Scratchgravel Road (Josie Gray Mysteries #2)(19)
Otto pointed to the sketchpad in front of him. “From the angle of the bodies, it appears she crawled toward the body, then passed out about five feet from him. Her story works, we just can’t figure out why she was there.”
“Any idea how the man died?” Marta asked.
“He’d been there a few days, so cause of death is anyone’s guess,” Josie said. “The scary part was, he had sores on his arms. Multiple open lesions. Cowan’s talking about some kind of flesh-eating disease.”
Marta looked horrified. “The stuff where entire villages are killed?”
“Cowan was pretty evasive,” Josie said.
“He wasn’t his usual chipper self, if that tells you anything,” Otto said.
Josie smiled. “Leave Cowan alone. You know how lucky we are to have a coroner in a town this size who actually knows something about dead bodies?”
Otto glanced at his watch and Josie noticed it was after nine o’clock. After working second shift this evening, she and Otto had to turn around and work first shift in the morning. They drew up a quick list of priorities for Tuesday morning and she and Otto left Marta to finish out the night on her own—one of the many hazards of an understaffed, underfunded border police department.
*
Charcoal gray light hovered over the horizon as Josie drove home from work. The rain had momentarily slowed to a drizzle but a downpour loomed in the thick layers of clouds. Josie rolled her windows down to smell the wet earth, a smell she associated with a sense of longing and dread. She loved the sound of raindrops on her roof, listening to the deep endless roll of thunder across the desert, and watching the sheets of rain travel across the land like a curtain being drawn across a stage. But the aftermath would be ugly. Mud and sand would be on the roads for days, making travel on the back roads time-consuming, and in some areas impossible. She would start tomorrow helping the crews assess the damage to determine if roads needed to be temporarily closed until the county trucks could plow. She had a meeting scheduled with Sheriff Martínez and Smokey Blessings, the county maintenance director, at 7 A.M. to discuss plans. Smokey was married to Vie, and was her laidback opposite. He was built like a grizzly bear with a full beard and thick head of hair, but his demeanor was kind and always polite.
Josie turned right onto River Road, the best paved road in Artemis, and saw that it was already covered with debris. Most of the town’s roads were gravel, some just worn paths through the desert, or arroyos that were used only during the dry seasons. They were even harder to clean after a major storm.
Josie drove slowly and enjoyed the balmy temperature and moist air on her face. She turned onto Schenck Road and caught a glimpse of Dell Seapus’s ranch, tucked into the foothills of the Chinati Mountain range, just beyond her own home. Dell had deeded her ten acres to build a house on after she brought back his prized Appaloosa horses that a band of horse thieves had taken to New Mexico. Dell was a seventy-year-old bachelor, short and wiry, stooped and bowlegged from too many years on horseback. He was also Josie’s closest friend.
Josie looked at her house with pride as she approached. It was a small, rectangular adobe with a deep front porch. She and Dell had framed the house with brick over a two-month period, and she had hired an old Navajo Indian to plaster the faded pink exterior. Pecan timbers were used for the front porch and lintels. Josie had oiled and hand-rubbed the wood to a deep brown patina. The house looked as if it had been there for a hundred years.
As she pulled into the driveway her headlights caught Chester trotting down the lane from Dell’s house to her own. He held his head high, probably searching for a scent, but it gave him a serious look that Josie loved. Most days, Chester had already made the quarter-mile walk back down the lane to Josie’s and was lying on the front porch when she got home. She knew the dog would give his own life for hers, but at heart, he was a chicken. He didn’t like the dark.
She slammed the jeep’s door and laughed as the dog made his way up to her, his tongue hanging, back end swaying in the opposite direction of his wagging tail. He moaned and barked, his entire being happy to see her. She rubbed his long velvet ears and finally followed him up to the house where he forced his way through the door ahead of her and made a straight path to the kitchen. She heard the plastic rattle as he pushed his nose down into an open bag full of rawhide bones. Before she made it to the pantry to hang her gun belt on the hook, he had lain down on his rug in the living room for an evening snack and nap.
After she hung her uniform and bulletproof vest in her closet and changed into cotton shorts and a Texas A&M T-shirt, she wandered back to the kitchen to search the pantry shelves for dinner. She opened the cabinet to scavenge and found a can of roast beef and a can of baked beans, which she thought matched surprisingly well. She pulled them down and found the can opener in the silverware drawer. She dumped the contents into two plastic bowls with lids and stuck them in the microwave for two minutes.
As her dinner cooked, Josie pressed the button on the answering machine that sat at the end of her kitchen counter. One message.
“Hey, it’s me.”
Josie smiled. It was Dillon Reese, her longtime, semi-serious love interest. He sounded tired and lonely.
“I’m still in Kansas. The conference is predictable. The feds want more than is humanly possible to give. I’m going out tonight for dinner and drinks. Nothing like twenty accountants to liven up the streets of Topeka. Call me later. I’ll keep my phone with me.” He paused. “Miss you.”