Midnight Crossing (Josie Gray Mysteries #5)(84)
Josie compared that number to the number that had called Josh Mooney at 6:37 p.m. the evening of the murder. The numbers matched.
“Damn. Marta. Come here.”
Josie ran through what she had just discovered and Marta clamped a hand on Josie’s shoulder. “How do we trace that number down?” she asked.
On a whim, Josie pulled her cell phone out and typed the number in to see if it registered as one of her contacts. The contact Mayor Moss appeared.
“Son of a bitch,” she whispered, and held her phone up for Marta to see.
*
Marta sat down heavily in the chair beside Josie. Her forehead was bunched into worry lines. “The mayor called Big Ben one day before Renata was killed.”
“And that was several days before I went to his office to tell him about Caroline being involved. So he obviously knew about this before I showed up. It’s probably why he took my gun and badge away. He wanted to block the investigation.”
“I just can’t believe this,” Marta said.
Josie went to her daily notes logbook on her desk and flipped through it. “Did I mention to you that Mayor Moss stopped by here before all this broke loose to say the mayor’s office had received a weird voice message?”
Marta frowned and shook her head. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”
“It wasn’t a big deal at the time. He said the message was about something bad going on in town. He said Helen accidentally deleted it.” Josie found the note in her logbook and looked up at Marta. “He stopped by the office the morning of the day we found the body in the pasture.”
“Why would he say that to you, knowing Caroline was mixed up in this?” Marta said.
“Maybe Moss has been a part of the organization all along. Maybe he was trying to deflect attention.”
She and Marta sat down at the table and stared at the phone records from Big Ben until the numbers blurred. Examining the calls over the past year, they weren’t able to find any other from Mayor Moss, nor did they find any additional calls from Big Ben to the 432 area code.
“Mayor Moss?” Marta said. Her voice was breathy, unbelieving. “Caroline was shock enough.”
“It’s not that he has a high regard for women; he obviously doesn’t. But he defends the law. That’s the part of his personality that always felt genuine to me,” Josie said. “It was the part of his personality that I respected. This is the kind of news that makes you question everyone.”
“What do we do now?” Marta said.
Josie looked at her watch. It was almost eight p.m. She wanted to call Otto, but refrained. “Holder told me to stand down while he turns the investigation over to the FBI. I want to go home and think on this tonight. I’ll wait until morning to turn Holder’s world upside down.”
TWENTY-ONE
Josie drove home, fed the dog but skipped her own supper, and then climbed into bed at nine o’clock, where she lay on her back staring at the ceiling. Her mind flitted from Nick sleeping in Mexico, to her mom driving back to Indiana, to five women traveling from Guatemala, to Josh Mooney in lockup, until she finally got out of bed and dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt to take Chester outside for a walk.
Behind the house, Chester hit on a scent and zigzagged around the backyard sniffing out a jackrabbit or some other little animal. Josie decided she didn’t have the energy for a walk, so she took advantage of the bright moonlight and sat on the ground with her back against a large rock to watch Chester scout out the yard.
She allowed her gaze to travel out across Dell’s pasture and wondered how long it would take her to view the field with the same sense of serenity she’d once had. A day spent working with twisted dopers like Josh and Macey Mooney slipped out of her mind when she and Chester took off into the desert, looking for nothing but interesting rocks and glimpses of wildlife or a bright blooming flower thriving in the midst of sand and dust. Now she looked into the pasture and the vivid image of two young women fleeing for their lives from men intent on capturing or killing them ran like a movie through her brain.
Josie thought back to the night she’d gone to town for the water meeting. The night the killers obviously knew she wouldn’t be at home. The killer who knew she had an interest in the county water supply. As a cop with limited resources, she didn’t own enough ground to be personally affected, but her neighbor Dell sure as hell did, and the killer had to have known that. The meeting was about the amount of water allowed to be pumped from an individual’s well, and the use of meters to determine depleting groundwater usage. The meeting became heated on both sides, from water conservationists to ranchers trying to save fragile crops and livestock. Josie watched men and women who had been friends and neighbors for years face off against each other in a battle that would end friendships before it was over. She ran through her mind the various people she had seen at the meeting, people who had stood at the microphone to speak from handwritten notes they’d carefully prepared, to the hotheads in the back of the room catcalling. Then she wondered who wasn’t at the meeting. Who was missing that should have been there? Who might have skipped the meeting in order to hunt down and kill a woman?
She felt the blood drain from her face as she mentally checked off the list of speakers that night. Who was the one person in town who lived for moments in the spotlight? Who loved controversy and the chance to stand as a voice of reason in troubled times? And he hadn’t spoken that night. Josie realized she hadn’t seen him at all.