CHAPTER 72
Simone glances around her. ‘Go on.’
‘The reason Max had an alibi is that he doesn’t do the kidnappings, but he does feed them the victims,’ Moody explains. ‘You were half right with your theory about the camp. But you missed a piece.’
Simone closes her eyes. So the British man was involved. Primed to send the names of kids whose parents were arriving to somebody even worse than him.
‘A Border Patrol officer named Michaela worked the Mexican border but lives in Fort Davis.’
At this, Simone takes a breath. Michaela. Michaela in the cowboy hat.
Michaela, who was female, but tall and broad … enough to kidnap?
The kidnapper, who always obscured their voice, their appearance …
Moody pauses. ‘That’s your woman.’
Michaela, who actually asked if Simone was all right at the border. A cruel double bluff.
Moody continues, ‘Michaela is Max’s cousin.
She recently bought a Porsche. Unusual for someone of her vocation.
On the day you arrived, a police friend who got her phone records for me just now tells me Michaela received a call from a phone registered to somebody else in Border Patrol, who works in the airport you flew into,’ Moody says.
‘Named Danny. I’ve been pulling every lever to find stuff out. ’
The man with the burrito in the airport.
‘Two hours later, Michaela buys a different phone. A contact I have at Buc-ee’s tells me she often does so.
Jon-Paul Delves is seen there on CCTV, meeting her and then leaving.
Then, according to number plate recognition, Michaela drives underneath two gantries that are on the way to the lodge.
Photos so clear I could see her lemon air freshener dangling in her car. ’
Simone closes her eyes. It makes sense. Max selected candidates from camp.
Then, when Michaela knew a parent was arriving, she used a contact, Danny, in the airport to get information from their ESTA.
Then she, ostensibly a nice officer on the coach, the one with the daughter – just like the kidnapper – training to be a space psychologist, let the parents through the border despite the sniffer dogs’ alerts. It’s so obvious.
The entire time, Max was on the coach and it was probably him who told the police that Lucy and Simone were seen together on it, to discredit them. But he wasn’t the kidnapper, so had an alibi.
It’s so, so obvious now.
It worked so seamlessly for them. A chain-link of crimes, undetected when viewed in isolation.
‘What’s her surname?’ she asks. ‘Michaela?’
‘Wyatt.’
‘Michaela Wyatt.’ And, just like that, a mystery is solved.
The Border Patrol officer. All that anxiety of transporting the drugs was for nothing.
She was being instructed to do it by the very person who would ensure that she could.
She directed Simone so precisely, timed it so she would be checked by her on her shift. Of course she did.
Michaela had spoken to her at the height of her panic, and she had told her about her daughter while knowing Simone’s was held captive – and alone – back at her house.
Then she handed Lucy over to Jon-Paul Delves.
He was a criminal for hire, nothing more, nothing less.
A nefarious, immoral person who would deliver Lucy once he had her.
Before that, Michaela had taken Lucy from her bed.
Gloved hand and all. The lemon smell came from the air freshener in her car; even Simone’s nose had no chance of smelling that on her when she’d been at work all day.
And if anyone else had searched Simone, Michaela had covered her tracks so well that she simply would’ve watched on as Simone was arrested.
There would never have been any point in telling the police, she supposes. The whole thing was too organized. She could do nothing except engage with it. A small shard of relief: she was right to answer the ransom.
She was right. She couldn’t have done anything differently.
She says to Moody: ‘Thank you.’ The handset is warm from her body heat and relief, humming, too, with a kind of optimism that Simone doesn’t trust.
‘You’re welcome,’ Moody replies. ‘It was you who figured it out, anyway.’ He pauses, and Simone waits.
‘I’ve got a tail on her, following her. But, and I hate to say this, she’s retired from Border Patrol.
I suspect maybe she gave up because of what happened with you and Jon-Paul. Too high profile.’
Disappointment floods Simone’s body. ‘And the hearing is in two days.’
‘We could cancel that. Adduce it at trial.’
‘She’s left, Moody! Our only chance was to catch her doing it. She’s not going to confess.’
‘I know.’ A beat. ‘I know.’
‘I can’t go to trial on that.’ She pauses, the excitement dying.
‘In the witness box, she’ll just lie. I can’t risk it on someone who will have covered every base.
She will have hundreds of colleagues who will vouch for her.
It’s all been done on burner phones. She doesn’t even sell the drugs herself … She’s left the force.’
‘You could take the risk. Reject the plea, go to trial.’
‘I can’t, Moody. I can’t risk it for Lucy. A decade,’ she repeats back to him. ‘A decade.’
The kidnapper: a mother of a daughter. The symmetry, the irony, isn’t lost on Simone. Who better to ransom a mother than one herself, who knew what women are made of?
Visiting hours the next day, now the day before Simone’s arraignment and guilty plea, and they’re in the side rooms. Sometimes, visiting hours take place in the main Visitors’ Centre, sometimes here, cubbyholes with glass screens and telephones.
There seems to be no reason why it’s sometimes one thing and sometimes another, like many things in jail.
The same reason breakfast is served at five thirty in the morning.
There has not been a single effort to make the cubbyhole anything less than completely depressing. Nothing on the walls. Despite the lack of physical contact, Lucy is still body-scanned on the way in. She sits down on a plastic blue chair and looks at her mother.
Lucy is likely ageing underneath the surface. Simone might not even notice it, until so much time has passed that she has grey hair and wrinkles and so, today, she scrutinizes her for changes.
She is wearing a cornflower-blue top that Simone doesn’t recognize. She’s gained back the weight she lost. Nothing else.
Lucy rubs at her eyes. ‘How are you?’ she says into the phone. The screen distorts her, just slightly, reminding Simone that they are not quite seeing each other in person.
Perhaps it is Simone’s imagination, but she is almost always marked very precisely by a guard, and wonders if this is because she has drugs offences on her records.
One passes by now, walking heel to toe, a slow lap, listening in on their intimate communications in the way the law entitles him to do.
‘How’s the house?’ she asks Lucy.
‘It weirdly feels like home,’ Lucy says. ‘That little pink house. It’s OK. It was nice to hear from Moody.’ Simone had used her phone call after Moody left to explain to Lucy that it hadn’t been him who had betrayed them. A beat. ‘You’d hate what Dad is cooking.’
‘It can’t be as bad as here,’ Simone says drily, and Lucy lets out laughter that sounds for a second just like a child’s.
‘I’d agree there. But it’s really awful. We had scrambled eggs this morning in the shape of a square box.’
‘God, is he microwaving them?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Tell him to fry them in a pan, for God’s sake.’
‘I will.’
‘But is it – is it nice, no longer hiding?’
‘It is nice,’ Lucy says carefully, but doesn’t add any more than that. ‘What news from here?’ she asks.
Simone steels herself, takes a breath. ‘Well, Moody thinks he has found your kidnapper. He thinks it’s a woman.’
‘What?’ Lucy says slowly, her voice audible only down the phone but her expression of guarded horror playing out right in front of Simone. But then her face changes. ‘It could be a woman,’ she says simply. ‘Yes. No voice. Yes. Strong, tall, but not necessarily male. You just imagine it is.’
‘Right.’
‘How old?’
‘Fifties.’
‘She’s a perfect kidnapper, in a way: someone who can hide in plain sight. A middle-aged woman. No one looks at old women.’
Lucy’s not wrong, but, nevertheless, throws Simone a tiny self-conscious grin. ‘Sorry.’
Simone laughs softly, and she tells Lucy what Moody told her.
‘So Max chose us, then she did it, with help from the other guy?’
‘Seems so. That other guy works the airport; I spoke to him briefly. Enough – unfortunately – to tell him we were staying together, enough for him to know how much I love you.’
‘Oh,’ Lucy says, her mouth round with surprise. ‘You told him that?’
‘Said I had missed you so much. I tell everyone. It’s obvious, too, without me saying …’
Lucy gives her a sad half-smile through the glass. ‘And the rest is bum luck,’ she says, her voice melancholic. ‘That you dropped one of the bars of drugs.’
‘Exactly. I think so.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Michaela Wyatt.’
‘So that’s her,’ Lucy says slowly. ‘The person we tried so hard for so long to find.’ Another pause.
‘She was there all along, at the border, assisting you.’ She fiddles with nothing, just the table – there’s nothing in there, not her phone or a set of keys or anything.
‘We now know who she is, the spectre over all this. A woman.’
‘I know.’
‘What was she like?’
‘Cowboy hat. Seemed benign enough.’
‘All that time. You’d met her, too.’
‘I know.’
‘God,’ Lucy says, and they lapse into silence. One more visiting hours tomorrow, before her sentencing, then after that … between twenty and forty. Between twenty and forty. The thought throbs in Simone’s ears like a bass beat. But she knows this is the right thing to do.
‘And now she’s retired, Moody tells me,’ Simone relays to Lucy, whose shoulders drop.
‘So she’s no longer doing it.’
‘Right.’
‘With no evidence she ever did.’
‘… Right.’
‘If you went to trial, she’d deny it on the stand, wouldn’t she? And what jury would believe it was a woman?’
‘Yes. And have her colleagues and Max say it’s preposterous. There’s zero evidence anyone at camp was ever kidnapped. God knows how many were – they’re always told not to tell. It could be hundreds. It could be just a few. No one will admit to shipping drugs.’
Lucy shrugs, and the gesture is so inadequate that both of them smile grimly. Simone has depressed even Lucy with her resolution, with her botched saving of the day.
‘How long do you think you will stay?’ Simone asks, finally saying it. ‘After.’
‘Forever,’ Lucy says. She meets Simone’s eyes and gives a kind of enigmatic smile. Simone can’t read it. It is both self-conscious but also knowing.
‘No – that’s not the idea!’ Simone says. ‘You’re going home.’
‘I can’t leave you here,’ Lucy says. Somehow, the plastic phone, the glass screen, it makes this more self-conscious, not less. Simone doesn’t feel one step removed; she feels on display.
‘I want you to be truly free. Go to RADA. Anything,’ Simone tells her, but Lucy just shrugs again.
A beep sounds: five minutes left. A kind of toddler timer set for inmates, to attempt to cut down on tantrums. Simone heaves a sigh.
This is it until tomorrow, and she can’t even hug her.
Back to her cell, to lie on the shitty bed, the too-soft mattress, her view of her stainless-steel toilet that looks like a loo from an aeroplane. Another day done of fourteen thousand.
They don’t say much of anything for the remaining five minutes.
Perhaps each is thinking of the kidnapper, some career criminal in Border Patrol, perhaps not.
Perhaps they’re both thinking how close to the truth they got with Max.
But they just sit there, two solid weights opposite each other, separated by a screen, but, otherwise, just as before.
They have shared a space a thousand times, a tent, a car, a sofa.
Companionable silence. Simone is grateful for it.
‘Save the day?’ Lucy says, just as she stands to leave.
‘How?’
‘I’m going to sing at the top of my lungs on the way home – the Uber driver can stuff it,’ she tells her. ‘I’m going to sing … what’s the cheesiest song you can think of?’
‘Uh …’ Simone pauses, a hand to the phone, then stands, puts it to the glass the way she did in the coach way back when, to Mexico.
Don’t go, she is thinking, the same refrain as always, a minor chord set for the song of motherhood.
I’ve let you go, it’s the right thing to do, but please don’t leave me.
It’s exaggerated, for Simone, the separation, but it’s still natural, too, to reach this point: the empty nest. Hers is a jail cell, that’s all.
‘The cheesiest, most rubbish song,’ Lucy says, and she comes towards the glass screen, too, matching her palm to Simone’s. Both leave sweaty smears – the heat of jail and the nervous energy of hundreds of inmates. ‘“MMMBop”,’ Lucy eventually says, and Simone breaks into a smile.
‘Deal. I’ll sing “MMMBop” in my cell.’
‘You’ll be in the green overalls before you know it.’