Heaven to Betsy (Emily #1) (7 page)

His voice was high-pitched, and very loud. “Lady, I don’t give out no information on my renters without a court order. They got as much a right to privacy as anybody.”

“But—”

“I already told the police and that CPS fairy. Ain’t nobody named Sofia Perez rent from me. That apartment’s rented by a totally different feller. He’s all paid up through December. That’s all I care about.”

“Could you ask him to call me, Mr. Scott?”

“What, are you deaf? I don’t give out no information on my renters.”

I thought hard. What did I have left? An appeal to his humanity? “I’m not asking you to give me information, just to have him call me. A little girl’s life could depend on it—a little girl that lived in that apartment.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t know no little girl that lives there neither. So bring me a court order or leave me alone.”

He hung up.

Well, I knew more than I had before I’d called, but still nothing about Sofia. I would just have to visit the apartments on Monday. Not something to look forward to, so I prayed I’d find leads that would point me in a different direction. That meant back to my list. I put a star by the apartments’ address and moved on to the next item. Find Maria Delgado. Nah. That one would be hard. I skipped to the third one. Call CPS. Much easier.

I dialed the number for the CPS investigator listed in the file: Wallace Gray. An automated voice answered and asked me to leave a message. I said my piece and ended the call. Crap. I looked at the fourth item. Find out who Spike Howard is. That was no easier than “find Maria Delgado,” so I skipped back to item two.

I started by hunting for the Maria Delgado that matched the Social Security number Sofia had used for her job. I plugged the name and number into a couple of different databases. On the tenth one, PeopleFinders—voila—I found a phone number with an 806 area code. I dialed and someone picked up on the first ring.

“
Hola
?”

“Is this Maria Delgado?”

“
Yo soy
Maria.”

I whipped out my stumbling college Spanish on her, and I managed to glean that a) she had no idea who Sofia Perez was, b) she had no idea how Sofia Perez had gotten her Social Security number, and c) she didn’t know nothing ‘bout nobody. Not that I believed her, I just had no leverage to get her to talk. I asked for her address, but she refused to give it to me.

That’s okay. I had it from the Internet. I read it to her. “
Si
?”

She hung up.

I put a big star by her address. More fun follow-up for Monday.

Spike Howard was next. According to the
Amarillo Globe News
articles about the shooting, he worked for an import business and was visiting Amarillo on behalf of his employer. I Googled him and found a mother lode of information. I clicked, shuddered, scrolled, grimaced, and printed screens. Mr. Howard was from Roswell, New Mexico. All I knew about Roswell was that some spaceship supposedly crashed there and was covered up by the feds. That, and it was the location for the supernatural show we in Lubbock followed with cult-like glee while I was in college, since Roswell was only about a few hours away.

But where Spike Howard lived wasn’t the most interesting part of what I found—though maybe interesting was the wrong word for it. More like the most disturbing part. Spike boasted a criminal record with assault charges going back to his teens in Dona Ana County, which was pretty far south from Roswell. In fact, it was on the border. Those crimes were bad enough, but it got worse. He’d done time under the “sexual conduct with a minor” section of the New Mexico criminal statutes. My stomach roiled as I read an article from the
Roswell Daily Record
that said he and an accomplice—an Amarillo man named Harvey Dulles—had exposed themselves to the ten-year-old daughter of Howard’s live-in girlfriend in Roswell, then had taken turns making her touch them down
there
.

“An Amarillo connection?” I breathed. Snowflake snorted and rolled over in her sleep. Yes, Spike’s friend Harvey was from Amarillo.

My phone chimed, interrupting me, and I jumped a little, bouncing my chair and jarring Snowflake. She yipped and rearranged herself.

Collin:
Sorry slow response. Traveling. I’m good. How are you?

I smiled. It’s always nice to hear from good-looking men who like you. I couldn’t revel in it long, though. I was onto something with my research, no matter how oogie it was.

Neither Spike nor Harvey spent more than five years inside prison, which shocked me. How could child molesters get out so fast? Wouldn’t they be the same people with the same tendencies doing the same thing, just to new victims? God, I hoped Jack didn’t represent
that
type of defendant. I wanted no part of defending child molesters.

I starting running Harvey Dulles through all my favorite databases. After his release, he’d returned to Amarillo—according to his voter’s registration information—and he owned a house here, per the property records, which it appeared he’d inherited from his mother. Spike’s connection to Harvey was too significant to ignore. Was Spike really in Amarillo on business, or was he hanging out with his old buddy? Or both? I printed out pictures of each man and put them in my file. Neither one was going to win any beauty contests, but Harvey was especially ugly with a smashed-in nose and shaved head.

A thought chilled me. What if Sofia had taken her daughter to work with her? What if this child molester, Spike, had exposed himself to Valentina, or worse? That would be enough to make a mother grab a gun and blow a man’s head off.

My phone rang. Another number I didn’t recognize. I answered. “Emily speaking.”

The male voice that answered transported me back to Oak Lawn in Dallas. “This is Wallace Gray. I’m the CPS investigator working on the case of Valentina Perez. You called about her.”

I straightened my posture. Excellent! “Hi, Wallace. Yes, I did. I’m Emily Bernal, the legal assistant for Jack Holden. He’s representing Sofia Perez, Valentina’s mother. We met with Sofia yesterday, and she was really worried about her daughter. I was hoping you had some good news about her that you could share with me.”

“Nooooo, I wish I did.” His voice dropped. “You’re not tape recording me, are you?”

That got my attention. “No, why?”

“Because I am not granting permission to be recorded, and I don’t want what I say on the news. So, this is all off the record.”

“I’m not a reporter. I’m just a paralegal looking for our client’s daughter.”

“Good.” Now he flat out whispered. “Then may I speak frankly?”

I tucked my phone tighter toward my shoulder and dropped my voice, too. “Yes, please.” I almost laughed at myself. We were acting like two kids telling secrets on the playground.

“We can’t find anyone that has ever seen or heard of Valentina.”

I stood up, accidentally knocking my chair back, its rollers not responding on the carpeted floor. Snowflake raised her head. She looked like she was starting to get annoyed with me.

“No one?” I asked.

“No one. Not neighbors, not your client’s co-workers. She’s not enrolled in school or day care. The police haven’t found anything, either.” He pitched his voice even lower and softer.

I cupped my hand over my non-phone ear to block out other sounds as he spoke.

“Is it possible your client’s, you know, nuts?” He asked.

Was it? I thought about the woman I’d talked to the day before. “Hmmm. I’ve only met her once. She didn’t seem crazy.”

Nausea came over me again, and I slipped the last saltine from my baggie and nibbled it silently. Snowflake smacked her lips. I fished some broken pieces out of the bag and tossed them to her. She licked them daintily, then swallowed them whole.

“There was no evidence whatsoever that a child lived in that apartment. None. Not clothes, a toothbrush, toys, nothing. Wait, I take that back. There was one picture on the refrigerator—an odd drawing of a brown person in a skirt. But that was it.”

“That sounds promising, at least as evidence of a child. Did you get anything else from it?”

Snack completed, Snowflake stood up and stretched, then whined. I shot her a look. What did the whine mean?

“Yeah, it was interesting. The guy in the picture wore a skirt and no shirt, and he had a big thing on his head—feathers or horns or something. He was dancing or hopping, too. There were two letters in the bottom right corner, an E and a P.”

“Where little artists usually sign their pictures. Those aren’t her initials, though.”

The P could be for Perez, but the E didn’t fit Sofia or Valentina. Snowflake’s whines had increased in the last minute and now she walked to the door and started howling.

“Nope. But it did look like it was drawn by a child, a young child, although I can’t say whether it was a boy or a girl, if that would even mean anything. But there were no pictures of a girl in the apartment. The police said there were none in Sofia’s purse or on her phone either.”

I shook my head. “That’s just odd. What kind of mother doesn’t have pictures of her kid?”

“The kind that doesn’t have one, maybe.” He clucked.

Snowflake’s howls changed to glass-shattering yips.

“What’s that noise?”

“The office mascot, Jack’s dog.”

I decided Snowflake must be asking for a potty break, which wasn’t a bad idea for me, either. Yesterday afternoon Jack had set me up to take her out every few hours. I snapped my fingers and she leapt over to me as I pulled her leash from my left hand drawer. I clipped it on, then grabbed a doody bag before returning to the subject at hand.

“But Sofia was genuinely upset, to the extent she wasn’t acting in her own best interests. She seemed sincere to me.”

I opened the door and Snowflake lunged against the leash like a five-pound sled dog.

“As she would, if she was delusional.”

“She said she wasn’t crazy. Of course, she could be delusional about being sane.”

Delusions of sanity. I could relate to that. I pressed the elevator call button.

“Have you
ever
had a murder defendant that didn’t want to claim they were crazy?” Wallace asked. “That’s crazy right there, to say you’re not crazy.”

I laughed. “Would you believe this is my first murder defendant? My first criminal case, even. I just started yesterday. I’ve been a civil litigation paralegal for nearly ten years. In Dallas.”

Ding. We entered the elevator and Snowflake paced and whined. I prayed the call wouldn’t drop and that the dog could hold it until we got outside. The doors closed and we descended.

The connection held up, and Wallace continued. “So you don’t know the first thing about anything, do you, girl? Of course not. You just moved to Amarillo. The real question is why do a damn fool thing like that?”

The elevator doors opened at the ground floor, and we exited—me calmly, and Snowflake like the place was on fire.

“I can’t say I didn’t know better. I grew up here.” Snowflake all but came unhinged as we walked outside to the Maxor courtyard. A huge outdoor kitchen area on the far side of a stone patio dominated the space, but the whole square area was surrounded by grass and mature oak trees nestled against the building’s L-shape. Outside a black metal fence, downtown buzzed by us on two sides.

Wallace laughed once, loud, like a bark. “I’m so sorry.”

I unclipped Snowflake. Her tags jingled as she bounded into the grass and got down to her business. Atta girl. She looked at me with something like relief on her little features.

“Yeah, I know, but waddaya gonna do?”

“Tell me about it. I got transferred here from Houston. Well, I’d be happy to help you in any way I can. You just say the word and Wallace is on the way.”

“I’ll take you up on it, and soon. But let me just ask you: Are the police and CPS still actively looking for Valentina?”

His tone darkened. “Absolutely. This mama may be crazy as a June bug, but if there’s even the slightest chance some little six-year-old girl is out there alone with all the predators there are in this world, I simply will not give up until I find her.”

His words filled me like helium, and it was so real I imagined I’d sound like Minnie Mouse when I spoke. He was one of the
truly
good guys. I bagged up Snowflake’s leave-behind and tossed it in the trash before we reentered the building. The dog pranced like she owned the place now.

“Good. Did Sofia tell you anything about bad men she was afraid of?” I asked. “Afraid would get Valentina? She hinted at this with us and then clammed up.”

“Huh-uh,” he said. “And that would be weird, since she told me she just let the girl stay at home with the door locked while she was at work.”

That felt wrong. Sofia didn’t seem like the kind of mother to leave her six-year-old at home alone, especially if she was scared of bad men. We hopped an elevator going up.

“Nothing about the father?” I asked.

“She said he was dead.”

“Okay, she didn’t give you much more than she gave us, then.”

The doors parted at our floor. Snowflake lunged against the leash, panting and straining toward the office. I tugged her gently in the other direction and she looked up at me, confused.

“Well, your bad guy angle is new to me,” Wallace said. “Listen, the police are still going door-to-door and talking to informants, checking in with homeless shelters, and rousting people in all the usual types of places kids go in that area. We’ll keep looking for her. And you let me know if you guys learn anything, okay?”

I pushed the bathroom door open and let Snowflake walk in first.

“I will,” I said.

Then I had a thought—I didn’t want to go alone to the shady areas I’d have to visit as I searched for information on Sofia.

“I’m going to visit witnesses that may have information about Valentina on Monday,” I said. “Some you may have already talked to, but sometimes people decide to open up when you circle back to them. One of them you didn’t mention, though. The woman whose identity Sofia used to get a job.”

I’d positioned myself in a stall.

“Could you hang on a second?” I pressed mute.