Steven Havill - Prolonged Exposure

“Yes, sir.” He spun on his heel and jogged back to his patrol car for his field kit.

“Tony, I want you to go get Jim Bergin and get an airplane. That’ll give us some speed and distance advantage. You know what we’re looking for, so you fly with him. Take a phone with you so you can stay off the radio.”

“We need to track Madrid,” Torrez said. “He’s the key to this. The sheriff’s been on the phone with Captain Naranjo of the federales . What he was able to establish so far is that Madrid parked his own car on the Mexican side of the border, came across, and then rented another vehicle.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” I said. “Under normal circumstances, his insurance may not have covered him in this country. A dozen reasons. A Mexican license plate draws more attention than an Arizona plate does. Maybe he wanted a car that blended in more. What was he driving?”

“Holman didn’t say.”

“Well, push him that way, Robert. He speaks Spanish about as well as I do. We’ve got to know what Madrid’s connections are. See if you can get Captain Naranjo in high gear.”

“That’s a trick,” Torrez said.

“Perform it,” I snapped. I watched him fold his enormous frame into 308.

“You need to talk with your husband,” I said to Estelle.

“Yes, I do.”

I glanced at my watch. It’d been several lifetimes since we’d dashed out of the Guzman house.

The night wore on, and on, and on. There had been a few times in my life when the sun simply refused to make any progress around the other side. This was one of them.

Tiny bits and pieces of information dragged in. We were using my office, spacious and removed from the traffic flow in and out of the Public Safety Building.

When Niel Costace of the FBI arrived shortly after ten from Las Cruces, Sheriff Martin Holman and I were alone in my office, trying to establish telephone contact with Capt. Tomas Naranjo of the Mexican federales . We hadn’t had much success, since Naranjo wasn’t in his office in Juarez and wasn’t at home-and his wife didn’t know where he was. If he had a cellular phone, he was ignoring it.

Costace stood in the doorway of my office, his posture suggesting that he was carrying a sack of cement in each hand.

“What the hell mess have you got going here this time?” he said by way of greeting, and Holman strode across the room to pump his hand like the good politician he was.

“And no word on either the vehicle or the boys yet,” Costace said when Holman finished his recap of the case.

“Not a thing.”

He turned one of my straight chairs around and sat on it, cowboy-style, resting his chin on his hands.

“We’ve met this Roberto Madrid a time or two,” Costace said. “He’s a wheeler-dealer, kind of a free agent. Works most of the time out of Monterrey, as far as we’ve been able to tell. I can tell you one thing. If he’s involved with the missing boys, don’t bother sitting around waiting for a telephone call.”

“I was afraid that was the case,” I said.

Holman looked uneasy. “Why not? What’s Madrid’s game?”

“No game, Sheriff,” Costace said. “Madrid doesn’t do drugs, as far as we can determine. Nothing to connect him, anyway. His name came up a couple of years ago in connection with that nasty deal in Matamoros. Remember some of those missing teenagers? Kind of a cult thing? He was connected with that, but we could never nail it down-and neither could the federales . The only thing we know for sure is that not all of those kids went down there of their own free will.”

“Abducted, you mean?”

Costace nodded. “That’s what we think. The next time his name came down the pike was in connection with a deal over in Tampico. That one involved a sixty-five-foot sloop that was stolen out of Hatteras, North Carolina.” He rocked the chair forward. “Now, you think it’s hard to hide a thirty-foot travel bus? How about a boat twice that big? He pulled it off, and the new owners had been using it for nearly six months before Mexican officials got around to making the connections.” He shrugged. “Hatteras to Mexican waters is a hell of a long run.”

“Madrid just sailed it down there?”

“He didn’t. He had some hired hands. No, old Roberto just does the deals. From the description the boat owners gave, we know it was Madrid. He said he was an insurance agent and he got himself on board the boat for an inspection. That’s how he knew the layout.”

“I don’t care about boats,” Holman said. “Why would he be interested in two three-year-olds?”

“Well, I said he was a wheeler-dealer. If there’s a market, then he’s in there pitchin’.”

“You mean sell them? Sell the kids?”

Costace shrugged in that cold-blooded way that suggested that he’d seen it all. “How’d it happen, exactly?”

Holman told him about Cody Cole’s disappearance.

“And that happened several days before the Guzman boy was taken?”

I nodded. “Well, see,” Costace said, “the Cole youngster’s abduction fits. There’s no way of tellin’ just yet how the Coles made contact with Madrid in the first place, but if they set up a deal, Madrid’s style would fit just what happened. They hold the kid-maybe using that big old RV for just that purpose.”

“That would mean that the boy’s natural father was in on it, too.”

“Would seem so. Madrid hits town, and if he thinks the coast is clear, all he has to do is hand over the pesos to the parents and then hit the road.”

“Why wait four days to do it?” I asked. “Cody went missing on Saturday night. Why would they run the risk of keeping him around for four days? That doesn’t make a bit of sense.”

“Madrid might have been planning to hit town last Saturday. Who knows?” Costace said. “Anything could have delayed him-traffic accident, other troubles.” He rested his chin on his hands and stared at the floor. “He’s late, and whoever is holding the boy is forced to mark time. One day, two days…”

“What about the second boy?”

“That’s a problem,” Costace said. “We’ve been getting rumblings now and then that there’s a market for children-sometimes a family of ricos gets it in their heads that they’d like a little blond-haired, blue-eyes status symbol. They’re willing to pay good money for an instant adoption, and that would attract the Roberto Madrids of the world. You want it, he finds it. But the Guzman boy puzzles me.” Costace smiled without much humor. “Lord knows, Mexico has its share of cute little black-haired, black-eyed urchins who speak Spanish. I don’t see much need to go north of the border to fetch another one, especially a high-visibility target like this little Francis. That sounds like panic to me.”

“Panic?”

Costace shrugged. “If the deal was goin’ down without any hitch, Madrid would have taken the Cole boy and hit the road. He would have been in and out of here so slick, no one would have been the wiser. Little Cody would have been a Mexican citizen by bedtime Saturday night.” He shrugged again. “Nobody would have been the wiser. After a few days, the search is called off; everybody’s sad, but eventually everyone forgets. Ma and Pa Cole pocket a trunkful of cash. But it didn’t happen that way. From what you say, there was a hell of an argument.”

“Someone changed her mind,” I said as a lightbulb flashed in my head.

“Who?” Holman frowned at me.

“We went through Tiffany Cole’s house tonight,” I said. “That woman has a screw loose somewhere. That child’s been living with them for all three years of his life, and except for a half-eaten dish of hash and a plastic child’s cup of milk, there wasn’t any way to tell he’d ever been in that house.”