Midnight Crossing (Josie Gray Mysteries #5)(11)
THREE
Marta carried a cup of hot tea and a bowl of canned pineapple chunks into the living room. She’d dug around in Josie’s refrigerator and cabinets and marveled at the lack of food. No wonder she stays so thin, she thought.
Marta placed the food on the coffee table and sat back down beside the woman on the couch to study her. She was hardly a woman, probably just beyond her teenage years. She no longer sat in a rigid ball, but had collapsed into a puddle at the end of the couch, her head lying on the armrest as her eyes stared at the opposite wall.
The woman had warmed up to Marta, and no longer seemed afraid. She sat up and hungrily ate the fruit and sipped at the warm tea flavored with milk and sugar. Marta tried to get her to carry on a conversation, to simply answer a question with a yes or no, but she wouldn’t speak or even shake her head. Her face was void of any expression, as if she had lost her ability to experience anything beyond fulfilling her basic needs.
When whimpering and scratching noises came from somewhere at the back of the house, the girl looked at Marta in alarm. Marta smiled and patted her leg as she walked past her and to the hallway where the sound was coming from. “It’s Chester,” she said, keeping her voice cheerful. “He’s a good dog. No worries.”
Marta stopped at the closed door at the end of the hallway and opened it a few inches. Chester poked his nose out. He was a gentle giant, and Marta thought he might be a good distraction for the woman. She reached her hand around the door and held tight to his collar as she let him out. He walked into the hallway, his tail wagging and his hind end shaking back and forth.
When they reached the couch the woman sat up and smiled at the dog, which was trying to lick her face and nuzzle his nose against her arm. She petted his head and stroked his back. A few minutes later he was lying down on the rug directly underneath her curled-up body on the couch. She rested her hand on his belly, watching it rise and fall as she cried quietly. The sight made Marta want to cry with her.
Marta’s own daughter was a freshman at Texas A&M in Corpus Christi. When she’d helped Teresa unpack her belongings in her dorm room just a few months ago, it had seemed like she’d moved her daughter to a different country, not just across the state. Nine hours separated her from Teresa, who was now living on the Gulf Coast. Her daughter’s dream was to study marine biology, a funny choice for a kid who’d spent her life in the desert, but Teresa had always wanted what seemed out of reach: a sober father, money to spare, a mother who wasn’t overprotective.
Since childhood Teresa had been Marta’s supreme joy and greatest anxiety, causing her countless nights of hand-wringing and praying. Now Marta looked at this young woman lying on Josie’s couch and wondered if there were similarities between the two. Maybe this young woman shared Teresa’s impulsive need to strike out on her own and declare her independence. And maybe it had even caused her to land here, in a strange person’s home, devastated over something Marta dreaded to uncover. She wondered what the young woman’s mother was thinking at that moment. Did she know her daughter was gone? Did she care?
*
Josie’s house sat back approximately two hundred feet from Schenck Road. Dell’s driveway, located to the left of her house, was a half-mile-long lane that led straight back through pasture to his barn and home. To the left of Dell’s lane were several thousand acres of wide-open pasture, small groves of pi?on pine, and a small mountain range that ran through the middle of Dell’s ranch. Josie planned to search the area between the road and Dell’s house where the car had stopped earlier that night.
The four officers lined up in a row parallel with the road, with Nick on the far left, farthest from Josie’s house, then Josie, then Otto, and finally Roy, who walked alongside Dell’s driveway. With their flashlights, they swept the land in front of them, looking for any tracks or sign of crossing.
Just a few hundred feet from the road Josie held her flashlight steady and quietly called Nick’s name. He jogged over to where her beam of light was trained.
“Jesus,” Nick muttered under his breath.
Josie’s heart clenched in her chest at the sight of a young woman lying flat on her stomach, her arms thrown out to the side, a bullet hole in her back.
Worried that someone else might be hiding in the distance, she called Otto on her cell phone rather than holler for him. “You find something?” he asked.
“There’s a body,” she said. “A female, probably the same age as the woman inside the house. Let Roy know. Then you’d better keep going. Check the barn and outside Dell’s house. I’ll call Cowan and start processing the scene.”
“You’ll let Dell know we’re checking his barn? Make sure he stays inside?”
“I’ll call him now.”
Josie called Dell and told him they were surrounding his house, and he agreed to remain indoors until further notice. She wouldn’t tell him about the body until she knew more details. He was probably already worried enough. At seventy-plus years, Dell was in good physical condition, and a self-proclaimed hard-ass, but he’d suffered a heart attack a few years back during a nightmare ride in her police car that involved a chase through the desert with the Medrano Cartel. She would do everything in her power to protect him now. She couldn’t imagine losing Dell.
*
Nick had served as a police officer for years. Now, as a kidnapping negotiator, he was forced to investigate crime scenes as horrific as anything a cop would see. Josie trusted he knew the protocol and the necessity of looking carefully for evidence while not disturbing the crime scene. While she started scouting the area directly around the body, he walked to her jeep and brought her evidence kit back with him to the pasture. He established a thirty-square-foot perimeter around the body with the crime scene tape and small tent stakes while Josie updated Border Patrol. Next, she called the coroner, Mitchell Cowan.