Scratchgravel Road (8 page)

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.

SIX

Tuesday morning Otto awoke at six, but before he made the ritual beeline to the kitchen coffeepot, he walked outside through a light rain to check on his small herd of milk goats that roamed freely on his sixty-five acres of pasture. He found them huddled under the stable, but as soon as they caught sight of him they stumbled up off the ground, their skinny legs propelling them forward as one group, their brown eyes concerned, bleating like scared children. Their routine had been interrupted and they were not pleased with the chaotic weather. Otto had raised goats for twenty years and never tired of their quirky personalities and social nature. He stopped to check the rain gauge on the fence post. Six inches in one night, most likely a record breaker. The desert was a place of extremes, but that year they’d experienced drought, record-high temperatures, and now possibly record-high rainfall. Otto tended to blame the weather patterns on nature’s fickle whims, but at times like these he wondered.

After feeding and watering the goats, he sat down with Delores for a breakfast of waffles and milk, and then showered, dressed, and left for work by seven thirty. On the drive to work the rain turned heavy again: from ground to sky was a gray wash. The West Texas monsoon season, when the area received most of its rainfall, typically lasted from July through September, with an average annual rainfall totaling just sixteen inches. Artemis had received eight inches in two days and it was still July. The old-timers at the Hot Tamale were predicting the hundred-year flood this season, and in his experience, the old-timers had a sense for all things weather. The lack of vegetation across the flat land made perfect conditions for flash flooding, and all officers were on alert for emergency calls.

Sitting at his desk in the office he made a few phone calls and answered e-mails while he polished off two cups of coffee. Then he called Mark Harper, Cassidy’s dad, and asked if he could stop by and see him at the shop. Mark owned a bulk food store that he operated out of a small warehouse located by the Arroyo County Jail, several miles east of town. It was a successful business, used by the jail and several restaurants in town to purchase dry goods at a reasonable price. Otto knew Mark from his membership in the Kiwanis Club. He and his wife had moved to Artemis several years ago after Cassidy had landed here. Otto wasn’t sure if they had seized a good business opportunity, or just moved to Texas to support their wayward daughter.

The wooden sign standing in front of the large warehouse read
HARPER’S BULK DRY GOODS.
The building was a green metal pole barn surrounded by tasteful desert landscaping that curved to the front door.

A buzzer sounded when Otto entered the empty front lobby, and a minute later Mark appeared from a door that led to the storage area beyond. He wore blue jeans and a green polo shirt with the company name embroidered across the breast pocket. He was medium height with a hefty build and thick brown hair. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and gave the impression of a confident, successful small-business man.

They said their hellos and commented on the rains and the flooding that was sure to come before Mark motioned for Otto to have a seat in a small lobby. It was furnished with two leather couches, a coffee table covered with magazines, and a dusty TV that looked as if it had never been turned on.

“What can I do for you?”

“I have some questions about Cassidy.” Otto noticed the change in his expression, from friendly to one of dread. As a police officer, Otto was used to that look when he appeared unannounced, but he thought Mark might have had conversations about his daughter frequently and had learned to anticipate the worst.

“She okay?” he asked.

Otto nodded. “Yes.”

“Is she in trouble?”

Otto put a hand up. “Don’t worry. She’s fine. I just hope you can help shed some light on her situation.”

The tension in his shoulders relaxed slightly and he nodded as if he understood and needed to sit back and listen.

“Did she talk with you about what happened yesterday?” Otto asked.

“No.”

Otto pulled his notebook and pen out of his chest pocket. “Here’s the situation. You know Chief Gray?”

Mark nodded. “Sure. Cassidy worked at the police department for a while.”

“Chief Gray saw Cassidy’s car along the side of the road yesterday and stopped to check. She located her about a quarter mile from the road. Found her passed out in the sand, suffering from heat exhaustion.”

Mark’s eyes widened and his face reddened in anger. “What was she doing in the desert? It was over a hundred degrees yesterday!”

“That’s not so much the issue. We found her lying beside a dead body.”

“What?” His expression was incredulous.

Otto put a hand up again. “We don’t think she had anything to do with the man’s death. Apparently she took a walk at a random location on the side of the road. She smelled something, looked around, and saw a body. She passed out. That’s when Josie found her. We carried her out and got her into an ambulance and to the Trauma Center. She’s fine now.”