Joanna opted for the green corn tamale platter and coffee. Arturo ordered coffee, too, along with the bacon burger. Noting the waitress’s raised eyebrow, he gave her a wink and a grin.
“Look,” he explained, “I can get green corn tamales in Naco, Sonora, anytime I want. Bacon burgers? Not so much.” As the waitress walked away, he turned back to Joanna. “Okay,” he added. “What’s the deal?”
“Highway Department guys doing flood watch at the bridge on the San Pedro in St. David on Saturday pulled a blue duffel bag out of the water. The body of a little boy was inside. The hyoid bone is broken, so the ME has ruled it a homicide. He’s been dead for a while. Our theory is that the killer buried the body in the riverbed, but the floodwaters brought it to the surface. Given the San Pedro’s headwaters are in Mexico, I wondered...”
“Did he happen to be wearing a blue plaid shirt?” Arturo interrupted.
Joanna was blown away. “As a matter of fact he was.”
“Then his name is Xavier Delgado,” Arturo told her. “He’s four years old, and he’s been missing for just over a week.”
“Someone filed a missing persons report with you?”
Arturo sighed. “Not exactly,” he said. “His mother is nineteen years old—a lady of the street, so to speak, who works from home. Some of the guys in my unit are good customers of hers. Whenever she had ‘company,’ she’d always send the kid outside to wait. Myguys often brought him treats to eat while he was waiting. They’re the ones who noticed he’s been absent.”
Hearing that, Joanna’s heart broke a little more. “How could they know to tell you what clothes he was wearing?”
“Easy,” Arturo replied. “I’m pretty sure those were the only clothes he had.”
“Is there a chance the mother’s responsible and that’s why she didn’t make an official report?”
“I doubt it,” Arturo replied. “Her name is Elena Delgado. She came north with a group of migrants and was pregnant when she arrived in Naco. She’s been here ever since, fending for herself and the kid and doing what she can to make the best of a bad situation. As far as kids disappearing without a trace? It happens along the border all the time. Human trafficking is a big problem for us. The mother was probably afraid that if she reported him missing, we’d accuse her of trafficking him.”
Their food came then. As it was being delivered, Joanna thought about the kind of desperation that would drive a woman into prostitution to support herself and her fatherless child. Making Xavier wait outside while his mother was entertaining her paying visitors sounded bad, but on the other hand, maybe having him witness what was actually happening inside the house would have been worse.
Before walking away, the waitress slapped two separate checks down on the table. Arturo reached for them, but Joanna beat him to it.
“Will my investigators be able to come to your side of the border to interview her?” Joanna asked, slipping both slips of paper under her plate.
“That would be a bit dicey,” Arturo said. “How about if you set a time for an interview at your department, and I bring her there myself. Doing that will rattle fewer chains.”
“But won’t bringing an illegal across the border be a problem?” Joanna objected.
“I can make it work,” Arturo replied.
“All right then,” Joanna said. “It’s a deal. Let’s eat.”
Chapter 8
Fertile, Minnesota
1963
In Miss Holt’s health ed class Steve’s senior year,everyone was supposed to do a research paper on some member of their immediate family. Since Steve’s “immediate family” was composed of exactly two people, he wrote the paper about his mother, Cynthia Hawkins Roper. Part of the process called for actually interviewing the person he was writing about.
During the interview, his mother was thrilled to be able to tell him about her happy childhood, growing up on the family farm with Gramps and Grandma Joan, but Steve noticed that, after the death of her mother, Cynthia tended to gloss over a lot of details. She said very little about having Grandma Lucille as her stepmother, but Steve knew enough about the woman to understand that if Grandma Lucille had been in charge, his mother’s teenaged years had been anything but a bed of roses.
No wonder she had taken to Jackson Roper, the first kid who ever asked her out. Details about that relationship were notably absent as well. Steve’s mom didn’t come right out and admit that neither she nor Jackson had actually graduated from high school. Steve had to track that detail down on his own by checking school records, and she was equally vague about the reasons for their subsequent divorce. However, Steve already knew the basics on that,because Grandma Lucille had spilled those beans to him time and again.
Single mothers weren’t exactly in vogue back then, but Cynthia was understandably proud that she had managed to raise her son on her own, and she was equally proud of the fact that, although she had waited tables for years, she was now the sole owner of the restaurant where she had once been employed. In Fertile, Minnesota, that counted as a success story.
In Steve’s retelling of the story, he didn’t pull any punches. He included the sordid details about his mother being knocked up shortly after her sixteenth birthday. Steve also managed to track down the divorce records in which he discovered that the divorce was granted due to her husband having an adulterous affair with a woman named Verna Slocomb of St. Cloud, Minnesota. Grandma Lucille had always said his father had run away with a godless slut, but until Steve saw the divorce papers, said girlfriend never had an actual name.
Steve didn’t show his paper to either Gramps or his mother, but Miss Holt had given him an A+. By then, however, Steve’s interest in his father had been piqued. He’d been given a partial scholarship to the University of Minnesota and had already been accepted there. Shortly after high school graduation, he explained to his mother that he wasn’t wild about living in a dorm and wanted to go down to St. Paul for a few days to see if he could scout out a possible apartment arrangement.
On that particular trip, however, Steve didn’t make it any farther than St. Cloud. Arriving in town in his shiny Bel Air, he stopped off at the first phone booth he saw, grabbed the phone book, and went looking for the name “Slocomb.” After finding seven listings for Slocomb, Steve dialed the number for the first one—Amos.
“Hello,” a male voice answered.
