“Marta, we can’t do that.”
“Just hear me out. I speak Spanish, so I can communicate with her. And she’s already established a relationship with me. I posted outside her room at the trauma center last night. I talked with her several times about Guatemala and her family. Nothing about the case, but I’m building trust.”
“That’s great. Meet with her again today. We need to find out who they contracted with to come to the U.S. But bottom line, she’s a suspect in a murder investigation.”
“She’s been traumatized!”
“Marta, come on. She is the only personal connection we have to the murder victim. At this point, we believe she knew about the body for days. We don’t know what happened, so we can’t clear her as a suspect.” Josie paused. She knew Marta wouldn’t like her next comment. “And, something else. She clearly wants help, but she’s not giving us anything. That may be an indication she’s hiding something. We just can’t tell.”
Marta took a second and said, “I think that’s a horrible stance to take. She’s most likely been raped and mentally terrorized for who knows how long by these men. And we’re going to treat the victim like the criminal?”
“That’s not what I said, and you know it.”
“I’ll see you at three-thirty,” Marta said, and hung up.
*
Otto drove twenty-five minutes to Presidio, the town nearest to Artemis, to meet Trooper Dan Haspin, a twenty-year veteran with the Texas Department of Public Safety. Otto had worked with Dan through the years and knew he was active with the Texas Human Trafficking Task Force. Otto called Dan and filled him in on their suspicions, and Dan had offered to meet Otto to share intelligence.
A black man in his early forties, he wore the khaki uniform, blue tie, and hard felt cowboy hat of a Department of Public Safety trooper. He was bulked up around the chest, with a narrow waist that made Otto wonder if he had to work to maintain his physique. Otto blamed his belly on Delores, forty years of Polish comfort food. But he’d take his satisfying suppers over a tightened belt any day of the week.
Otto walked into the sandwich shop and found Dan in the corner booth with his back against the wall, his sandwich sitting untouched in front of him. He waved and smiled, and Otto bought his lunch and joined him.
They discussed Otto’s goat herd and the price of meat at the market, and Dan’s woodworking hobby, making toy trains and trucks. Both men knew the benefit of a hobby to occupy a cop’s off-duty mind.
Midway through their sandwiches, the conversation turned to work and Dan finally said, “You’ve got a dead woman in her early twenties, and a traumatized woman in her early twenties who speaks Spanish. The women are apparently from Guatemala, but they don’t show up in the missing persons databases. And the traumatized woman doesn’t want to share information about her family.”
Otto nodded. “That’s it.”
“It sure as hell fits the description for a human trafficking case.”
Otto cocked an eyebrow at him. “Without knowing any other details, you’d make that statement?”
“Here’s how widespread it is. Texas has a trafficking guide for teachers now to help them identify and report signs of trafficking in school-age kids. And it’s not just our state.”
Otto shook his head in disgust.
“Look. I’m not saying it’s rampant, but there are more cases than people would like to admit. It’s not just massage parlors and crappy hotels. So I’m not surprised to find that small-town Artemis has been affected.”
“That’s not the answer I was looking for,” Otto said.
Dan considered him for a moment. “You’re sure they came from Guatemala?”
Otto nodded.
Dan frowned. “From Guatemala to West Texas?”
“The surviving woman told someone who was providing her help, as well as one of our officers, that they were from Guatemala. I can’t imagine why she would lie about that,” Otto said.
“Here’s my issue. We have known groups coming up out of that country. No doubt. But it doesn’t make sense that they’d come to this part of West Texas first.”
Otto shrugged, not sure what he was getting at.
Dan took out his cell phone. “Let me pull up a map and you’ll see.”
A moment later Dan handed his phone to Otto with a route map drawn from Guatemala in Central America, up the eastern coast of Mexico, to Houston and San Antonio. Artemis, in West Texas, was hundreds of miles to the west. He nodded, instantly understanding.
“It’s a sixteen-hundred-mile trip from Guatemala to San Antonio. Even farther to Houston,” Dan said. “I can’t see them driving another six hours to West Texas, only to turn around and head back toward San Antonio.”
Otto was taken aback. “Why would you automatically assume traffickers would head to San Antonio?”