“Did you notice anyone suspicious, perhaps someone following you around?” the police asked.
“No one,” Caroline said, her body growing numb with fear and fatigue. Every time she answered one of their relentless questions, she felt her energy dim, her voice grow weaker. Almost two hours had passed since they’d returned to their suite. It was after midnight. A search of the hotel and its grounds had thus far proved fruitless. Samantha was gone. By now she could be anywhere. “Can’t you issue an Amber Alert?”
“We’re not in California,” Hunter said, his voice betraying his impatience. With the police. With their questions. With her. “They don’t have Amber Alerts in Mexico.”
“We’ve notified the border patrol to be on the lookout for anyone traveling with a small child,” one of the officers said. Caroline had initially thought there were two policemen, but now she saw that there were three, two of them looking barely out of their teens, one closer to middle age. All had black hair and piercing, judgmental eyes. The younger two wore uniforms of navy pants and white shirts; the oldest was dressed in street clothes, gray pants, and a rumpled short-sleeved shirt he hadn’t bothered to tuck in.
Caroline thought of the thousands of people who snuck across Mexico’s border into California every year, and her body filled with despair. The border was so close, and they’d already lost so much time. If someone had wanted to sneak her daughter into the United States, she was long gone by now. The greater likelihood was that whoever took her was still in Rosarito, that he’d taken her somewhere close by for his own perverse purposes. The police were conducting room-to-room searches of both wings of the hotel. “There was a waiter,” Caroline said with a shudder, her mind’s eye filling with the image of a man in a white jacket pushing a portable dinner table down the hall. “Room service. I passed him in the corridor after I checked on the kids. He stopped a few doors down.”
“What time was this?”
“Around nine o’clock.”
“We’ll check on it,” the hotel manager said, already speaking into his cell phone.
“And I saw a housekeeper on the floor at four o’clock. No,” she amended immediately, “it was closer to four-fifteen. I told her I’d lost my keycard and asked if she could use her master key to let me inside.”
The manager nodded, relayed this information to the person he was speaking to.
“Just how many people have access to master keys?” Hunter asked.
The hotel manager lifted his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “Many people—the senior staff, housekeeping, the clerks at the reception desk, the valets who bring your luggage to your rooms. The same as in hotels in America.”
Caroline noted the defensiveness in the manager’s voice.
“So the last time you saw your daughter was…when exactly?” the oldest officer asked Hunter.
“Nine-thirty.”
The officer turned his gaze to Caroline. “And you checked her again at ten?”
“No. We were leaving in a few minutes, so Hunter said it wasn’t necessary.” She glanced accusingly at her husband, who immediately looked away. In truth, it had been more like ten minutes, she realized. Would those ten minutes have made a difference?
“So it would appear your daughter disappeared sometime between nine-thirty and shortly after ten o’clock.”
“Yes,” Caroline and Hunter said together.
“And that you were the last person to see her,” the officer said to Hunter.
“Yes,” Hunter said, his eyes growing opaque with tears.
The phone rang. One of the younger officers directed Hunter to answer it.
Caroline felt a sudden surge of hope. Was it possible Samantha had been kidnapped and was being held for ransom? Was it the kidnapper on the phone, calling with his set of demands? Whatever you want, Caroline thought. We’ll give you all the money we have. Just bring my daughter back to us, unharmed.
“Hello?” Hunter said, listening for several seconds before lowering the phone to his chest. “It’s your brother,” he told Caroline. “He’s calling to make sure everything is okay. Apparently the police just searched their room, told them a child had gone missing…” His voice caught in his throat. He hung up the phone without saying anything further.
Minutes later, Steve and Becky were banging on their door. The police ushered them inside. Peggy and Fletcher arrived soon after, Rain and Jerrod only seconds behind them.
“My God, what happened?” Becky asked, rushing to Caroline’s side, her voice as shrill as an alarm clock, jolting Michelle from her sleep.
“Mommy!” the child cried, sitting up and burrowing into her mother’s chest.
“Where’s Samantha?” Becky asked.
“Oh, God,” Peggy said, eyes darting frantically in all directions.
“It’s Samantha?” Rain asked. “Samantha’s the child who’s missing?”
“How can that be?” Jerrod asked. “You checked on her every half hour.”