Scratchgravel Road (Josie Gray Mysteries #2)(15)
Josie passed Otto the 35-millimeter camera and he nodded slowly. “Here’s another one. How’d she get the wallet? The guy is lying on his back. His body is decomposing. She had to work hard to get that wallet out of his back pocket. Fight the flies and the smell. I can’t imagine the wallet being worth that kind of grief.”
“Maybe he carried it in his front pocket, along with his pocketknife,” she said.
“I thought she looked pretty disgusted with the whole idea of the dead body. Remember her face when you asked if she could identify him? She looked ill even thinking about it. I can’t see her putting her hands into that dead man’s pants pocket.” Otto looked doubtful. “Front or back.”
“And why would she dump it in her backseat? Would you work that hard to get something and then throw it on the floor?” Josie shook her head no to her own question.
“You’d put it on the front seat, or you’d hide it,” he said.
“Let’s go back to the keys. If there’s a second set, it makes sense that Cassidy’s boyfriend would have them. What if Leo planted the evidence?”
“And why would he do that?” Otto asked.
“Maybe he’s planting evidence on her to keep the focus off him,” she said.
“Doesn’t make sense. All it does is draw more attention to both of them. If he had the evidence he’d want to hide it. Ditch it.”
“The body has been there several days. Maybe Leo drove Cassidy’s car out there and took the wallet himself. Killed the guy and took his identification. Left the wallet in the backseat,” she said.
“Although it still doesn’t make sense why he’d dump it in the backseat for Cassidy to find.”
Otto handed Josie a pair of latex gloves and grabbed himself a pair as well.
Josie absently slipped a glove over her hand, trying to make sense of the details they were collecting. “Meanwhile, we have a man with a curious mess of sores on his body, who was banged on the back of the head, then most likely left for dead in the middle of the desert.”
They spent the next twenty minutes inventorying everything in the car. It amounted mostly to music CDs, hair ties and headbands, and the items in Cassidy’s purse. The license from the man’s wallet never showed up.
Josie was packing up the evidence kit and Otto was locking the car when the first raindrops pinged off the metal roof of the garage. Within ten minutes the temperature dropped twenty degrees. They walked up to the open garage door as nickel-sized drops of rain pooled on the dry ground like water on a waxed car. The sky directly above them was still relatively clear with the setting sun casting light onto the ground in patches. Across the Chihuahuan Desert the rains were coming.
The country music stopped and Danny and Mitch ambled up to join them.
“Ain’t nothing better than the first rain of the season,” Danny said. He smiled widely and stepped out into the rain with his arms thrown wide, his head tipped back, and his eyes closed.
“Crazy shit. He’d be running through the raindrops if you two weren’t here,” Mitch said.
The sky to the south was moving fast, the clouds rolling like boiling water as the sun became completely blocked out and the light faded. The rain tapped louder and faster on the roof and Danny finally came back into the garage for shelter. They listened in silence and watched the display for a long while before Otto said they’d better get back to town. West Texas had experienced no rain in over nine months and it wouldn’t take long before the roads began to fill with mud. When the sand in Arroyo County mixed with rain it formed a frustrating combination of slick mud and concrete. Some areas received rain and compacted so hard the ground cracked when it finally dried. In other places sand mixed with soil and sediment and turned into a sludge that could turn instantly dangerous in the right conditions. Mudslides weren’t common, but they could be deadly when they hit.
*
In a suburb just south of town, two dozen modest, one-story homes were located around a road shaped like a race track. The center of the track, referred to as the infield by the kids in the neighborhood, was a park; mostly just a large empty lot with brown grass for a playing field that the kids used for baseball or whatever pickup game they could arrange. Most of the homes were rental units owned by Macon Drench, including the one where Officer Marta Cruz lived. Her house was located on the far end of the block, a small two-bedroom home covered in white siding with white vertical blinds covering all of the windows. A stone shrine to the Virgin Mary, surrounded by colorful plastic flowers in terra-cotta pots, decorated the front of the house. The landscaping consisted of gravel and a few cactuses. The house was clean and unassuming.
Inside, the walls were painted white, the decorations primarily religious in nature: an ornate gold cross hung on the wall above the couch, religious poems and plaques hung from the other walls. A floral couch and love seat and oval-shaped coffee table filled the small living room to capacity. The only room in the house painted anything other than white was Teresa’s. When she had turned thirteen she had insisted on a deep purple that now felt dark and overpowering, especially with the rain falling outside. She lay on her bed staring at the cracks in the ceiling. She imagined each line as a choice. She thought if she studied long enough the lines would connect and her life would make sense again.
She had never seen a dead body. She’d been to a funeral once when her grandpa died, but she’d not been allowed to walk up to the casket. But this wasn’t just a body. The man was murdered. She had seen the guy who last touched the body. She knew what the truck looked like. This wasn’t about sneaking out of the house with Enrico. Each minute she let go by without telling her mom increased her guilt. Now, two days had passed and she’d said nothing. She wondered if she might be arrested herself for something—for hiding information. She had lain awake for hours that night, listening to the soft tap of the minute hand on the clock, then the rain pounding on the roof and sliding down the windows outside her room, and still she had done nothing.