The Territory (Josie Gray Mysteries #1)(43)
The Medranos had been collecting information on the Artemis law enforcement agencies for years as they planned and set up transportation across the border. Chief Gray had been a target of concern. He opened the manila file folder that sat on the table beside the carafe. He picked up a black-and-white photo of an attractive female dressed in a police uniform. She was in her early thirties with long hair pulled back in a tight ponytail. She was looking off in the distance, her expression proud and brooding, gauging the world through a personal lens of justice; right and wrong were hers to decide, and for that he both despised and admired her.
A second photo showed her leaning into a man bent over a car hood with his hands in cuffs behind his back. She grasped his T-shirt in a bunch with one hand, her other hand planted on the hood, and talked to him with her lips close to his ear as a larger male officer stood behind her, looking away from the scene.
The last photo was a head shot, telephoto from straight on, as she looked just to the right of the shot. She was the rare woman who wore her sexuality unself-consciously. She was stunning. Her complexion was like cream, her cheeks pronounced, almost gaunt, adding to the severity of her expression.
The Americans would use threats and intimidation, torture if necessary, to gain information about the business. He would not allow his own traitorous blood to jeopardize his family. The Bishop looked over the knee-high stone wall that surrounded the veranda, across the lap pool, and into the great Chihuahua Desert. He vowed to do whatever was necessary to bring his cousin home within the week. He would see justice served by himself, not by the Americans. Not by this woman. It was no longer business. It had become personal. I will enjoy every detail of her death, he thought.
*
Josie stopped at the bakery on the way to work that morning and bought a dozen chocolate iced doughnuts and a half gallon of milk for her and Lou and Otto. She smiled at Lou and placed three doughnuts on a napkin beside her computer. Lou thanked her, and Josie smiled all the way up the stairs to the office. She had just heard the weatherman on Lou’s radio announce that the monthlong heat wave was about to give way to eighty-five-degree temperatures for a few days. The rain had not materialized, but at least the heat had broken. Josie looked at her watch as she logged on to her computer. She had four hours to enjoy a good day before her mother ruined it.
Her first order of business was to study a packet of photos of missing persons mailed to her every two weeks from a Mexican human rights group supported by the U.S. Consulate in Mexico. Over the past six months, an average of thirty-three kidnappings each month took place along the border, most of them along the migrant routes. A host of cottage industry kidnapping schemes had spread throughout Mexico and into the United States, most recently into Phoenix. Thousands of virtual kidnappings were made every day; an unsuspecting parent receives a phone call demanding money be wired to an account before their family member, heard screaming in the background, is killed. The parent is too terrified to check into the claim and pays the ransom before realizing their family member is fine. The cell phone call, made from Mexico, is not traceable and goes undetected.
Another racket, express kidnappings, were popular in bigger cities. A person hails a taxi, the driver picks them up, drives a block, picks up two additional men who force the passenger to withdraw money from ATM machines all over town. The person is typically then robbed and left on the street with nothing.
But in Josie’s mind, parents were the easiest target of all. She and Sheriff Martínez had led a series of town meetings on Situational Awareness to make parents more aware of their surroundings and dangers their children could be in. Josie was always surprised by how unaware most parents were of their environment, especially in terms of their kids’ safety. She was certain it would be an unhealthy obsession with her when she became a parent. Although she wouldn’t let herself give up on the idea of having kids, there were days when the dangers of raising a child seemed to outweigh the joys.
Josie looked through the stack of black-and-white photos of dozens of Mexican and American children, most smiling into the camera from family and school pictures, unaware of the horror they were about to endure.
She set the pictures aside after one photograph started to blend into another. She read through Marta’s report from the previous night. Marta had interviewed three local drug informants about the continuing violence between La Bestia and the Medrano cartel. The general consensus was that La Bestia had moved into Piedra Labrada, where the Medranos already operated, in order to focus on a transportation route directly through Artemis.
Josie glanced up from the report and saw that Otto had silently settled in. He was sitting at his computer reading e-mail and eating a doughnut. She interrupted him and filled him in on the details from Marta’s conversations.
“The international border crossing between Presidio and Ojinaga is the least used in all of Texas. And Artemis is another thirty minutes beyond the crossing. We’ve got desert all around us. No big cities to blend into. This area doesn’t even make sense as a route,” she said.
Otto shrugged. “Maybe that’s the draw. No one expects it. Maybe the Beast thought the same thing. They could ease in on this little podunk town, and Medrano wouldn’t notice. Didn’t turn out so good, though.”
She nodded. “I could see it if Medrano wasn’t already a presence. But why go to battle with one of the largest crime syndicates in Mexico? There are plenty other border towns to blend into.”