Island of Bones(44)
“Good afternoon. Do you speak English?” he asked.
The woman shook her head and mumbled something, turning back to her laundry. He slipped the picture of Angela Lopez from the folder and held it out to her.
She glanced at it. “Vete,” she muttered and turned her back.
Louis looked around. A small pack of children had gathered around his Mustang. The top was down and the kids were running their hands over the blue vinyl seats. A young woman was pushing a crying baby in a rusty stroller across the asphalt street. She passed an old man sitting on an overturned plastic bucket under a leafless frangipani tree. Louis could see that the man’s eyes were focused on him.
He started toward the man. The man watched him approach, his cigarette dangling loosely in his short fingers.
“Do you speak English?” Louis asked.
The man nodded slowly.
Louis held out Angela’s picture. “Do you know this girl?”
The man looked at it for a long time then pointed across the street to a red and white cinder block building with a tin awning. “There.”
Louis crossed the road, pausing outside the store. The hand-painted letters outside the store read JUAN’S PLACE and under that, CAMBIAMOS CHEQUES.
Louis pulled open the flimsy screen door and walked in, taking off his sunglasses. A ceiling fan turned slowly above, stirring the heavy air that smelled of frying food and spices.
A Hispanic man sitting at a table looked up at him. A woman came out from behind the counter, wiping her hands on a towel.
“You lost?” the man asked.
Louis shook his head. “I’m trying to find out about this girl,” he said, holding out the photo.
Neither the man nor woman said a word. The man was gripping a can of Tecate beer. He raised it slowly and took a drink.
“She’s been missing for almost four years,” Louis said. “Her name is Angela Lopez.”
Louis saw something pass over the woman’s face, something buried and painful that she was trying hard not to let surface. She turned away.
The old man said something to her in soft Spanish. The only thing Louis could make out was the name “Rosa.” With a glance back at Louis, she disappeared into a room in the back. The man looked back at Louis.
“Why are you here? Why do the cops come now?” he asked.
“I’m not a cop.”
“No difference,” the man said. “Angela has been gone three years. No one cares now. Go away.”
When Louis didn’t move, he waved his hand. “Go. No one here wants to talk to you. Go. Vete!”
Damn it.
Louis put Angela’s picture back in the folder. He hated dead ends. He hated it when people wouldn’t talk to him. He hated having to go back to Fort Myers with no new information.
Landeta’s voice was there in his ear. Come on, Rocky, you can do better.
Louis pushed open the door and walked back out into the hot sun. The kids at the Mustang scattered when they saw him coming. He reached in and grabbed the files on the other girls and went back into the store.
The woman was back behind the counter and glanced up at him. She said something softly in Spanish to the man, who silenced her with a raised hand.
“Why are you back?” the man asked Louis.
“Whoever took Angela took other girls,” Louis said. He went to the table and laid Cindy Shattuck’s photo in front of the man.
“This girl disappeared in 1964,” Louis said.
He set Paula’s and Mary’s photographs down. “These girls disappeared in 1965 and 1973.”
Then he set down Angela’s picture. “Angela Lopez, disappeared 1984.”
The man’s eyes went from the pictures up to Louis’s face. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“Because you need to know that Angela is not the only one.”
The man’s black eyes rose to Louis’s face. “She is dead,” he said.
“Probably,” Louis said. “But we haven’t found her. We haven’t found any of these girls, except one.”
“Which one?” the man asked.
Louis looked down at the last photo in his hand. It was a facial shot of Shelly Umber taken at her autopsy.
“This one. They found her in Pine Island Sound a few weeks ago. She’s probably victim number six.”
The man took a drink of his beer then spoke quietly. “Angela worked in the fields with her father. But sometimes she worked here to make extra money,” he said. “She left early one day in July.”
The woman was watching, silent.
“Why?” Louis asked.
“She met a boy.”
“From this area? From Immokalee?”
“Fort Myers,” the man said, pulling Angela’s picture toward him. “She told us he was going to take her to lunch in the city.”