Girls Like Us(10)

“Well, right. Because then ICE would come knocking.”

“No one really seemed to notice she was gone. Took them almost two months to ID her.”

“What about her parents?”

“Dad was never in the picture. Mom’s a mess. She’d go MIA for weeks at a time. The girl bounced around. Sometimes she’d stay with her neighbors. She was tight with one of them. Girl named Luz Molina. Both did some escorting. They used a driver sometimes to take them to motels or clients’ houses. An ex-con named Giovanni Calabrese. He runs a limo company out of Wyandanch. Thinks he’s a pimp. Drives a tricked-out white Escalade with custom rims.” Lee rolls his eyes.

“How’d they find themselves a driver?”

“Not sure. Maybe online? Once Ria met Calabrese, she stopped advertising on Craigslist and Backpage. He connected her with clients directly. Rich ones, according to your dad. Calabrese runs a high-end operation.”

“Was Calabrese driving Ria the night she went missing?”

“Yeah. He said he dropped her off in a motel parking lot. GPS backed that up, and the motel attendant remembered seeing his car pull into the lot, idle by the curb, and then leave. Ria was supposed to spend the night with a client and call Calabrese to pick her up in the morning. He never heard from her again.”

“I assume he had an alibi?”

“He did. It checked out. He was out all night, partying with friends.”

“And the client?”

“Never did figure out who it was.”

“Did the motel have security cameras? Client records?”

“Cameras were broken. Had been for months. Most of the clients paid in cash. It’s that kind of establishment.”

“Were there any leads at all?”

Lee sighs. “There was a landscaper. Alfonso Morales. He lives in Brentwood, down the street from the Sandoval house. Ria’s friend Luz said he used to stare at Ria when she passed by. Followed her a couple of times, too. Luz said that she once heard footsteps around the house late one night when Ria was staying over. She thought she saw a man staring in at them through the back window.”

“And she thought it was Morales?”

“That was her guess, but she never called the police or anything.”

“Does Morales still live in Brentwood?”

“Last I checked.”

“And what about Luz?”

“Not sure. I assume so. She works at a bar down by the marina now. Hank O’Gorman’s place. Remember him? I see her there sometimes. I hope what happened to Ria scared her straight, you know?”

“Scared her straight?”

“Got her to stop selling herself.”

I take a beat. “You do understand that most girls don’t choose that life, right?”

“Everyone makes choices.”

I take a deep breath and decline to respond.

“Oh.” Lee snaps his fingers. “There was a thing about a red truck. Morales drives a maroon pickup. The motel clerk said he thought he saw a red truck in the lot the night Ria was there, but he couldn’t say for sure. And he couldn’t positively ID Morales.”

“Did you talk to Morales?”

“We picked him up a couple of times. I always thought there was something off about him myself. He looks all around when you talk to him, but never right in the eye. Got nervous when we started asking questions about Ria. At first, he tried to claim he’d never seen her before.”

“Maybe he’s scared of cops.”

“Maybe. I got a bad feeling, though. He does some work for the South Fork Preservation Society. You heard of them?”

“The plover people?”

Lee snorts. “Yeah. They care a lot about the plover. They do projects all over the island. Run by a bunch of bored hedge-fund wives, mostly. Too much time on their hands and definitely too much money. They buy up land for preservation and do sand dune restoration and that kind of thing. Last summer, Morales was working at one of their sites in the Pine Barrens, not too far from where the body was buried. He was planting trees out there. And guess what the tree roots were wrapped in?”

I raise my eyebrows. “Burlap.”

“You got it. He had yards of it in his truck. Same make, everything. That said, it’s pretty common. You can find it in most of the nurseries on the North Fork.”

“You find anything else? Hair, blood?”

“Nah. We searched the car, his house. Nothing.”

“What about DNA?”

“Vic’s body was too badly degraded to find anyone else’s DNA. Morales had scratches on his hands and a big, nasty gash on his leg. Looked like it was healing up, so maybe a few weeks old. Matched up with our timeline.”

“Did he have an explanation?”

“Claimed he got injured on the job.”

“Plausible.”

“I guess. In the end, we had to let him walk. Your dad didn’t think we had enough to hold him.”

“What did you think?”

Lee sighs. “I thought he might be good for it. At least, I thought we should have turned him over to ICE, let them get rid of him. Better safe than sorry, right? But what did I know? I was two weeks into homicide. And your dad wasn’t really into friendly suggestions.”