Scratchgravel Road: A Mystery Read online

  Josie thanked them and they wandered back to the plow truck and turned the music back up. Over the hum of the fans Josie heard George Jones singing to Tammy Wynette about the “Crying Time.”

  “That’s some classic music,” Josie said. “Makes me want to find a lonely spot in the desert.”

  Otto turned up his lip. “That stuff’ll put you in an early grave. You ever listen to a good polka?”

  Josie got inside her jeep and turned it around so the back end faced Cassidy’s car. She opened the hatch and Otto spread a plastic tarp over the carpet inside. She opened up her evidence kit, then backed away to face Otto, hands on her hips.

  “Did you forget something?” she asked.

  “You have issues,” he said. “I borrowed your sketchpad and pencil. And I stuck them right back in there when I was done.”

  “Right back in there isn’t where you found them. The pad and pencil don’t belong with the evidence collection. That should be obvious to you by now. There is a section in the back for files. There’s even a nice clip to hold the pencil.”

  “You need to lighten up, Josie.”

  “How many years have we been having this same conversation?”

  “Learn to enjoy your life a little.” He grabbed the black powder and brushes and walked over to the car to take latent prints off the silver door handles.

  “I would if I didn’t have to suffer a slob as a partner.”

  He smiled and winked at her.

  She laughed. “Delores deserves a medal. I wouldn’t put up with this at home.”

  Josie got Cassidy’s keys from the cup holder in the front of her jeep and unlocked Cassidy’s trunk. She snapped pictures of the contents: a bowling ball bag with a bowling ball zipped inside, a messy collection of college math and science textbooks ranging from calculus to nuclear physics with pages and covers ripped, an oily bath towel, and torn newspapers. With the closest bowling lane thirty miles away in Marfa, she wondered about the bowling ball. She didn’t picture Cassidy or the boyfriend as the bowling league types. Josie picked up one of the newspapers and saw the date was from two years ago. She thought she ought to do the girl a favor and throw everything from the trunk in the trash.

  Josie jotted down a list of the items and slammed the trunk closed. Otto was peeling the tape off the passenger-side door handle. “That’s a pretty print. That’ll run for sure.”

  “You done with the back yet?” Josie asked.

  “Yep. This is my last door. I got two decent prints on the front driver side. This was the best one, though.”

  Josie opened the back passenger door and leaned down to examine the items on the floor.

  Otto stood and stretched his back. “How about a drink break?”

  “Give me a minute,” Josie said, and got down on her knees beside the open car door. She used a pair of tweezers to lift a man’s wallet off the floor and drop it into a one-quart plastic evidence bag. She also found several coins that she dropped into the bag. There was nothing else on the floor of the car except for a straw wrapper and small pieces of trash.

  Otto leaned over her. “There’s a Coke machine in the corner where you can buy me a drink.”

  Josie stood and wiped the sweat away from her eyes. “I might have something.”

  She walked over to the trunk of her car and Otto followed. She dumped out the evidence onto the tarp and Otto hummed beside her.

  “Is that Leo’s wallet?”

  Josie used a pair of large tweezers to open the wallet. “No driver’s license. But there’s cash in it.” She bent over the wallet to examine the clear windowed space for the ID more carefully. “At some point there was definitely something in this space. There’s a square ridge all the way around where the license was.”

  “Looks like Ms. Harper might know more than she says,” Otto said.

  “Why would she take the ID and pitch the wallet in her backseat?” she asked.

  Josie used the tweezers and a gloved hand to open the bi-fold brown leather wallet. A twenty and four one-dollar bills were in the bill section. She backed up to let Otto look.

  “Odd amount of money for an illegal trying to cross the border,” Josie said.

  “Who would steal a guy’s driver’s license and leave the twenty-dollar bill?”

  “That’s assuming the license was still in there when she took it.” Josie wiped the sweat off her forehead with her arm and sighed. She dropped the wallet into another plastic evidence bag, then put her hand in her front pocket and pulled out several dollar bills. “Come on. I’ll buy you a drink.”

  They walked over to an enclosed office area with a humming Coke machine. They got their drinks and each drained half a can at once.

  Josie nodded absently. “You figure Cassidy found the body and took his wallet back to her car out of some kind of morbid curiosity?”

  “You hear about killers keeping items as souvenirs after they kill someone.”

  “Come on. You don’t see her as the killer,” she said.

  Otto nudged her arm with his own. “You being sexist? She’s a cute young girl, so she couldn’t possibly kill this guy?”

  “Tell me how many cute young girls you’ve arrested for murder.”

  “Not my point.”

  “Besides, you know Cassidy. She’s clueless. Not a killer.”

  “What’s that saying about desperate times?” he asked.

  Josie ignored the question. “We’re assuming the wallet is the dead man’s. Maybe it’s her boyfriend’s. Maybe he bought a new one and switched wallets out while sitting in the car,” she said. “Just pitched the old one in the backseat.”

  Otto gave her a skeptical look. “He has so much extra money that when he switched his wallet out he just left the twenty-four dollars.”

  She tilted her head, conceding his point.

  Josie stopped at her trunk and slipped on a fresh pair of rubber gloves. “I just can’t figure why she’d take the wallet. Think about the timing. She’d have found the body, taken the wallet, walked it all the way back to the car, dumped it in the backseat, then walked back to the body in this deadly heat, and passed out from exhaustion.”

  “Maybe she took the stuff and got a guilty conscience. Decided to go back,” he said.

  “Still doesn’t work. If she felt guilty she would have called the police. Why walk back to a body that was obviously dead? There’s no point in that.”

  “Maybe someone else put the stuff in the car,” Otto said.

  “Nope. The doors were locked. All the windows were rolled up. Her car keys were on her.” Josie opened the backseat of her jeep and pulled out her camera case. “We’ll need to check if she has another set of keys.”

  Josie passed Otto the 35-millimeter camera and he nodded slowly. “Here’s another one. How’d she get the wallet? The guy is lying on his back. His body is decomposing. She had to work hard to get that wallet out of his back pocket. Fight the flies and the smell. I can’t imagine the wallet being worth that kind of grief.”

  “Maybe he carried it in his front pocket, along with his pocketknife,” she said.

  “I thought she looked pretty disgusted with the whole idea of the dead body. Remember her face when you asked if she could identify him? She looked ill even thinking about it. I can’t see her putting her hands into that dead man’s pants pocket.” Otto looked doubtful. “Front or back.”

  “And why would she dump it in her backseat? Would you work that hard to get something and then throw it on the floor?” Josie shook her head no to her own question.

  “You’d put it on the front seat, or you’d hide it,” he said.

  “Let’s go back to the keys. If there’s a second set, it makes sense that Cassidy’s boyfriend would have them. What if Leo planted the evidence?”

  “And why would he do that?” Otto asked.

  “Maybe he’s planting evidence on her to keep the focus off him,” she said.

  “Doesn’t make sense. All it does is draw more attention to bo
th of them. If he had the evidence he’d want to hide it. Ditch it.”

  “The body has been there several days. Maybe Leo drove Cassidy’s car out there and took the wallet himself. Killed the guy and took his identification. Left the wallet in the backseat,” she said.

  “Although it still doesn’t make sense why he’d dump it in the backseat for Cassidy to find.”

  Otto handed Josie a pair of latex gloves and grabbed himself a pair as well.

  Josie absently slipped a glove over her hand, trying to make sense of the details they were collecting. “Meanwhile, we have a man with a curious mess of sores on his body, who was banged on the back of the head, then most likely left for dead in the middle of the desert.”

  They spent the next twenty minutes inventorying everything in the car. It amounted mostly to music CDs, hair ties and headbands, and the items in Cassidy’s purse. The license from the man’s wallet never showed up.

  Josie was packing up the evidence kit and Otto was locking the car when the first raindrops pinged off the metal roof of the garage. Within ten minutes the temperature dropped twenty degrees. They walked up to the open garage door as nickel-sized drops of rain pooled on the dry ground like water on a waxed car. The sky directly above them was still relatively clear with the setting sun casting light onto the ground in patches. Across the Chihuahuan Desert the rains were coming.

  The country music stopped and Danny and Mitch ambled up to join them.

  “Ain’t nothing better than the first rain of the season,” Danny said. He smiled widely and stepped out into the rain with his arms thrown wide, his head tipped back, and his eyes closed.

  “Crazy shit. He’d be running through the raindrops if you two weren’t here,” Mitch said.

  The sky to the south was moving fast, the clouds rolling like boiling water as the sun became completely blocked out and the light faded. The rain tapped louder and faster on the roof and Danny finally came back into the garage for shelter. They listened in silence and watched the display for a long while before Otto said they’d better get back to town. West Texas had experienced no rain in over nine months and it wouldn’t take long before the roads began to fill with mud. When the sand in Arroyo County mixed with rain it formed a frustrating combination of slick mud and concrete. Some areas received rain and compacted so hard the ground cracked when it finally dried. In other places sand mixed with soil and sediment and turned into a sludge that could turn instantly dangerous in the right conditions. Mudslides weren’t common, but they could be deadly when they hit.

  * * *

  In a suburb just south of town, two dozen modest, one-story homes were located around a road shaped like a race track. The center of the track, referred to as the infield by the kids in the neighborhood, was a park; mostly just a large empty lot with brown grass for a playing field that the kids used for baseball or whatever pickup game they could arrange. Most of the homes were rental units owned by Macon Drench, including the one where Officer Marta Cruz lived. Her house was located on the far end of the block, a small two-bedroom home covered in white siding with white vertical blinds covering all of the windows. A stone shrine to the Virgin Mary, surrounded by colorful plastic flowers in terra-cotta pots, decorated the front of the house. The landscaping consisted of gravel and a few cactuses. The house was clean and unassuming.

  Inside, the walls were painted white, the decorations primarily religious in nature: an ornate gold cross hung on the wall above the couch, religious poems and plaques hung from the other walls. A floral couch and love seat and oval-shaped coffee table filled the small living room to capacity. The only room in the house painted anything other than white was Teresa’s. When she had turned thirteen she had insisted on a deep purple that now felt dark and overpowering, especially with the rain falling outside. She lay on her bed staring at the cracks in the ceiling. She imagined each line as a choice. She thought if she studied long enough the lines would connect and her life would make sense again.

  She had never seen a dead body. She’d been to a funeral once when her grandpa died, but she’d not been allowed to walk up to the casket. But this wasn’t just a body. The man was murdered. She had seen the guy who last touched the body. She knew what the truck looked like. This wasn’t about sneaking out of the house with Enrico. Each minute she let go by without telling her mom increased her guilt. Now, two days had passed and she’d said nothing. She wondered if she might be arrested herself for something—for hiding information. She had lain awake for hours that night, listening to the soft tap of the minute hand on the clock, then the rain pounding on the roof and sliding down the windows outside her room, and still she had done nothing.

  Her mother had walked into her bedroom early that morning, at the end of her shift, kissed her on the forehead, and whispered good night. Teresa had faked sleep, unable to admit what she had done. Then her mother had been called back into work that afternoon, and Teresa had said nothing. She had already waited too long. How could she tell her mother she had lain in bed, silent, knowing that a man had been killed?

  She’d always imagined herself as tough, as someone who could take care of herself and stand up for what was right. But she had discovered she was a coward. Teresa closed her eyes and wondered what Enrico was thinking at that moment. When they had climbed back into his truck and driven away from the Hollow he had made her promise she wouldn’t tell her mom. At the time, she had thought it was an empty promise. She had imagined confessing everything to her mother, but now, the thought of telling her seemed impossible.

  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.