The Girl in the Glass Box: A Jack Swyteck Novel Read online

  Dedication

  For Tiffany

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by James Grippando

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Dominican women are the most beautiful women in the world.

  Julia Rodriguez had heard it said a thousand times since coming to Miami. Usually she just smiled and took it as a compliment.

  “But you don’t sound Dominican,” people would also tell her. Sometimes it came from native speakers with an ear for Dominicanismos—like “chilaxing,” which means exactly what it sounds like in English, and which was part of the Dominican lexicon long before American millennials embraced it. Other times, however, seemingly innocent questions about her accent felt more calculated, a passive-aggressive way of fishing for her exact ancestry. Or her immigration status.

  “Another Haitian hot chocolate, Julia!” the waitress shouted from the end of the long coffee bar. Julia was behind the counter, working the espresso machine. She’d been on her feet for nearly eight hours, since five a.m.

  “Coming up,” she said.

  Miami’s January cold snap, with temperatures way down into the fifties, made Haitian hot chocolate a seasonal sensation at Café de Caribe, and Julia made it like no other barista in South Florida. She started by hand-shaving a ball of pure chocolate. Then she’d simmer cinnamon sticks, star anise, nutmeg, and fèy bwadin leaves, when she could find them at the markets in Little Haiti, but mace was a passable substitute when she couldn’t. An enchanting aroma filled the coffee bar as she combined the ground chocolate, sugar, some vanilla essence, and a pinch of salt. The final step was to thicken with plenty of evaporated milk, which she crowned with shavings from the rind of a green bergamot orange, a shriveled, pungent limelike fruit.

  Julia claimed it was her Haitian grandmother’s recipe, no one the wiser that she had no idea who her grandmother was, let alone if she was Haitian. Sometimes she’d embellish even further, telling customers of a beautiful ebony woman with a French accent who’d migrated from Port-au-Prince and survived by selling delicious Haitian hot chocolate on the streets of Santa Domingo. Most Dominicans were of mixed European and African ancestry, and those who openly admitted to Haitian blood ran a unique risk; the country deported thousands of Haitian descendants every year, even if they were born in the DR. But the politics of island immigration mattered not to Julia’s story, for in reality she’d never set foot in Hispaniola, be it the Dominican or Haitian side.

  “Julia, can I see you in my office, please?”

  It was the café manager. Duncan McBride was one of those people who liked to tell Julia that Dominicans were the most beautiful women in the world, though hearing it over and over again from the middle-aged gringo who approved her paycheck was just creepy.

  “Be right there, Mr. McBride.”

  Julia watched out of the corner of her eye as the manager retreated to the office at the end of the hallway and closed the door. Her hands shook as she poured the hot chocolate into a porcelain cup and, for the first time all day, knocked it off the saucer and spilled it all over the counter.

  “Puchica,” she said, instinctively reverting to her native tongue.

  A coworker grabbed a clean hand towel and came to her aid. “I got it, honey. And by the way, in the DR it’s coño, not puchica.”

  Every country has its own way of saying “damn.” “Gracias, Elena.”

  Elena was Dominican and the first coworker to realize that Julia was not who she claimed to be. But they’d become friends, and, rather than ask questions, Elena had made herself an unofficial tutor in all things Dominican.

  “Why would he call me to the office?” Julia asked with concern. “You think he’s going to fire me?”

  “No way. You’re the best barista here.”

  “I told him I was Dominican when he hired me. You think he’s on to me?”

  “Don’t worry about that. It’s called the Café de Caribe, but hardly anyone here is from the islands. Eduardo’s Mexican. Jorge’s from Ecuador. Maria’s from Peru. We’re all the same to McBride.”

  Julia moved closer, speaking softly. “Is everyone else here legal?”

  “Of course.”

  “Really?”

  “Mmm-hmm. And we’re also all doctoral candidates at the University of Miami who decided to sling coffee while working on our dissertations.”

  They shared a laugh.

  “Just go see McBride and stick to your story. You’ll be fine.”

  Julia thanked her with a smile, then made the long walk down the hallway to the back office and knocked lightly on the door.

  “Come in,” said McBride.

  Julia opened the door and stepped into his windowless office, which was only slightly larger than a walk-in closet. Shelves lined the walls, and bags of coffee beans from eleven different countries were stacked from floor to ceiling. McBride was seated behind his metal desk.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  He asked her to close the door, which she did, and directed her to the only chair. Julia sat facing her boss, his desk between them.

  No reason to panic, she told herself.

  “So, it seems we have a little issue, Julia.” He laid a one-page document on the desktop and slid it all the way to the edge, facing her. It was the IRS form W-9 she’d completed and signed when she was hired.

  “Payroll tells me that the Social Security number you gave us doesn’t exist.
”

  Julia was speechless. She’d cleaned houses for five months, sixteen hours a day, to save up enough to buy that number. “How can that be?”

  “You tell me.”

  Julia was silent.

  “Look, you’re an awesome worker,” said McBride. “Personally, I don’t think this should even matter. You do the work, we withhold the taxes, and Social Security happily pays the money to some aging baby boomer. At the end of the day, the only thing this phony number means is you can’t claim benefits from a system you paid into. Where’s the foul?”

  “Are you saying I can keep working here?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “But I really need this job.”

  “I understand. You’re desperate. You’re probably even a little pissed off. I’m sure you talk to other employees, and right now you’re thinking, ‘Why me?’ Between you, me, and the coffee beans, here’s the situation. It’s probably less than one in a hundred new hires that we actually verify the Social Security number. Our lawyer tells us to do random spot checks just in case we ever get audited by ICE, so we can say we have a compliance program and avoid the big fines. Your bad luck: you’re the one in a hundred.”

  “So . . . I can’t work here?”

  “No. Unless—”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless we come to an understanding.”

  “What kind of understanding?”

  McBride reached across the desk for the W-9, but rather than retract it, he knocked it over the edge. His pedestal-style desk had an open front, and the paper fluttered to the floor, landing at the tunnel-like gap between the pair of side cabinets that supported the desktop.

  “Pick that up, Julia.”

  Julia was sure he’d knocked it to the floor on purpose, but she was on the verge of losing her job and chose not to make an issue of it. She leaned forward from her chair and reached down for the paper. She nearly had it when McBride’s foot shot from the opening and landed on the paper. He pulled it back toward him, drawing the paper farther under the desk. Julia glanced through the opening and got an eyeful. McBride’s pants were halfway down his thighs.

  Julia froze.

  “Do we have an understanding, Julia?” McBride took his swollen member in hand. It was obvious that he’d been thinking about this conquest for some time. “We can help each other here, Julia.”

  It suddenly occurred to her that there was no lawyer and no ICE compliance program—that she was not the randomly chosen, one-in-a-hundred new hire whose Social Security number had come back invalid. McBride had singled her out for his own pleasure.

  “Julia?”

  He wanted an answer, so Julia decided to give him one. The center drawer was suspended by metal slides beneath the desktop. Julia reached up through the opening, grabbed the back of the drawer, and pushed it open with all her strength. McBride squealed like the pig he was, as the metal face of the drawer slid forward and slammed directly into his state of self-arousal.

  “You little bitch!”

  Julia jumped to her feet, flung open the office door, and bolted from the room. She was half running, half walking as she hurried past the coffee bar.

  “What happened?” asked Elena.

  Julia was too upset to tell her. She grabbed her purse from under the counter and continued to the door.

  McBride emerged from his office with his shirt untucked, but his trousers were pulled up. “You’d better run!” he shouted down the hallway. “I’m calling ICE right now!”

  Julia kept going. The door had barely closed behind her when it burst open again. Four of her coworkers flew out of the Café de Caribe at the speed of Olympic sprinters, apparently having taken McBride’s ICE threat more generally than he’d intended.

  Julia dug her car keys from her purse, got in her car, and fired the ignition. The engine whined as it always did, and then it made a strange clicking sound that she’d never heard before. Julia made the sign of the cross, begged the Lord to forgive her for what she’d done to McBride, and turned the key once more. The engine started.

  “Gracias, Señor Jesús,” she said, and her eyes welled with tears as she steered out of the parking lot.

  Chapter 2

  Julia drove straight to Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood.

  Julia was what sociologists called the new face of Little Havana—the influx of Central Americans who moved in as the Cubans moved up and out of the immigrant neighborhood they’d established. The Nicaraguans had arrived first, driven by political and economic unrest in the 1980s. Then came the Hondurans, fleeing poverty; Guatemalans, escaping their civil war; and Salvadorans, running from gang warfare and the highest murder rate in the Western Hemisphere. The Cuban immigrant success story transformed Coral Gables, Key Biscayne, and other upscale areas into Hispanic upper-middle-class enclaves. Central Americans took over the barrios left behind, especially the East Little Havana community, close to the Miami Marlins baseball stadium and north of Southwest Eighth Street—the famous “Calle Ocho.” Where there were once Cuban sandwich shops selling media noches, there were now Nicaraguan cafeterias selling queso frito and nacatamales. Julia could have starved to death searching for a tortilla in the original Little Havana. Now they were sold on every street corner.

  “Let’s go, let’s go,” she muttered under her breath. She was behind the wheel, stuck in traffic just two blocks from her duplex. The sleek white architecture of the domed baseball stadium glimmered in the South Florida sun, casting shadows on the boarded-up businesses across the street. The school day had just ended, and a group of children walked along the sidewalk, headed for houses and apartments that had been painted orange, red, or other bright colors to look more like home. Julia looked for her daughter, but these girls were clearly middle schoolers. She could hardly believe that Beatriz was in the ninth grade.

  Julia’s old Chevy inched forward. The traffic light had cycled from red to green and back to red again. She’d barely moved. Angry motorists all around her blasted their horns. The old man in the intersection selling bags of lychee nuts from his bicycle just shrugged, as if to say, Don’t blame me.

  “I am so sorry,” Julia said to no one, but she was suddenly thinking of her four coworkers who’d fled the Café de Caribe after McBride threatened to call ICE. They could no more afford to lose their jobs than she could. Julia had taken everyone down in a desperate act of justifiable penis-cide.

  Julia shook off the guilt and focused on the problem at hand. She had a teenage daughter at home alone, with ICE possibly on the way. She dug her cell phone from her purse one more time, hoping for a miracle, but she’d missed last month’s payment, and she knew it was futile: no service.

  Gotta get home.

  A delivery van suddenly pulled away from the curb. Julia was still two long blocks from home, but she could get there faster on foot than fighting traffic. Parking on the street was normally impossible, so Julia seized the opportunity. She zoomed into the open spot and hoofed it down the sidewalk. Her duplex was at the end of the block-long coil of razor wire that ran like a man-eating slinky atop a chain-link fence, right next door to Little Havana’s “cheapest” used-tire garage, señor gomas—gomas usadas más barata!

  Julia was winded from the two-block sprint from her car as she hurried inside. She locked the door with the chain, caught her breath, and shouted, “Beatriz!”

  A response didn’t come quickly enough. Julia ran to the kitchen. Beatriz was at the table staring into an open algebra textbook.

  “Why didn’t you answer me?”

  Beatriz looked up from her homework. “Did you say something?”

  “Ay. Never mind. You need to pack a suitcase.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Your aunt’s house.”

  “Why?”

  “Because ICE is coming.”

  Beatriz rolled her eyes. “You always say ICE is coming.”

  “This time is different. My boss turned us in, and he knows our ad
dress.”

  “Why would he do that to you?”

  “Because he’s a—” she started to say, then stopped herself. “It doesn’t matter why. Just go to your room and pack a bag.”

  “It’s hardly my room,” Beatriz said, grumbling. Mother and daughter shared the one bedroom, which wasn’t actually a bedroom. It was once the dining room of an old single-family house that had been chopped into three apartments for five different families.

  Julia chased her all the way to the dresser, threw a suitcase on the bed, and unzipped it. “Pack enough for at least two weeks.”

  “Two weeks!”

  “Yes. We have to stay away from this house till I’m sure ICE isn’t coming.”

  “You know, Mom, if ICE comes, you don’t have to answer the door.”

  “What if they break down the door?”

  “ICE can’t enter anyone’s house unless they have a search warrant from a judge. If they knock on the door, you just don’t answer.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Every immigrant knows that.”

  “Yeah, all the ones back in El Salvador.”

  “No, Mom. Mr. Perez told me. My social studies teacher.”

  “Is Mr. Perez going to be our lawyer and keep us from getting deported if ICE does beat down the door?”

  “You’re impossible.”

  Julia yanked open a dresser drawer and threw a handful of Beatriz’s clean socks into the suitcase. “No, I’m your mother. Get packing.”

  Beatriz started by picking up her favorite jeans from the floor. Over the next five minutes, mother and daughter systematically worked their way through the rest of their possessions, some things landing in the suitcase, other things being left behind. When the bag was full, Julia zipped it up, and Beatriz grabbed her school backpack.

  “Let’s go,” said Julia, and she wheeled the bag out of the room. Beatriz followed her to the door, and the last thing Julia grabbed on her way out was the small crucifix that hung on the wall. She put it in her purse, locked up the house, and hurried down the steps toward the street.

  “Does Tía know we’re coming?” asked Beatriz.

  “No, I didn’t have a chance to call her.”

  “How do you know we can stay there?”

  “Because she’s my sister.”

  “Can I drive?”