black people also keloid easily; that’s where African tribal body art comes from. Of course you can get keloid scarring from picking at your scabs or going out in the sun too soon, too.”

  Elixchel said, “But my favorite of her body art projects is her hair, of course. You should have seen the Mohawk….”

  My phone rang and I quickly rose from the quilt to answer it. No one stopped me, not even Victoria with her belief that we need to recreate the exact experience of Colonial quilting bees.

  Under these circumstances, we would definitely take phone calls.

  I stayed Gloria with a raised finger as she started to follow me. I needed to take the call alone. I should have gone into the bathroom.

  Once in the living room my nose discovered that someone had cut into one of the pies--peach.

  Whoa. I was in trouble now. Peach was one of my favorites, along with blueberry and of course apple and, and…cherry.

  Oh, God, they were all out on the counter. As long as they’d been uncut I was safe, but now that someone had broken into the peach pie, I was doomed. Swallowing a sea of drool, I flipped my insistent cell phone open
and quickly said hello.

  I don’t get ads on my cell.

  It was Matt. I listened as he hurriedly brought me up to speed. Then he hung up. It was all so fast I didn’t get a word in edgewise. How did I know if he hadn’t left something out?

  Maybe he was in danger.

  No, Matt would naturally want to get back to what he was doing. But now I had a thousand questions rushing around my head like a forest full of Capuchin mothers searching for a missing baby.

  I placed my hands on the kitchen counter trying to think what to do. That was when I cut a piece of pie. Which led to picking up a fork and….

  “Who was it?” Gloria demanded, inches away from me.

  My mouth was full. I half-choked it down and mumbled, “Matt.”

  “And? Come on now, Rachel, don’t hold out on me.”

  At least I think that’s what she said. So I turned toward her, thinking, where the hell is Tom?

  But maybe they weren’t together. Maybe Tom doesn’t know what Matt knows. I stalled, pretending I was still choking down the pie, trying to decide what to tell her.

  I decided to go with the truth. She’d know if I was lying, she was a trained nurse—symptoms were her specialty.

  “Matt says there’s been another killing. They’ve found a third Pintos gang member out behind the school grounds. It’s recent. And they’re going door to door now with the help of some folks from LA.”

  Her face fell into a flat mask. Another child had died at the hands of these violent people. Would Abigail be next?

  Gerry’s phone finally rang. Gloria ran to grab it and began speaking in Cyrillic. She caught herself and switched to English. We all listened to her listen to Tom, probably telling her pretty much what Matt had just told me.

  Tom was nervous. His voice was so loud I could even make out some of it from ten feet away, and he concluded that he would have to keep it short because he was busy at a new crime scene.

  “How did he die? He didn’t’ tell me.” Gloria said, looking at me. Elixchel and Andrea had turned to face us, both of them chirruping “Who? Who died?”

  And now they were all standing. Except Victoria. She sewed.

  “Matt didn’t say either, Gloria. He was rushed. He’s in the middle of a neighborhood…”

  “Don’t hold out on me!” She was close to screaming.

  “I’m not Gloria, really,” I lied. Then I added, “But if I do, it will be because it’s necessary. I might not tell you something Gloria because it’s best if you don’t know. It’s like watching Congress make sausages. Who doesn’t come away with indigestion? Some of us even get sick. Do you understand?”

  I thought of another analogy. Chalk it up to too much pie.

  “You don’t let relatives into the operating rooms of your hospital and Matt and Tom won’t tell you hurtful, useless information. He will even keep things from me sometimes, for the same reason.”

  Like I was doing right now.

  I wasn’t about to tell her the gang member’s head had been sawed off and was now missing, and that the enraged and grieving family had identified the boy only by his clothing. And that now there was talk of gang warfare racing around the Pinto Springs barrio. Someone had pointed their collective fingers at the Scrub Valley High School across I-13.

  Football rivals, for cripes sake.

  But the ploy to redirect the rage had worked. Scrub Valley High contained another large ethnic group—Asians of all types. And there was a Vietnamese gang presence there comparable to the Pintos.

  I thought this was evidence of just how clever the Hidalgo gang was. Matt and the rest of the authorities knew it was the gang from Mexico killing the Pintos boys. Hidalgo was warning the Chicano parents in the barrio not to cross them.

  I tried to see this misdirection toward the other high school as good news, that maybe it meant Hidalgo was growing afraid.

  But I really was seeing these monsters as just hopped up sadistic nuts.

  Gloria slumped down in her chair, her hands temporarily stalled. Next to her Victoria continued sewing as if she were deaf.

  “I need more.” Gloria whispered.

  “I know.” I would too.

  I thought about it again and still came to the conclusion I wouldn’t give her more. Our new quilter Anne saved me.

  “Where did the word kidnapping come from, anyway, who-who.”

  All hands stopped sewing.

  I was studying her who-who’s by now. It didn’t always happen. And it didn’t seem to matter if her sentence was ending in a vowel sound or consonant. But it almost always happened when she was at the end of her thoughts on something.

  Hannah saved us all by launching into one of her homeschooling lessons.

  Chapter 67

  “In Federal criminal law kidnapping is the removal of a person against their will, usually to hold that person imprisoned without legal authority.

  “However, all our laws are handed down to us through English common law. In other words, kidnapping and murder are what’s called common law offenses as opposed to statutory offenses. Statutory laws are court decisions that have happened since the establishment of the United States.

  “I know this because Deborah wants to learn more about Medieval times. We’re into Renaissance Fairs now. And I’m studying California laws to get my PI license. So it’s kind of an overlap.”

  “Really! You’re going to be a private investigator?” Elixchel-the-incredulous.

  “Yes. I’m actually hoping to apprentice with Rachel once I’ve gotten a few classes under my belt.”

  I was picturing her farm, her chickens and her children, and her mother, and her one-acre garden…and I figured it would be a while before she formally asked us.

  “But where’d the word kidnapping come from, who-who?” Anne whined.

  (Had I just met her seven year old self? Miss-misunderstood? Must’ve been awful being the sandwich child in a seven-decker. You’d never taste her among all the other ingredients.)

  Everyone started sewing again. We returned to the familiar behavior associated with our bees. But the terror of not knowing was just below the surface.

  “I’m getting to it. You have to remember that common law was originally set down in the Middle Ages--after the fall of Rome.

  “In those dark days when common law was evolving, judges’ decisions were addressing the properties of men. The kings owned the land and all the people who lived and worked on it. This system was called feudalism.

  “To make their men-folk feel better about being surfs—being owned by a king--the kings declared them all kings of their own houses. So the prevailing attitude of the courts—actually the king’s court, quite literally—in the middle ages was that any man in the village could own a wife, children, goats, sheep, and chickens. But they ‘rented’ their homes and farm lands, which all belonged to the capital K king. The good kings accepted rent in the form of goats, sheep and chickens.”

  “Soooo, what did the bad kings take in payment?” Andrea.

  “They owned their wives?” Elixchel.

  Hannah stared at her. I couldn’t read her face. She continued.

  “The most common profession in the early middle ages was keeping goat herds. Goats are very hardy. They breed like rabbits and eat anything at all, and of course they produce lots of milk. And they can be left out in the fields over night, which is more pertinent to this story. Because—unlike cows and horses--they’re small enough when they’re young that you can pick one up and slip off into the dark, with the poor thing quietly bleating under your arm and without the goatherd noticing until full-on morning. By then you could be six villages away.

  “Big goats could be quite aggressive, so they were mostly left alone.

  “A young goat is called a kid. In those days it was spelled, kide, with an e. It was Old Norse. At any rate, when it was discovered that a kid had been napped the penalty was quite severe, because you weren’t just napping the little king’s kide, you were also napp
ing the big King’s kide.”

  “So napping means stealing, like stealing a few minutes of sleep.” Andrea, the co-teacher.

  “Huh. That makes sense.” Anne said.

  “Exactly. So my best guess is that kidnapping as a legal term came about to cover the offense of stealing a young goat, and was later applied to child stealing. In much the same way, child labor laws were changed in the early twentieth century so that making children work for more than fourteen hours a day in a factory was declared unlawful under existent animal cruelty laws.”

  “Whoa. Fourteen hours a day was considered an improvement?” Elixchel.

  “Yes, and I share your horror, Elixchel. Anyway, the first usage of kid as slang for a child was recorded in 1599. I know this because Deborah asked the same question you did Anne. And the word kid was established as informal usage for a child by the 1840’s in most English dictionaries.

  “It makes sense to me. I have two goats and they are aggressively inquisitive, almost human in their need to learn,” Hannah finished.

  I wondered why she never seemed to get lost in the grand halls of her knowledge. But the capacity to put together a mini-lecture on the fly probably came from that same genius.

  “And we eat them?” Andrea-the-vegetarian.

  “Unfortunately, we are omnivores, Andrea.” Me.

  Stunning me, Victoria said in a quavering voice, “The real importance of the development of common law during the Middle Ages stems from the fact that our Constitution was written based on English common law, which is also a Christian-based law.”

  She was changing the entire direction of our conversation—toward a history lesson about the beginning of the United States. I found myself drifting in and out of this discussion by the women as my mind returned to wondering what Matt was doing and where Abigail was.

  Finally, I returned from my internal thoughts.

  “Of course, these gentlemen sitting down and declaring themselves to be independent of England was one thing. Fighting the war was quite another.”