Sinclair Justice (Texas Rangers #2)
By Colleen Shannon
CHAPTER 1
The sign said: “Amarillo: 50 miles. Beaumont to El Paso: 1046. Welcome to Texas.”
Managing not to yawn at the needless reminder of how large this state really was, Mercy Magdalena Rothschild pressed slightly on the accelerator, impatient to finish this interminable trip. A new BMW M4 convertible was a great way to cover the miles, but it was still a huge distance from Washington, DC, to the booming metropolis of Amarillo, Texas.
Emm, as her best friends called her, was not looking forward to her destination, or to the tasks ahead, though as soon as she’d seen the job posting for historic preservation trust officer, she knew she had to apply. But the fact that she had another mission in coming to this border state never left the back of her mind. An unapproved mission even her parents didn’t know about. But there was one skill she now excelled in after ten very expensive years of higher education: how to do research.
Even of the criminal variety.
Even of the missing persons variety.
But thinking about Yancy and Jennifer would only bring the tears, never at bay very long, back to her tired eyes, and on this long and winding road, she couldn’t afford that. Trying to distract herself, she shuffled to the Beatles tune of the same name on the iPhone connected to the car’s onboard computer system.
The song, one of her favorites, still wasn’t distraction enough even when she sang the lyrics about a long and winding road leading to someone special’s door. She broke off in midrefrain. Yeah, like she’d meet someone in Texas. To say men didn’t get her was putting it mildly, but their reaction was consistent, as different as all five of her prior boyfriends had been.
One of them had even declared plaintively, “You’re just weird, you know? And why do you use such big words?”
Because words are the font of knowledge and life, you dullard, learn a few, she’d wanted to say but had held her tongue as the door closed behind him.
As her song list cycled into another optimistic tune, Emm sighed, doubly depressed now. Her eyes burned behind her sunglasses, but the ache had nothing to do with the bright spring light. Yancy had been missing for six months, nine days—she glanced at her watch—and thirteen hours. Jennifer longer than that. She’d never forget the knock on her door at her tiny efficiency after eleven p.m. almost six months ago.
The Baltimore detectives who’d taken the missing persons report stood there, looking uneasy. “Ma’am, we have news about your sister and her daughter. May we come in?”
In her matchbox living room, they laid it out to her. The reward she and Yancy had posted for information leading to Yancy’s missing daughter Jennifer had finally yielded a clue. Yancy had, as usual, been hell-bent and determined to follow up on her own because her younger sister Emm was embroiled in oral exams for her PhD. Then Yancy had disappeared, too. . . .
Of her own volition, before she even completed her orals, Emm had canvassed the downtown Baltimore bars Yancy favored, handing out and posting flyers for both women. Mother and daughter strikingly resembled each other: both naturally slim blondes. Yancy had been twenty-one when she’d had Jennifer, so she was only in her late thirties and looked a decade younger.
Finally, three months after Yancy’s disappearance, nine months after Jennifer had been taken, one of the flyers yielded a tip. The night cook at a seedy little café in downtown Baltimore remembered coming off duty at one in the morning, and he’d seen a woman who matched the picture of Yancy being forced into a big black sports truck with Texas plates. Her scream was choked off as she was jammed into the front seat between the man who’d snatched her and the driver. He gave the detectives a description of the man who’d grabbed her but never saw the driver.
When the detectives asked why he hadn’t come forward earlier, he gave the usual spiel about being afraid of being deported, but when the se?orita—“that was you, Ms. Rothschild,” they’d told her—had pleaded for information, he overheard and felt guilty. Besides, he wanted the reward to send back to his family in Mexico.
“But what exactly does this mean?” Emm had asked. “Yancy was taken to Texas? What about Jennifer?”
The detectives seemed uneasy. The younger one looked away, but finally the older detective, Sergeant Ruiz, answered quietly. “Three months ago we had an urgent message from your sister asking us to call, saying she had a lead on her daughter’s whereabouts. We were working a dual homicide and by the time we called her back, her phone went straight to voice mail.”
Emm wearily rubbed her tired eyes. “So? I was preparing for my orals, so she didn’t even call me to tell me she was going after Jennifer. What does the phone call have to do with her being missing?”
“We think she got too close, that she must have stumbled across the northeastern source of the human trafficking ring. And they . . . took her, too.”
Or worse. Emm heard what he didn’t say.
He seemed oblivious to her doubts, going on calmly, “At least that’s what we think if the eye witness is correct. So we combed surveillance footage all over DC’s major arteries for a similar truck with Texas plates. The cook didn’t recall the number. We found several matches heading south on the interstate, but none of the registered owners match the physical description given by the witness. In the meantime we informed the Texas authorities and were told there’s a high-end snatch-and-grab ring with national reach culminating in West Texas. They bring in the . . . their . . . their . . .” He cleared his throat.