Chapter Nineteen
Danica
Leo’s appeal was denied, lack of evidence cited as the reason. None of his new evidence was solid, no matter how compelling it would have been in his original case, it wasn’t enough to save him now.
Attwood refused to admit his part in any of it. And why would he? He was facing life inside. Any plea deal would only take the death penalty off the table. He’d murdered his wife in cold blood after she threatened to expose him, he’d conspired to murder his own daughter for the same. If he added the murder and rape of an innocent eight-year-old to his charge sheet, he'd be signing his own death warrant.
The Chief and their other accomplices all denied anything to do with any murders, claiming Attwood had acted alone in that. Most of them took plea deals, including the Chief. He’d be free after five years in a cushy federal prison. They all deserved what Leo faced.
Leo’s death warrant was signed last night. In thirty days, his life would be snuffed out. We still couldn’t visit him. His final visits would be allowed. They’d be the first and last time we’d be permitted to see him. He wrote us all long, heartfelt letters explaining he was at peace with his situation, tired of fighting, of having his hope snatched away over and over. To allow him to end it would be a kindness.
My letter curled up in the heart, the flames licking the sides, racing over the paper, eating his carefully thought out words. He might be ready to stop fighting. I wasn’t.
Visiting the former Chief, begging for his help hadn’t helped me. Nor had threatening Attwood with a fate worse than lethal injection. Lucy had tried to reason with him to no avail. There was one last person who could help me now.
I snatched my phone from the cluttered coffee table. An empty beer bottle skittered to the stained carpeted floor. Schilling would turn up soon, he didn’t need to hear this. Emma was away on business. He’d moved himself in last night. I was berated for an hour over the mess I’d made since coming back home a week ago. Tonight I’d be forced to clean it.
“Danielle, sweetheart,” my father answered “Wait, I’ll go get Maria. We weren’t expecting your call.”
“It’s not a social call, Joey.”
“Oh.”
“I need your help. Leo can’t die. I won’t allow it. Break him out again, please. I am begging.”
“You know Leo made me promise not to, don’t you?”
“I’m your daughter and I am asking you to.”
“I’ll do what I can, Danielle.”
“Thank you.”
“I love you, never forgot that. All I’ve done in the last twenty-eight years has been for you. You are my daughter, always. No matter what.”
“Okay…”
I cut the call as Schilling walked in, his arms weighed down with bottles of bleach and trash bags.
“Get cracking, kid,” he snapped tossing a roll of trash bags at me. I scanned the chaos of my sitting room. It was gonna be a long night.
◆◆◆
Schilling acted odd all morning and the Hell would he tell me what was going on. He’d already left when I woke this morning, my muscles aching from the six solid hours of cleaning, tidying and organising he’d put me through last night. I have to admit, the three rolls of trash bags we went through humiliated me.
He stalked past my desk, keeping his head down.
“What’s crawled up his ass?” I asked my partner.
“I’m fucked if I know, babe,” he sighed.
“Call me that again, I fucking dare you,” I growled.
“Oh, sorry, I forgot, you only love paedophiles.”
The rumour mill had been busy. Every department in PD had all the juicy details on my life, my past, my nightmares, my father and Leo. My friends were few and far between. And by that, I mean limited to Schilling. They weren’t going to beat me this time. I wouldn’t allow myself to be forced from my job by the whispering like I was in Pasadena.
“Milano, someone at reception is asking for you,” Harry, an ageing Detective grinned. “At least I assume it’s you he’s asking for. Hard to tell, the state he’s in.”
“New boyfriend?” My partner grinned. So much for him being a decent guy. The second he’d heard of my involvement with Leo his only purpose in life became making me as miserable as possible.
“Fuck you.”
A lanky Mexican waited in reception. A foul aroma of booze and stale urine surrounded him. He slumped against a wall, his eyes rolling back in his head.
“Danielle?”
“And you would be?”
“You’re Danielle? Danielle Ortiz?”
“Ramirez,” I frowned.
The Ortiz brothers were muscle for a rival cartel and not a nice one. They made my father and his associates look like Bambi. Execution-style slayings were too tame for them, they prided themselves on torturing their victims until they begged for death. They were also behind my abduction and enslavement. I despised them. Only one had survived my father’s vengeance. The younger of the two brothers, Miguel Ortiz.
“Oh yeah, Ramirez, sorry,” he slurred. “It’s you then?”
“Do you need arresting for something? Only I’m a little busy at the moment.”
“Of course it’s you. You look just like her. You are so beautiful.”
“What? Are you high right now?”
The receptionist sniggered. What a stupid question. The man had trouble standing, speaking in coherent sentences was beyond his capability. He was high. That was a question that did not need asking.
“I do. I need arresting. I killed that baby and her momma.”
My heart stopped. I grabbed for my gun. He fell forward, landing in a heap on the linoleum tiled floor. He pulled himself onto his forearms, dragging his sorry ass across the floor until his face was inches from my feet. It took every ounce of strength I had not to break his teeth with my steel-capped boot.
“Which baby?”
“Masie and Saya, Stacey and Maia. I don’t fucking know. That blonde junkie and her bambino. My bosses got the job from some builder billionaire guy.”
“Your bosses?”
“I don’t remember their names. It’s the crack, it muddles my brain. I remember him though, Marcus Appterwood, he give me the cash for my bosses in a bar on fifth street.”
“Place your hands on your head,” I snapped training my gun at the back of his head. Two uniformed officers in reception raced to help me. The Mexican fumbled, so out of it, he couldn’t locate his own head. His arms flailed, he whacked himself in the head twice before the unis cuffed him, dragging him to his feet.
I reeled off his Miranda rights.
“Take him to interview two,” I snapped.
Whatever Schilling was up to was going on in interview room one. I punched his number into my phone.
“Schilling,” I grinned into my phone, racing after the officers and the perp, “we got the bastard. We actually got the bastard. Leo is gonna be okay.”
My voice caught in my throat. My mind a mess of emotion. Somewhere, deep down I knew it was bullshit. The thugs who’d attacked me were the ones who killed Maia and Stacey. But if there was anyone who deserved to pay for something they hadn’t done, it was an Ortiz brother. How my father had pulled this off was beyond me. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was Leo.
“You heard, then?” Schilling sighed.
“What? He’s just confessed in reception.”
“Fuck me,” he snapped, “this isn’t an episode of Spartacus.”
“What?”
“We have someone for it, in interview one.”
“Who?”
“Meet me in my office. Now.”
Schilling sat behind the Chief's desk. His desk. It was hard to see him as my boss but that’s what he was. His face was pale, his elbows rested on the desk in front of him, his fingers steepled at his tight lips.
I sank into the seat opposite him.
“Who’s in interview one, Schilling?”
“Your father. He handed himself in this morning. Said he framed Leo as revenge for you. Thought he had something to do with you going missing. The DA’s watching his interview now.”
Shit.
My heart crashed, my body turned to ice.
“Who do you have?”
“An Ortiz brother.”
“Would your dad confess if he’d paid someone else to?”
“No. The Ortiz’s hate him and his cartel, they’re rivals. Shit, Schilling, this guy could actually be guilty.”
“And why would he just walk in here and confess?”
“I don’t know how the minds of violent assholes work,” I snapped.
Schilling called the DA. The idea of a third man confessing after Leo and my dad went down like a cup of cold puke.
“I have half a mind to arrest all of you,” she snapped, staring pointedly at me. “Keep her away from all of them, Schilling.”
“Got it.”
Bitch.
Schilling let me watch the interview from his office.
The Mexican had all the gory details. He couldn’t remember his own name, but he remembered the exact date and time he took the money from Attwood, or Apptawood, Attlewood and all the other names he christened the sleazy asshole. The same barman worked in the bar they’d met in. He gave cops a detailed description of Attwood and Ortiz, claiming he remembered because of how odd it had seemed at the time, a construction billionaire meeting with a half shot Mexican tramp in a backstreet bar. Attwood gave him the condom Leo and Lucy had used the same day.
Attwood had drawn out $25,000 the morning of the exchange. It was all falling into place.
Ortiz drew a detailed drawing of Leo’s apartment. He reckoned a stripper had been paid to feed him a line about having info on my whereabouts and then drug him. Ortiz and one of his heavies dragged him into a car, tossing him into the trunk. He’d been there the whole time. When Stacey Maia were killed, Leo wasn’t even in his apartment. The neighbour had been paid to phone the cops. Leo and Stacey fighting all the time had been a crock of shit.
My dad’s story was almost identical. The only difference, he didn’t meet up with Attwood. His actions were born from vengeance, not greed. He received no payment to frame Leo.
The final questions the DA asked brought the truth crashing down, ripping apart my father’s confession, thrusting me into the deep, dark belly of confusion.
“Do you know Miguel Ortiz?”
“Not really,” my father shrugged. “I’ve heard of him, nasty fucker by all accounts, I don’t know him personally. Why?”
“Does the name José Ramirez mean anything to you?”
“He’s married to my mother, he raised my baby after I abandoned her when she needed me most. He wanted to take the blame for what I’d done, to save them both from learning what a monster their own flesh and blood is. You can ask my mother, she’ll tell you. Maria Ramirez, formerly Ortiz, or her brother Angel Diaz, they’ll confirm everything. I confessed to Joey and Angel. Joey dragged me right to rehab and made me promise to look after my mother and Danielle. I discharged myself last night, and look at me. I don’t deserve them, any of them. Can’t even keep clean for a night.”
The walls of Schilling’s office closed in on me. Nausea crept over me. It didn’t make sense. My father is the last person who’d help an Ortiz. He wouldn’t raise one of their babies.
Ortiz crouched at the table his head bowed, shoulders slumped. The DA read out a long list charges, rape, two counts of capital murder, rape of a minor, obstruction of justice.
My father was charged with obstruction of justice.
“I need to go,” I breathed.
Schilling tore his attention away from the screen, his brow folded, his bushy eyebrows meeting in the middle.
“Did you know about any of that?”
I shook my head.
“I need to get out of here.”
“I’ll take you home.”
“No.”
Home is the last place I wanted to be. I wanted to hide away, bury myself until the truth vanished or at least until people forgot it. Constant streams of well-meaning people asking if I was okay is the last thing I needed. I strutted purposely out of the office. My colleagues sat in stony silence, aware something big was going on. If it’s not bad enough that they thought my boyfriend was a monster, now they’ll learn my father is. Both of them.
I drove aimlessly around Houston, unable to decide where to go. It wasn’t until I pulled into Leo’s street, I realised I’d been heading there all along.
He was off the hook now, he’d be released in a few days, finally free. Rumours and suspicion would dog him for the rest of his life. People would always wonder if he was involved. But he’d be free. His mother needed to know. She deserved to learn about her son’s exoneration from someone who cared, not the media.
Theo answered the door.
“Dani, we weren’t expecting you.”
“I have news on Leo. Can I come in?”
“Sure,” he swung the door open, ushering me inside. The tangy scent of lime hit me. Laughter rang from the belly of the house. “Everyone is in the kitchen.”
I followed Theo down the narrow hallway, my eyes skimming the walls. Pictures of the happy family hung on every inch of the walls. Theo and Leo grinning at the camera. Mr and Mrs Roman in loving embraces. Family portraits. A few pictures of Leo in prison overalls sat on a small table at the end of the hall, a vase of flowers in front of them, his face grim but smiling.
“We have another guest,” Theo beamed, pushing open the kitchen door. Mrs Roman stood at the stove, stirring a pan of stew.
“Danielle.”
Maria. I swung around. She sat at the table, squeezing a lime over a fresh salad.
I froze. Did she know where her husband was? Angel pushed me into the kitchen.
“You should sit,” he barked, shoving me towards the table, slamming me into the seat by Maria. “You must have questions.”
Where would I even start?
“Someone has been charged with Stacey and Maia’s murder,” I whispered. Mrs Roman spun around, her hands flapping in front of her.
“Danielle, I’m…”
“Danica.”
“Who’s been charged?” Maria asked, gazing at me with tears in her eyes.
“Miguel Ortiz. My father has been charged with obstruction of justice.”
Maria exhaled.
“Leo will be released soon.”
“I’m happy for you,” Maria sniffed.
Angel spoke, explaining everything.
My biological father, Miguel Ortiz, and my mother, an American drug mule working for the cartel, lost themselves to addiction. Their lives rapidly descended into chaos and debt. He and Maria pleaded with them to think of their baby girl, clean themselves up, leave Mexico. Their words fell on deaf ears. Ortiz and his wayward wife fell deeper and deeper into their addiction.
It went too far when Ortiz stole from the cartel to pay a drug debt.
Maria was the first to hear of the sick revenge they took.
She raced to the house. The scene that greeted her is one that will torment her until her dying day. The small, run down shack in the favela was ransacked. My mother, Theresa Lewis, lay naked from the waist down, on the floor. Her body broken and twisted, her face beaten beyond recognition, blood soaked the carpet beneath her.
Maria stepped around the body, her heart pounding. She crept towards the baby’s crib, my crib. Blood spattered the unwashed, soiled bedding. The mattress had been thrown across the room. The baby was gone. Only the blue stuffed whale remained, stained with crimson.
Maria fell to the floor, the animalistic wail ripping from her lungs echoed around the favela. No-one came to her aid. No-one dare comfort the mother of the Ortiz’s.
Her cries smashed through pervasive silence filling the house. She stopped, holding her breath, her pain broken by the muffled cry of a newborn. Maria tore the house apart. I was found in the laundry basket, covered with piles of dirty clothes and bedding, unharmed, alive, screaming my tiny lungs raw.
“Theresa hid her,” a small voice said. A frail, elderly woman stood in the doorway, her eyes glued to the lifeless, battered body of my mother. “I heard them screaming at her, demanding to know where the baby was. She wouldn’t tell. Run, Maria, run.”
That’s exactly what Maria did. She grabbed me, wrapped my tiny, half dressed body in a towel and ran. She ran until her feet bled, until her lungs screamed for air until the favela she’d grown up in was nothing but a dot on the horizon. Her purse was empty, her only possessions me and the blue whale she’d snatched from the crib. She had nowhere to run to, no-one to help. If she went home her estranged husband and son would find her, kill me and torture her. Her family had disowned her when she got into bed with Carlos Ortiz, the father of her children. Angel, the only family she had who still spoke to her was in prison, he’d gotten caught up in a shootout, protecting his sister from her ex-husband's gang.
He’d wooed her with luxuries, promises of a life of riches. She didn’t know who he was, how savage he was.
Eventually, she stopped at a diner, physically and mentally broken, unable to take another step, her body screaming out for food and water. I sobbed until my face turned purple, hungry, cold and wet. The poor woman, my saviour and grandmother had no way to comfort me, to feed me or to clean me. She held me close to her bosom.
She scraped together the last of her change, enough to buy a coffee for herself. Newborns don’t drink coffee, they don’t eat cake, she couldn’t feed me.
Maria sat in that diner for hours, nursing the same cup of coffee, sobbing and frightened. She’d leave me somewhere, pray I was found by a kind-hearted soul, who’d care for me and love me, provide for me in the way she could not. She’d go home, wait for her ex-husband to find her and end her pain. Her youngest son had caused this, she’d raised a monster. She refused to live with the pain of it, choosing death over life, if only she could save me.
“Ma’am, I’m sorry, we’re closing up,” the young waitress told her. Maria glanced through the window. The sun had set long ago. While she’d been trapped in a nightmare, day had turned to night.
“We’re leaving,” she sighed. “Can you tell me where the closest hospital is?”
“Just along the street,” the waitress smiled. “I’ll show you. I pass it on my way home.”
“You’re walking home alone? Aren’t you afraid of the cartels?”
“No,” the waitress laughed, “this area is protected by Ramirez and his crew. No-one would dare harm a woman on his watch. He’s good man.”
“He’s cartel,” Maria snapped.
Cartels cause nothing but pain and misery, they were decimating Mexico, filling its streets with bloodshed and pain. Mothers mourned their sons and daughters, no person was too young to avoid the wrath of a cartel.
“He’s different to the rest, lives by his own code. No harming women or kids, he invests a lot in this area, runs a charity for youngsters caught up in gangs. Crime has gone down massively since he set himself up here. When I was homeless, with my baby, he gave me money, found me a place to live, helped me find a job. He’ll help you too, if you need it. I can take you to his place?”
Maria nodded. It was only her chance. If he’d agree to find me a family, she could walk to her death knowing I was safe. It was a better option than leaving me outside a hospital, risking me being found by the Ortiz’s or ending up in a run down orphanage for the rest of my childhood.
They stopped outside the biggest villa Maria had ever seen. It dwarfed the fancy home Ortiz had bought her on the eve of their wedding. She sucked in a lungful of air, held her breath and pressed the buzzer.
“Yes?” A man barked through the intercom.
“Sir, I need help. My baby is starving, we’re being hunted like animals by our own family. If you don’t help us, we’ll be dead by morning.”
My father came to the gate, flanked by three machine gun-wielding men.
“I apologise for the heavy artillery,” he told her, “it wouldn’t be the first time a woman has been sent her to lure us to our death. Our rivals fight dirty.”
“And you don’t?”
“I try my best not to. If someone goes after me, I go right back at them, not their women or children.”
Once he was satisfied Maria was not a trojan horse for a rival cartel, the heavy gates swung open. She was bustled inside, safely ensconced in Ramirez’s sitting room, plied with sandwiches and cocoa. José sent one of his men to hunt down baby supplies. They came back weighed down with diapers, formula milk, bottles, baby clothes, blankets and toys. My father hadn’t missed a thing. Everything Maria needed to care for me was handed to her, free of charge.
“I had a child,” Ramirez explained, “she was caught in crossfire, her mother too. Gunned down in broad daylight in the middle of a children’s playground. That’s when I got into drug running. I swore vengeance, vowed to clean up the cartels who use women and children as leverage. I needed money and status to do it.”
Ramirez listened silently as Maria relived the last twenty-four hours, from the rumour she heard that Carlos Ortiz and her other son were going after Miguel and Theresa over a drug debt, to finding me in the laundry basket and running.
“If you could find her a good home, Sir, that’s all I want,” Maria breathed, barely holding herself together as I snuffled in her arms, guzzling on a bottle of formula.
“May I?” Joey asked, standing over Maria, holding out his arms. She lifted me towards him. He tucked me into his arms, smiling down at me, tears welling in his eyes.
“I’ll care for her as if she was my own, if you’ll allow me?”
“Thank you, Sir.”
She stood to leave, kissing me goodbye, her heart aching. She’d lost both sons one to drugs and one to a violent cartel and now she faced losing her granddaughter. Whatever her ex decided to do to her after that, it would be a mercy.
“I’d like you to stay too,” Joey said, glancing up from me, “She’ll need a nanny and I’ll need help in the home if it’s to be kept fit for a child to live in. You’ll be paid a fair wage, of course. We’ll tell people I adopted the child from a young, single mother and hired you to help care for her. I’d like to see the Ortiz’s dare to question me over it. You’ll both be safe here.”
Maria sat at the table by my side, sobbing, her heavy breasts heaving with every gasped breath she fought for. Maria, my grandmother. Angel stood behind her, his meaty hand rested on her shoulder.
“Whatever you believe Joey did to you, my sister is innocent. She fought for you her entire life.”
“That’s why I was never allowed out anywhere? Because the Ortiz’s wanted to hurt me?”
Angel nodded.
“Joey desperately wanted to grant your wish to study in America, but all your documentation is faked. You were born Lucia Ortiz and your birthday is October, not August.”
The day Leo handed himself in, my father scoured Mexico, searching for Miguel, eventually finding him in a pool of his own urine, drooling into a tumbler of Tequila in a hovel in Mexico City. He’d dragged his pathetic ass into rehab less than an hour later. His plan was to hand himself in, take Leo’s place. Miguel was supposed to clean up, support Maria and be there for me if I needed anything.
“I don’t understand why Miguel would confess if my father didn’t ask him to.”
“He betrayed you Danielle, your entire life. He was the one who told Carlos Ortiz were you where, he set up your kidnapping. He reckons they promised to return you once your father paid a ransom, which for the record, he tried to do. All he asked was a quick handover, they hand you to me, he hands the money to one of their crew. They didn’t even bring you to the handover. They were never gonna let you go. I guess Miguel just got sober enough for long enough to feel ashamed of what he’d done to you. He begged me to drive him to the station. I refused, he broke outta rehab, got himself high as a kite and handed himself to you. Don’t cry for him, if anyone deserves to be in Leo’s shoes, it’s Miguel Ortiz and I say that as his Uncle, a man who helped raise him. Sober that man is a violent piece of shit, and drugged, well, we know how low he sank. He gave up his own daughter.”
I rested my head on the table, trying to process my new reality. Maria collapsed on top of me, her tears soaking through my polyester jacket.