I know nothing about immigration law. I never even took the class in law school. There could be a lot of business in this neighborhood, melting pot that it is, but I always assumed they went to people who had some connection with their community or at least spoke their language. I barely know enough Spanish to get a glass of water in a Mexican restaurant. It made me wonder why Monica Fullbright had really come to see me. I was about to ask her when she stubbed out her cigarette and pulled a Gucci wallet out of her purse. She laid ten crisp one hundred dollar bills on the desk.

“I’m afraid if I go down there to look for her they’ll know I’ve been hiring her illegally. I don’t want my ex-husband to find out she’s gone because he’ll give me hell about the kids being alone. He knows Carmen and he thinks she does a great job. If I don’t get her back, he might take me to court to change custody. He’s got a new girlfriend living with him now. Maybe he thinks she’d do a better job than I have. I don’t know. I just don’t want to have any problems. I told you you’d think it was silly.” Monica Fullbright sighed and shook her head the naughty schoolgirl way again.

Damn it. Custody cases are ugly. The clients are always hysterical. But at the hundred dollars an hour I was going to charge, who’s to complain? I opened my legal pad to a clean piece of yellow paper.

“How long has she been gone?”

By the time Monica Fullbright left half an hour later, the ashtray was overflowing and I had learned a lot about her. That she lived near the Rancho Tennis Club with her two children, Mikey, who was five, and Luke, who was almost seven. That her ex-husband was a hot-tempered TV producer with an Italian last name, and he was paying a grand a month in child support. Despite all the details she gave me about the household and the good-natured ministrations of the loyal Carmen, the only thing I managed to write down was the name—Carmen Luzano.

She had left LA on July 21 and was due back on the sixth of August. That was three days ago. I didn’t bother to jot down the description Monica Fullbright gave me. Dark skin, five feet tall, shoulder-length black hair. It would be hard to guess how many women in this town fit that description. There had to be at least half a million of them. Mexico. Guatemala. Two hundred thousand at a conservative estimate had fled the bloody civil war in El Salvador.