“Eight months ago,” Siobhan continued, “it was early February, I think, though I can check my notes, one of my reporter friends did an undercover exposé on a brothel in Del Rio. Most of the girls he spoke with were underage, most illegal immigrants, most hadn’t been trafficked but didn’t see any other way to earn a living. However, one of them gave my friend a story about six girls who’d stayed at the brothel for three days. This was a year ago last June. They closed the place—why would they do that? And the regular girls were paid to stay away. What brothels that use underage girls pay them for a vacation? The girl recognized the photo of Marisol, but more than that—she said that Mari spoke French. Mari has a knack for languages—Spanish is her native language, but she speaks and understands multiple dialects, speaks near-perfect English, French, and was learning to read French before the mudslide.” Siobhan shook her head. I know it was her. But after those three days, the six girls disappeared and no one seems to know what happened to them.
“Anyway, I’ve been looking for them for two years, but couldn’t do much until I got that lead. The number on the locket is my cell phone—I don’t give it out to many people, and the village didn’t even have electricity, but I wanted to make sure if there was an emergency that they could reach me.” It felt like a lifetime ago. “I’d sent out flyers, I’d called, I made sure I was always accessible. I know Mari and Ana as if they were my own sisters … they would escape if they could. They’d find a church. They don’t trust the authorities—their village is in the middle of nowhere, but the few run-ins they had weren’t pleasant.”
“What happened to them? Were they kidnapped?” Lucy asked.
“I don’t know. Six years ago, there was a mudslide. Nearly half the people in their village were killed, including their parents. Tilda was one of my friends, and I didn’t even know about the disaster for weeks because I was on assignment in Chile. By the time I got there…” It had been awful.
They were still recovering bodies. The Sisters of Mercy had come to help with the cleanup and burial, but there was so much work to do, and so much sorrow. And there were no young sisters, not anymore. Siobhan shook her head, clearing her thoughts. “We started rebuilding, but donations are difficult these days. One of the sisters heard about a business hiring bilingual employees, and she helped Mari get the job in Monterrey. Ana went with her, safety in numbers, and she worked for the same company. They were vetted, I talked to the owner—he was upset when they went missing. Distraught—I don’t think he was faking.” She knew he wasn’t faking, because she’d called in Kane—Kane had talked to him. Kane said their employer had nothing to do with their disappearance. How he was so certain, she didn’t know … but she trusted him.
“I’m certain their roommates know something, but I couldn’t get anything out of them.” Neither could Kane, and he was far more intimidating than Siobhan. But Kane tracked them until they disappeared—dead or in hiding, he couldn’t say, but he’d spent a lot of time helping her. “Now they’re gone, too.”
“Did you run it through RCK?” Noah asked.
“You know of … of course you do. You know Rick and Kane and Sean. No one filed a missing persons report on the roommates, but things are handled a little less … formally, you could say, down south.”
“Do you think someone misled the girls? Maybe enticed them with more money, and then tricked them?”
“Not Mari,” Siobhan said. “She was too smart to fall for anything like that. And she wanted to go home. The job was supposed to be for two years. She was translating for the company to help them gain more business in the US. They manufactured children’s toys. Wooden puzzles, mostly. Ana … maybe. She was sweet. Mari wanted to go home, Ana might have been a bit more excited about Monterrey.” Siobhan hesitated. “I’m the one who took them from their village, traveled with them, got them to Monterrey. The job. And left them there. I should have checked up on them more often, made sure they were okay.”
“They could call you, right?”
She nodded. “They knew that.”
“Then stop blaming yourself,” Lucy said.
Siobhan sighed. “I’m not.” But she was.
She leaned forward as they rounded the corner and she saw the rental car. “Thank God,” she said and crossed herself out of habit. “It’s still here.”
Noah parked behind it and Siobhan got out. So did Noah and Lucy. “I want to show you the house. I know, you can’t go in, but you should still see—” She opened the trunk and frowned. Her camera case was on the right side of the trunk and she was positive she’d put it on the the left side, like she always did.
She opened up the case and checked her camera. It was gone. “Well, dammit.”
“What happened?” Noah asked.
“Someone took my SD card.”
“Are you certain?”
“Of course. I locked my camera in the trunk; the camera is here, the memory card is gone.”
Lucy raised an eyebrow. “You don’t sound all that upset that you lost all your pictures.”
“I didn’t lose anything. They save automatically to the cloud through a phone app that your brilliant fiancé set up for me ages ago. But that SD card was the best I had, costs two hundred bucks a pop.”
Siobhan was even angrier that someone had gone through her things. She glanced through her satchel and backpack—nothing else appeared to be missing. She’d left her laptop in the hotel safe. It was a bold move to grab her SD card—could they have also taken her hotel card key and gotten into her room? Maybe … though they wouldn’t know what room she was in.