Chapter 7: What Detective Garza Said
Detective Garza called at four o'clock.
"We've identified him," he said.
"His name is Carl Reeves.
He's been running variations of this scheme for about two years, mostly in Bexar County, targeting older residents in neighborhoods where property values have recently changed.
He looks for houses with older ownership records and no mortgage — people who've paid off their homes and are living on fixed incomes."
I sat down on the couch.
"He knew what he was doing," I said.
"He knew exactly what he was doing.
He had forty-one names on a contact list in his truck.
Forty-one households." Garza paused.
"Some of them had already paid him multiple times."
Forty-one.
"Your grandmother was one of his earlier visits in this area.
He'd already been to this neighborhood twice before her." Another pause.
"Miss Mendez, the fact that you called us when you did — that stopped him from completing this round.
We've already had four other families contact us this afternoon after we put the word out locally."
"Will they get their money back?"
"That depends on what we find in his accounts.
It won't be fast.
But we're looking." He cleared his throat.
"Your grandmother — she'll need to give a formal statement at some point.
It doesn't have to be this week.
But her account of the initial visit will be important for the case."
"She'll do it," I said.
"I had a feeling." He said it with something that might have been a smile.
"She sounds like someone who finishes what she starts."
After I hung up, I sat there for a few minutes.
Forty-one names.
I kept coming back to that.
Forty-one households.
Forty-one front doors he'd knocked on with his clipboard and his badge and his pleasant, professional manner, forty-one people who had answered because they were doing what you're supposed to do — opening the door, being cooperative, trying to stay on the right side of a system they didn't entirely understand.
Abuela Rosa came in from the kitchen with a plate of toast and set it on the coffee table in front of me without saying anything.
"Garza says there were forty-one names on a list in his truck," I said.
She sat down in the armchair across from me.
"Forty-one families," I said.
She was quiet for a moment.
"Did they catch him before he went to those houses?" she said.
"Yes."
She nodded slowly, the way she nodded when she heard something at church that confirmed what she already believed.
"Then it was worth it," she said.
"What was worth it?"
"That I told you." She picked up her rosary from the side table.
"I almost didn't.
I thought I would just find a way to fix it myself.
I didn't want you to know I had been foolish."
"You weren't foolish."
"I was frightened and I believed him and I gave him money." She turned one bead between her fingers.
"That is a kind of foolish."
"He was designed to be believed," I said.
"He practiced.
He had a clipboard and a badge and a blue shirt.
He knew which streets to target and which houses to pick and which people to look for." I leaned forward.
"Abuela.
He was a professional at making people feel exactly what you felt.
That's not foolishness.
That's being human in front of someone who decided to exploit it."
She looked at me for a long moment.
"Your mother used to argue like that," she said.
"Like what?"
"Like she was right and also like she wanted to make sure you felt it." She almost smiled.
"She was good at it too."
We sat there for a while after that — the toast going cool on the plate, the late afternoon light changing against the wall, the neighborhood quiet outside the window.
It was the particular stillness of a day that had carried a lot of weight and was finally setting it down.
Then Abuela Rosa said, "Daniel called."
I looked up.
"The young man from the shop.
He called the house phone." She paused.
"He said to tell you the drive is fully recovered.
All the files.
He said—" she glanced at the ceiling, remembering — "he said to tell you, quote, everything is there.
Even the stuff from 2019."
I put my face in my hands.
Not because I was sad.
The 2019 folder was my first real project — a small residential redesign I had done for a professor's sister as a favor, completely unpaid, that had somehow become the foundation every subsequent project was built on.
I had never backed it up.
I had not thought about it in two years.
I had assumed, without fully admitting it to myself, that it was simply gone.
"Mija," Abuela Rosa said.
I looked up.
My eyes were wet.
"I'm fine," I said.
"I know," she said.
May you like
"You look fine."
She handed me a piece of toast.
