Midnight Crossing (Josie Gray Mysteries #5)(34)

She’d been here less than two years ago when the former tenant had been murdered. The man was Mexican, working in the U.S. to send money back to his family. The apartment had been almost bare. Now every square inch appeared filled: photos, piles of magazines and mail, shoe boxes filled with who knew what stacked ten high in the corners of the room, bookshelves filled with knickknacks against the wall. The bookshelf to her right, just inside the entryway, was filled with snow globes and dozens of ceramic ashtrays. It smelled musty, with the underlying odor of stale pot smoke.

Macey wore a short dress with combat boots, and her hair was in pigtails.

“We’re reorganizing. That’s why it looks so bad,” she said, without any introduction. “We just need another week.”

“We’re not here about your apartment,” Josie said. She glanced at the couch and had no desire to sit on the cushions. She then saw that even though the kitchen table was piled high with papers, its chairs were empty. “Can we sit in your kitchen for a few minutes and talk?”

“Sure. We can do that,” Macey said. “We’re organizing. Gonna have a garage sale. Make some money. Give some to Mom. That kind of thing.” She spoke with a clipped manic rhythm to her words.

The four of them sat around the table, and Josie looked at Josh. “I hear you’ve been asking about me at the police department.”

His unbelievably big eyes opened farther and he peered at Josie over the stacks of junk mail. “What?”

“You called the police department, asking about me. Why’d you do that?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Josie saw Josh glance at Otto, who was shaking his head as if disappointed in his answer.

“Here’s the deal. You just lied to me. Strike one. You tried to impersonate a police officer when you called to ask about my schedule. Strike two. You know what strike three is?”

He shook his head.

“We have your impersonation of a police officer all on tape. Strike three.”

He leaned back against his chair and looked to his sister as if she might know what to say.

“Why did you want to know my schedule?” Josie asked again.

“I was going to come talk to you.”

“About what?”

He shrugged. “I forget now.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I do!”

Josie looked at Otto. “I don’t have patience for this.”

Otto tipped his head toward Josh. “Let’s take him in. Arrest him for impersonating an officer. Give him some jail time so he can remember what he wanted to talk to you about.”

“I am not going back to jail! That place is a hellhole filled with a bunch of gagbags.”

Macey seemed as if she was going to start crying.

“Why did you tell the dispatcher you were a police officer?”

He considered her for a second, like he wasn’t sure if the truth was a good idea or not. “I didn’t think she’d tell me your schedule if I said I was me.”

“You needed to talk to me so bad that you pretended to be a cop, and now you can’t remember why?”

“That was a long time ago.”

Josie started to nod her head slowly and gave him the knowing look of someone who just caught on to the game. “I know what it was. I bet you wanted to talk to me about the two women you transported from Guatemala. Was that it?”

“No! We had nothing to do with that!”

“Macey, help us out here,” Otto said. “We know about the trafficking. We just need some information from you.”

Again, wide-eyed innocence.

“Tell us about those two women. How did they end up here in Artemis?” he said.

“It wasn’t our fault!” she said. Her voice was a high-pitched whine. “You need to go talk to Ryan Needleman. He’s the man you need. Not us.”

“How do you know him?” Otto asked.

“We know him from around town,” Macey said.

“What does he have to do with the women from Guatemala?” he said.

“We just heard he was driving some people up. He asked us to help but we didn’t want to get involved.”

“You mean, you didn’t want to get involved with the woman’s murder?” Otto asked.

“With none of it,” Macey said.

Her facial expression didn’t change at the word murder. Josie had no doubt the two were involved.

Otto stood, moved behind his chair, and gripped the back of it. He scowled angrily at both of them. Josie was always surprised when Otto took this role in an interview. He was such a kind, generous man; to see him turn dark and angry was unsettling.

He stared at one, and then the other, finally landing on Josh. “Let me tell you something.” His voice dropped an octave and landed into a quiet threatening zone. “We found a young woman, shot in the back and left to die. Her friend slept in Chief Gray’s shed for days and is terrified now. I will catch who did this. So you can either stay out of a lot of trouble now and come clean with us, or you can wait and pay full price with jail time later.”

Josh cleared his throat and Macey looked at him in a panic.

“We’ll think about—”

Macey cut him off. “We got nothing to say because we did nothing wrong.”