Ellin looked around the office. They were the only people there. “This looks pretty private to me.”
“It concerns kidnapped babies and falsified birth certificates.”
Ellin’s face changed, the friendly smile vanishing. She stared at them a second, then sighed and said, “Let’s go into the judge’s office. He won’t be back from lunch for another hour, at least.”
She led them to a small, crowded office and closed the door behind them. There were only three chairs in there, including the one behind the judge’s desk, so she took it and heaved another sigh. “Now, what’s this you’re asking about falsified birth certificates? I don’t know that it’s possible, with everything computerized now.”
“When was this office computerized?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Ten years ago?”
Ellin surveyed Milla, the look assessing. “No, not that long ago. Five or six years, maybe.”
Ellin was keeping her composure, trying to find out how much they knew. Milla decided to oblige her. “My son was one of the babies kidnapped.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“It’s taken a long time, but we’ve finally broken the smuggling ring. Let me name some names for you: Arturo Pavón.” She watched closely as she said each name. Ellin showed no sign of recognition. “Susanna Kosper.” Still nothing. “True Gallagher was the boss.” Ah, there was a telltale flicker. “Ellin Daugette.”
“Damn it!” Ellin slammed her hand down on the desk. “Damn it all! I thought all that was over with. I thought it was over.”
“You thought you’d gotten away with it.”
“It’s been a long time, of course I thought that!” She seemed to realize there was no use in prevaricating now. “Are you two cops?”
“No. I don’t know that any cops are coming. I can’t promise you that they won’t, but I don’t intend to tell them anything about you—in exchange for information.”
“You’re looking for your baby, aren’t you?”
“That’s more important to me than anything else.”
“What makes you think I’d keep incriminating evidence around? Do I look stupid to you?”
On the contrary, Ellin looked like a cagey woman who knew how to look out for number one. “Yes, I think you’d keep it. It would give you an edge, wouldn’t it? Something to bargain with, whether it’s with someone private like me, or a district attorney, or even True Gallagher. If you ever felt that you couldn’t trust him, you’d need some way of keeping him in line.”
“You’re right about one thing. I wouldn’t trust Gallagher as far as I could throw him.”
Milla leaned back in her chair and crossed her legs, pinning Ellin with a cool look. “I really, really hope you have what I need, because otherwise you’re no use to me.”
“You’re threatening to turn me in.”
“No, I’m promising it. Just as I promise not to if you help me. Like I said, I don’t know if the cops will come calling or not. The people you dealt with are involved in a series of murders, and they’re going down. The investigation will probably concentrate only on that.” She felt Rip tense beside her, and wanted to pat his arm in comfort. Instead she concentrated on Ellin, pouring all her force of will into her face and voice. “If they hadn’t been the same people running the smuggling ring all those years ago, I wouldn’t have made the connection to you. But I will turn you in, in a heartbeat, if you don’t help me.”
Ellin said “All right” so easily Milla could scarcely believe what she was hearing. “I believe you. Let me get my list.”
“You kept a list?” Milla couldn’t believe it.
“Well, how else would I remember which birth certificates were legitimate and which weren’t? It’s not like I wrote ‘FAKE’ across the bad ones.”
They went into the outer office, and Ellin sat down at a battered metal desk. “See, I’ve had this job for almost thirty years; it’s not like I had to worry about anyone going through my desk, finding this list, and getting suspicious. It’s just a list of names, doesn’t say anything about them. And if I get killed in a car wreck or drop dead from a heart attack, then I guess I don’t care if anybody finds it, right?”
“No worries,” Milla said, shaking her head.
“You got it.” She opened a desk drawer, pulled out a fat file, and placed it in front of her on the desk.
Milla was astonished. “That many?”
“Hmm? No, of course not. This is a bunch of other stuff.” She began thumbing through the papers. She reached the end, grunted, and started back at the beginning. “Must have overlooked it.” She didn’t find what she was looking for on the second thumb-through, either. An alarmed expression crossing her face, she went through the file a third time, one sheet of paper at a time. “It isn’t here. Damn it, I know it was here!”
For some reason, Milla believed her. Ellin’s upset was too genuine. A new worry crept into her mind. “Could someone—like perhaps True—have broken in and taken the list?”
“He didn’t know it existed. Why would he do something like that? The sheriff’s department is right next door; it isn’t like breaking in would be an easy thing to do. Besides, we’re on camera.” She nodded toward a huge metal shelving unit that was stacked high with huge ledgers.
Milla looked, but didn’t see any cameras. “Where?”
“Tiny little bastard; the upper-left-hand corner. See the holes in the braces for moving the shelves around? Third hole down.”
Ah. Now she saw where the third hole looked as if it had been blocked. “That’s the camera?”
“Sneaky, isn’t it? See, one of the county commissioners suspected his wife was having an affair with the probate judge before the one we got now, coming down here at night for some private, extracurricular activity. So one weekend he sneaked in a security company and had the offices wired. Caught them, too.”
“Can we look at the tape? Or is it possible you moved the list?”
“I never moved the list,” Ellin said flatly. “Ever. And it was here just a month or so ago, I saw it when I was going through the file looking for something else. But all is not lost, as Shakespeare would say. Like I said, do I look stupid? There’s a copy in my safe-deposit box.”
Milla went weak with relief. Thank God, thank God, she thought fervently. To come this close and hit a wall was more than she thought she could bear.
“Let’s have a look at that tape, though; I’m curious if someone came snooping around.” Plus Ellin needed to know exactly where she stood, so she could protect herself if maybe True had known about her list after all, and decided he needed some leverage in his present situation. The same thought occurred to Milla. If that was the case, Ellin would do better to come forward immediately and use the list for her own protection, before True could use it.
She led them down a set of narrow stairs to the dusty, musty basement level. An older Hispanic man sat at a metal desk reading a newspaper. “Ellin,” he said in greeting.
“Morning, Jesus. We want to take a look at the security tapes.”
“Sure, no problem. Or is there?”
“We don’t know. Someone could have been in my office.”
“Last night?”
“Have no idea. Could have been any time in the last month or so.”
“The tape resets and records over itself every seven days. If it was that long ago, you won’t find anything.”
He fetched the tape from the security system’s recorder, and slapped it into a VCR hooked up to a thirteen-inch television. He punched Play, then Rewind, and they all gathered around to watch everything in reverse. Milla and Rip were the most recent visitors, of course. There had been several more during the morning, plus one fairly busy stretch when there was actually a line three people deep waiting for Ellin’s help.
Then there was a long stretch, before the office opened, when nothing happened. They watched daylight reverse into night, with only one light left burning in t
he office. Then, suddenly, there was a dark figure in Ellin’s office.
“There!”
“Well, how about that,” Jesus said, sitting up alertly. “How did that rascal get in? There’s no sign of a break-in, everything was locked up tight as a drum when I got here this morning.” He let the tape continue to rewind until it picked up the dark figure coming in the door, then he stopped it and played it forward.
Milla’s heart skipped a beat, then another. Beside her, Rip said, “Son of a bitch!”
They watched the man, dressed head to foot in black, walk calmly around the office orienting himself. He came to Ellin’s desk, saw her name plaque on it, and sat down in her chair. He began opening drawers, taking out files and going through them as casually as if he had all the time in the world, as if there wasn’t a nerve in his body. Eventually he came to the correct file, and leafed through it one page at a time. When he reached a certain page, he paused and seemed to read it, then pulled it out of the file and laid it aside. He continued his systematic search of the desk, but pulled out no other papers. He even examined the undersides of the drawers.
“What in tarnation is he looking for?” Jesus said. No one answered.
Then the man extended his search to the rest of the office. Finally, evidently satisfied he’d found what he wanted, he went back to Ellin’s desk and picked up the single page. He took the sheet over to a machine and fed it into it.
“That’s the shredder!” Ellin said.
Then, thorough to the end, he lifted the shredder off the trash can and pulled out the shredded paper, stuffing it into a small plastic bag he’d pulled out of his pocket. He put the shredder back in place, restored Ellin’s desk to order, then left as quietly as he’d entered.
Pain expanded in Milla’s chest, smothering her. Rage followed, and she had to clench her fists to hold herself in.
The man was Diaz.
* * *
No wonder he’d had his phone turned off. No wonder he’d slipped out in the middle of the night. There wasn’t any possibility he’d gotten the list to search for Justin himself, to do this for Milla, because he’d destroyed the paper. For whatever reason in his convoluted brain, he didn’t want Milla to find her son.
Jesus wanted to call the sheriff, but Ellin said no, it was a personal paper she was missing and not anything she wanted to pursue. Milla pulled herself together and shoved everything she was feeling to the back burner. There were still things to do.
The small community bank closed for lunch from one until two, after everyone else’s lunch hour, so people could do their banking then if needed. Promptly at two, Ellin was there with Milla and Rip to get into her safe-deposit box.
There it was, a single sheet of paper with three rows of single-spaced names. They returned to the car and looked over the list. Each name had a numerical code next to it. “Is that the birth certificate number?” Milla asked.
“No, that’s the date, so I know exactly where to look. Only I wrote the date backward. See, December 13, 1992, is 29913121. Easy.”
Milla told her the date Justin was stolen and that she’d found he was flown out of Mexico right away.
“Huh,” said Ellin, running her finger down the list of dates. “That narrows it down, because there’s only one Caucasian male name during the next week. The babies were moved fast, you know. The adoptions went through almost right away. Anyway, there are two Hispanic male names, and three females. That’s gotta be your boy. The name I gave him was Michael Grady, ‘Michael’ because it’s the most popular boy’s name. That’s the name he was adopted under, though of course the adoptive parents would rename him.”
They returned to the courthouse basement, where Ellin looked through the microfiche files and came up with the birth certificate for Michael Grady. “There. The father is listed as unknown. I made up the mother’s name, too.”
“What about the mother’s social security number?” Rip asked, staring at the microfiche screen.
“You think that’s actually checked out? Especially in a private adoption, ten years ago? Things like that may be checked now, but as long as the mother’s signed and notarized consent is provided, who’s going to check if that’s her correct social security number? Besides, the adoptive parents get the baby’s social security number for him.”
Hoping against hope, Milla asked, “Do you have any idea where the babies went? What attorney handled the private adoptions? Anything?” Without that information, she wasn’t in a much better position than she’d been in before.
Ellin grinned. “Well, now. For that list to be much good, you gotta have some backup information, don’t you? There’s a lawyer here in town who handled the legal stuff on this end. He knew there were a lot of adoptions, but he didn’t ask a lot of questions as long as he got paid, and he was told an adoption service was working with poor Hispanic families to ease their burden, plus you know Hispanics frown on their unmarried girls messing around. It’s a real social no-no for them, so any Hispanic girl who got pregnant was likely to give up her baby. At least, that’s what we told Harden. We’ll go see him now; at the very least, he should have the name of the lawyers on the other end of the adoptions.”
Two hours later, Rip drove them back to Roswell, because Milla was crying too hard to see. She was holding a copy of Justin’s fake birth certificate, as well as a copy of everything Harden Sims had had in his file concerning that particular adoption. The attorney on the other end practiced in Charlotte, North Carolina.
As everyone had kept telling her, the adoption records were probably sealed, and she would have to get a court order to unseal them. But she’d get the information she needed from the attorney in North Carolina, even if she had to sue him to get it, and then she’d get that court order. Considering the circumstances and how well publicized her own case had been, she knew she’d win.
The future wasn’t a fog of heartbreak now. She’d done it. A lot of legwork remained, but at the end of it she knew she’d find her son.
When they got to Roswell, they decided to drive straight through. It was a long drive, they wouldn’t get home until late, but both of them wanted to get home.
“What are you going to do?” Rip asked soberly. He was talking about Diaz.
“I don’t know.” She couldn’t let herself think about it too much, or she would break down. His betrayal sliced through her, so much more painful than the sense of betrayal she’d felt about Susanna. She had trusted Diaz more than she’d ever trusted anyone, trusted him with her life and her body and her heart. Why would he do such a thing, knowing how long and hard she’d searched for Justin? He might as well have stabbed her in the back himself. Looking back, she examined their times together, looking for some clue, but there was nothing. He’d either gone absolutely crazy during the last night they’d spent together, or he’d had a different agenda the entire time.
They were exhausted when they reached El Paso. It was after midnight, and they’d had an early start that morning and been on the go for over eighteen hours. She had taken over the driving at Carlsbad, so she dropped Rip off at his hotel and drove home, taking extra care because she was so tired.
When she opened her garage door and drove inside, she almost didn’t notice the pickup truck parked in the other bay of the double garage. Slowly she slid out of her seat, staring at it. The bastard had his nerve, after what he’d done. She hadn’t wanted to have this scene now, while she was almost punch-drunk with fatigue, but she wanted him out of her house and out of her life.
She let herself in through the garage and went into the kitchen, dropping her purse and the file on the table. A light was on in the living room, and then he was there, leaning against the door frame and watching her.
She didn’t look at him. She couldn’t. A tremor ran through her every muscle and she leaned against the table.
“Susanna rolled,” he finally said. “She’s been arrested. True, too. Just a few hours ago.”
“Good,” she said briefly, not
ing that there wasn’t a word of explanation about where he’d been, why he’d left in the middle of the night, or any questions about what she’d been doing for the past two days. Finally she looked at him, her fury and hatred clear in her eyes. “Get out.”
He straightened from the door frame. His expression had been faintly quizzical, but now it shut down, in an instant as blank and remote as she’d ever seen it.
“You didn’t check closely enough,” she said. “There was a security camera. Caught you in the act.”
He was silent for a moment, watching her, letting the time tick by. Then he said softly, “It was the best thing to do. It’s time to let him go. It’s been ten years. He isn’t your kid now, Milla, he’s someone else’s. It would have wrecked his life if you’d shown up.”
“Don’t talk to me!” she said fiercely. He didn’t understand; he had no idea about her or how she felt. “You . . . had . . . no . . . right! He’s my child, you bastard!” She screamed it at him, then caught herself and knotted her hands into fists.
“Not now, he isn’t.” He stood there like judge and jury combined, untouched by human emotion, and she wanted to kill him.
Tears began running down her face, tears of rage and hurt and from the superhuman effort it took to keep from attacking him. “It didn’t work. She had copies.” She swiped at the tears on her cheeks. “I’ve got all the information I need now to find him, and that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Now get out of my house. I never want to see you again.”
Because he was Diaz, he didn’t stand there arguing his side. He didn’t even shrug, as if to say, If that’s what you want. He simply walked past her and left. She heard the garage door open; then his truck started, and he was gone. Just like that.
She sat down at the table, laid her head on her crossed arms, and sobbed like a child.
25
He looked like David.
Milla kept the field glasses trained on him as he darted around the fenced schoolyard with an excess of energy that seemed to be shared by most of the boys his age. He seemed to have three or four particular buddies, and they shoved one another, laughed uproariously at one another’s jokes, and generally postured and strutted all the while they pretended they were cool. Maybe, to other ten-year-olds, they were cool.