by Jo Robertson
"I will take care of the girl and the shipment," Santos promised. "Do not worry."
At that moment, a noise from down the hallway to the left drew Santos' attention. When he turned in that direction, he saw a naked blonde stumbling through the archway into the living room.
"Wass goin' on, honey?" she mumbled. "Come to bed, baby." She held her bare arms out toward Vargas. Her brassy hair glimmered in the pale light and her tanned, toned body looked lean and muscled.
A showgirl, Santos thought sourly, barely of legal age.
"¡Salga de aquí!" Vargas yelled harshly. "Go back to the bedroom, bitch!"
Even around his young daughter, Diego behaved like a pig. At least when Magdalena was here, he did not conduct himself so carelessly.
His boss was deteriorating rapidly.
#
"I need a shower," Bella said, climbing off the bed.
"Great!" Rafe smiled, slipping his hands beneath the sheet and running them over her hips. "I enjoy team sports."
She adjusted the shower spray and water temperature, dropped her robe, and jumped in. Suddenly shy, she was grateful the steam blurred the image of her naked body behind the textured glass of the shower. Through the foggy glass she watched Rafe pull off his shorts and open the door. She thought again how magnificent his dark, coppery skin looked, how the muscles rippled beneath the surface of his flesh, and how fine thick hairs covered his chest and legs.
He wrapped his arms around her from behind and cupped her breasts. "You have the most gorgeous breasts."
He kneaded them gently and teased the nipples. "They feel like satin, smooth as silk." He nuzzled her neck, moving his mouth over her ear and gently nipping the lobe.
"Your nipples are so small and pink I want to do this." He turned her around and bent his head to take her nipple and breast into his mouth, the rasping of his tongue an erotic and scintillating texture against her sensitive peaks. He reached for the soap and lathered his hands, running his slick palms over the breasts he'd just teased with his mouth. His caresses lit tiny fires in her blood as he smoothed her arms, belly, between her legs.
When he finished, she performed the same for him, reveling in the smooth, soapy feel of him beneath her hands. She took his penis and rolled it between her fingers, loved hearing him groan. This time he entered her from behind, languidly and slowly, pressing her against the glass shower as he moved within her and touched her in an exquisite rhythm. At last he pounded into her with an almost desperate urgency and she came at the same time as he spilled himself within her.
When her heart had stopped racing and she no longer felt the thunder of his chest against her back, he turned her around and kissed her sweetly on the mouth and cheeks and neck. "That was nice," he whispered, rubbing her wet arms and back. "You are nice."
Nice? she thought, what a ... mild word.
Later they toweled off and wrapped their nearly naked bodies in warm quilts. They sat on the sofa in the living room, drinking hot chocolate. Bella stretched her legs across his lap and he rubbed her feet with his free hand. "This is nice," Rafe said, running his hand up her bare thigh.
"What's with the N word?" Bella teased, half disgruntled.
"What?"
"Nice, you keep using that word."
"You don't like it?" He laughed. "I'll find another one."
"It's just so ... pedestrian."
"Pedestrian? Like a jaywalker?"
She punched him lightly on the arm. "Not like a jaywalker, silly, just ... ordinary, average."
"Oh, baby, you're anything but ordinary." He leaned over to kiss her knee, opened the front of the quilt, and gazed at her chest. "And those are ... God, nothing less than spectacular."
She flushed and pulled the blanket around her. "You're embarrassing me," she protested.
He ruffled her still-damp hair and laughed. "But you're so gorgeous when you blush." He winked. "Gorgeous," he repeated, "not at all pedestrian."
She stood, let the quilt fall away from her body, and reached for his mug, wiggling her hips in her skimpy panties as she strutted into the kitchen.
Rafe followed her, reaching for her waist and missing. "Oh, no, baby, not ordinary at all." He caught up to her at the sink and swung her around, bringing his lips down to hers. "I think I'm addicted."
She felt his erection pressing through his shorts into her stomach and laughed. "At least some part of you is."
He lifted her long hair off her neck and pressed a gentle kiss behind her ear. "Wanna try again?"
She reached inside his shorts. "I'm game."
Then Rafe's cell phone vibrated annoyingly on the counter. "Hell," he mumbled.
"Leave it," she said, working her hand up and down his hard length.
"Ah," he groaned before pulling away with a painful grimace. "I can't." He took a deep breath and flipped open the phone. "Slater," he said, nodding at Bella.
Suddenly embarrassed for no reason she could have explained, other than Slater was on the other end of Rafe's cell phone, she went into the bedroom and slipped on jeans and a heavy shirt. Rafe remained standing at the counter, naked but no longer at full alert, she noticed. His brow was furrowed in thunderous disapproval. He reached down and pulled up his shorts, then brushed by her on his way to the bedroom.
She stood in the doorway, watching him put his clothes back on. "What's wrong? What did Slater want at this hour?"
"The girl's ready to talk," he said. "Slater's driving her down here himself. Has a safe house all picked out."
"Good, that means she's well enough to travel."
"Evidently." Anger etched every line of his face and his movements were stiff and hurried. "He wants us to meet him there, but won't identify the place until I'm on what he calls a secure line."
"Why? Doesn't he trust you?"
"He says there's a leak." He paused before scooping his wallet, badge, and change off the dresser. "And he's sure it's not in his department."
"He thinks it's on your end," she confirmed.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Slater gave Bella directions to the safe house, but only after she called him from a pay phone halfway between the courthouse and the unknown location. "Are you sure all this secrecy is necessary, Slater?" Bella complained from the phone kiosk. "It seems like overkill."
His voice sounded tinny over the phone. Poor reception? "After the hit on the van carrying the girls? What do you think?"
"I guess, but ..." She looked over her shoulder at the gasoline pump where Rafe stood beside his car, drumming his fingers on the hood. "Hashemi's pretty steamed about it."
Slater laughed shortly. "He'll get over it."
"Still, he's in charge of the case."
"All the more reason for him to plug the security leak he's got. Pass the message on," Slater ordered before hanging up on her.
So much for her being able to handle Ben Slater. She settled into the passenger seat and waited for Rafe to buckle up and start the engine before passing on the directions to the safe house.
Rafe glanced over at her. "What took so long?" When she remained silent, he mumbled, "Slater was giving you grief about the leak, wasn't he?"
"He's got a point. Vargas' people found out about the girls too fast. They couldn't have used their usual sources."
He rapped the heel of his hand on the steering wheel. "I know, but I don't see where they could've gotten the information from. Every damn member of my team has been security cleared dozens of times – background searches, known affiliates, tax returns, family members – very deep checks."
"You should probably have them all investigated again, just to be sure," she suggested.
Rafe took his eyes off the road to gaze at her, a thoughtful expression on his face. "Maybe you're right. There's a breach somewhere, but it looks deeply buried."
After a thirty-minute, silent drive northeast, they arrived at the safe house location, an unoccupied summer home at a higher elevation in Bigler County. Rafe pulled the car onto a gra
vel driveway behind Slater's truck and a squad car.
By the way he clicked off the ignition and turned to face her, Bella knew he'd been planning what to say the whole trip up into the foothills. He blew heavily through his mouth and scraped his hands over his heavy beard. Then he reached for her, placing his forefinger over her lips, his eyes dark with an emotion she couldn't read.
"We should talk about last night." He brushed a strand of hair off her cheek, trailing his fingers along her jaw line.
She nodded.
"We can't ... we shouldn't let this ... thing between us get in the way of the case," he murmured.
She leaned her cheek against his hand and closed her eyes. "Maybe last night was a bad idea."
He dropped his hand, gripped the wheel, and stared straight ahead as the front door to the house swung open and Slater's large body filled the frame.
"Hell, yes, it was a bad idea," he finally said, sounding impatient, his jaw working furiously. "But we can't take it back."
"Are you sorry?" she asked.
Rafe opened his mouth to answer, but by that time Slater was tapping on the passenger's window and the moment had passed. God, Bella thought bitterly, was last night just a fling for him? Having a one-night stand – how pathetic was that?
She swung out of the car and joined Slater. "Where's the girl?"
Slater looked from her to Rafe and back again, as if he were sizing up the situation, aware that something was amiss. "She's inside. Fell asleep on the way down here and I didn't have the heart to wake her up."
He peered into Bella's face again, and she wondered what he could see written on it. Slater was too astute not to miss the emotions playing there, and she was too unschooled to hide them.
"Are you okay?" he asked, placing a large hand on her shoulder.
She shrugged him off and hurried up the small flight of wooden steps into the house. Snow would cover the grounds this high up in the winter so the houses were built up off the ground on wooden frames. From the entry Bella moved into a single, spacious room which contained a kitchen at one end and a living area at the other.
Waylon Harris and Deputies McKidd and Ruiz from the Bigler County Sheriff's Office sat at the kitchen end of the room, surrounding a table where they sipped coffee from mugs. Harris, a tree trunk of a man with skin like polished ebony, jumped up from his chair to greet her. Bella suspected that he had a bit of a crush on her because he seemed to fall all over himself whenever she was around.
Deputy Ruiz was a new recruit, a hefty Hispanic man with a brush of moustache above his lip and eyes that danced with humor. Slater would've assigned Ruiz to this case because of his Spanish background even though Bella herself spoke the language fluently. Slater liked covering all his bases.
McKidd, a tall, bony redhead with large freckles in a ridiculously young face, seemed all arms and legs as he sprawled on the tiny kitchen chair. He'd just popped a powdered doughnut in his mouth and white dust sprinkled across his sparse, reddish soul patch.
Rafe and Slater trailed in from the car. After Slater made introductions all around, everyone poured a first or second cup of coffee. Rafe, Bella, and Slater took the chairs at the kitchen table, while Ruiz, Harris, and McKidd returned to their posts guarding the two entrances to the house.
Rafe checked out the front of the house, noting the wide window that opened onto the gravel drive. The back door led to a deck from which a long stretch of stairs wound downward to a dirt embankment and a copse of slender pines. The entire back wall consisted of floor to ceiling glass windows and the view through the glassed wall was spectacular, but he wasn't interested in that.
"What's the girl's name and how old is she?" Isabella asked as she added sugar and cream to her coffee.
"Esperanza. Says she's thirteen, speaks English very well," Slater answered. "She's exhausted."
"Was she injured in the fracas?" Rafe asked from his position by the window.
"Took a bullet to the upper shoulder and she's sore, but it's not serious," Slater replied.
"What's going to happen to her?" Isabella asked. "When this is all over, I mean."
"After we get the information, she'll go back to Mexico," Rafe answered, not meeting her eyes, knowing the girl would go back where she came from, but there'd be no happy ending for her. "Hopefully, she has a family still waiting for her."
"Hopefully, she wasn't sold into slavery and prostitution by that same family," Isabella snapped.
Rafe ignored the anger in her eyes and directed his question to Slater. "Has she said anything yet?"
Slater nodded towards the behemoth Deputy Harris and tapped his own chest. "The four of us – you can see we're not dainty men. I was waiting for Bella. I think a woman will work better with the girl."
Rafe wondered how Slater had managed to find a good safe house on such short notice. Good location, isolated, gravel to alert vehicle approach, and only a few trees to hide someone coming up on foot. "Whose place is this?"
"Friend of a friend of a friend, who's vacationing in Italy. This is their second home, completely untraceable."
"Good," Rafe grunted. "The girl's in there?" He gestured towards the hall to his left where he could see several closed doors.
"Second door on the right," Slater answered, glancing at his watch. "She should be awake soon."
As if on cue, the door swung open and a young girl, looking scarcely twelve, barefoot and sleepy-eyed, wandered to the end of the hall. She was skinny and dirty, but Rafe could tell she'd be a beauty when she was older, wide round eyes surrounded by long, sooty ashes, skin the color of sun-kissed copper, and a look of sadness on her face that would break a man's heart.
Isabella approached Esperanza, introduced herself, and asked if she'd mind talking to her. The girl glanced at the two men first, and drawing her brows together, finally nodded before turning back to the bedroom. Isabella followed.
An uncomfortable silence descended as Rafe joined Slater at the table. Rafe could see Harris positioned by the patio door and assumed the other two deputies were posted at the front.
"I guess it could be Nevada County," Slater said, apropos of nothing, after a few minutes of silence.
Rafe looked over in surprise. "The leak? You think?"
Slater shrugged. "Not really.
"But part of it could be," Rafe speculated. "The Nevada hit was awfully fast."
"That's what I was thinking."
Rafe raised his eyebrows. "Shared responsibility? Multiple leaks?"
"Something like that."
"So the Nevada hit was a Nevada leak," Rafe concluded. That sounded right to him. "Law enforcement?"
"How could it be anything else?"
"And Lupe?"
"Your confidential informant in L.A.?" Slater asked. "That one had to be a DEA leak, don't you think?"
Rafe hated the idea, sure no one in L.A. could've tied Lupe to him. They'd been rigidly cautious. Still ... "Shit, looks like it."
"We can't take any chances with Esperanza's life," Slater warned.
Rafe glanced down the hall to the closed door behind which Isabella was getting details on the hit from the girl. "No, no risks."
Another few minutes passed while Rafe alternated between looking out the large glass window that filled the entire southeastern wall and the closed bedroom door down the hall.
Suddenly another comment, completely out of the blue, came from Slater. This one floored Rafe. "Are you sleeping with her?"
Rafe choked on his coffee. "What the hell?"
He guessed that Slater hadn't missed the careful avoidance Rafe and Isabella had maintained – the tension between them, not touching, eyes sliding off the other's – so he wasn't as completely surprised by the question as he should've been. Shit! They'd really complicated the case by what they'd done last night. "None of your goddamn business!" he growled in warning.
"Oh, but it is," Slater said in a matter-of-fact voice, "my business, that is. See, Bella's like a little sister to me. I don't
want to see her hurt."
At least that cleared up the relationship between the two of them. "Are you so certain I'll hurt her?"
Slater leveled him a hard look. "Maybe, maybe not. I'm here to make sure you don't."
"All she needs is another brother."
"Yeah," Slater laughed. "And it's not like Bella can't handle herself."
"She's pretty tough." Rafe smiled in memory, mopping up the spilled coffee with a paper towel.
"Still ... she's not so tough in her heart."
Slater was referring to Isabella's lost and probably dead sister Maria.
"Yeah," he conceded.
#
The microfiche records were surprisingly easy to access in the state archives. Twenty years ago the story caused quite a media blitz. Young Mexican immigrant family. The father a migrant worker, the mother domestic help, but they managed to educate their seven children. The girl Maria was her class valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and the first family member to go to college.
Then she'd disappeared on a graduation trip to Mexico with three of her best friends. The three remaining girls were no help in providing the police with details about how Maria had vanished. But Santos was fairly certain he knew exactly what had happened to her.
After a few months the newspaper coverage waned and eventually dwindled to nothing. By the time the girl was really dead, there wasn't even an anniversary article in the local paper.
Five years.
Maria Anna Torres had lasted five years at the cruel hands of Diego Vargas.
Santos pulled the worn photograph out of his jacket pocket and held it up beside the grainy newspaper photograph on the microfiche screen. The resemblance was unremarkable, although both girls had long, dark hair and wide black eyes. Both were Latina, but the girl in the newspaper photo wore a white graduation cap and gown. In Santos' picture, she was thinner, bare shouldered, and heavily made up.
But he had no doubt the two pictures revealed the same girl. The resemblance to Isabella Torres was uncanny, and the details of the disappearance and presumed kidnapping of Maria Torres matched what Santos remembered from twenty years ago.
