Bitter Crossing (A Peyton Cote Novel) (17 page)

“Discuss custody and child support yet?”

Elise shook her head.

Peyton looked at her. “Does he know?”

Elise turned away and retrieved two mugs. “We haven’t been intimate for three months.”

“Elise, does he know why?”

“I haven’t told him I’m gay. He’s just furious that I stopped telling him how attractive he is. You know how he can be. He thrived on that.”

“Don’t you think you should tell him the truth?”

Elise turned from the counter to face her. “I will, but …”

“But what?”

“He’s got a temper,” Elise said.

“Has Jonathan ever hit you?”

“What? No.”

“You keep saying he’s got a temper.”

“Not like that.”

“I’ve never liked how he’s treated you. I think he’s a bully, Elise. And he constantly needs to be the center of attention.”

“He says you never liked him because of his past.”

“His past? He’s a convicted felon, Elise.”

“He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“He was incarcerated for Possession with Intent. He was selling prescription drugs to kids. I realize you met him after that phase of his life, Elise, but please don’t act like it didn’t happen.”

“Peyton, that was never proven. He pled guilty because he had a bad attorney.”

Peyton exhaled slowly and went to the breakfast counter. “I’m not arguing with you. Look, Mom put me on the spot this afternoon. I don’t want to pressure you to tell her, but you know what she can be like. The old lady could get a confession from O.J. Simpson.”

Elise smiled. “Mom’s the best. She just wants to help, but I don’t want to upset her. I know she drags you and Tommy to Mass with her on Sundays. This will be a huge conflict for her.”

“She might surprise you.”

“Let me tell Jonathan first.”

“I can be here when you tell him,” Peyton offered.

“I won’t put you through that.”

“I’m your sister.”

“No. I’ll handle it.” Elise took a bowl of tea bags from the cupboard and held it toward Peyton, who selected green tea. “I have to.”

“What did Jonathan say in Boston that was so bad?”

“I don’t want to get into it. What do you need to talk to him about?”

“Nothing big,” Peyton said again. “Mom’s worried about you ending up alone like me.”

“That wouldn’t be so bad. You’re pretty self-reliant.”

“Is that code for stubborn?”

Elise smiled and took a teabag from the bowl. “I’ll tell Mom soon. I promise.”

Peyton didn’t feel self-reliant at 11:15 p.m. She felt exhausted.

Wearing a hands-free headlamp, she stood where the baby had been found, careful not to trip a sensor. The seismic motion sensors had picked up nothing in the twenty-four hours since she’d buried them. But Hewitt was big on these things, so she’d returned to Monty Duff’s desolate potato field to check on them.

Everything looked fine. No footprints nearby, but that meant little since the ground was frozen.

Stan Jackman’s voice crackled over the radio clipped to her belt. The call wasn’t for her. Jackman told Miguel Jimenez that he was at the west end of the potato flat. Jimenez replied; he was to the east. No lights emanated from east or west, so Jackman and Jimenez were using night-vision goggles.

“Stan”—Jimenez’s voice was clear over the radio—“there’s a light on in the potato house. Harvest is over. I’ll check it out.”

A voice called from behind, “Peyton Cote, is that you?”

She turned, and a flashlight’s beam blinded her. Feeling the instantaneous sense of helplessness and fear a sudden loss of vision induces, she moved her hand to the holstered S&W on her right hip.

She exhaled slowly. “Turn—the—light—off.”

“Oh, sorry, Peyton.” The light went out.

“Who is that?”

“Just me, Monty Duff.”

Her eyes readjusted to the darkness. Monty Duff was five feet away.

“Hello, Mr. Duff. I spoke with your wife.”

He nodded. “Just wanted to see what these things look like.” He scanned the ground looking for them. “This is where my main crop will be next year.”

“The equipment is already buried. But don’t worry. I put it between rows. Your crops won’t be damaged.”

“You’re the daughter of a farmer,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“I appreciate it. Where is the thing?”

Peyton wouldn’t divulge that. “How was the crop this year?”

“Oh, great,” he said. “Not many of us had big years, but it was one of my best.” He spoke enthusiastically, forgetting his previous question.

“Well, I appreciate your cooperation, sir.”

He made a hand gesture that said,
It
’
s nothing.
“If something’s happening on my land, I want to know.”

Peyton wore her heavy flannel field coat. The forecast predicted an overnight low of twenty-five degrees. Duff wore only a hunting shirt atop overalls.

“The sensors will be out well before planting,” she said.

“Want coffee? Jenny and me eat dinner at four-thirty. I’m usually in bed long before now. Thought I’d stay up. See what this was all about. We don’t get much company. I can bring you a cup.”

“No. But thank you.”

“Well, it’s good to have you back in town, Peyton.” He paused. “Jenny baked cherry pie. I can bring you a piece. We don’t get much company,” he said again.

“That’s an awfully nice offer, but I can’t accept. I’m on duty. Really, thank you very much.”

“Sure,” Duff said, looking down.

She saw his dirt-covered hands. His daughter had moved away. He and his wife led a lonely existence. What had life been like for Lois when the sisters were gone?

Duff offered a warm smile and started back to his house. Ten yards away, he froze, and they both looked eastward. “Was that a gunshot?” he asked.

But Peyton didn’t answer.

She was already sprinting east.

Peyton knelt near the Crystal View River beside the north wall of the potato house, gun drawn, eyes scanning the terrain. It had been a gunshot. There was no doubt, but if she’d not grown up here, she might not have been certain. Unlike the sounds she’d forever associate with the southern border—the bursts of automatic weaponry, the
snap
of a handgun—this shot had been the large singular explosion she’d heard from her late-father’s hunting rifle during deer and moose season.

Water rhythmically slapped the rocks that guarded the thicket-and-tree-lined river embankment. The water, she knew, was far too cold for swimming now, and for a split moment, she recalled her father’s words:
The fish are deep now. Let the lure sink
.

A Northern Harrier startled her, diving low and skimming the land between the potato house and the river as if traversing the dark barrel of a firearm, before rising and heading north over the river, the flapping of its wings resounding like a snare drum.

The ten-thousand-square-foot potato house was used for storage and as such, its design was unique to its purpose: It looked as if it had fallen from the sky and sunk nearly to the roofline. Potato houses utilized two natural resources Aroostook County had in abundance: space and dirt. The building’s foundation couldn’t be seen. Earth rose to the tin roof on the sides and in the back, providing the insulation needed to store the potatoes until a buyer was found and they could be shipped. An oversized garage door for transport trucks dominated the front of the building. And she remembered the look of relief on her father’s face each time a truck had pulled away from the loading dock.

“Where the hell is Miguel?” Jackman said, rounding the corner of the potato house. “I’ve gone over the inside twice. Lights were on when I arrived.”

Peyton stood, pulled the night-vision goggles down around her neck, and switched on her flashlight. The goggles tinged the landscape green. She’d been back and forth along the river’s edge.

“I staked out this area the other night,” she said.

“This is where you found the baby?”

“About two hundred yards east. But I was here because a tip said pot was coming through in this area.”

“Still think that’s the case?”

She looked across the Crystal View River. Youngsville, New Brunswick, was sparsely lit like layers of twinkling lights on a distant Christmas tree.

“Canada’s just across the river. Only house around here is Monty Duff’s. That’s a half-mile away, and he goes to bed by seven. It would make sense.”

“By boat?” Jackman said. “Think we heard an engine backfire?”

“No. Sounded like a rifle to me.”

“Those Canadians you guys nabbed last night, they come from here?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But the baby was found here?” Jackman said.

“Yeah. You call for backup?”

“I did, but I’m not sure I heard a gunshot. Sounded like a car or a boat backfiring.” In the dim light, she saw him look away. “But I trust your instincts more than my own right now.”

She understood what he meant. He simply hadn’t been the same since his late-wife Karen passed, as if she’d taken his confidence with her.

“I think I heard a rifle,” she said again and swept her Maglite over the terrain. Nothing.

The original plan had called for her to roam the field’s two-mile perimeter, sweeping west to east, while Jimenez and Jackman remained at the boundaries, working separately. But the sound had led her directly east.

“You know, Miguel has struggled with this terrain,” Jackman said. “Maybe he got lost.”

“Why don’t you wait for the backup? I’ll head east for ten minutes or so.”

The recent snow had been heavy and wet. She’d killed the flashlight, pulled on night-vision goggles, and was moving slowly, trying to register both sights and sounds. Sign-cutting here meant looking for footprints in the slush or any irregularity or deviation among the natural habitat that registered with her experience and intuition and signaled that something was out of the ordinary.

Jimenez was young, twenty-six, an El Paso native who longed to return to the southern border, where he knew the terrain and had family. And she knew he had struggled since arriving. In this climate, things only got more difficult. Where El Paso’s desert winds blew sand and covered tracks, Garrett’s winter days grew dark by 4 p.m. Icy temperatures dropped to thirty, even forty below, making the countryside brittle and treacherous. She’d heard the woeful tale of a southern agent who’d come north and, early in his tenure, had studied the same frozen track for a week before realizing what he’d thought to be a pattern of nighttime activity was nothing more than a useless week-old footprint. On other occasions, nighttime activity was quickly concealed by a fresh white coating. Timing, therefore, had to be perfect for one to even locate a print. When it didn’t snow, gusts whipped through open farmland not only covering tracks but peppering agents’ faces with icy needles. And traversing knee-deep fields of snow left agents exhausted.

It all made Peyton wonder whose side Mother Nature was on.

She continued slowly, head swiveling, eyes sweeping back and forth over the furrows of frozen dirt and slush to the brush and trees lining the river’s edge, mind gathering and sifting data.

Then something registered.

TWENTY
-
ONE

P
EYTON KNELT TO EXAMINE
the rock.

Amid the frozen dirt row, the glistening rock stood out in the moonlight, a diamond on wet tar. She removed her night-vision goggles and switched on her flashlight.

Fresh blood.

For an instant, everything slowed. She became cognizant of all surrounding sounds—her breath rasping in and out, the earth crunching beneath her, the water lapping the shoreline.

She drew her .40 and shone her light on the ground near her. The trail of darkened soil spots wasn’t easy to follow, but she needed only four spots. They led to a cluster of bushes at the shoreline. A black, high-laced boot was the first thing the flashlight’s beam hit upon. Freshly polished. Metal lace holes shining in the moonlight. She recognized the boot as government-issued.

She inhaled deeply.
Calm.
Then exhaled slowly.

Miguel Jimenez lay, as if beneath a crown of thorns, under a wind-ravaged bush. The center of his leather aviator jacket was darkened, his throat blood-spattered, his eyes open, as if to look at something in the distance.

“Miguel, can you hear me?” She was on her knees beside the bush.

No response. No movement.

The flashlight dropped to the ground as she fumbled for her radio.

“
AGENT DOWN!
This is Bobcat Nineteen.
AGENT DOWN!
”
She rattled off her location.

The response came quickly: Help was on the way.

She was facing the river, back to the open field. She pressed her hand to his face. Still warm. His blinking eyes strained to focus on her. He opened his mouth. No words came. A slow stream of blood coursed his bottom lip and ran down his chin.

She unzipped his jacket. No Kevlar vest. What the hell had he been thinking?

Blood flowed from a nickel-sized hole near his right shoulder. It hadn’t been a shotgun. She glanced once behind her. No one. She needed her other hand and reholstered her pistol. With her utility tool, she cut a large strip from Jimenez’s shirt, balled the fabric, and pressed it firmly against the wound.

Two fingers against his wrist registered a faint tap. A warm bead of perspiration ran down her cheek as an eternity passed before the next beat.

She thought she heard something move behind her and pulled her hand away from Jimenez’s wrist. Grabbing her gun again, she glanced over her shoulder. Nothing.

She turned back to Jimenez.

“You’re going to be okay.”

She didn’t believe that, but if she was on the ground, it’s what she’d want to hear.

“The potato house …” Jimenez’s words came as if funneled through sludge, his breath grating against his throat like an old man suffering emphysema.

Were his lungs filling with blood?

Jimenez shifted weakly, trying to free himself from a twig. Protocol dictated an agent not move a shooting victim unless in harm’s way.