There is an old saying in police work. Never disappear on a Friday. Friday is a no work day for every detective. The work ethic is a casual as the clothes worn on that day and no one wants to start an important case that might not get looked at again until Monday. The day is usually reserved for catching up on paperwork. But today was one of those days. You just can't pick when to go missing.
I was in my office when Danny walked in carrying a file. Danny was one of the best intuitive cops I had ever met. He could read a file on a case and make a guess, and he was usually right. It just came natural to him. The file he brought me was a missing person's case. An 18 year old girl had been reported missing by her family 4 days earlier and he had caught the case. He had done some digging around and pulled phone records, talked to witnesses, the usual stuff. He threw the file on my desk, pointed at it, then looked at me and said, "She's dead". I believed him. Not because of his instincts but because of his recent stats. Danny had worked maybe 20 missing persons cases in the last year and the last three missing persons cases that he said were dead bodies, ended up in dead bodies. Not all homicides, of course, but dead nonetheless.
As if reading my mind Danny spoke, "This one's a homicide". I believed that too. I asked for the short version and Danny grabbed the file and pulled a picture from it. He then handed me the file and sat down. He explained that she had been missing for the last 4 days and no one had heard from her. No phone calls or messages had been made from her phone since the moment she disappeared. No one had reported seeing her or talking to her since then. She had also not gone to work or even picked up her purse or last paycheck since she disappeared. She left her home with an unknown friend and took no extra clothes with her. Still might be a runaway with a broken phone I thought. "What's the catch"? Danny handed me the picture. The picture was of 18 year old Jo Ana Maria Cardenas in her high school cap and gown. I understood what he meant now. She was absolutely gorgeous. I don't mean to be cruel here but there is a cynical understanding of human nature that cops have and most other people don't. This girl was a beauty. Beautiful girls are loved, wanted, needed. People need to see them and be with them. Had the picture been of an ugly girl Danny might still have called this a runaway. But a girl this beautiful cannot get away with not talking, texting, or somehow being in contact with someone who loves her. That's just the way things are. I knew she was dead too.
I asked Danny what his next step was and he smiled and said "I don't work homicides", making quotation marks in the air as he finished the sentence. "You do today", I said.
We walked to his office where Jo Ana's parents, older sister, and brother-in-law were waiting. The parents were in their late 50's, didn't speak English, and looked like they worked hard every day of their life, and never in the shade. The sister was just a couple of years older than Jo Ana and was almost as pretty. Her and Jo Ana had gone to school here most of their lives. The brother-in-law understood English but did not speak it much. I talked to the parents and let them know that we would do everything to find her. I didn't tell them I thought she was dead. There was no need for that right now, and I could be wrong, though I doubted it. The brother in law was named Jose. He was the last person to see Jo Ana alive. He explained that they were in the house and the parents and his wife had gone to go wash clothes. He said Jo Ana got ready to go out and someone in what he thought was an older model blue Buick picked her up. He explained that he didn't think she had permission to go anywhere so he borrowed her phone while she was in the shower and called her mom to let her know. He said he only saw the vehicle as it left and he argued with her to wait for her parents, but she didn't listen.
I sat there and listened to him and the rest of them recount their last contact with Jo Ana. There is no secret to listening to people. There is no fool proof way to tell if they are lying. One of my favorite methods of finding out if people are lying is to put them in a group with their family or closest friends. I have no baseline information to gauge your truth from your lies, but your close family and friends do. They have listened to you lie all their lives and they react to it in ways that sometimes even they don't notice. As each one talked I looked at everybody else. Mom, dad, and sister checked out okay with everyone else. When Jose spoke, though, his wife's body spoke even louder. She could not sit right, hold her head still, or find any place to put her hands. Everything about her told me she had a problem with him or his story. It could be she was just mad because he let her sister take off without permission, and this led to her disappearance, or it could be more. Whatever it was it was too early to divide and conquer anyway, assuming this was a homicide, but it never hurts to look ahead.
I had Danny walk them out and he met me back in my office. "The wife doesn't like his story, does she"? he asked. He had seen it also. No, she sure as hell didn't. Danny filled me in on the rest. The last phone calls from Jo Ana's phone were to her mother minutes before she left the house but it wasn't her that called, it was Jose. He had already explained that he borrowed her phone while she was in the shower. Calls and texts to friends, mom, and sister all day long, but who did she call to pick her up? We checked with neighbors and one of them did report seeing a blue Buick leave the area with who they thought was Jo Ana in the passenger seat, but they could not be sure.
It was around noon already and I sent our CSI guy and Danny ahead to the girls house to see if they could find any leads. Danny had already gone once, but I wanted the CSI guy to check for all the stuff we can't see. But I had to eat. Before going to the house I went to the nearest convenience store to get something. When I pulled into the parking lot Danny was waiting for me with my usual, - two beef and bean burritos, a bag of potato chips, and a Diet Coke. The best and fastest meal you could get for under four dollars. The beef and bean burritos didn't really have beef in them as far as I could tell. It was stuffed with re-fried beans and what I can only describe as the memory of meat, a distant memory at that. It was wrapped in a flour tortilla and deep fried until it was nice and brown, and all nutrients, if there were ever any, had been escorted out by a big vat of boiling grease. These things had been my dear friends for the last 20 years and Danny knew that. He was really pushing this case for the over time, I thought. And we should work it. There was after all a girl missing, but it was Friday, and not much was going to get done, especially if we didn't have a body. If there is one thing I learned at the PD it's that overtime is holy grail of gifts that can be bestowed upon an investigator, and it doesn't get handed out easily, much less on Friday, working a missing person's case.
I told Danny to leave his car there and he drove mine while I ate. I inhaled most of the food by the time we got to girl's house. I realize I don't want to call it a crime scene yet. I don't even know if there is a crime, and if there is, I don't know if the house is the scene of the crime. But it was the last reported place she was seen so we have to start there. The house is 12 miles away almost at the city limits. We get to the subdivision the house sits in and I realize that across the expressway from it is one of the city's landfills. I think maybe she is buried in there, and if she is it would take a miracle to find her. This particular landfill is over 150 square acres and takes in 1,100 tons of trash a day. A body could disappear there forever.
We get to the house and I meet David (the CSI guy) outside. He said he has done a sweep of the house and didn't find anything suspicious. No blood or other fluids. Nothing out of the ordinary. The house was brown and beige mobile home sitting on good size piece of dirt. There was no fence and the front yard had sparse grass on it, some bougainvilleas, and a couple of lemon trees. Two cars that appeared junked sat in a small dirt drive way that lead up to the front porch of the house. There was a small barbecue pit on the porch, empty beer cans, and some old fishing poles. Also in the front yard were 2 very small dug out pools with fish in them. Apparently Jose and his wife like fancy fish and they stocked the two holes with all kinds of tropical fish. I had honestly never seen anything like that before, other than a sushi place I went to once. I sure as hell did not expect to find it in the front yard of a Mexican owned mobile home. I stepped in the house and found a place that looked like it had been ransacked, but as is often the case around here that wasn't true. They were just messy as hell. I don't mind messy, but it sure as hell screws up a crime scene, which this wasn't, yet. How can you tell what is out of place when no object in the house has a place of it's own? I hate that.
The mobile home had a cheap carpet that smelled of old dirt. No air-conditioning and 100 degree weather produced a hot and humid feel to the place that bounced off the walls. The living room was cluttered with clothes and garbage every where. The parents room was well kept and had a small air-conditioning window unit. Jose's and his wife's room also had a small window air-conditioning unit. Jo Ana's room had a little more order to it than the rest of the house. There were pictures and purses hanging from the walls on nails, a small bookshelf, and a well ordered closet. I quickly figured that the room had been made up after Jo Ana disappeared. Everything was too carefully cleaned and put away for it to be the work of an 18 year old girl. CSI had checked for blood and other trace evidence but didn't find anything. All the linen on the bed had been washed. Her sheets were a pale yellow, and, there was one missing. Her mother told me that she did have a full set on her bed but she did not find the flat sheet when she washed her sheets. I pictured Jo Ana wrapped in it. Somewhere dumped or buried. Sure, it was possible that it was simply discarded because blood or something got on it. But no, if the suspect killed her in the house he would need to carry her out covered in something. She was wrapped in it. Her body was rolled into a ball somewhere tightly wrapped in a pale yellow bed sheet. The only question was where.
CSI then called me out to the back of the house. They had found loose dirt in a couple of areas indicating that something had recently been buried there. I asked the parents for consent to dig up the back yard and they agreed. They did not even ask why. Sometimes it's like that. The family is so lost in their own pain and confusion that they cannot even make sense of what you are asking or why. They just agreed. They did not know if their daughter was dead or not, but they already were. They had become the walking dead. Stuck somewhere between here and the the horrible truth, not wanting to move in any direction for fear of knowing. They just left.
Even with their consent I knew I would need more. If I suspected the brother in law, and he lived there, he might have some expectation of privacy. I took no chances and got a warrant to dig up the back yard. Before serving the warrant I asked the brother in law about the recent digging in the back yard. He explained that he had dug some holes to catch rain water for the fish ponds he had in the front yard. His wife and her parents confirmed that he does that every time it rains. And it had rained hard in the last few days. The brother in law said he had filled up the holes with dirt and trash he had collected in the back yard.
Within a few hours we dug up the entire back yard. Among the trash we found a bra belonging to Jo Ana and a pair of shoes belonging to her sister. Her sister said she had noticed the shoes missing and assumed Jo Ana had taken them. We showed her a photo of the bra and she confirmed it was Jo Ana's. Jose claimed he simply gathered up the items from the back yard and filled up the holes assuming everything was trash. CSI advised me that the trash was buried at slightly different times. There were layers of dirt in between the bra, shoes, and the rest of the the trash, indicating they were buried at separate intervals. The items were tagged as evidence sent to the lab for testing.
The world was closing in on Jose. I think he knew that. But it wasn't time yet. If I had any inclination she was still alive I would have swooped him up hard and taken him in for questioning. But I knew she was dead, and without a body there is no case unless I get a confession. He wasn't ready to talk yet. I could see it in his eyes.
We took everything back to the PD and regrouped. I advised my supervisor of the status of the case. He said if I was not going to interrogate Jose to shut it down for the weekend. Asshole. He was right, but still an asshole for even saying it.
The evidence so far was circumstantial. It nearly always is in murder cases. If I bring him in now and press him, and he doesn't break' then I have nothing. If I had a body I might find some evidence linking him to the murder, but I don't have one. I might never have one. I can't count on ever having one. I could turn his family against him but they still don't even suspect him, at least not consciously. They would probably take his side and cement him further in his denial.
I let everyone go home. I myself went home too. As usual I took the whole case with me. Not physically, I never forget a single detail in a case, but I took it home mentally and never let it go. I can honestly tell you I don't remember anything about going home that day. I know I did. I probably had dinner with my wife and kids but I don't remember it. I feel bad about that now. They got a sucky deal with that. Many years later when I was no longer a cop I would realize that. Had I known what I was doing back then I would have left the job much sooner.