“You want to bring her in tonight or wait until we get ballistics in the morning?”
She paused. “It’s your case.”
“Come on.”
“If this wasn’t such a screwed-up mess with Caroline and the mayor I’d say get her tonight. But I think we get it all together first and go to Holder with everything.”
“Good enough,” he said. “I coordinated with the sheriff. We still have an officer posted outside the women’s rooms twenty-four/seven. Phillips is there tonight. He has strict orders not to let Isabella leave. I made contact with Homeland Security, but with all the red tape I don’t know what kind of time frame we’re looking at to get the other women sent home. I’m hoping they can continue where they are for now.”
“Any new information about Caroline from the women?”
“Selena Rocha talked to them. She asked if they knew anything about a female running things. The women agreed that Josh and Ryan talked about a woman they called boss lady, but they never mentioned her name. That’s as much as we got about that. Selena also asked Isabella if she could tell her who killed Renata and she broke down. Refused to talk.”
“Damn, Otto. You realize we’re probably going to lose this case before we get it all pulled together?”
Otto said nothing, but she knew he understood.
“We have crimes crossing state and national lines. FBI and Homeland Security will be all over this before we’re through,” she said.
“Then we better work like hell to figure something out before we lose control.”
Josie heard a car coming down her road and walked around to the front of her house, where she saw Smokey Blessings pulling up her driveway. She hung up with Otto and waved as Smokey got out of his truck wearing a Stetson, cowboy boots, and a western shirt. Smokey was married to Vie Blessings, his polar opposite in life. For all the vibrancy she displayed, Smokey showed none of it. The cowboy hat was as splashy as he got, and his demeanor was as low-key as his clothes.
He walked up to Josie to shake her hand and she noticed the worry lines across his forehead. “What the hell’s going on?” He had a slow drawl to his words, which somehow intensified their effect.
Josie didn’t have to ask what he meant. As the city council president, he was elected to work with the mayor to supervise the chief of police. Josie knew that, without the support the council had given her, the mayor would have fired her years ago.
“There’s not much I can tell you,” she said.
“You better tell me something. There’s a group carrying signs outside of the courthouse about police brutality, and another group across the street on the corner with posters, chanting, ‘Save our Chief.’”
She laughed in spite of the subject matter. “Where’d the police brutality come from?”
Smokey looked frustrated. “Hell if I know! The mayor refuses to talk about it. We’ve called an emergency council meeting and demanded answers but he’s stalling. I want you to tell me what the breach of contract is over.”
“I can’t tell you. It concerns an ongoing investigation.”
“I don’t need to know the particulars of the case. I need to know what you did to be considered in breach of contract.”
“I can’t tell you that. You can talk to Otto about the case. He’s the investigator and knows the particulars. It’ll be up to him if he wants to share details.” Josie almost smiled at the irony. She shouldn’t have shared details with the mayor, who was now out to fire her, but she was refraining from telling the person who was most able to help her.
He rubbed his hand across the back of his neck and tilted his head from side to side as if trying to release tension.
“I’m here to help,” he said.
“I know you are. And you have no idea how much I appreciate it. But I’m not giving the mayor any fuel to burn my ass. Someone else can, but not me. As much as I despise that man, I love my job more. And I want it back.”
SIXTEEN
Chester ran to Dell’s house several times a day, visiting him anytime Josie left home, in constant need of companionship. Josie made the walk to Dell’s house when she needed to hear a sane voice.
She found Dell in the tack room of his barn, bent over his workbench, tooling a design into the side of a saddle. He wore a pair of ancient blue jeans and a navy T-shirt that was so threadbare his skin was visible through the cotton around the shoulders. This was a man who Josie suspected had several hundred thousand dollars squirreled away, most likely in coffee cans buried behind his house, but she knew in Dell’s mind a new T-shirt was an unnecessary extravagance.
He looked up when Chester ambled in, and smiled when he saw Josie.
“How’s tricks?” he said, and pitched his leather punch onto the workbench.
“You haven’t heard?”
He pointed at the radio on a shelf above him, his only source of daily news. “Got tired of the drama. Gave it up for a day or two. What’s happened?”
“I got suspended this morning. The mayor took my badge and gun.”