Scratchgravel Road (Josie Gray Mysteries #2)(14)

“I would if I didn’t have to suffer a slob as a partner.”

He smiled and winked at her.

She laughed. “Delores deserves a medal. I wouldn’t put up with this at home.”

Josie got Cassidy’s keys from the cup holder in the front of her jeep and unlocked Cassidy’s trunk. She snapped pictures of the contents: a bowling ball bag with a bowling ball zipped inside, a messy collection of college math and science textbooks ranging from calculus to nuclear physics with pages and covers ripped, an oily bath towel, and torn newspapers. With the closest bowling lane thirty miles away in Marfa, she wondered about the bowling ball. She didn’t picture Cassidy or the boyfriend as the bowling league types. Josie picked up one of the newspapers and saw the date was from two years ago. She thought she ought to do the girl a favor and throw everything from the trunk in the trash.

Josie jotted down a list of the items and slammed the trunk closed. Otto was peeling the tape off the passenger-side door handle. “That’s a pretty print. That’ll run for sure.”

“You done with the back yet?” Josie asked.

“Yep. This is my last door. I got two decent prints on the front driver side. This was the best one, though.”

Josie opened the back passenger door and leaned down to examine the items on the floor.

Otto stood and stretched his back. “How about a drink break?”

“Give me a minute,” Josie said, and got down on her knees beside the open car door. She used a pair of tweezers to lift a man’s wallet off the floor and drop it into a one-quart plastic evidence bag. She also found several coins that she dropped into the bag. There was nothing else on the floor of the car except for a straw wrapper and small pieces of trash.

Otto leaned over her. “There’s a Coke machine in the corner where you can buy me a drink.”

Josie stood and wiped the sweat away from her eyes. “I might have something.”

She walked over to the trunk of her car and Otto followed. She dumped out the evidence onto the tarp and Otto hummed beside her.

“Is that Leo’s wallet?”

Josie used a pair of large tweezers to open the wallet. “No driver’s license. But there’s cash in it.” She bent over the wallet to examine the clear windowed space for the ID more carefully. “At some point there was definitely something in this space. There’s a square ridge all the way around where the license was.”

“Looks like Ms. Harper might know more than she says,” Otto said.

“Why would she take the ID and pitch the wallet in her backseat?” she asked.

Josie used the tweezers and a gloved hand to open the bi-fold brown leather wallet. A twenty and four one-dollar bills were in the bill section. She backed up to let Otto look.

“Odd amount of money for an illegal trying to cross the border,” Josie said.

“Who would steal a guy’s driver’s license and leave the twenty-dollar bill?”

“That’s assuming the license was still in there when she took it.” Josie wiped the sweat off her forehead with her arm and sighed. She dropped the wallet into another plastic evidence bag, then put her hand in her front pocket and pulled out several dollar bills. “Come on. I’ll buy you a drink.”

They walked over to an enclosed office area with a humming Coke machine. They got their drinks and each drained half a can at once.

Josie nodded absently. “You figure Cassidy found the body and took his wallet back to her car out of some kind of morbid curiosity?”

“You hear about killers keeping items as souvenirs after they kill someone.”

“Come on. You don’t see her as the killer,” she said.

Otto nudged her arm with his own. “You being sexist? She’s a cute young girl, so she couldn’t possibly kill this guy?”

“Tell me how many cute young girls you’ve arrested for murder.”

“Not my point.”

“Besides, you know Cassidy. She’s clueless. Not a killer.”

“What’s that saying about desperate times?” he asked.

Josie ignored the question. “We’re assuming the wallet is the dead man’s. Maybe it’s her boyfriend’s. Maybe he bought a new one and switched wallets out while sitting in the car,” she said. “Just pitched the old one in the backseat.”

Otto gave her a skeptical look. “He has so much extra money that when he switched his wallet out he just left the twenty-four dollars.”

She tilted her head, conceding his point.

Josie stopped at her trunk and slipped on a fresh pair of rubber gloves. “I just can’t figure why she’d take the wallet. Think about the timing. She’d have found the body, taken the wallet, walked it all the way back to the car, dumped it in the backseat, then walked back to the body in this deadly heat, and passed out from exhaustion.”

“Maybe she took the stuff and got a guilty conscience. Decided to go back,” he said.

“Still doesn’t work. If she felt guilty she would have called the police. Why walk back to a body that was obviously dead? There’s no point in that.”

“Maybe someone else put the stuff in the car,” Otto said.

“Nope. The doors were locked. All the windows were rolled up. Her car keys were on her.” Josie opened the backseat of her jeep and pulled out her camera case. “We’ll need to check if she has another set of keys.”