Page 67 of Girl in the Water
Chapter Twelve
Daniela
Daniela’s body was still tingling as they sat at the police station. Ian had held her for the entire twenty-minute bus ride—which passed way too fast.
That kind of physical contact between them was new—a first. Okay, second. This morning, she’d woken up in his arms. He was finally seeing her as a woman and as his equal. She could have spent the rest of the day daydreaming about his arms around her, but they weren’t here on a pleasure trip. Unfortunately.
They went through the case step-by-step with the investigating detective, Gustavo Santos, a man in his late forties who was graying at the temples and thinning on top. He wasn’t overweight, but he did sport a respectable potbelly, a sign that he’d primarily been riding a desk for the last couple of years. He wore a wrinkled suit and a tie that had tomato stains on it and smelled like fish. Quite a bit sloppier than the delegado had been in Rio.
Santos had his own office, crowded with file cabinets, but a decent size. He had his own coffeemaker.Must rank fairly high up. Probably the old fox of the department.
One of the men who’d always beaten Daniela at Rosa’s, the man who’d been the roughest, had been a policeman. But Santos was the picture of friendliness and cooperation.
He scanned through his own report, a copy of which they already had, but the printout in his hand was embellished with handwritten notes on the margins that he must have added since the official report had been filed.
“The call came in at nine thirty in the morning,” he said. “We responded immediately, arrived at the scene at nine forty-seven.”
He took a sip of his coffee, then went on. “We were told by the parents that they discovered the baby missing just before nine.”
Ian asked, “Why wait half an hour to call?”
“The parents had gone down to breakfast. They left the baby sleeping in the crib. They thought it was safe. The whole group had been looking after her. In fact, a couple of people had said they’d look in on her if she woke up and started crying.”
Santos sipped some more coffee. “So when the parents came up and saw the empty crib, they thought the baby cried and someone came in and got her. They went from room to room to see where she was. Some time passed before they realized that the baby wasn’t on the premises.”
“Do you have a list of who was upstairs at the time?”
The man paged through his notes, didn’t find what he was looking for, so he went to his computer. “Four of the six permanent See-Love-Aid staff were downstairs, coordinating breakfast. Out of the twenty-one visiting volunteers, fifteen were downstairs, including the Heyerdahls, and six were upstairs, including the baby. The metal door between the girls’ dormitory and the adults’ section was locked.”
“So seven people with immediate access,” Ian said.
The detective nodded. “Although, somebody could have gone up without being seen. It’s just a short flight of stairs.”
“I assume you questioned everyone, the people upstairs and downstairs.”
“We conducted extensive interviews. Nobody saw anything suspicious.”
“What’s your best guess?” Ian asked.
Santos pressed his lips together, clicking his pen a few times before responding with reluctance. “Trafficking for illegal adoption. A blue-eyed, blonde-haired baby girl in the private adoption circuit is worth her weight in gold, I’m sorry to say. With a forged birth certificate and adoption release, the fees start at twenty thousand dollars. That’s big money here.”
“It’s big money anywhere.” Anger choked Daniela at the thought of a defenseless little girl in the hands of conscienceless men.
When she’d been young, she’d thought this was simply how things were done. The strong made choices for the weak—the natural order of things. Everybody accepted it, the same way they accepted the start of the rainy season, the floods, and the fact that some snakes and bugs were poisonous.
But since then, she’d seen a different world. She’d seen freedom and justice, neither perfect in the US either, but better than here. She could no longer accept the “this is how things are”explanation. She had no intention of accepting it.
The detective leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his large belly, over his rumpled jacket and stained tie. “I don’t think the visiting volunteers were involved. I checked them thoroughly. They alibied out each other. And this was not a crime of opportunity. This is something set up in advance. You have to have connections for this sort of thing.”
Daniela said, “You must know the people in town who are usually involved in activities like this. You must have looked into them.”
He nodded. “We have suspicions about one gang in particular when it comes to trafficking babies. But we have no specific lead that points to them in this case. I had the gang watched for as long as I could justify it in the budget. They only have about a dozen members, but to watch that many…” He made a helpless gesture with his hands. “We simply don’t have the manpower.”
“What have you done so far?” Ian asked. “Just so we don’t duplicate.”
“We brought in as many gang members as we could catch for questioning, nine altogether. Believe me, we’re working this case as hard as we can. A kidnapped American child is not good news to any city. All we need is for tourists to stop coming. The economy is in a crisis already.” Resignation echoed in Santos’s tone. “The police just went through budget cuts. Now we have fewer people to solve more crimes, because, of course, the worse the economy, the higher the crime rate. I’m sure things are done better in the United States.”
“Don’t bet on it,” Ian said. “Some things are the same everywhere.”
