Siobhan sat back down and looked again through her camera lens. She was losing light. In an hour it would be dark, and she wouldn’t be able to see much of anything.
The small, broken-down houses were set far apart, most rented by migrant workers or longtime residents who couldn’t afford much. No air-conditioning in the hot summers; faulty heat in the cold winters. Dismantled cars cluttered dirt yards; metal and other large items that most would call junk—most of it was junk, Siobhan thought—littered the area. Refrigerators with and without doors, some chained and bolted. But the house across the street was cleaner than the others; it was not in as sorry a state of disrepair.
There was activity every day—when Father Sebastian first talked to Mrs. Hernandez, she’d said there were many people coming and going, men and women of all races, many of them pregnant. If Father hadn’t spoken at Mass about the baby left at the rectory, Mrs. Hernandez probably wouldn’t have even approached him. But Siobhan convinced him to release the information. Mrs. Hernandez was the only one who stepped forward. The only one who was willing to help, even though Siobhan saw fear and guilt in the eyes of others.
Father Sebastian had wanted to come with Siobhan tonight, but she wasn’t going to risk an old priest with arthritis so severe he could barely stand upright.
Right now, this was her only lead other than the baby herself. Father had called her Elizabeth, and the nurses in Laredo had kept the name. Siobhan couldn’t wait to return to the hospital and see her again. She’d promised Elizabeth that she would find her mother. There was no doubt in her mind that either Marisol or Ana had given birth to that small, beautiful child.
She stared out the window. Nothing had changed, except it had grown darker.
She needed something.
Please, God. Don’t let me leave with nothing.
Mrs. Hernandez came into the bedroom where Siobhan was sitting in the semi-dark, waiting for someone to exit the house across the street.
“Enrique will be home soon,” the woman said. “Please, you need to go.”
Mrs. Hernandez had been nervous from the moment Father Sebastian had convinced her to let Siobhan in, and those nerves had steadily increased. But she’d been the one who called Father when the van arrived two hours ago. She wanted to help, but she was scared.
Siobhan had faced people like Mrs. Hernandez many times.
“Ten more minutes, por favor.” What would ten minutes do that the last two hours could not?
“No more, no more,” Mrs. Hernandez said, a catch in her voice. She walked out.
Of course the woman was fearful—that’s what these bastards did. They scared people into silence. Good people, who recognized evil, didn’t want to face it down. They didn’t want to be hurt. Close the doors, shut the blinds; if they couldn’t see the bogeyman, the bogeyman couldn’t see them.
A false and dangerous sense of security.
She’d already searched property records. The property across the street was owned by a business in San Antonio that was most surely a front. That would be her next step—tracing the business. Even if she found Marisol and Ana …
When. Even when you find them …
… she would track down these people and expose them. Her camera had never let her down.
Siobhan tried to put Mrs. Hernandez out of her mind and once again turned her attention across the road. There were no streetlights anywhere she could see; if she couldn’t get a good photo of someone in the next thirty minutes, she’d have to leave even if Mrs. Hernandez didn’t kick her out first. She could only do so much without a flash.
A car was coming down the broken street, headlights on in the dusk. At first Siobhan feared it was Mr. Hernandez, but the black Escalade pulled into the driveway across the roadway.
An Escalade certainly didn’t fit into this neighborhood. The vehicle practically screamed Illegal activity here!