Midnight Crossing (Josie Gray Mysteries #5)(24)

“You’re not listening. That’s what your family is for. That’s why you have to make your family and your loved ones, your man friend Nick, priorities too. They’ll keep you strong enough to keep doing this insane job. They’ll help you clear your head instead of filling it up with bourbon. Even if it’s only a few hours at the end of your shift, you have to shut your brain down. You can’t be in that fight-or-flight mode twenty-four/seven or you’ll be joining that woman in the morgue all too soon.”

Josie glanced up at him, surprised at the anger in his voice.

Otto sighed. “I’m sorry. I just worry about you. Somebody has to.”

“You’re a good friend, Otto. I appreciate your advice, and I’ll give it some serious thought.”

“Good enough.”

“Okay, grab your notes,” she said. “Let’s get down to business.”

As they were sitting down at the conference table they heard someone coming up the stairs, two at a time. Marta walked into the office looking like she’d waded through a mud pit. Her uniform was mud-streaked, as were her face and arms.

“We got that son of a bitch!” she called.

“Who?” Josie asked, grinning at her excitement.

“Slick Fish is in custody. I’d heard rumors that he was going to transport a large group this evening around dusk. I set up an observation point on the river along with two Border Patrol agents who knew all about him. Slick had seventeen people ready to cross, and we nabbed him with the very first one.”

“Did you mud-wrestle him to the ground?” Otto asked, pointing to her muddy pants.

“That’s exactly what it was. He might have been wet and naked, but he couldn’t slip by three officers. And, best of all, it’s BP’s case. No paperwork for Marta.” She grinned and brushed her hands together.

“You smell like dead fish,” Otto said.

“You know I hate that river. Next time you get the river detail.”

“Well done,” Josie said. “And good timing. We’re just about to debrief on the murder.”

*

Marta washed up in the office bathroom and sat down with her notebook.

Josie started with Otto. “What did you find out on the autopsy?”

“No surprise with the bullet wound. Cowan said the wound was consistent with being shot from behind at twenty-three feet. The body wasn’t moved or tampered with after the gunshot. The biggest news was that Cowan said she had been raped multiple times before her death.”

“Recently?”

“That’s what he said. Recent multiple lacerations around her groin and thighs.”

“What about the other woman?” Marta asked. “Do we know if she was raped?”

“The doctor won’t tell us. Patient confidentiality. We’ll have to wait on her to offer that kind of information,” Josie said.

“Cowan also confirmed time of death was what he originally thought. She’d been lying in the desert for two days. The official time of death is now ten p.m., but it’s obviously an estimate.”

Josie raised her eyebrows in surprise. “We had originally thought it happened during the day, and we were surprised Dell hadn’t heard the shots.” She pulled her calendar up on her phone to look at the date. “That was the night of the water meeting. Dell and I had come into town together. It was a special session that everyone in town knew was going to get heated and would probably last for hours. Which it did,” Josie said.

“So maybe the killer is someone who knows you well enough to figure you’d be at that meeting,” Marta said.

“And they took advantage of you and Dell both being gone,” Otto said.

They sat for a moment, trying to decide if the new information changed the course of the investigation. Otto finally moved on. “Was the psychiatrist able to share anything?”

“Her name is Isabella Dagati,” Josie said. “Lou is running a search for her name. We still don’t know where she’s from. She may be bilingual, Spanish and English.”

“That’s more than I thought we’d get today,” he said.

“There’s more,” Josie said. “The doctor said she repeated the words Josie and help multiple times. He interpreted it to mean that she went to my house, seeking help.”

Otto frowned. “Not that you had provided her help at your house, and she was just repeating that you’d helped her?”

“That’s exactly what I thought. The doc said that considering her body language and facial expressions he thought she came to me for help.” Josie paused. “He said she viewed me as a kind of savior.”

Otto’s eyebrows shot up.

“It makes sense to me that she would latch on to you like that,” Marta said. “You were her savior. You finally put an end to the nightmare she’d been living for days. But it seems like a big jump for the psychiatrist to conclude that she was seeking you out specifically, if she can’t even talk much yet.”

“I agree. Without having been in the room, it’s hard to know how he came up with that idea.”

“Brazen is a respected psychiatrist. He works with PTSD. I don’t think he’d make a statement like that if he wasn’t confident in his assessment,” Otto said.