Border Crossings

by Michael Lee Weems

  Fuentes spoke in his ever-political calm voice, “I understand your concern, Ma’am. While our laws require us to perform an autopsy, I assure you we will take every measure to leave your daughter as she is. I will see to it personally that she is treated with the utmost respect.”

  “How long until we can take her home?” asked Jim.

  “Tomorrow, sir,” said Fuentes. “We have arranged a private plane for you. And again, if there is anything we can do to help, please do not hesitate to ask. I am at your service.”

  The following day the Woodalls were on their flight back to Texas. Catherine accompanied them, wondering what would be waiting when she returned to Cancun. She and Matt had only talked briefly before she had to get ready to leave. Julio hadn’t taken the news she had to leave for a couple days very well, but she assured him he was in good hands. She used the time for the trip to try and gain some perspective on everything and organize her thoughts. She believed Ramirez was a good cop, but she had seen the way the officials were sweeping as much of the dirt under the rug as possible. She’d have to remove some carpet when she got back, and was feeling better about calling Matt. He’d have an idea of where to begin rather than sit around waiting for the Mexican authorities.

  As for Ramirez, he was in the middle of an angry outburst. He had picked up the phone and called the coroner’s office. In his hand he held the official Mexican autopsy report. When the coroner answered he didn’t waste any time. “What the hell is this?!”

  “What do you mean?” asked the coroner nervously.

  “I mean, what is this autopsy supposed to be?”

  “That’s how the girl was killed, sir. I don’t know what else to tell you.”

  Ramirez wasn’t buying it. According to the autopsy report Kelly Woodall had multiple drugs in her system. Even if it was true, they’d conveniently included that information and excluded most everything else. “You can tell me why the hell the rest of the information has been left out. What about the ligature marks? The burns? The rape and torture, for God’s sake. I saw that girl. We all know what happened and you didn’t mention any of it in this report. I want to know why!”

  There was a long pause. “She died from a gunshot wound. I merely reported the cause of death, sir, as I was told.”

  “Told?” asked Ramirez. “What do you mean told?”

  Another pause. “I’m sorry if you are dissatisfied with the report, sir. I’m afraid it’s out of my hands.” And then Ramirez heard a click as the coroner hung up.

  Fuentes, he thought to himself. That son of a bitch. He ended the call on line one but started another on line two, this time calling Fuentes.

  “Hello?”

  “Mr. Fuentes, this is Detective Ramirez.”

  “Hello, Detective, how may I help you?”

  “Why are you intentionally holding back this investigation?”

  “I’m not,” said Fuentes defensively. “And I would encourage you to take a moment before making such accusations.”

  “I just got the autopsy for the girl. All it says is she was highly intoxicated, on drugs, and died by a gunshot wound. It says nothing about her other wounds or the sexual assault, which seemed pretty apparent to me. And I’ve already told you who the shooter in the market was.”

  “I see no reason to believe the two are connected,” said Fuentes.

  “With all due respect, sir, I can’t see how you could just dismiss . . . “

  “I will not entertain conspiracy theories in this matter for the media to expound upon. This situation is delicate enough. You do your job, let the coroner do his, and I’ll do mine,” warned Fuentes.

  “And how am I supposed to do my job when information is intentionally being withheld?”

  “Stick to your own affairs, Detective. Your job is to bring this mess to an end without causing any more damage than what has already been done.” And Fuentes hung up.

  Ramirez slammed his phone down as well. God, damn it. The wheels were turning and he was quickly putting the pieces together. They’re going to cover it up and blame it on the girl. He could already see it, now. Soon there’d be a press conference or some other kind of media announcement. They’d detail the drugs and alcohol in Kelly Woodall’s system and call the whole thing some seedy drug deal gone wrong. No, no, it wasn’t a kidnapping after all. The girl obviously was an addict and it must have been a drug related crime. It was going to a smear campaign, and Kelly Woodall was the target. Cool and calm Ramirez decided he’d about had enough.

  Over the next few days men came and went. Yesenia had every intention of running away, but each time either the other girls would talk her out of it or simply the fear that Miss Lydia would hand her over to someone worse than the meth-head mechanic again was enough to scare her from trying. I need somewhere to go, she thought to herself. And some way to get there.

  He’d come back again, the mechanic, though this time it wasn’t as bad as the first time. He seemed bored with her now that she’d figured out the fight was what he was in it for, so she refused to give it to him. She just lay with her eyes closed or off to the side, doing her best to show no emotions, which frustrated him immensely until finally he finished and told her, “Lost your fight, huh? You’re just like a little dead fish, now. You ain’t no fun.” He told Miss Lydia to call him when she had someone more interesting and sped out of the little compound with a roar of his truck.

  Jose had come for her the next night, and it was a night, like the first time with the mechanic, that made her sick to think about. He hadn’t cried like she’d been told her sometimes did, but he was rough and let fly a laundry list of insults for no apparent reason.

  Their little compound, she learned, was located about forty miles Northwest of Dallas. Miss Lydia had been running it for nearly two decades, always with illegal immigrants for prostitutes. Her deal with Ortiz back in Mexico City made it easy for her to get a supply of young pretty girls whom she had complete control over. She’d work them until they weren’t earning enough to appease Miss Lydia, then most were told their debt was paid and they could leave, although it usually took years before a girl was actually allowed to leave. There had been one or two over the years who weren’t so lucky. If Miss Lydia thought a girl to be a particular risk if set free, then the others were told she had paid her debt and was now free to pursue her own interests, but in truth that girl would just disappear.

  The prices were anywhere from forty to a hundred and fifty dollars, of which the girls got only twenty-five percent towards their debt, not that it mattered. Some girls had their debts paid off long before they were allowed to leave, but they were too afraid to contact the authorities. Miss Lydia made them believe they’d be deported back to Mexico where friends of hers would deal with them. “Don Ortiz saves all your information,” she reminded them. “And all I have to do is pick up a phone and I can get to you or your families any time I want.” The threat worked. The girls were prisoners without walls.

  Yesenia knew she could not live this way much longer. With each man she was with she imagined her Papa looking down upon her, his heart breaking and hers echoing. She knew she had to find a way to escape this life. That’s when she got the idea for using Armando.

  He was a young Hispanic man who had arrived one night in his old Chevy pickup truck, and he absolutely worshipped Yesenia from the first time he laid eyes on her. “I’ve never done anything like this,” he told Miss Lydia while the girls all lined up in the courtyard area.

  “Oh, there’s nothing to be concerned about,” she told him. “My girls are all clean and very pretty, as you can see.” Immediately he locked on to Yesenia. “Do you like her?” asked Miss Lydia. He nodded. “Well, I think she’s going to like you, too. Come now, let’s see if we can work something out.” She had led him to her place of business and that was the first night he slept with Yesenia.

  He came back the very next night. “You’re so beautiful,” he told her in Spanish as he lay on top of her, kissing her neck, he
r ears, and her breasts. His touch was gentle, almost comforting. “You shouldn’t be a prostitute. You could be a model or an actress or something,” he told her.

  It was just the break she needed. Until now, none of the other men outside the compound she’d met spoke Spanish. Miss Lydia has seen to it to keep Yesenia away from someone who spoke her tongue fluently until now, so she had no way to articulate her predicament, with the exception of one other man who visited on occasion, but he seemed close to Miss Lydia and Yesenia wouldn’t have trusted him. Armando was different, though. He’d never been to their compound before. He didn’t know Miss Lydia, and best of all, she didn’t really know him. He wasn’t a regular that she might have information on. On that very second night she began to formulate a plot.

  When Armando returned again the third time a week later, she tested the waters. After he reached his climax and lay on her panting in deep breaths, kissing her as he did before, she asked him, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  He kissed her lips as if in a half dream. “Hmmm?”

  “A girlfriend. Do you have a girlfriend somewhere?” she asked.

  “No,” he told her. “No girlfriend.”

  “How come? You seem like a nice guy. Not like the others.”

  He ran his fingers through her hair. “I don’t know. I guess I’m not that great with most girls. I don’t make a lot of money or drive a fancy car.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I work at a big car dealership, washing cars and stuff. It’s not very interesting, but it pays the bills . . . well, sort of. I’m going to school, too, though,” he added quickly. “At night, I take some college classes. I’m working on a business degree so I can get a real job, you know. One with benefits and all that, actually be able to take care of us.”

  “Us?” she asked.

  “Yeah, my brother and me. I look after him.”

  “Is the school hard?” Yesenia had daydreamed about attending college in the U.S., of course. That now seemed an impossible fantasy.

  “No, just time consuming and expensive.”

  “You don’t live with your family?”

  “No, just me and my little brother. Our parents weren’t very responsible, if you know what I mean.”

  “How so?”

  It wasn’t something he was accustomed to talking about, but he felt at ease with Yesenia. “Our dad took off when we were young and my mom’s kind of a screw up. She doesn’t live far from us, but my brother and I just couldn’t live with her anymore. She’s into too much shit. My brother works with me so we saved up and got out own place. Just a little house we rent, not much bigger than this,” he gestured around the mobile home. “It isn’t much, but it works for now.”

  “What about you?” he asked. “Where’s your folks?”

  Yesenia leaned against him. She felt a little bad playing on his sympathies like she was about to do, but she didn’t feel she had much choice, either. “They’re back in Mexico. They’ve no idea what’s become of me. None of this was supposed to happen.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  She looked deep into his eyes and tried to find the words that would make him help her. “This place. These people. They tricked me,” she told him in a whisper, “all the girls here.”

  “They tricked you? How?”

  And there she saw it. In the glint of his eye and the way he caressed her as though he cared for her, she saw her chance. “If I tell you, you mustn’t speak a word to anyone else. If they find out, they might hurt us both. They’re bad people.”

  He shifted his body weight and pulled her close. “Who are bad people?”

  “Miss Lydia and the men here. You don’t know how bad they are.” She held his arm and pressed her head against his cheek. “It all started back in Mexico City . . . “ she began. She told Armando about meeting Ortiz and the man that came to the apartment with papers, about crossing the river with the marijuana, the truck ride, and what happened when she got to the compound. She left out a lot of things, in particular what had happened to the state Trooper, but she was able to quickly summarize events.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “Well, you have to get away,” he told her.

  “I want to run away,” she whispered, “but I’ve no place to go.”

  “You could come stay with me.”

  She rolled over on his chest, “Really? Would you actually do that for me?”

  “Yes,” he told her. “I’m serious. You can’t stay here, not after what you just told me. You can come stay with me and we’ll get a hold of your family.”

  And that was how it happened. She knew he had no idea just how serious a thing he was agreeing to, and she didn’t want the young man hurt because of her, but she had to get away. Her desperation was far more potent than her reason at this point. She was ready to accept any risk on her own, but she knew that if she did get away she’d have to warn her family immediately. She refused to stay a slave in this hellhole, but exactly what they were all going to do afterward she didn’t yet know.

  The very next morning, Yesenia felt as though God smiled upon when she looked out the window and saw rain. She walked as a shadow to the fence, holding her breath the entire way in fear the dogs would raise the alarm, but luckily they had retreated to the hot box for shelter. She could have simply run down the beaten trail to the fence, but she was too frightened of being seen or heard, so she had snuck through the barbed wire fence in the back and now circled around through the brush.

  When she reached the road, Armando was parked in his old pickup truck waiting for her. Thank God he’s here. She smiled with exuberance. She felt luck was with her that her escape was meant to be. She ran to the truck and knocked on the passenger window. Inside, Armando jumped. He unlocked the door and opened it. “You scared the hell out of me,” he told her.

  “Has anyone seen you?” she asked.

  “Not that I know. Get in, get in. Let’s get out of here.”

  Yesenia crawled inside and the car pulled way and headed down the lonely county road. She looked back, worrying that the suburban might suddenly dart out from the little compound, but no lights came. It was five twenty in the morning. As most of the brothel’s traffic was at night, she knew everyone would have gone to sleep hours ago.

  As she looked back, she thought about Silvia. She didn’t want to leave her, but she couldn’t risk Silvia revealing her plan in fear. Their threats and violence had subdued Silvia from the start. Yesenia knew Silvia was far too afraid to risk their wrath after all they’d seen. She’d accepted that she was now the property of Miss Lydia, something Yesenia would never accept. I’ll send help back to them, she thought. But first I have to warn Ceci in case Miss Lydia calls don Ortiz.

  Funeral services for Kelly Woodall were held the following weekend in Kelly’s hometown of Katy, Texas. Police formed a perimeter around Anderson Funeral Home keeping the reporters and general masses back. Flowers, stuffed animals, and cards were piled high at the driveway entrance. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people were there. The Governor also attended after asking if it would be all right with the family, as did most of Kelly’s old classmates from high school and new friends from the University of Texas.

  “I’ve never seen so many,” said one of the funeral home directors as he looked out at the sea of well wishers that were lined up outside their gates.

  “It’s big news,” said the other. “Did you hear what Shelly said? About the body, I mean?” Shelly was the embalmer.

  “No, what?”

  “She was covered head to toe in wounds. She said it looked like someone had not only beaten that girl, but they tortured her, too, bunch of burns on her and all sorts of things they didn’t mention that on the news. She filed a report and the state sent someone in to take pictures and all. I think she got killed by some psychopath down there.”

  “God damn bastard,” said the other.