She explained that after Luz’s funeral, Soledad insisted that her relatives return to Texas right away. Alone at home in Santa Mariana, she invited Leeta over and told her that her friend Missy was going to kidnap Wilson and Martinez. They couldn’t get to the other rapists, who were locked up, so the two ringleaders would pay for all their sins. “I asked Soledad why she wanted to kidnap the men—I was stunned at what she was suggesting—but she just said they were going to get what they deserved. This wasn’t the Soledad I knew.” Leeta tried to talk her out of it for Soledad’s own sake, so she wouldn’t risk going to prison, but she’d made up her mind.
Soledad couldn’t be directly involved in the kidnapping because she would have been an obvious suspect, so she asked Leeta to go to the bar where Wilson and Martinez hung out and lure them to a vacant lot, where Missy would be waiting for them. “I would be the bait in a short dress and blond wig,” Leeta said. “I wasn’t in my right mind then. What’d happened to Luz was the worst thing that’d happened to anybody I’d ever known. I just kept thinking of her and all those crying women at the clinic and how this was never going to end. Despite my shock at Soledad’s plan, I began to wonder if she was right. Maybe we needed to go to the source of the problem.”
It wasn’t difficult to lure the men from the bar. They followed Leeta to the car, eager and excited at the thought of sex, and she drove them the ten miles to where Missy was waiting. “Being in the car with them made me sick. Those two scumbags killed Luz, each of them and the other men taking a piece of her, and I wanted to pull the car over and run into a field and scream, but I couldn’t do that, so I drove and screamed in my head. The men were talking to me in the car but all I could hear was my screaming.”
When they arrived at the darkened lot north of town, Missy was waiting with a black van. “They suspected something was wrong. They were scumbags but they weren’t stupid.” Leeta said they were reluctant to get out of the car. When they finally did, Missy Tasered them and tied them up. Leeta helped Missy load them into the back of the van and then Missy told her to drive away and keep going, out of Santa Mariana and as far away as she could get.
I had no idea how to reply. Leeta stared from beneath her hood into the darkness that surrounded us. I could only imagine the scenes that played in her mind, that would always play. In my head I saw the Dirty Dozen dropped into the desert, the Harbor Freeway interchange, and all of the other attacks linked to Jennifer. “Did you know this was the beginning of something bigger?”
Leeta said she didn’t. Days after the abduction, she called Soledad from the desert motel where she’d taken refuge and asked again what she was going to do with the men. “She said she’d let them linger for a while, that they weren’t going to be first. I didn’t know what she meant by first. I didn’t ask. That’s the last time I talked to her.” After the Jennifer attacks began to unfold, the first publicized attack with its link to the military, Leeta wondered if they were connected to Soledad and Missy. She tried to contact Soledad again, but it was Missy who replied. She and Leeta talked on the phone and through email, but Missy never admitted to anything. After Wilson and Martinez were killed with the rest of the Dirty Dozen, she knew for certain. “Missy was worried that I’d go to the police, so she wanted to keep tabs on me. I didn’t go to the police, but I told my roommate I knew who Jennifer was. I just couldn’t keep it inside anymore.” Leeta knew she’d made a mistake by telling her roommate. That’s when she went underground.
“How have you coped with hiding down here?” I asked, tugging on my collar. Finally, I was getting the answers to my questions, but what I really wanted to do was leave the suffocating hiding space. Leeta and I had both been underground—she in the Beauty Closet, me in Verena’s basement. New York was full of these dark places.
“During the day I know Julia is on the other side of the wall, but at night . . . sometimes there’s that screaming in my head again.”
“Why don’t you turn yourself in? Your sentence might not even be that long.” I was out of my depth, but this seemed like the sensible thing to suggest. Prison couldn’t be worse than this hiding space.
“The police wouldn’t believe anything I’d tell them. They’re out for blood. They’d want me to turn against Soledad, and I’m not going to do that. The truth is, I’m scared.”
Whether she ran or turned herself in, she was headed for a life of confinement. I wanted to reach out to her, to say it would be all right, but that would be a lie.
“Almost ready?” Julia said. Leeta struggled to stand up and so did I.
“I understand if you don’t want to give me the money, Louise B.”
“You need the money,” Julia said.
“It’s her choice. I don’t want her to do anything she’s uncomfortable with. She could get into trouble.”
I knew I could get into trouble, but I wanted Leeta to see the sun. “This money was given to me for a reason, but that reason no longer exists. You helped me,” I said. I wanted to say, You saved me. “Now it’s my turn to help you.”
She took the paper bag and stuffed it under her jacket. “I was right about you. You’re not like them.” She nodded upward toward the fifty-two stories on top of us.