Sinclair Justice (Texas Rangers #2)(2)
Emm inserted quietly, “I think the term is merchandise.”
He looked relieved and nodded. “Anyway, they bring them from all over the nation through Texas to the border. We still haven’t figured out how they smuggle them across. The Texas Rangers are heading the task force along with the Border Patrol. We’ve given them all the information we have but will work the case from this end as well.”
Emm had to clear her throat because as she asked the question, she dreaded the answer. “What is the . . . the merchandise used for? Surely Yancy is too old for, for . . .”
He opened his mouth, swallowed, and then looked away, for the first time showing some genuine regret. The younger detective reached out to pat her shoulder, but under a sharp look from his partner, he froze and his hand dropped back to his side.
Emm closed her eyes, biting her lip to stifle a moan. She was a trivia and science buff. The average American citizen might not be aware that slavery was worse now, in the technological age, partly because of the anonymity of the Internet, than ever before in human history, but she knew the statistics. Recent UN estimates pegged the worldwide trade in human flesh at $32 billion and rising.
She also knew the vast majority of the kidnapped women were forced into prostitution. Yancy was beautiful, and though she was thirty-nine, looked twenty-five. After being taken more than nine months ago, Jennifer was probably nothing like the vibrant young seventeen-year-old she’d once been. But she was probably too valuable to greatly mistreat.
But Yancy? Emm’s wild, irrepressible one year older half sister wouldn’t tolerate boundaries, or orders. Once on the inside, assuming she’d been taken by the same people, she’d risk her life to find her daughter. And she would not take well to captivity.
“What can I do?” she whispered over the tears she was restraining.
“I know this is difficult, but keep handing out flyers,” Ruiz suggested. “Try maybe to find out why she was in that part of Baltimore. We’ll let you know if we get any more leads. Inform us immediately if you get any new information, no matter how insignificant.”
“And you’ll apprise me of any new leads?”
Ruiz’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Of course.” Both men gave her sympathetic nods and left.
And that had been that. Three months passed, but neither detective had called her, even when her old friend Curt Tupperman, a freelance investigative reporter for several well-known papers, wrote a follow up article on the kidnappings. He broke the story, saying that various agencies believed the Baltimore area to be the East Coast beginning of the pipeline they speculated ended in the border town of El Paso or Del Rio, with stops in Dallas and Amarillo.
When Emm called Ruiz to ask for more information about the pipeline, he didn’t call her back. Wondering why he’d stonewall her, Emm finished her demanding doctorate. In her spare time, she talked to everyone she could think of: classmates, friends, acquaintances, tenants in her sister’s apartment building, old bosses, old boyfriends, including Curt, who had dated Yancy for two years and seemed upset when Yancy broke it off about six months before she was taken.
No one knew why Yancy had been in downtown Baltimore or of anyone who drove a macho Texas truck. The detectives were obviously off on another big case. Yancy was just another missing woman, and since she was Emm’s half sister, she wasn’t even a Rothschild.
Now, three months later, on a long lonely road to nowhere, Emm glared around at the sere landscape too tough to yield more than mesquite and cactus. Maybe Yancy was already dead. Maybe Emm was on another foolish crusade, as her father had scolded her. Maybe her sister was buried in this wasteland. . . .
Emm removed her sunglasses to swipe angrily at her eyes, pressing harder on the accelerator.
So far, despite all the pressure she was under, she’d been good, exceeding the speed limit only when she could see for miles or had another speeder to follow. She looked around, even over her shoulder, and the landscape was so open she could see from horizon to horizon. Nothing. She was dying to try this new baby out. She knew the effort and expense her father had expended to give his only natural daughter this hundred thousand dollar–plus vehicle, partly his way of voicing his regret that his wife was a self-absorbed alcoholic who had long ago lost interest in her older daughter’s fate. As sales manager for a BMW dealership, her father made good money and had been able to get a screaming deal on this car, but the only Rothschild inheritance he had was a silver dollar collection given to him by a remote relative. And the name, all too often, had been more of a burden to Emm than a boon. People assumed she had money and that she was cold and snooty because of her unusual grasp of the English language. Wrong on both counts.
Yancy had even less money; her own father had passed when she was a child, and their social-climbing mother was not happy about her willful older daughter, who refused to get a steady job or go to college. But Yancy and Emm, only a year apart, had always been close. And Jennifer . . . the tears threatened again as she remembered her beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed niece. She tried to picture her as she likely was now, a dead look in her eyes, forced into short, tight dresses and hooker makeup.
Emm’s foot twitched at her unhappy thoughts, pushing down until the speedometer passed the conservative eighty, only five over the limit, the speed she’d tried very hard to maintain since she’d hit the Texas state line. She knew the expensive red sports car and her Maryland plates made her a delectable morsel to the typical Texas highway patrolman’s ravenous appetite for revenue.