“Not really. I mean, she’s always doing some charity thing. That’s how she described the whole thing. She said the girls didn’t have the money for passports and all that. She was going to get them here first, and then help them get paperwork and all that. She wanted to help them become citizens and get jobs.”
“Legally it doesn’t work that way. You get the documents first,” Josie said, trying to figure out if Ryan was that na?ve.
“I don’t know how it works. I didn’t care either. I mean, it was Caroline. She wasn’t going to do something that could get us into trouble.”
“But she said she’d destroy you if you told anyone?”
“That came later. After the girl got shot. She came to the house when she knew Mom and Dad were gone. She was shaking, had tears in her eyes. She kept asking me what happened, and I kept telling her I didn’t know. The girls just escaped, and now one of them was dead. Then she got mad at me, like the screwup was my fault! I was like, seriously? I was driving a van with a lunatic who wanted to have sex with anything that moved, and I screwed up?”
“Do you think she had anything to do with the murder?” Josie asked.
He curled his lip at the question. “No. She was freaking out. I think she thought she was helping those girls, and Josh just fouled it all up.”
“Do you think Josh shot Renata?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it constantly. I mean, he’s the only one who makes sense to me. But I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t there.”
“Have you been in contact with her since she came by your house?”
“No. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone about anything. That’s when she put a finger in my face and said she’d destroy me if I talked about it to anyone, including my parents.”
Josie glanced at Otto, who shook his head once, signaling he was done. “We’ll be in touch,” she said to Ryan.
“Are you going to tell her that I told you about this?” he asked.
Josie considered him for a moment and realized she wasn’t able to offer him any reassurance. “I just don’t know at this point.”
When they’d gotten to the jeep, Otto slammed his door and looked over at Josie. “What the hell are we going to do?”
“This is gonna get ugly.”
TWELVE
Josie called Marta and asked her to have burritos from the Hot Tamale delivered to the police department. Otto dropped Josie by the jail so she could pick up her jeep. By the time she arrived at the department the delivery kid was just pulling up with a paper bag full of food.
Upstairs, they spread out their lunches around the conference table and popped the tops of soft drinks while Josie dropped the bombshell.
“Caroline Moss.”
Marta’s jaw fell open and then snapped shut. “You’re putting me on.”
“I wish I was.”
Marta dropped into the chair in front of her burrito. “I just don’t know if I can believe that. I mean, I never liked the woman, but I always thought she was basically a good person. That her heart was in the right place.”
“Maybe her heart is in the right place,” said Otto. “The way Ryan talked, she was trying to help those women.”
Josie gaped at Otto. “You don’t seriously believe that, do you?”
He talked around a massive bite of burrito. “I’m just repeating what Ryan said.”
“Human trafficking is a federal offense. She knows that. And even if she somehow twisted her participation into something humane, she hired Josh Mooney, who apparently raped at least two of the women he was hired to protect. That goes way beyond irresponsible.”
Otto began nodding and raised his hand to stop her. “Calm down.”
“What do we have, beyond Ryan’s word?” said Marta.
“Nothing,” he said.
“I’ll subpoena Josh’s, Macey’s, and Caroline’s cell phone records, but they’ll be throwaway phones. We may ping one in her cell phone area, but that’s about it. We won’t connect Caroline to Josh and Macey,” Josie said. “Unless Caroline paid for a throwaway phone with a personal credit card.”
“She’d be more careful than that,” Otto said.
“Unless she figured it was a throwaway number that would never be traced back to her. It’s hard work covering your tracks. People get bogged down in the details and forget about the never-ending paper trail,” Marta said.
“Meanwhile, we’ve got the testimony of an eighteen-year-old kid versus the mayor’s wife, who is also a philanthropist and well-respected senator’s daughter,” said Josie.
“And we have three displaced women, a murder victim, and a witness to the murder who refuses to talk about it,” Otto said.
“Then let’s go to the source,” Marta said. “Yesterday, when I dropped Isabella off at the motel, I pressed her to give me contact information for her family. She confided that she didn’t want to tell us who her family was because Josh had said their families would be killed if any of them left before reaching their destination. She finally gave it up, but she didn’t want to. He played terrible head games with those girls.”