"Here's what happens now." Lashes ticks it off on her fingers. "We've got a woman in Chihuahua named Imani who can find a person from a name and a city, and she's extremely good at it, and she owes me a favor she doesn't know about yet. You give me every name you've got. Your mother. Your brothers. Your grandmother. The street you grew up on. And we start there and we don't stop."
"And if they?—"
"Then we'll know. And knowing beats the six years you've had of not knowing." Lashes puts her hand out, palm up. "I've done this. I've been the woman standing over a dead phone. So I'll tell you what nobody told me. Families don't usually movebecause they've stopped looking. They move because they can't stand the house anymore."
Belén takes her hand.
We roll at four in the afternoon.
Three of Alejandro's vehicles and two of ours, running south with the women split between them, and Yoli in the back of the lead SUV with a nurse practitioner from Las Vegas beside her, because Sakura won't hand her off to anybody.
Mila's in the second vehicle with Lucia's head on her shoulder.
I drive.
The road runs out flat and gold ahead of us and the Huachucas come up on the right.
My mother's house is somewhere out past that ridge, thirty-five minutes from where I'm sitting.
I don't look at it.
Because I'm not going to it, and because Wendell Trask is out there too, somewhere behind us, standing in a cleaned-out yard with thirty-two men and nothing to show for any of them.
He did all of that for one reason.
Me.
That's the piece I can't put down. He didn't set that trap for eleven women. He was never trying to keep them.
Mila had it right from the start.
They were inventory, and inventory gets replaced.
He knew we were coming and he left the doors unlocked, becauseIwas going to be in that yard.
He wanted me on his own ground.
Thirty-two men stood out in the cold half the night waiting on a shot at one prospect out of Chihuahua.
And a fifteen-year-old took a bullet through the collarbone running for a truck.
That's what it bought him. Not me.
A child bleeding into gravel because Wendell Trask wanted a crack at the Kincaid boy who talked to the government eleven years back.
Both hands on the wheel, desert going by, and I'm not angry the way I've been angry before.
It's colder than that.
It's what you feel when youfinallyunderstand you were never a person to somebody.
You were a shape they built a plan around.
In the mirror, Lucia's asleep against Mila's shoulder.
Mila catches me looking.
She doesn't say anything.
