“I was worried about you,” she says when they reach each other.
“Why?”
“You never answered the text I sent you last night.”
“I was so tired. I put my head on the pillow and fell asleep.” The volleyball coach blows her whistle. Perla Rubi and Emiliano walk toward the court side by side.
“Really? I couldn’t sleep.” She smiles.
The way she looks at him. She’s telling him that she couldn’t sleep because she was thinking of him. “Actually, I couldn’t sleep either.”
Perla Rubi stops and comes closer. “Is everything all right?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Really? Truly? You seem different.”
“Good different or bad different?”
She peers into his eyes. “I’m not sure.”
“I’ve been thinking.”
“Well, that explains it.” They laugh. “Were you thinking about what you and my father talked about?” she says.
The whistle blows again, but Perla Rubi ignores it. Emiliano smiles at her and she smiles back. He’s not imagining it: There is something new between them. Like a current of electricity flowing unimpeded in a complete circuit where before it traveled in spurts. She has given him something precious and in so doing made herself vulnerable. If he decides not to enter through the door she opened, she will be hurt.
“Yes,” he says, “it’s the job I talked about with your father.”
“My father knows a lot about business. You can’t go wrong with his advice.” She says this as if she knows exactly what her father wants him to do.
“Would you like me to?”
“Would I like you to follow my father’s advice?”
“Yes.”
“You should do what is best for everyone.”
“Everyone?” He’s pretty sure that Perla Rubi and even the players down on the volleyball court can hear his heart pounding.
“Everyone that matters.”
“You matter.” He says it mostly to himself, but she hears him.
She lowers her eyes briefly as if considering whether to say what she wants to say. When she raises her eyes again, she says, “You matter too.”
They are facing each other now. Emiliano’s eyes fall to Perla Rubi’s lips. She is a magnet and he is all iron. They are leaning, falling almost imperceptibly toward each other, when the whistle blows and Perla Rubi’s teammates begin to chant: “Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!”
Emiliano and Perla Rubi pull back, blushing.
“See you in a while,” she says, walking backward toward the court. “You better call me, Emiliano Zapata.”
“I will, Perla Rubi Esmeralda.” He watches her run to her laughing, cheering teammates.
He waits until she turns to wave and then he walks away, his heart bursting.
He matters.
Sitting there in the near-empty coffee shop, Sara reads Emiliano’s text message again.
I won’t be able to meet you after work today. Make sure you take a taxi home.
She remembers the two hundred pesos he left on the kitchen table this morning. She didn’t take them, because she knows how much work that money entailed. What’s going to happen to Emiliano’s business when she tells him that their lives are in danger? That he can’t go out bicycling all over the city anymore? Whatever she does to help Linda will affect Emiliano, Mami, Ernesto, Juana. She imagines someone hitting Emiliano on the back of the head with a rubber tube and it brings tears to her eyes.
“Are you all right?” It’s the young woman who runs the espresso machine at the café. How long has Sara been sitting there? The young woman puts a cup down on the table. “I thought you could use this. It’s not coffee. It’s chamomile tea. My mother makes me drink it when I’m nervous.”
“Thanks.” She tries to smile. “I do seem nervous, don’t I? I’ll leave in a few minutes, I promise.”
“No, no. Stay as long as you want. I don’t know what it is about this table. Yesterday I saw a couple break up. The day before someone got some bad news when she was sitting here.”
The girl is all of sixteen, maybe, and Sara can tell by the holes in her sneakers that she is poor, like Linda, like Erica. How can anyone hurt girls like her? What goes through the minds of men when they hurt them? Isn’t there a spark of conscience somewhere in them telling them to stop? How is it possible that they forget their sisters or mothers when they abuse another woman?
“Thank you,” Sara says. And then, as the young woman is walking away, “God bless you.”
“You too,” she says, turning around.
Sara sits there staring at the screen of her phone for who knows how long. Then she taps the icon for her contacts and scrolls down until she finds Alejandro Durand’s number.
Sara met Agent Durand when she wrote an article on a joint task force between the FBI and the Mexican Attorney General’s Office—a special investigation dedicated to the murders of six girls in one month on both sides of the border. She tried to get Agent Durand to admit that the Mexican State Police’s investigation of the murders was at best negligent and at worst corrupt. He would say only that the State Police were doing the best they could with the tools they had. It was clear to Sara, as it was to the families of the missing girls, that there were many officers in the State Police who were not helpful. Many were sympathetic but seemed to lack the resources needed to do their jobs, while others acted as if they were afraid. There were even a few whose behavior could not be explained by anything other than bribery.
Although Agent Durand never said that corruption was the only possible explanation for the critical delays and loss of evidence in the investigation, Sara was able to get him to describe how the FBI would have handled the exact same situation. The comparison proved indirectly what everyone suspected—that people in the State Police were protecting the killers. Sara’s article was reprinted by La Prensa, one of Mexico’s most prestigious newspapers, and after that, it was translated into English by the El Paso Times. She received a letter from Agent Durand after the article was published: “Keep up the good work. You are on your way to becoming a good investigative reporter and a good writer, but most of all you have courage. If you ever get any good leads or if I can ever be of help to you, call me. You have my number.”
It’s that number she calls now.
“Agent Durand, this is Sara Zapata,” she says when she hears his voice.
A few moments go by before he responds. “Sara! What a nice surprise.”
“I need a favor,” she says.
“Shoot.”
Sara tells him her story from the beginning. She speaks as if she is writing a story for El Sol, making sure she mentions every detail, every person involved. She talks for ten minutes straight and he does not interrupt her once. Sara knows he is still on the line because she can hear him breathe, and when she tells him about Joselito Rentería, he sighs.
“My friend Ernesto thinks he can find the location where Erica and Linda and maybe more girls are being kept.”
“Mmm.”
“What do I do if Ernesto gets that information?” Sara asks. “Who can I call? Who can rescue the girls? I know this is not your jurisdiction. But you’ve worked with Mexican law enforcement agencies. Do you know anyone I can trust?”