Midnight Crossing (Josie Gray Mysteries #5)(50)

“She’s a criminal, Ryan. Why do you care what she—”

“She’s not a criminal! That’s why I can’t say anything! No one would believe me anyway.”

“If you’re straight with us, it won’t matter who she is. If this woman is transporting women from Guatemala to Texas for a profit, then she’s clearly breaking the law. It’s that simple,” Otto said.

Ryan glared at him and said, “Caroline Moss.”

Josie felt like she’d been kicked in the gut. The mayor’s wife. The woman voted Citizen of the Year for Arroyo County. The same woman who offered to pay for Isabella’s plane ticket to Guatemala.

“You’re saying that Caroline Moss approached you about driving the van to transport those women?” Otto asked.

“See! You don’t believe me! I told you.”

“This is a serious allegation,” he said.

“No kidding! It was serious when she said she’d destroy me too.”

“Why don’t you back up and start at the beginning. When did she contact you? Where were you? You tell us everything you can think of,” Josie said.

He leaned his head back and groaned. “It doesn’t matter what I do. I am so screwed.”

“What did you just tell me last night? You were going to get your act together. This is how you start.”

He blew out air in frustration and kicked at the dirt before he finally opened up. “I’ve known Caroline since I was a kid. She and the mayor are friends with my mom and dad. They do some wine-tasting thing every month together. We’ve been on vacations with them. So when I got in trouble this fall at school she sent me a card and basically told me to hang in there. That it would all work out.”

“When was this?” Josie said.

“A month or two ago. After I left school. Then she stopped by here one day like she was looking around for plants. But I think she came to see me. She said she knew I was having a bad time, and that she had a way for me to earn some extra money to help pay back my parents. I was like, Yeah, that’d be great. It was weird, though. I could tell she was nervous about talking to me. Then she was like, Listen, if you do this, you can’t tell anyone what you’re doing. She told me to come up with a story about helping a friend of mine to move here from Mexico.” Ryan crossed his arms and leaned against the building, his expression unbelieving. “I thought she was shipping dope from Mexico. Then she says it’s girls. She’s helping these girls from Guatemala who have these terrible lives, and she’s figured out how to help them get jobs here.”

“When she was explaining this, did it surprise you that she would ask something like this from you?” Josie asked.

“Not really. I mean, she’s always doing some charity thing. That’s how she described the whole thing. She said the girls didn’t have the money for passports and all that. She was going to get them here first, and then help them get paperwork and all that. She wanted to help them become citizens and get jobs.”

“Legally it doesn’t work that way. You get the documents first,” Josie said, trying to figure out if Ryan was that na?ve.

“I don’t know how it works. I didn’t care either. I mean, it was Caroline. She wasn’t going to do something that could get us into trouble.”

“But she said she’d destroy you if you told anyone?”

“That came later. After the girl got shot. She came to the house when she knew Mom and Dad were gone. She was shaking, had tears in her eyes. She kept asking me what happened, and I kept telling her I didn’t know. The girls just escaped, and now one of them was dead. Then she got mad at me, like the screwup was my fault! I was like, seriously? I was driving a van with a lunatic who wanted to have sex with anything that moved, and I screwed up?”

“Do you think she had anything to do with the murder?” Josie asked.

He curled his lip at the question. “No. She was freaking out. I think she thought she was helping those girls, and Josh just fouled it all up.”

“Do you think Josh shot Renata?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it constantly. I mean, he’s the only one who makes sense to me. But I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t there.”

“Have you been in contact with her since she came by your house?”

“No. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone about anything. That’s when she put a finger in my face and said she’d destroy me if I talked about it to anyone, including my parents.”

Josie glanced at Otto, who shook his head once, signaling he was done. “We’ll be in touch,” she said to Ryan.

“Are you going to tell her that I told you about this?” he asked.

Josie considered him for a moment and realized she wasn’t able to offer him any reassurance. “I just don’t know at this point.”

When they’d gotten to the jeep, Otto slammed his door and looked over at Josie. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“This is gonna get ugly.”





TWELVE

Josie called Marta and asked her to have burritos from the Hot Tamale delivered to the police department. Otto dropped Josie by the jail so she could pick up her jeep. By the time she arrived at the department the delivery kid was just pulling up with a paper bag full of food.