Midnight Crossing (Josie Gray Mysteries #5)(32)

“That’s not what I said, and you know it.”

“I’ll see you at three-thirty,” Marta said, and hung up.

*

Otto drove twenty-five minutes to Presidio, the town nearest to Artemis, to meet Trooper Dan Haspin, a twenty-year veteran with the Texas Department of Public Safety. Otto had worked with Dan through the years and knew he was active with the Texas Human Trafficking Task Force. Otto called Dan and filled him in on their suspicions, and Dan had offered to meet Otto to share intelligence.

A black man in his early forties, he wore the khaki uniform, blue tie, and hard felt cowboy hat of a Department of Public Safety trooper. He was bulked up around the chest, with a narrow waist that made Otto wonder if he had to work to maintain his physique. Otto blamed his belly on Delores, forty years of Polish comfort food. But he’d take his satisfying suppers over a tightened belt any day of the week.

Otto walked into the sandwich shop and found Dan in the corner booth with his back against the wall, his sandwich sitting untouched in front of him. He waved and smiled, and Otto bought his lunch and joined him.

They discussed Otto’s goat herd and the price of meat at the market, and Dan’s woodworking hobby, making toy trains and trucks. Both men knew the benefit of a hobby to occupy a cop’s off-duty mind.

Midway through their sandwiches, the conversation turned to work and Dan finally said, “You’ve got a dead woman in her early twenties, and a traumatized woman in her early twenties who speaks Spanish. The women are apparently from Guatemala, but they don’t show up in the missing persons databases. And the traumatized woman doesn’t want to share information about her family.”

Otto nodded. “That’s it.”

“It sure as hell fits the description for a human trafficking case.”

Otto cocked an eyebrow at him. “Without knowing any other details, you’d make that statement?”

“Here’s how widespread it is. Texas has a trafficking guide for teachers now to help them identify and report signs of trafficking in school-age kids. And it’s not just our state.”

Otto shook his head in disgust.

“Look. I’m not saying it’s rampant, but there are more cases than people would like to admit. It’s not just massage parlors and crappy hotels. So I’m not surprised to find that small-town Artemis has been affected.”

“That’s not the answer I was looking for,” Otto said.

Dan considered him for a moment. “You’re sure they came from Guatemala?”

Otto nodded.

Dan frowned. “From Guatemala to West Texas?”

“The surviving woman told someone who was providing her help, as well as one of our officers, that they were from Guatemala. I can’t imagine why she would lie about that,” Otto said.

“Here’s my issue. We have known groups coming up out of that country. No doubt. But it doesn’t make sense that they’d come to this part of West Texas first.”

Otto shrugged, not sure what he was getting at.

Dan took out his cell phone. “Let me pull up a map and you’ll see.”

A moment later Dan handed his phone to Otto with a route map drawn from Guatemala in Central America, up the eastern coast of Mexico, to Houston and San Antonio. Artemis, in West Texas, was hundreds of miles to the west. He nodded, instantly understanding.

“It’s a sixteen-hundred-mile trip from Guatemala to San Antonio. Even farther to Houston,” Dan said. “I can’t see them driving another six hours to West Texas, only to turn around and head back toward San Antonio.”

Otto was taken aback. “Why would you automatically assume traffickers would head to San Antonio?”

“I just don’t have much intel about this area. Houston, San Antonio, and occasionally El Paso, sure. But not Artemis, out in the middle of nowhere.”

Otto passed a card across the table. “Make sure you give me a call if you hear anything that might help us out.”

Dan nodded and stuffed the card in a wallet packed full of business cards. He was a typical cop, Otto thought—his wallet packed with more work-related notes than payment options.

*

Josie found Lou at her computer, her arms crossed at her chest. “You will not believe this.” It was two o’clock and Lou had just buzzed her desk and said to come down.

“Did you track down the caller?”

“I did.”

Josie waved her hand for Lou to get on with it.

“Josh Mooney.”

Josie pulled back at the name, smiling like she’d heard wrong. “Seriously?”

“Josh Mooney wanted to know your schedule for the week. Told me he was a law officer. And we have it on tape.”

“You are a saint.”

*

Back in the office, she called Otto and explained Lou’s findings.

“That’s the creep that hangs out with his sister all the time?” he asked.

“That’s him. Macey is his sister’s name. We busted them for meth about three years ago.”

Otto laughed. “Oh, hell. I remember that bust. We found both of them in a house trailer. With an afternoon soap opera blaring on the TV.”

“While they were cooking up a batch of meth in the kitchen,” she said.

“Matching Mickey Mouse pajamas.”