“From El Salvador,” she said hesitantly, the unofficial spokeswoman.
“What should we call you?”
Another pause, longer this time. “Mayra.” She nodded to her friend. “This is Rosario.”
“How long have you been here?” Ari asked, taking over the questioning, her manner gentler than Jez’s.
“In the prison room?”
“In the prison room and in the United States.”
“In the prison for one month, in the United States for six months. We only want to work.”
“In the vineyard? Is that how you met Roy and Margaret Leland?”
“Sí, sí.” Her face fell. “The man who brought us, he said we come to the United States for a good job. We picked the grapes all summer, and when there were no more grapes… They put us in the prison.”
“Just the two of you?”
She shook her head. “Twenty-three people. Now two.”
Rosario burst into tears. “They took Gabriela.”
“Her daughter,” Mayra explained. “The lady who looked after her while we were working got sick, so Mrs. Leland said, ‘Okay, Gabriela can come and pick the grapes too.’ Then… We were all in the prison.”
“So they put everyone in that room, and then each day, they took people away?”
“Not every day. Most days.”
“Was Gabriela the only child?”
A nod.
“The others were all women?”
Another nod.
“When did they take Gabriela?”
“Before yesterday.”
One of Ari’s strengths lay in her ability to ask questions sympathetically, even when the subjects began rambling or crying. Jez wasn’t great at that, and I didn’t like speaking with people, period. Over the next hour, we worked out that the Lelands were treating migrant workers as disposable—they’d take them on for the summer, mostly women, and when they were no longer needed at the vineyard, the Lelands would hand a bunch of them over to Bug Chapin, aka gun guy. From there, the workers disappeared. The perfect plan, right? Who cared about undocumented migrants? Well, we did, and Demelza did, and then it turned out that the folks on Point Team India—which everyone called the Circus—had some issues with Bug Chapin, so they offered to take him off our hands. They’d also hunt for Gabriela and the other missing workers.
Helpfully, Margaret Leland had kept a spreadsheet on her laptop with names, dates, and dollar amounts. A woman went for ten thousand bucks, a man five thousand. And Gabriela? Fifteen thousand. There was a special place in hell reserved for child traffickers, and I sure hoped the Lelands would be heading there soon.
Of course, I’d do everything I could to help with their journey.
But back to the Nolan problem… In our quest to find the arsonist who’d set fire to Nolan’s cottage, we’d accidentally stumbled onto a much bigger issue. And you know the worst part? Margaret Leland wasn’t even the arsonist. Mayra and Rosario were almost certain that Gabriela had been picked up the night before last—the prison room had a light that was turned off at night, which let the women count the number of days they were stuck there—and Margaret was there for the handover. Assuming Bug had arrived at the same time on Tuesday as he had tonight, she couldn’t have been tossing a Molotov cocktail at Dionysus.
I glanced across at the list Ari had made. She’d also ruled out Donna Hayes, who’d been attending her first group therapy session at the time of the fire, and none of the other suspects screamed “guilty.”
Wyatt Hayes
Lisanne Fulton
Margaret Leland
Marielle Marten (the real one)
