He dragged his finger along the faces of the file cabinets as he walked. “Here we are,” he said. He slid open the drawer second from the top and found the green folder he wanted, opened it, and held it for me to see. “Rosalita Gonzalez,” he said.

I studied the picture. It was old, frayed at the bottom. It showed a woman standing in front of a small house with an older woman. The young woman held a small dog in her arms, a Pekingese, maybe.

“Is this the woman you saw?”

“I can’t say,” I said, reaching out and touching the picture with the tip of my right index finger. I traced the outline of her face, touched the dog. “I saw her only once, and this photo is not very clear.”

Deocampo closed the folder. “You seem like a good man,” he said. “There is a lot of sadness here because of this. It is easy to get people’s hope up. Is that how you say it?”

I nodded. Hope, hopes, it was the same thing. I saw no need to correct him on such a small thing, or even a bigger thing.

“Maybe the police in New Mexico will listen to you?”

As he said this, I wondered why I had not gone to the New Mexico police at first. Perhaps it was because I saw them as white, but, frankly, they scared me, seemed too much like the men I was reporting. More likely it was because I didn’t have a real story to tell them.

“There are others,” I said. “I think some white men are holding them as prisoners. Slaves.”

Deocampo put the folder back into the cabinet and pushed in the drawer. He paused his hand on the handle.

“I don’t think the police in America will believe me. I think my story sounds crazy. It does, doesn’t it?”

“Not so crazy. You believe you saw a missing woman. It happens every day. Here, a woman goes missing every day.”

“What should I do?” I asked.

“Where do you live?”

“Los Angeles.”

He looked at me, I thought, as if that piece of information helped him better make sense of all of this and me. “Go home, Mr. Wells. Be with your daughter.”

“You’re not going to call anyone, are you?”

Deocampo looked at his watch. “How much time do you have? Do you have time for a drive? An hour?”

“Of course.”