Midnight Crossing (Josie Gray Mysteries #5)
Tricia Fields
To my friend and mentor, Sandra Scofield
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you, Linnet, Mella, and Merry, for your friendship and writing support through the years. Thank you to firearms editor Frank Disbrow, for your expertise. And thank you to my agent, Dominick Able, and to Peter Joseph and Melanie Fried, at Minotaur/Thomas Dunne Books, for five great years.
ONE
Josie opened her eyes, her body instantly alert, muscles taut. Nighttime had never scared her. Lying awake, alone in bed at two o’clock in the morning, could lead to miserable thoughts, but not fear. At the same time, she also didn’t believe in coincidence. For the second night in a row, she awoke to the distant sound of a car driving down the gravel road toward her home.
Schenck Road wound through the foothills of the Chinati Mountains for five miles, and then reconnected with River Road. Two houses were located on Schenck: her own house and Dell Seapus’s, a quarter mile behind hers. The only reason to drive down Schenck was to visit Josie or Dell, and her seventy-something-year-old neighbor did not have visitors at two in the morning.
She lay flat on her back with her hands folded over her abdomen as she listened to the low drone of the engine, growing louder as it neared her house and then slowing like a roller-coaster car approaching the top of a rise. With the late October temperatures in the sixties at night, she’d been keeping her windows open. She slipped out of bed and walked down the wood floor in the hallway without a sound, not wanting to rouse the dog sleeping at the foot of her bed.
Standing to the side of the living room window, she slowly slid a finger behind the fabric and pulled it back an inch from the window. The oncoming vehicle rounded the bend in the road, and as it reached the straight stretch that ran past the front of her home, the headlights disappeared and the car vanished from sight. As she heard it roll by her house, the light from the moon wasn’t enough to determine the size or make.
A half mile past her house, the lights reappeared, but too far away for her to catch any details. The driver knew the road, knew her house, and knew she’d be watching.
Long after the car lights had disappeared, Josie stayed at the window, feeling the rhythm of her pulse slow to normal. She heard Chester rise from the bedroom and his paws clicking down the hardwood floor in the hallway. He nuzzled up beside her, more curious than worried. She couldn’t have picked a less aggressive dog than a bloodhound.
Lying on her back in bed again, but now holding her cell phone in her hands, she stared at the time: 2:17 a.m., obviously too late to call Nick and rouse him out of a deep sleep. He was somewhere in Juárez, Mexico, living with a young woman and her three small children, negotiating the release of the woman’s husband. Josie had thought her position as chief of police wasn’t conducive to starting a family, and then she’d begun dating Nick Santos, a kidnapping negotiator, and all thought of a normal family life, whatever that meant, had ended.
She tried to imagine him, curled up on his side on a lumpy fold-away mattress in the temporary bedroom constructed for him on the family’s back porch. Or maybe he was crouched down behind a garage in a dark alley, waiting for movement, for the quiet approach of someone who might lead him to the terrified victim. Josie pondered how strange their life was, avoiding the criminals while all the same seeking them out.
*
When her cell phone alarm rang later that morning, Josie turned it off and fell back asleep instantly. Ten minutes later the alarm across the room on her bureau buzzed, forcing her up and out of bed, swearing as she tripped over Chester, who insisted on sleeping in the direct path to the alarm clock.
By 6:45 a.m., Josie had locked up the house and sent Chester down the lane to spend the day at Dell’s ranch. Dell was a bachelor with little patience for people, but infinite tolerance for animals. Josie figured as far as a dog’s life went, Chester was living the dream.
As she unlocked the driver’s door on her retired Army jeep, her department-issued vehicle, she noticed something lying just behind her back tire. She bent down and picked up what appeared to be a plastic sandwich bag with bread crumbs in the bottom of it—what the Border Patrol would refer to as a sign, usually the remnants of someone crossing the border and leaving behind their trash as they made the long trek.
The problem was, the odds of the bag finding its way to her driveway were incredibly slim. Artemis had many more miles of unpaved roads than paved. Most people lived miles apart. The closest businesses to her home were located downtown, a ten-minute drive down remote roads that sometimes saw no other cars for hours at a time.
Driving to work did little to diminish the unease she felt from the night before.
She wondered if the baggie might be connected to the car driving by her house. A few months ago, she and Nick had found signs of crossing and two kayaks on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande, just a few miles from her house. Crossing the Rio from Mexico into West Texas made no sense at that particular location. Josie lived in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, with the Chinati Mountains located just beyond her home. If someone from Mexico wanted to illegally make the trek into the States, they would cross five miles beyond her house, where the land was wide open and mountains wouldn’t add dangerous and unnecessary travel to the journey. And any coyote working out of Piedra Labrada, the Mexican sister city to Artemis, knew where along the Rio the cops lived. They wouldn’t choose to cross by her home, unless crossing by her home was their specific intent. In that case, the crossing probably had little to do with illegals, and more to do with the Medrano Cartel.