Chapter Four
Danica
Leo’s file scattered my floor. I’d snatched it on my way out of the office, from the shelf it sat on waiting to be moved back to storage, walked out with it clutched under my arm. His execution loomed. None of it sat right with me. I’d mulled over every detail. It consumed every spare moment of the two months since I’d confronted him in the prison.
In all my limited time as a detective, I’d never seen a more open and shut case or known a perp to fall asleep without even attempting to clean up.
I started at the beginning, burying myself in his history. He’d been arrested in Mexico, the week of my disappearance, charged with breach of the peace. They held him three days before dropping the charges.
He’d been right about my father. It was taken care of in-house. The Police only became involved after six months of bloodshed. My kidnapping sparked a savage gang war between the cartels. The only person who did the right thing, Leo, a child killer and rapist. My own flesh and blood opted for murder and torture. The sister of one of the rival cartel leaders was found raped and murdered a few weeks after my vanishing. Angel and my dad were behind that, they deserved the needle every bit as much as Leo did.
After his arrest in Mexico, which my dad probably had a hand in, his record was squeaky clean. He held down a high earning job in construction.
I blinked, rereading the last section. He’d volunteered at a centre for trafficked women. Jesus, how sick can you get? They’d poured their pain out to him while he planned on inflicting the same trauma to his girlfriend and her child. The founder of the charity was a character witness for his defence.
There wasn’t much known about Stacey. She was a runaway, her parents hadn’t laid eyes on her in over a decade, they’d never met Maia. Maia’s father was identified from her DNA after her death, his name left off her birth certificate. He’d been in the police database as a pimp.
The more I read, the more questions I was left with. How did Stacey and Maia come to live with him? Why did the founder of the trafficked women charity speak out for him? Did she still believe in him?
I had to know the answers before it was too late. I couldn’t let him face execution until I quelled the unease eating away at me. Schilling, for all his faults, grew on me, he’d fathered me more in the last two months than my father did the entire eighteen years he was in my life. If I asked him to help, he would. We worked well together, bouncing our opposing ideas off each other until we dug down to the truth. That’s exactly what this case needed, I was too close to it, too biased to handle it alone. I’d see what I wanted to see, blinded by the misty, rose-tinted vision of Leo I’d clung to for so long.
◆◆◆
“Kid, tell me you’re supposed to have all this?” Schilling begged, surveying the carpet of paperwork scattering my lounge with a concerned frown. I shrugged, biting my lip. Leo’s case was closed. The date set. Texas was now legally bound to execute him. No-one is meant to be going over this.
“There’s just something not right about it. I loved this man for years. I have to know the truth.”
“It’s my case, kid. I was first on scene. He deserves everything he’s got coming to him.”
“Please,” I begged.
Schilling sighed, rolling his eyes at me.
“Where do you want to start?”
Honestly? No-where. The whole thing filled me with dread. It’d mean well and truly facing my past, meeting other trafficked women and Carly. My father, if Leo had been framed, he’s the first place I should be looking.
“I suppose I start by telling you who I am, really. It’ll all come out if I go through with this. It’s best you hear it from me.”
“Sounds like something that should be done over a beer,” Schilling said, beelining to my chiller.
A beer in hand, Schilling in a fold out chair, parked in front of the sofa I curled myself into, I delved into my past, reliving every detail of my worst nightmares. Schilling listened quietly, handing me tissues from the coffee table as the tears flowed.
Angel’s hefty frame sprawled out over the marble floor, his mouth stuffed with a dirty sock, his hands bound with heavy-duty silver tape. Congealed blood lay drying on the floor around his head. His wide eyes fixed on me, his pupils as big as dinner plates, giving his already dark gaze a demonic appearance. He shook his head, growling through the gag.
I stepped back, my heart bursting, my blood pumping with pulse racing speeds through my veins, backing straight into a hard, body warm barrier. I only saw the two men in the sitting area, a machete swinging dangerously from the thick, bloodied hand of one them when the arms of the man behind me were already on me. One hand wrapped around my waist, so tight he squeezed the air from my lungs. His other hand cupped over my mouth, muffling my terrified screams, suffocating. I clawed at his arm, my body screaming out painfully for oxygen, my lungs on fire. My vision shrank to pinpricks. Darkness folded in, my last memory before waking, Angel screaming out venomous threats through his sock gag.
That was just the start of four long, agony filled years of misery and horror. My body reduced to a plaything for the pleasure of sadists, my soul hardening so brittle it was on the verge of shattering completely.
“Once they knew my father wouldn’t pay, they sold me to the sex traffickers. I was hauled around the US, forced to sell myself, raped daily, beaten if I didn’t comply. Vegas Vice rescued me during a raid on the brothel I was being held in. They offered me wit pro. I took a watered down version, changing my name, taking American citizenship. I joined the Police Academy a year later and the rest you know.”
Schilling shook his head, wiping his hand over his weather worn face.
“What part of that did you think I didn’t already know, kid?”
“The bit about who my dad is and what exactly happened to me the four years I was missing. I told you I was taken by a drug cartel my dad owed money to, which I was. They sold me.”
“I read between the lines the first time I pressed you for the truth.”
“But you don’t treat me like…”
“Like you’re broken? Damaged goods? Weak? You don’t act it, that’s why. Except the damn eating. You need to eat more.”
I laughed, my body heaving a sigh of relief. Schilling’s main purpose in life these last two months had been feeding me, bringing casseroles and pie his wife had made for our lunch, refusing to get back to work until I finished every last morsel. I outgrew my favourite jeans last week.
With Schilling still determined we had the right man waiting to die, we decided to start with the things that bothered me around the information we already had. Leo’s connection with the trafficking charity irked me the most. These women spend their lives on high alert, I should know. They’d spot an imposter a mile off, yet Leo spent three years in their midst. To this day, they still appeared to support him.