“I had one in his, too.”
“Would that make you any less dead if he’d pulled the trigger?” He bit her shoulder, then gently pulled out of her and turned her around. He buried his fingers in her hair, holding her head as he sank into a kiss as hungry and devouring as if they hadn’t just made love. She gripped his wrists and let that steely strength wrap around her, soaking it up and using it to bolster her own. There was so much still to be done . . . tomorrow. She would spend the rest of the night just being with her lover.
Tomorrow she would go to New Mexico. Only part of her mission had been accomplished. She still had to find her son.
24
In the night, while she drowsed with her head on his shoulder and one arm draped across his stomach, he said absently, “I think I should tell you something.”
She woke enough to murmur, “What?”
“True’s my half brother.”
She sat straight up in bed. “What?”
“Get back down here,” he said, tugging her down into place once more on his shoulder.
“Neither of you go out of your way to broadcast the relationship, do you?” she demanded sarcastically.
“He hates my guts and I hate his. That’s the relationship.”
“So he knew exactly who you were and where to find you when I first asked!”
“No. He’s never known where to find me.”
Wow. They were really close, weren’t they? “You have the same mother, obviously.”
“Had. She’s dead. But, yeah. He was around five, I guess, when she left him and her husband and went to Mexico with my father. She had me, she left my father, she found another guy.”
“But she took you with her when she left him.”
“For a while, until I was about ten. Then she sent me to live with him. I doubt they were ever married, and now that I think of it, unless True’s father divorced her before I was born, my last name might legally be Gallagher.” He sounded only mildly interested, and she knew he’d never go to the trouble of looking up the legal documents to find out.
“Why does he hate you? Does he even know you?”
“We’ve met,” he said briefly. “As for hating me, his mother left him for my father. Then when she left my father, she took me along. She didn’t take True when she left his father. Old-fashioned resentment, I guess. And I’m half Mexican. He hates Mexicans, period.”
She had never picked up on any prejudice from True, but that would be something he kept hidden, wouldn’t it? Especially in El Paso. He was a man intent on climbing as high as he could go, and it wasn’t smart to offend the people who would help him along the way.
“What happens now? Shouldn’t you tell whoever you deal with”—she waved a hand to indicate the universe—“about Susanna and True?”
“I did that as soon as I talked to Enrique Guerrero. They’re being watched to make certain they don’t try to leave the country. As for gathering the hard evidence, I leave that to the other guys. They have the crime labs, the forensics experts. Normally I just find people for them; I don’t get involved in the crime solving.”
She felt flat. Perhaps she’d watched too many crime dramas on television, but she wanted a big showdown, with violence and a full confession and True being led away in handcuffs. Played out this way, she wouldn’t even get to ask him the question that burned in her mind: Why? She couldn’t go near him now, not without tipping him off, because there was no way she could act normally around him, and she probably wouldn’t be allowed to see him later.
She didn’t care about his confession, about the careful gathering of evidence. She wanted to see him staked out the way Pavón had been staked out. She wanted him to suffer the way she had suffered. She wondered what it said about her as a person that she wasn’t suffering agonies of the conscience about Pavón, but she wasn’t. She was glad he was dead. She was glad she’d been involved.
“Tomorrow I’ll try to find this woman in New Mexico,” she said, changing the subject because she couldn’t let herself focus on True right now. Her job wasn’t finished. “She’s the next link in the chain. She knows which birth certificates are false.”
“Adoption papers are usually sealed. In these cases, you can bet they are. It’s a dead-end road.”
She shook her head. “I can’t accept that. I still haven’t found my son, so I have to keep trying. Finding the people who took him—that was just part of it, the smallest part.”
Diaz fell silent, his hand rubbing up and down her bare back. Milla breathed in his scent and warmth, and felt comforted, strengthened by this short lull before she once again had to throw herself into what seemed like a never-ending effort. She nestled closer against him, feeling herself lapse back into sleep, and this time he let her.
He was gone when she woke in the morning. She sat up in bed and stared in bewilderment at the empty space beside her. He was gone. He wasn’t just downstairs making coffee, or in the bathroom; she could sense that the condo was empty except for herself.
She got out of bed and looked around for a note, but of course there wasn’t one. His communication skills were rusty, to say the least. Or rather, he communicated just fine when he wanted to, but a lot of times he simply didn’t feel the need. She tried his cell phone number. The irritating voice said the customer was not available, meaning he didn’t have the damn thing turned on. She growled in frustration.
Thinking about his cell phone reminded her of her nonworking one. She had to do something about it today before she went to New Mexico. She put on coffee and got out her atlas to locate the town where Pavón had said the woman falsified the birth certificates. It was located exactly where it needed to be to make getting to it from El Paso difficult. She glanced at the clock; the travel agency wasn’t open yet. Depending on what the airline schedules were, she might well be able to get there faster by driving. “Fast” was a comparative term, of course. The earliest she could get there was probably late afternoon. Even if she did fly, she would have to either go to Roswell, rent a car, and drive north, or go to Albuquerque and drive east.