Robert Crais - Taken

She dismissed the assistant, and returned to her desk while I looked around. Shelves along the wall opposite her desk were lined with mugs, cups, bobbleheads, T-shirts, caps, giveaway toys, and dozens of other promotional items. Want team shirts for your kid’s soccer club? They could do it. Want the name of your insurance agency on cheap plastic cups for the Knights of Columbus barbeque? That’s what they did. Photos of youth teams dotted the walls, the kids all wearing shirts made by Hector Sports.

I said, “Who’s Hector?”

“My husband. He started the company twenty-two years ago, silk-screening T-shirts. I run it now. Cancer.”

“Sorry.”

“Me, too. Seven years, this June.”

“You must run it well. Business looks good.”

“No one’s getting rich, but we’re doing okay. Here, let’s sit.”

She came around her desk so we could sit together on matching metal chairs. Nita Morales was in her mid-forties, built sturdy, and wore a conservative blue business skirt and ruffled white shirt. Her sleek black hair showed no gray, and framed her broad face well. Her nails were carefully done, and her wedding ring was still in place, seven years later, this June.

She held out a snapshot.

“This is who you’re going to find. This is Krista.”

“I haven’t agreed yet, Ms. Morales.”

“You will. Look.”

“We haven’t talked price.”

“Look at her.”

Krista Morales had a heart-shaped face, golden skin, and a smile that dimpled her right cheek. Her eyes were deep chocolate, and her hair glistened with the deep black sheen of a crow’s wing in the sun. I smiled at the picture, then handed it back.

“Pretty.”

“Smart. She’s going to graduate summa cum laude in two months from Loyola Marymount. Then she’s going to work in Washington as a congressional aide. After that, maybe the first Latina president, you think?”

“Wow. You must be proud.”

“Beyond proud. Her father and I, we didn’t graduate high school. I had no English until I was nine. This business, we built with sweat and the grace of God. Krista-”

She ticked off the points on her fingers.

“-highest GPA in her class, editor of the student newspaper, National Honor Society, Phi Beta Kappa. This girl is making our dreams come true.”

She suddenly stopped, and stared through the glass wall into the shop. Even with the angle, I saw her eyes glisten.

“They’re good people, but you have to watch them.”

“I understand. Take your time.”

She cleared her throat as she pulled herself together, then Nita Morales’s face darkened from a sunrise of pride to the iron sky of a thunderstorm. She put Krista’s picture aside, and handed me a page showing a name and Palm Springs address. The name was Jack Berman.

“She went to Palm Springs seven days ago. With a boy. Her boyfriend.”

She said “boyfriend” as if it were another word for “mistake.”

She described the boyfriend, and didn’t have anything good to say. A USC dropout without a job and little future. Just the type of boy who could derail her daughter’s ambitions.

I glanced at the address.

“He lives in Palm Springs?”

“Somewhere in L.A., I think. His family has the house in Palm Springs, or it might belong to a friend, but I don’t really know. Krista hasn’t told me much about him.”

Old story. The less Krista told her, the less she could criticize. I put the address aside.

“Okay. So how is she missing?”

“She went for the weekend. That’s what she told me, and she always tells me where she’s going and exactly how long she’ll be gone. But she’s been gone now for a week, and she won’t return my calls or texts, and I know it’s that boy.”

That boy.

“How long have Krista and that boy been together?”

Thinking about it seemed to sicken her.

“Six or seven months. I’ve only met him two or three times, but I don’t like him. He has this attitude.”

She said “attitude” as if it was another word for “disease.”

“Do they live together?”

Her face darkened even more.

“She shares an apartment near campus with a girl. She doesn’t have time for that boy.”

She had time to go to Palm Springs. I had seen this story five hundred times, and knew where it was going. The good-girl daughter rebelling against the dominant mother.

“Ms. Morales, twenty-one-year-old women go away with their boyfriends. Sometimes, they have such a good time, they turn off their phones and stay a few extra days. Unless you have reason to believe otherwise, that’s all this is. She’ll come back.”

Nita Morales studied me for a moment as if she was disappointed, then picked up her smart phone and touched the screen.

“Do you speak Spanish?”

“A few words, but, no, not really.”

“I’ll translate. This is the second call. I recorded it-”

Nita Morales’s voice came from the tiny speaker as she answered the incoming call.

“Krista, is this you? What is going on out there?”

A young woman fired off rapid-fire Spanish. Then Nita’s voice interrupted.

“Speak English. Why are you carrying on like this?”

The young woman shifted to English with a heavy accent.

“Mama, I know you want me to practice the English, but I cannot-”

She resumed a torrent of Spanish, whereupon Nita paused the playback.

“She’s pretending. This exaggerated accent, the poor English. My daughter has no accent. This isn’t the way she speaks.”

“What is she saying?”

“She began by saying they’re concerned because they didn’t get the money.”

“Who’s they?”

She held up a finger.

“Listen-”

She resumed the playback. A young male voice took Krista’s place, and also spoke Spanish. He sounded calm and reasonable, and spoke several seconds before Nita paused the recording.

“You get any of it?”

I shook my head, feeling slightly embarrassed.

“He’s saying he has expenses to cover. He wants me to wire five hundred dollars, and as soon as he gets the money he’ll see that Krista gets home.”

I sat forward.

“What just happened here? Was Krista abducted?”

Nita rolled her eyes, and waved me off.

“Of course not. The rest is just more Spanish. I’ll tell you what they said.”

“No. Play it back. I want to hear the emotional content.”

The playback resumed. Nita repeatedly interrupted. The man remained calm. He waited her out each time she interrupted, then resumed as if he was reading from a script.

The recording finally ended, and Nita arched her eyebrows.

“He apologized for asking for the money. He told me where to wire it, and promised to take good care of Krista while they waited. Then he thanked me for being so helpful.”

She dropped the phone to her desk. Plunk.

I said, “This was a ransom demand. It sounds like she’s been abducted.”

Nita Morales waved me off again.

“He put her up to this so they could get married.”

“You know this for a fact?”

“You don’t kidnap someone for five hundred dollars. Five hundred dollars is what your stupid boyfriend tells you to ask for when he wants money. And this business with the Spanish and the bad English? This is absurd.”

“Did you pay them?”

“Not the first time. I thought she was making a joke. I thought she would call back laughing.”

“But she didn’t call back laughing.”

“You heard. I wanted to see if she would come home, so I paid. She hasn’t called again, and that was four days ago. I think they used the money to get married.”

All in all, Krista Morales did not sound like a person who would shake down her mother for a few hundred bucks, but you never know.