“Other than the necklace you already mentioned, was she wearing any other jewelry?”
Hal shook his head. “No watch. No rings, and no sign that she had worn either one recently.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because when you wear a ring long-term, it usually leaves an indentation around the base of the finger. And in this climate, watches and rings both leave pale spots wherever the sun doesn’t reach. There wasn’t one of those either.”
Joanna shot Hal Witter a quizzical look. “That’s pretty observant for a civilian,” she said.
He grinned back at her. “Thanks,” he said. “I trained as a cop once, years ago. After Korea and before I re-upped in the army, I was a trooper in upstate New York.”
“Why’d you quit?” Joanna asked.
“Couldn’t afford it,” he said. “The hours were too long and the pay too low. I figured I was better off back in the army. The pay wasn’t that different, but it came with a place to live and a chow line.”
“Career army then?” she asked.
He nodded. “Retired Special Forces. Colonel.”
Just then Jaime Carbajal’s voice came from behind them, from the far side of the road opposite where he had disappeared into the culvert. “I may have found something after all. Look at this.”
As the three people on the road turned to look, Jaime materialized at the far end of the culvert holding three plastic milk cartons aloft. Two were empty. One still contained a quart or so of water.
“UDAs?” Joanna asked.
“I think so,” Jaime replied.
“But they could have been through here anytime. There’s no way of saying they were here last night, is there?”
“Don’t be so sure about that,” the detective answered. “One of the handles is stained with something that looks a whole lot like blood. I wouldn’t be surprised if it matches up with our victim’s.”
Joanna found the very suggestion chilling. In recent years the steady stream of undocumented aliens coming north from Mexico had turned into a vast flood, one that threatened to overwhelm the resources of local law-enforcement jurisdictions and of the Immigration and Naturalization Service as well. Increased enforcement in one place only caused the flow to move to some other likely crossing point. It seemed to Joanna that as soon as INS officers plugged one hole in the border fence, another opened up a mile or two away.
In the past few months, the UDA crisis had gone from bad to worse. Recently the number of illegals apprehended in rural Cochise County rivaled those captured in San Diego, with far fewer officers and far less money available to deal with the problem. As the number of illegals increased, a vocal group of ranchers whose properties lay on the most traveled routes had been raising a call to arms.
Several isolated ranch owners had been victims of unsophisticated burglaries. They complained that cattle had died after ingesting abandoned plastic bottles that the illegals used to carry life-sustaining water as they walked across long stretches of unforgiving desert. Ranchers reported that faucets on stock tanks had been left open, allowing precious water to drain out, that fences had been cut down, allowing livestock to stray onto roads and highways, and that their properties were littered with human waste. Several of the most vociferous of the frustrated cattlemen had threatened to take the law into their own hands. Their position was that if the government couldn’t be counted on to protect them from foreign invaders, the ranchers would do so themselves and round up any illegal found trespassing on their land.
Joanna knew that she was dealing with an extremely volatile situation, one already rife with threats of vigilante justice. She dreaded what might happen once news of this incident was made public. The specter of armed illegals preying on lone women motorists along deserted stretches of highway might well ignite a whole new style of range war. It wasn’t difficult to see how this added element of fear might provoke a few rabid individuals into shooting first and asking questions later.
Joanna stared at the bloodstained milk cartons as though they were leaking powder kegs.
“We’d better bag them up and get them to the lab,” Joanna said. Her comment proved to be unnecessary, since Detective Carbajal was already doing that very thing.
“Not only that,” Jaime continued as he entered the bagged cartons into the evidence logs. “It looks to me as though this end of the culvert wasn’t disturbed by the EMTs. There are a few tracks just inside here that are probably worth casting. I’ll go get my equipment.”