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He claimed to have left the ranch to run some errands and came home to find them gone, along with their clothes, suitcases, and the family minivan. The deputies had done a detailed investigation. They’d concluded that Clarisse Chavez had probably fled and was in hiding from an abusive husband. The family was never found and the case was still open, but not under active investigation.
Chavez called periodically to harass them about finding his family and the calls were duly noted in the file. Alex now had the man’s home address in Helotes.
He rose and scooped up the folders. Sarge wouldn’t be happy, but Alex had to make a detour before going to the station. “Thanks,” he called to the deputy as he loped toward the door.
“Hey, you can’t take those folders—” The deputy stood. He seemed to think twice of the effort and sat down.
Alex took the steps two at a time. It wasn’t just one little girl, it was five kids. If the little girl had met this end, what had happened to the other four? Were there more graves somewhere, graves they hadn’t found yet?
He was glad he hadn’t eaten lunch—he would’ve lost it at the images looming in his head.
All those little graves. The image drove Alex to keep the accelerator to the floor on Highway 16 all the way to Chavez’s address on the outskirts of Helotes. The man lived in a trailer set back from a dirt road. A patch of tall grass and weeds almost obscured the set of steps leading to the door. What looked like a garage and a falling-down shack were half hidden behind the trailer. An enormous Dodge Ram sat in the dirt driveway. Nice ride for a handyman. When Alex identified himself as a police officer, Chavez didn’t flinch.
“Come in.Mí casa es su casa.” He held the door for Alex, his arm extended in welcome, despite the sardonic tone. Alex guessed his age as close to fifty if the wrinkles around his eyes and the thinning hair shot through with gray were any indication. “Beer?Está fría.”
“Gracias, señor, but no.”
“Some water then?” Without waiting for an answer, he shuffled to the kitchen on bare feet. The trailer was so small, from where Alex stood, he could see Chavez pull the glass from the cupboard. “You here about my kids? After all these years, did you find Clarisse?”
Alex hesitated. The remains hadn’t been definitively identified. “Sir, you haven’t had any communications from your wife in the last five years?”
Chavez handed him a huge plastic tumbler of ice water. “Not a word. Hard to believe six people could disappear from the face of the earth like that.” A spurt of anger flickered in his face and then disappeared. “The police are real good at their jobs around here.”
Alex ignored the dig. “Did you try looking for them on your own?”
Chavez’s expression remained serene, but something about his eyes struck Alex as hard. “I spent some serious mula on a private investigator after the police sat on their hands and did nothing. He came up with squat, took a trip on my dime, and then bailed. His partner gave me my money back. What’s this all about?”
No choice but to go out on a limb. “You leased Spanish Oak Ranch for about a year, didn’t you?”
The man’s sudden stillness reminded Alex of a cornered animal trying to camouflage itself in the landscape. “Yeah, I did. How’d you know that?”
“A friend of mine bought the ranch five years ago.”
“And what does that have to do with me?” The question came a little too quickly. He was quiet a minute and Alex let it ride, waiting. “Hey, I read about this in the paper this morning. About the kid who disappeared at the ranch. It caught my eye, since I lived there. Brought back some memories.” He shook his head as if reviewing those memories again. “Shouldn’t you be out there looking for him instead of chasing ghosts from five years ago?”
Ghosts. Interesting choice of words. “Well, there’s more to it than you read in the paper.” Alex held off giving him the details. “You actually have been back to the ranch since you left it five years ago, haven’t you?”
Chavez scratched his neck over the collar of a ragged T-shirt. “Yeah, a few months ago. I did some work for the lady who has the place next door,señoraStover. Mostly I worked at her ranch. She had some heavy stuff she needed moved. Once or twice I went to the Spanish Oak, but I never see the new guy who owns it. He was in a wreck or something. He never come out of the house. He couldn’t walk good, she said.”
“But you spent time on his property.”
“A few hours, here or there. Is that against the law? I worked. I got paid. Ask señora Stover.”
“When we were searching for Benny Garza, we found someone else.” Alex quickly laid it out, omitting the details.
The man went still again. Alex waited, studying his face. Not a muscle moved. After several seconds, Chavez’s hands went to his face. “Mr. Chavez, should I get you some water?”
The hands dropped. Chavez’s eyes were dry. “No.” He stared at Alex. “Are you saying one of my kids has been buried out there on the ranch for the last five years?”
“Maybe you should tell me.” Alex said the words gently, never taking his gaze from Chavez’s face. Not a single crack in the façade.
“Detective, my wife packed up my kids and left me five years ago. I came home one day and she was gone. As far as I know all five of them went with her. If you’re accusing me of something, why don’t you just come on out with it?” He spoke as if he were offering Alex another beer. “Are you doing some kind of tests on the remains to see who it is?”
“A forensic anthropologist is doing the work, but we know she was a little girl, no more than five or six.”
Chavez rose from his chair and went to the window, his back to Alex. “Nina. It had to be Nina.”
“She was your youngest?”
