That’s what you call a good assistant-one who solves problems for his boss.

“That’s one terrific woman,” Payne said with genuine praise.

Coughlin turned to Payne.

“Yeah, and one terrific cop.” He paused. “And you, Matty, are one lucky one. Guess where you’ll be at three twenty-two this afternoon?”

[THREE] 826 Sears Street, Philadelphia Wednesday, September 9, 8:16 A.M.

Sitting on the well-worn parlor couch, her legs crossed beneath her, Rosario Flores sipped from a can of Coca-Cola.

Across from her, Paco and Salma Esteban each sat in a stackable molded plastic chair, of the type commonly found on backyard patios.

“Are you sure?” Salma Esteban said softly, leaning toward her.

Rosario nodded. “It is all my fault. I could have stopped it, or at least been smarter, when we met El Gato in Matamoros…”

She then explained herself.

It had been no accident that Ana and Rosario had crossed paths with Juan Paulo Delgado just over the border from Brownsville, Texas.

On that late afternoon in March, he had lain in wait, carefully watching the pedestrian traffic crossing the Gateway International Bridge into Matamoros, Mexico. He again was ready to cull from the crowd.

Ana and Rosario, wearing jeans, T-shirts, and dirty sneakers, were walking off the bridge in a group of twenty others. They had been officially declared by United States immigration officials to be unaccompanied minors. They had no way of knowing, of course, but they had joined some 35,000 other immigrant children who in a given year were so declared and, accordingly, lawfully deported.

This afternoon’s group was a mix of teenagers and younger children. One was a six-year-old, being carried by another teenager, whose mother was said to be missing in the desert. And Rosario held the hand of a sad-eyed ten-year-old boy whom she’d met only an hour earlier, when the group had been gathered. He’d warmed to her and taken her hand.

Two days earlier, Ana and Rosario had been in another group, one of a dozen Latino women and children, when they were caught illegally attempting to enter the United States of America.

They had come from Honduras, setting out weeks earlier by foot, then crossing Guatemala and Mexico by truck and train. When they had reached the Rio Grande, the “Great River” that was the United States border, their coyotes waited with them in the foliage until night, then secretly ferried the group the thirty-yard distance across in three small rubber rowboats.

Then bright portable floodlights had popped on. And they were almost immediately apprehended-following a futile attempt at fleeing-by the green-uniformed officers of the United States Border Patrol.

At that point, of course, their coyotes were nowhere to be found north of the border.

The American government’s processing of unaccompanied minors was similar at all southern U.S. points of entry. Within twenty-four hours of the declaration, with the detainees held in secure rooms, the usual telephone call was made to the local Mexican consulate. For Ana and Rosario, that meant the one in Brownsville. It was located on Mexico Boulevard, adjacent to the Amigo-land Shopping Mall, not quite a mile’s walk to two of the three bridges there that crossed into Mexico.

The Mexican consulate in Brownsville then arranged for an official in Matamoros with the more or less Mexican equivalent of child protective services to meet the group of unaccompanied minors. The children then would be repatriated to Mexico and, the Mexican government hoped, swiftly returned to their families.

The cold damn reality of that, however, was that in all likelihood their immediate family was still in the United States (parent and child having gotten separated during a crossing, for example). Or, worse, that their immediate family no longer existed for one of any number of tragic reasons, including a mother being lost and presumed dead in the desert.

And the task of (a) finding the child’s extended family and then (b) getting them to agree to take custody (and with it the financial burden) of the minor was daunting-if not damn impossible.

Thus, most of the unaccompanied minors had of course absolutely no desire to be returned home. Certainly not Ana Maria Del Carmen Lopez or Rosario Flores, who had struggled-had very much risked their lives for six weeks along dangerous smuggling routes-to reach the opportunities that awaited them in America.

Yet now, Ana and Rosario-having been processed by the American immigration system and given the status of unaccompanied minors-found themselves in the late-afternoon confusion of the crowd on the international bridge.

And out of that mix of tourists taking quick trips into Mexico to shop or eat and Mexican nationals returning home from working in Brownsville, a handsome young man suddenly appeared before the pair.

He had been exceedingly charming. With a calculated manner, so that the girls would come with him not only willingly but enthusiastically, he immediately began appealing to their desires.

And he began by saying he could get the pretty senoritas back to the United States.

Rosario was charmed.

Ana was wary.

How does he know what we want? Ana thought.

That was quickly replaced with: Is it not obvious? We were just thrown out. Everyone sees it.

And I don’t want to be stuck in cells here.

When caught at the river, they’d first been in the custody of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Border Patrol. That agency had then turned them over to the Customs and Border Protection, also under DHS, which in turn had delivered them to the Mexican officials. They’d thus just suffered through the United States’ bureaucratic system, killing time in cold and sterile holding areas for what seemed like a month. It had actually been four days, and they were told it had taken longer than the standard twenty-four hours thanks to the delay of the weekend.

Neither Ana nor Rosario liked the idea of going through any of that again. Especially in Mexico, which without question would be a worse system with even fewer resources than those of the United States.

As Ana eyed the handsome young man, she thought, And we can’t get sent all the way back to Tegucigalpa.

So far, Ana and Rosario had avoided that by lying to the U.S. Border Patrol polic?a. They’d stated that they were Mexican nationals, which was what their coyotes had coached them to do if caught.

Neither had any official papers-no birth certificate, certainly no driver’s license, no passport, nothing-proving that they were or were not Mexican.

But they also did not have anything that stated they were from Honduras or Guatemala or Nicaragua or any other country. The Americans called that “OTM,” any country Other Than Mexico. If the illegal aliens admitted to being from a particular country OTM, American law required that they be sent back to that particular OTM country.

If, however, they proclaimed Mexico was their home, the norteamericanos-Customs and Border Protection, to be precise, but it made no difference to the girls which official agency-would expedite their repatriation via the nearest port of entry.

Even Ana Lopez and Rosario Flores-with very little formal education, barely able to read or write beyond basics in their mother language, let alone the least bit literate in English-had the street smarts to figure out that game. And walking across the international bridge and winding up in Matamoros was a helluva lot closer to getting back into America than being trucked or bused or whatever all the way back to Honduras.

Of course, conveniently, repatriation via the nearest port also happened to be the most expeditious option for the U.S. government and its agents.

The Mexican official who was meeting the group of unaccompanied minors was an overweight gray-haired Latina woman in an ill-fitting pantsuit. She held up a clipboard and looked more than a little weary, if not overwhelmed.