Scratchgravel Road: A Mystery Page 9

  Josie pursed her lips, then leaned her hip against the counter. “Can I ask you a personal question?”

  Cassidy sighed heavily and hopped up onto the other end of the counter. She looked down at her feet. “I know what it is.”

  “Yeah?”

  “‘What do you see in him?’” Cassidy said. “Right?”

  Josie smiled. “That’s what I’m wondering. You’re a nice girl, you’re intelligent, a hard worker, pretty. Artemis is small, not a lot of options, but—” Josie stopped, unsure how to proceed without offending her.

  Cassidy stretched her legs out and stared at her feet. “He’s not that bad. He just says things to people because he doesn’t feel good about himself. He knows people look down at him. It makes him mad and he gets defensive.” She looked up. “He doesn’t do that to me. I swear it.”

  “He doesn’t talk down to you?”

  Cassidy didn’t answer the question. She crossed her arms over her chest and pulled them in tight as if she were cold.

  “Would you tell me if you were in trouble? If you needed help?” Josie asked.

  She sniffed and lifted a shoulder but said nothing.

  “No one can figure out why a girl who’s shown no interest in hiking would suddenly choose to go out in the middle of a record-breaking heat wave.”

  “I don’t know what else to say. I just did.”

  “Any explanation about the wallet?”

  She looked up then, her face finally animated. “I swear, I didn’t put it there. I never saw it before.”

  “Why didn’t you tell Leo about the wallet in your car?”

  Her face registered surprise, and then worry. “Did you tell him?” she asked.

  Josie shook her head. “Why didn’t you tell him?”

  Cassidy’s eyes remained large and confused. Josie often had the sense that Cassidy was trying to concoct a story, but she wasn’t good enough at lying to keep her stories straight, so she panicked and said nothing. Josie opted to wait her out.

  Cassidy finally said, “I was just afraid he wouldn’t believe me.”

  “About what?”

  “That someone put a man’s wallet in my car, and I didn’t know why.”

  Josie pulled away from the counter. “Here’s the situation. You are the only connection to a dead man. You found him. His belongings were locked inside your car. I suspect you know quite a bit more than you’re telling me. I would suggest you think this over, and come see me tomorrow. If you’re worried that you’ll get someone else in trouble, put that out of your head. Trying to protect someone usually ends up backfiring.”

  EIGHT

  When Josie arrived back at the station she found a packet of cheese crackers in her desk drawer, and borrowed one of Otto’s Cokes out of the refrigerator at the back of the office. She carried her lunch downstairs where she asked Lou for the evidence room keys and logged the time she entered the room on a clipboard that hung beside the door. She flipped a switch to the right of the door and the fifteen-foot-wide by forty-foot-long room slowly came to light under the flickering fluorescent bulbs. The floor was poured concrete, but the walls remained the rough red brick that covered the outside of the department and the Gun Club next door. At one time, evidence was kept upstairs, in a small locked room that was now used for the custodian’s cleaning supplies. When the amount of evidence grew too large for the small area, the alley between the two buildings was bricked up on either end and the space finished to house the growing number of objects and boxes of paperwork. The only access to the locked room was a door cut into the police station wall.

  Twenty-five feet of metal shelving units were attached to the brick on the Gun Club side. Otto had made wooden signs in his workshop at home and hung them from the top of the shelving units. The years were noted on the signs to aid in locating evidence more quickly.

  Josie took a deep breath. The room smelled like rock and sand and musty paper boxes. The smell seemed old and comforting, like her grandma’s cellar back in Indiana. She found a shoebox-sized cardboard box on the shelving unit labeled 2012–2014 and pulled it down and placed it on an eight-foot-long library table that sat to the right of the door. The room had no windows, so the only light was the yellow fluorescent flicker from ten feet above. She turned on two hundred-watt lamps on either end of the table and sat on a metal folding chair.

  When a case was going nowhere she liked to walk through the crime, altering the variables and playing out different scenarios in her mind. With the rain, there was no chance of getting back to the crime scene, where any trace evidence that may have remained would have been washed away. All she had was a small box of objects collected from Cassidy’s car, while the majority of the evidence still sat in a hazardous material bag at the jail. Her only connection to the dead body was a young woman who Josie suspected knew something but refused to talk.

  Josie laid her pad and paper on the table and opened the box. She pulled out the man’s wallet in the sealed, clear plastic bag. She knew Cowan would have wanted it quarantined so she left it sealed. The wallet was opened so she could see the inside. The leather was worn around the edges, as if the man had carried it in his back pocket. Due to the curve of the wallet, Josie was certain it had not been carried in the front of his pants, so how had Cassidy pulled the wallet from underneath the man? Had she taken it before the man died? Someone had placed the effects in her car, Josie was certain of it. But why? How had they gotten there? And why lock the car again—was the person attempting to mess with the investigation, or with Cassidy?

  She had told Josie the only other person with a key to her car was Leo, and he had been in Presidio at the library, with a library receipt that showed his checkout time was two hours after the time that Josie found the car. Cassidy had told Josie that she was certain the wallet had not been in her car when she left for the desert that morning because she had removed a container of laundry soap from the backseat that she had left in the car after work the day before. Cassidy said she would have noticed if it was on the floor. Josie had a sense that Cassidy was telling the truth.

  Josie examined the other items she and Otto had confiscated from the car and found nothing more of interest. She pulled her camera out of her shirt pocket and turned the power on. She clicked through the pictures slowly, examining the details. On the second time through the pictures she stopped at the picture of the dead man’s work boots. There was a close-up of the seams on the bottom of the boot, and Josie remembered that they had been resoled. The only cobbler she knew of lived out past the mudflats, north of town. Jeremiah Joplin had fixed her gun belt last year, and sewed together a belt and pair of sandals a few years prior. Now long retired, he worked out of his home. Josie figured he had to have been approaching a hundred, but he appeared thirty years younger. She frequently ran into him in town, where they always spoke, with him remembering her name and personal details about her that he would bring up in conversation. He was the kind of person who seemed to be in a perpetual good mood.

  She replaced the items in the evidence room and logged out on the clipboard, then returned the key to Lou. Josie found Joplin’s number in the phone book. She called and he told her to come on over, that she would find him on the back porch.

  Josie stood at the front door of the police department and unlatched her umbrella. It was late in the morning but the sky was not visible through the sheets of rain pounding the pavement.

  Continuing to type at her computer, Lou said, “Not fit for man nor beast. Better wait till the rain quits.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to quit.” Josie looked at her watch. Otto was due in to the office any minute to start a noon-to-eight-thirty shift. “Tell Otto I’ll be back in an hour. I’m going to talk to Jeremiah Joplin.”

  Josie popped her umbrella open and dashed to the jeep. By the time she got the door unlocked, slid inside, and pulled her umbrella through the door, she was soaked. She pulled a napkin out of the center compartment and wiped the water off her face, the
n pulled her wet hair back into a ponytail again with her fingers. Her uniform felt heavy and steamy and she thought ahead to the end of the shift: shorts, a T-shirt, and Dillon. It would be a good night.

  At the stoplight on the courthouse square, she turned north, and drove toward the mudflats. Josie snaked along the road where Vie and Smokey Blessings lived, crossing sections of gravel where running water ran directly across. Smokey would be working twelve-hour shifts for days. It would take the maintenance guys weeks to get the roads back into shape after the rain finally ended. They were on a shoestring budget, like all the other county and city agencies, and could not afford to dump new rock. They would have to use the county trucks to scrape the rock back into place.

  A half mile from Jeremiah’s trailer, the incline was steep enough that the rain had produced ruts running the length of the road where the gravel had been washed away. Josie put the jeep into four-wheel drive and kept her wheels on the high parts of the road. Each year, they lost cars that were carried away because people tried to drive on running water. Four-wheel drive accomplished nothing with water rushing under the wheels.

  Josie turned off onto Jeremiah’s lane: it was a mudpit. She cussed herself for making the trip, but she had so few leads that it had seemed worth the risk.

  She parked in front of the trailer and grabbed a clear rain poncho and black rubber boots from the backseat. Utilitarian, she thought, but effective. She scooted the driver’s seat back and struggled into the raincoat, then took her work boots off and replaced them with the knee-high rubber boots. Encased in the plastic, she felt her skin steaming in the enclosed car.

  She stepped outside and trudged up to a poured concrete walkway that led around to the back of the trailer. Rain pelted her poncho and dripped off the hood in front as she walked. Jeremiah’s place was decorated like a Florida retirement home with concrete statues of rabbits and deer hidden around bushes and benches. Lacy blue curtains hung in the window and a WELCOME FRIENDS sign hung on the front door.

  She found Jeremiah rocking in a lawn chair on the porch, a contented smile on his face, watching the rain fall on the patches of grass and desert scrub that covered the land for miles behind his home. He wore black shorts and no shirt. His body appeared completely hairless and deeply tanned. He looked like a sleek sea otter with his round head and leathery wrinkles that stretched across his head, neck, and abdomen. He leaned forward in his seat and shook her hand.

  “Good to see you again,” she said.

  He patted the chair next to him. Josie pulled her raincoat over her head, draped it across a small end table, and sat next to Jeremiah, facing the rain.

  “Haven’t seen rain like this since before Grace passed. That’s going on twenty years now,” he said.

  “You’ve kept the place up nice. Even in the rain it looks cheery,” she said.

  “She’d be proud. Made me promise on her deathbed that I wouldn’t let her roses die. They were her pride and joy.” He pointed to a trellis-covered bench in the backyard. Splotches of white and red color showed through the rain from where the blooms covered the climbing plant. “Takes a lot to make them grow in this heat. Grace had the touch, though.”

  They small-talked about the weather and the forecast before Josie settled in on the purpose for the visit.

  “I’m working on an investigation, and I’m trying to make some kind of a connection to a man we found dead with no identification.”

  He nodded, his eyebrows raised.

  “I’m trying to find something in his personal belongings that will give me a lead to his identity.”

  “Makes sense.”

  Josie took her digital camera out of her shirt pocket and found the picture of the boots the man was wearing. She passed him the camera and said, “You’re the only person I know who repairs shoes.”

  “Lost art,” he said. He picked up a pair of glasses off the side table and slipped them on.

  “This is a picture of the boots the man was wearing. They’re good quality, but they’re definitely broken in. I thought they looked like work boots, maybe from a factory. Then I looked at the soles and saw the bright red thread where they had been resoled.”

  He smiled broadly. “I know these boots.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “You recognize the brand?”

  “I recognize the boots.”

  Josie laughed. She had expected nothing to come of the visit.

  “Do you know where I worked before I retired?” he asked.

  “I assumed you’d always repaired shoes. Had your own shoe store,” she said.

  He stood from his chair slowly, easing his joints into an upright position. “Be right back,” he said. He disappeared through a sliding glass door and Josie got a whiff of what she assumed was a pot roast in the oven. She realized how hungry she was.

  Through the downpour she could barely make out streams of water rushing down the tail end of the Chinati Mountain chain behind Jeremiah’s property. It reminded her of the mudslides that washed down the mountain a few years ago. Several of Jeremiah’s neighbors had lost their homes. She hoped he would manage to stay lucky.

  A gust of wind blew a fine mist across the porch and caused goose bumps to run up her arms: a welcome relief from the heat the day before.

  Jeremiah appeared carrying a pair of boots that looked identical to the pair the dead man had been wearing, and he placed them in her lap.

  “Where did these come from?”

  “The Feed Plant.” He grinned and winked. “That’s where I worked fixing boots.”

  “You worked at the nuclear weapons plant?”

  “For over twenty years. That’s what brought me to Artemis. I worked here in the fifties when the plant was in full production. When the plant shut down I moved away, but came back when I heard about Drench’s project.”

  Josie attempted to keep her face neutral. The place, now closed up behind barbed-wire fences, had always given her an uneasy feeling. “Didn’t it bother you working there, knowing the kinds of deadly material you were working with? Weren’t you scared you might be exposed to radiation?”

  He leaned forward to pick his chair up and turned it slightly to better see Josie. His face was animated, his bald head beaded with sweat. She had touched a nerve.

  “What scared me was what happened in Japan at the end of World War Two. Those bombs we dropped stopped the war. If we hadn’t dropped them, someone else would have dropped them on us. Don’t you believe otherwise.”

  Josie gave him a skeptical look.

  “The science was out there. We just figured it out first.”

  She squinted at him, trying to understand his logic. “So, we needed to build weapons capable of killing millions? I just never understood that.”

  He looked at her, wide-eyed. “One of the safest eras in American history? You don’t understand that? We were top dog during the Cold War. We were proud to call ourselves American. There wasn’t any flag burning back then. We went to work at the Feed Plant because that’s what the country needed.”

  “But it turned into a race to see who could build the most bombs,” she said.

  He crossed his arms over his bare chest and clamped them down. His expression had turned intense. “We knew, and the Russians knew, we were stockpiling enough weapons to blow each other to kingdom come. And neither country wanted that.” He reached over and grabbed Josie’s arm. “We were in a stalemate. Neither of us could make a move without destroying not just their country, but everyone else on earth! Every country in the world had their safety in our hands. It was science and strategy.” He frowned and leaned back in his chair. “And then it all came crumbling down. And look at us now. There’s no strategy. War today is like street fighting.”

  Josie didn’t want to get into a political debate with him so she returned back to her original questions. She needed to get back to the station before the road washed out.

  “So, why would a nuclear weapons plant need a cobbler?” she asked.

&nb
sp; “Was a time we went through a lot of boots. Back in the fifties? We had two thousand people who rode the railcars into work every morning. Got dropped off in their civvies, changed into regulation uniform and boots, then changed back before they left. That helped keep the radiation inside the plant. We took good precautions.”

  He picked his glasses up off the coffee table again and put a hand out for Josie to pass him the boots she held in her lap. He took them and studied the bottom. He pointed to where the leather met the sole and held them up for Josie to examine them. It looked as if the leather had been melted. “See that? That’s from what they called boil-overs. There were eight or ten stations in the factory, and each one used chemicals that did something to the uranium to make it ready for the bomb.” He glanced up at her from over the top of his glasses. “They were powerful chemicals. When they would boil over, workers would walk through the sludge on the floor and the soles of their boots would melt. Rather than throwing the boots away they hired me to resole them.”

  Josie shook her head in amazement. “The workers had to walk through chemicals so hazardous they melted the rubber and leather on their boots?”

  “Yep. I never saw anybody get burnt from the chemicals. Leastwise, not their feet. We were careful. We took precautions. Wouldn’t happen like that today, but back then we had a serious job to do. We were protecting our country, and we took the job serious. We did what we had to do.”

  “If the plant is closed down, how would the man in the desert have a pair of the boots? Especially if the workers weren’t allowed to take the uniforms home at the end of the shift,” she said.

  “I’m guessing they’re using the old leftover boots for the cleanup. From what I hear, they’re pretty lax on safety. They probably let the workers wear their uniforms home now since there’s no production. No new uranium coming in.”

  Josie considered what he said for a moment. Jeremiah had worked at the plant in its glory days and he was obviously proud of the work he had done. She wondered at the validity of his comments.