Scratchgravel Road A Mystery

FIVE



Officer Marta Cruz was a ten-year veteran of the force—twelve if her first two years working as a custodian were included. She left Mexico fifteen years ago after an abusive relationship with her then husband had forced the relocation. She was a compact woman with a deeply lined face; the permanent scowl lines that fanned out from her eyes and mouth belied her generally positive outlook. Marta attributed the recent deepening of those lines to constant worry over her sixteen-year-old daughter, Teresa. The girl had the curves to turn a grown man’s head, and a smart mouth that would either serve her well in life, or prevent her from finding success. Either way, the girl kept her mother and the parish priest up nights with worry.

Marta was thinking about her daughter as the first raindrops slid down the windows of the police department. She was sitting at her desk, on hold, waiting for the Border Patrol agent, Jimmy Dare, to come back on the line with a report on missing illegal immigrants in the West Texas area. Marta was struggling to remain focused on her job. Teresa was draining all of her energy. She was infatuated with a boy who was too old and too experienced for her own good. Marta predicted Enrico Gomez would be in jail before the year was out, but she couldn’t convince her daughter that he was anything more than misunderstood.

Jimmy finally came back on the line. “There’s a group of three kids missing. They took off about a week ago and supposedly headed up north through Presidio, but they were in their early twenties. Doesn’t sound like your man.”

“Thanks for checking. You’ll let me know if you hear anything?” she asked.

“Will do.”

Marta hung up with Jimmy and called her home phone to check on Teresa. They had been fighting nonstop lately and Teresa had started threatening to run away from home with Enrico if Marta didn’t allow her to see him. Marta listened to the busy signal on the phone and sighed, relieved her daughter was at least home. As a single mother she had no idea how to handle her hardheaded teenager with a rotating shift and no family in town to help.

* * *

By the time Josie and Otto arrived back at the Trauma Center the rain was coming down in sheets. Josie parked just outside the emergency room door and she and Otto made a run for the building. Standing inside, shaking the rain off, they watched as Cassidy walked down the hallway with Vie on her heels. Josie was relieved to see she had apparently made a full recovery, aside from the angry red burn covering her arms, legs, and face. Josie had talked with Vie about thirty minutes prior to tell her they were coming back to talk with Cassidy. She must have decided to make a quick getaway, and Vie was determined not to let it happen.

Vie threw her hands in the air when she saw Josie and Otto. “I told her you needed to talk to her!”

Cassidy was dressed in the same yellow shorts and brown T-shirt she had been wearing when they carried her out of the desert that afternoon. She looked as if she were ready to cry.

“Hold on a minute. What’s the rush?” Josie asked.

“My boyfriend’s on his way to get me. I have to go.”

Josie turned from Cassidy and gestured back toward the entrance door. “I’m sure he’ll come in. Nurse Blessings can explain we’re talking.”

“He called a few minutes ago. He’ll be here any minute.”

“You’ve been here all day. Surely he can wait a few minutes while we talk,” Josie said.

Her lips quivered and she squinted through tears. “He doesn’t want me talking to you. I told him you were coming back and he said he was coming to get me. I can come by your office tomorrow.” Her voice had grown shrill.

Josie motioned to the brightly lit patient waiting room. “Let’s sit down for a minute. We need to ask you some questions today. I don’t think you want to come down to the police station later, do you?”

She shook her head no and sat on the edge of a plastic chair with her hands underneath her thighs. Her eyes darted around the room as if searching for an escape route, and her forehead was creased in worry. Josie wondered if it was an act to get her way, or if she was truly fearful of the boyfriend. She considered taking Cassidy in to the station just to remove her from the boyfriend’s influence so she could try and talk sense into her.

Otto sat in the seat next to Cassidy and passed her a digital camera that he had turned on and queued up. “Take a look at that picture.”

Cassidy looked at the camera, then back at Otto.

“Recognize it?” he asked.

She shook her head no.

“It’s a wallet.”

“Okay. But I’ve never seen it,” Cassidy said.

He took the camera back and advanced to the next picture. “Recognize that?”

She leaned forward to look at the picture and looked confused. “Is that the backseat in my car?”

Otto nodded, his expression grave. “You recognize it now?”

Her eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “That’s not my wallet,” she said, pointing at the camera screen.

“What do you see in the picture?”

Cassidy frowned. “A wallet, in the backseat of my car.” She looked up at Otto.

“Whose is it?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen it.”

“Does it belong to the dead man?”

Her eyes widened. “I told you, I don’t know. I’ve never seen that wallet.”

“Is it your boyfriend’s?” he asked.

“No. He doesn’t carry a wallet. He carries a money clip.”

Otto glanced at Josie, who remained impassive.

A horn honked several times outside of the emergency room doors where Josie’s police car was parked. She assumed it was Leo.

Cassidy looked toward the door but didn’t speak.

Josie said, “Did you see any other cars drive by while you were in the desert?”

“No.”

“Would you have noticed someone driving by while you were walking?”

She shook her head. “From where the dead man was I couldn’t see the road at all.”

The driver of the car outside the Trauma Center lay on the horn.

“Please. I have to go,” she said.

Josie handed her another business card. “Put this in your pocket. You call me first thing tomorrow. We’ll find a time to get your car back to you.”

She stood and Josie put a hand out to stop her. “Hold on. You have some homework to do tonight. I want you to make me a calendar that details your day, from the time you got up, through your sleeping hours, for the last four days. Start with last Friday, end with today.”

“I will. I promise.”

Josie blew air out in frustration. She didn’t know how to get through to her. “One piece of advice and you can go. Tell the truth. Whatever has happened, you need to tell me what’s going on so I can help you figure out a plan.” Josie gestured toward the honking horn outside. “He may not have your best interest in mind.”

Cassidy turned from Josie and ran from the building.

Josie pulled her keys out of her front pocket and smiled grimly at Otto to keep her anger in check. “I’ll be visiting Leo tomorrow.”

She and Otto thanked Vie for her help, but as they turned to leave Vie asked if she could talk with Josie for a minute. Josie pitched Otto the keys and he went outside into the rain. She followed Vie over to the waiting area and sat down beside her.

Vie crossed her hands in her lap and pursed her lips. “I need to talk to you in confidence.” She paused and Josie nodded for her to continue. “I’m worried about someone you work with. About their child.”

Josie considered Vie for a moment. The only one of her coworkers with a child who lived in the area was Marta.

“Okay,” Josie said, her tone cautious.

“Obviously I can’t tell you specifics, and I can’t go to the parent, but I’m worried about the direction this young person is headed.”

Josie nodded. She knew discussing patient care violated federal laws and would be cause for dismissal. The only thing that came to Josie’s mind was a rumor she’d heard recently that involved Teresa dating Enrico Gomez. Josie had dismissed it as nasty small-town gossip.

“Should I be concerned about Enrico?”

Vie nodded once, her lips forming a thin line as if forcing her to not say more, but her eyes were filled with worry.

Josie had heard enough. It meant the rumors were true. Teresa was seeing Enrico behind Marta’s back. Marta worked third shift and Teresa was often alone at home in the evenings. Enrico was a known meth user, a twenty-year-old who had done time in juvenile hall for drug possession and dealing several years ago. Josie felt sick.

Vie patted Josie’s knee and walked away, back to the ringing phone at the nurse’s station.

Josie leaned back in her seat, and stared blankly at the TV hanging from the wall, its volume muted. The weather forecaster, standing with rain dripping off the hood of her yellow rain slicker, was no doubt delivering more bad news. Josie sighed heavily and watched Vie talking on the phone. For such a smart kid, Teresa was one of the worst judges of character Josie had ever met. Her mom, who would do anything for her, got nothing but grief. Teresa made excuses for her alcoholic dad and cut her mom zero slack. And now she was running with a convicted meth user.

* * *

Cassidy pulled the car door shut and Leo slammed the accelerator, spinning the tires on the wet pavement. He didn’t speak until they were out of town on River Road. “What the hell is going on?”

She looked out the passenger window and said nothing as she tried to force down the knot in her throat. She focused on the raindrops pelting the ground, all falling at precisely the same angle. Before she had met Leo he had been an assistant physics professor. But then he had lost his job due to cutbacks. When they first started dating he would impress her with his ability to use wind speed and velocity to figure out the precise angle of raindrops, or he’d tell her exactly how long it would take to drive somewhere at a certain speed. She didn’t care, but she liked that he tried to impress her. Most guys wanted nothing more than an easy date. Now, here it was six months later, and she wondered if he was capable of murder.

He took a deep breath and blew it out in frustration. “What were you doing on Scratchgravel Road, in the middle of nowhere, passed out by some dead guy? That deserves an answer.”

Her attention remained on the rain. Numbness ran through her entire body. She felt it all the way to the middle of her brain. He had to know that she knew about his conversation the other night. Or, maybe he suspected she knew much more than she did. She wondered if her own life was in danger. She forced words out of her mouth. “I felt like getting out and walking. I just took a walk.”

“And ended up by a dead man.”

She didn’t respond.

Leo slammed on the brakes. Cassidy’s body jerked forward and she threw her hands out to keep from hitting the dash. The car fishtailed on the wet pavement and stopped in the middle of the road. She looked forward and backward and saw no other cars, but she knew it wouldn’t have bothered Leo if there were.

He turned his body toward her and squeezed her sunburned arm. She cried out in pain.

“What the hell is wrong with you! I won’t put up with this shit. I don’t like it when I can’t trust you.”

Tears stung her eyes. They were a defense she used with him that often worked. Now she cried openly, swearing to him that she just went outside to walk.

A car slowed to ask if they needed assistance, and Leo waved them on. He let go of her arm and started toward home again, leaving his questions unanswered. Cassidy’s head throbbed, and she wondered how she could force herself to climb into the same bed with him that night.

* * *

A glass entrance door opened between two large windows in the front of the Artemis Police Department. Inside, the brown-paneled office was narrow and deep. The receptionist/dispatcher area snugged in behind a waist-high counter that kept the general public just out of reach. Behind the dispatcher and her computer and radios were two metal desks used for officer intakes and interviews. Beyond the desks were a dozen filing cabinets against the wall on either side of the room, and the flags of the United States, Texas, and Artemis in the rear corner. A set of stairs in the back led upstairs to one small unused room and a large classroom-sized room that held desks for the two officers and the chief of police. A wooden conference table was located in front of the entrance to the office. When Josie became chief she declined the use of the small private office in favor of working in the same room as Otto and Marta.

Josie and Otto arrived back at the police department at eight o’clock that night. Otto stayed downstairs to discuss information Lou had for him on an ongoing burglary investigation. Josie found Marta at her desk upstairs. She was on the phone, but turned and waved hello at Josie when she entered.

Josie hung her dripping rain slicker on a hook in the back of the office and poured a cup of burnt coffee. A small table with a coffeemaker and condiments sat under one of the large plate-glass windows. The view from upstairs was one of her favorite lookouts in Artemis. Even on a gloomy rainy night she could picture the neighborhood behind the police department, lined with colorful small adobe homes with postage-stamp lawns filled with tricycles and toys and plastic swimming pools. On most spring and summer days kids bicycled endless laps around the block while men worked under the hoods of cars and women tended to small backyard gardens, fussing at the kids and gossiping with friends over the fence. As a girl, growing up without a father, Josie had imagined herself in a home just like the ones she stared at; she had imagined herself married with two kids by this point in her life, but the happily-ever-after had proven elusive.

Josie sat at her desk and watched Marta finish her phone conversation. She looked bad; her eyes were tired and her cheeks sagged. Marta wiped perspiration from her forehead as she hung up the phone even though the room was cool and damp from the rain.

She opened the notepad in front of her and flipped through a few pages of notes. “I called Border Patrol. Talked to Jimmy Dare. He doesn’t know anyone using that area as a crossing point right now. And no missing persons fit the victim’s description.”

Josie nodded. “I don’t think he was crossing the border.”

Otto entered the office and said hello to Marta, then sat down at his computer and hit the power button.

Josie continued, “It’s an odd one. The body was already decomposing, but we should still get a decent autopsy. Cowan’s guessing he was in his sixties. Hispanic. Nicely dressed. Western shirt and nice belt, jeans, and work boots. Expensive knife in his pocket. No luggage or extra bags. He had some money in his wallet, but his wallet was gone.”

“How do you know there was money if the wallet was gone?” Marta asked.

“Guess where we found the wallet?” Otto asked.

“No clue.”

“In the backseat of Cassidy Harper’s car,” he said.

Marta groaned.

Josie nodded and sat down at her desk. “Doesn’t know how the wallet got into her car.”

“And the boyfriend doesn’t want her talking to the police,” Otto said.

“She claims she went hiking because she wanted to be outside. She just happened to find a dead man. Then we search her locked car and find a man’s wallet lying on the floor of her backseat,” Josie said.

“She says she’s never seen it,” Otto said.

Marta rolled her eyes. “Of course not.”

Josie pitched her pen on her desk, frustrated with Cassidy’s unwillingness to help herself.

Otto pointed to the sketchpad in front of him. “From the angle of the bodies, it appears she crawled toward the body, then passed out about five feet from him. Her story works, we just can’t figure out why she was there.”

“Any idea how the man died?” Marta asked.

“He’d been there a few days, so cause of death is anyone’s guess,” Josie said. “The scary part was, he had sores on his arms. Multiple open lesions. Cowan’s talking about some kind of flesh-eating disease.”

Marta looked horrified. “The stuff where entire villages are killed?”

“Cowan was pretty evasive,” Josie said.

“He wasn’t his usual chipper self, if that tells you anything,” Otto said.

Josie smiled. “Leave Cowan alone. You know how lucky we are to have a coroner in a town this size who actually knows something about dead bodies?”

Otto glanced at his watch and Josie noticed it was after nine o’clock. After working second shift this evening, she and Otto had to turn around and work first shift in the morning. They drew up a quick list of priorities for Tuesday morning and she and Otto left Marta to finish out the night on her own—one of the many hazards of an understaffed, underfunded border police department.

* * *

Charcoal gray light hovered over the horizon as Josie drove home from work. The rain had momentarily slowed to a drizzle but a downpour loomed in the thick layers of clouds. Josie rolled her windows down to smell the wet earth, a smell she associated with a sense of longing and dread. She loved the sound of raindrops on her roof, listening to the deep endless roll of thunder across the desert, and watching the sheets of rain travel across the land like a curtain being drawn across a stage. But the aftermath would be ugly. Mud and sand would be on the roads for days, making travel on the back roads time-consuming, and in some areas impossible. She would start tomorrow helping the crews assess the damage to determine if roads needed to be temporarily closed until the county trucks could plow. She had a meeting scheduled with Sheriff Martínez and Smokey Blessings, the county maintenance director, at 7 A.M. to discuss plans. Smokey was married to Vie, and was her laidback opposite. He was built like a grizzly bear with a full beard and thick head of hair, but his demeanor was kind and always polite.

Josie turned right onto River Road, the best paved road in Artemis, and saw that it was already covered with debris. Most of the town’s roads were gravel, some just worn paths through the desert, or arroyos that were used only during the dry seasons. They were even harder to clean after a major storm.

Josie drove slowly and enjoyed the balmy temperature and moist air on her face. She turned onto Schenck Road and caught a glimpse of Dell Seapus’s ranch, tucked into the foothills of the Chinati Mountain range, just beyond her own home. Dell had deeded her ten acres to build a house on after she brought back his prized Appaloosa horses that a band of horse thieves had taken to New Mexico. Dell was a seventy-year-old bachelor, short and wiry, stooped and bowlegged from too many years on horseback. He was also Josie’s closest friend.

Josie looked at her house with pride as she approached. It was a small, rectangular adobe with a deep front porch. She and Dell had framed the house with brick over a two-month period, and she had hired an old Navajo Indian to plaster the faded pink exterior. Pecan timbers were used for the front porch and lintels. Josie had oiled and hand-rubbed the wood to a deep brown patina. The house looked as if it had been there for a hundred years.

As she pulled into the driveway her headlights caught Chester trotting down the lane from Dell’s house to her own. He held his head high, probably searching for a scent, but it gave him a serious look that Josie loved. Most days, Chester had already made the quarter-mile walk back down the lane to Josie’s and was lying on the front porch when she got home. She knew the dog would give his own life for hers, but at heart, he was a chicken. He didn’t like the dark.

She slammed the jeep’s door and laughed as the dog made his way up to her, his tongue hanging, back end swaying in the opposite direction of his wagging tail. He moaned and barked, his entire being happy to see her. She rubbed his long velvet ears and finally followed him up to the house where he forced his way through the door ahead of her and made a straight path to the kitchen. She heard the plastic rattle as he pushed his nose down into an open bag full of rawhide bones. Before she made it to the pantry to hang her gun belt on the hook, he had lain down on his rug in the living room for an evening snack and nap.

After she hung her uniform and bulletproof vest in her closet and changed into cotton shorts and a Texas A&M T-shirt, she wandered back to the kitchen to search the pantry shelves for dinner. She opened the cabinet to scavenge and found a can of roast beef and a can of baked beans, which she thought matched surprisingly well. She pulled them down and found the can opener in the silverware drawer. She dumped the contents into two plastic bowls with lids and stuck them in the microwave for two minutes.

As her dinner cooked, Josie pressed the button on the answering machine that sat at the end of her kitchen counter. One message.

“Hey, it’s me.”

Josie smiled. It was Dillon Reese, her longtime, semi-serious love interest. He sounded tired and lonely.

“I’m still in Kansas. The conference is predictable. The feds want more than is humanly possible to give. I’m going out tonight for dinner and drinks. Nothing like twenty accountants to liven up the streets of Topeka. Call me later. I’ll keep my phone with me.” He paused. “Miss you.”

Josie stood at the counter, staring at the answering machine, imagining Dillon in his Dockers and pressed white shirt and striped tie, sitting in a hotel eating conference chicken for lunch, chatting amiably with the other accountants at his table. He was the most stable, the most predictable man she had ever met. She could count on him like the earth’s rotation. She knew what his reaction would be before she knew her own. And she could not fathom why he seemed to love her when she could not offer him the same level of commitment in return.

The microwave buzzed and startled her. She dumped the contents of both containers onto a plate and sat on the couch with Chester gnawing on his rawhide at her feet. She clicked on the local news to watch the grim weather forecast, then clicked it off again. She was tired of bad news.

Her thoughts drifted to Marta, and her daughter Teresa. She wondered what dinner must be like at their house: an angry teenage girl and her frightened mother, trying to look brave and in control across a plate of food that Marta scraped together from a paycheck that never went far enough. Josie wondered if the hole in her own heart would be filled by a child, or if the emptiness she felt so often was just part of her nature. She envied Dillon, lanky and easygoing, able to say what he felt with no forethought or anxiety.

She walked into the kitchen and dug back in the cabinet beside the refrigerator to find her bottle of bourbon. She’d hid it one night after Dillon commented on how quickly the alcohol was disappearing. He had hurt her feelings and she was irritated with herself for hiding something that she knew was not a problem. She poured a juice glass full and went back to the couch, hoping to fill the hole, at least temporarily.