Scratchgravel Road (2 page)

She glanced down at the gold medallion that lay in the tray on her console; her father’s ten-year award for his service as a police officer. It was the only memento she had of her father’s work as an officer and she kept it with her, a talisman to protect her on the job. Her father had been killed in a line-of-duty accident when she was eight, and in her own mind, it had always been a given that she would become a cop as well. Looking out at the lonely desert before her she knew the job was a good fit. She preferred watching people to talking with them, asking questions rather than answering them.

*   *   *

Cassidy Harper wiped the sweat out of her eyes with the sleeve of her T-shirt and turned to face the road, a quarter mile back through scorched desert sand, to where her water bottle sat in the front seat of her car. With thirty minutes before Leo returned home, there was no time to turn around.

She pulled a folded piece of paper out of the front pocket of her shorts and stared at the words she had heard two days ago. At one thirty in the morning she had awoken to the sound of Leo’s voice in the other room. She got out of bed and crept down the hallway to see him sitting in the dark on the living room floor, hunched over the phone. She had only caught pieces of his conversation before the fear of being caught eavesdropping forced her back into bed. But she’d grabbed a pen, and a paperback book from her nightstand, and in the light from the digital clock she scribbled down fragments of the conversation she had heard on a blank page:
I’ll take … to Scratchgravel Road. Half mile before River Road, on the right. A quarter mile downhill. Can’t see … from the road.

Then he’d disappeared for three hours. Gotten in his car and driven away without waking her up or leaving her a note about where he was going. Cassidy had remained rigid when Leo crawled back into bed near dawn the next morning. He had curled away from her and said nothing. A mix of fear and anger kept her from saying anything that morning, but she couldn’t let it go.

Over dinner that evening, she had asked where he had gone in the middle of the night. He’d given her a startled look and then concocted some ridiculous answer about not being able to sleep. “I just took a ride, got some fresh air. I didn’t want to wake you.”
Bullshit,
she’d thought.

Cassidy had allowed the words she had written down to chew at her for two days, but the not knowing was driving her crazy. She’d heard rumors about a dirt road somewhere off of Scratchgravel that led to a place where kids partied on the weekends. The druggies called it the Hollow. But she had never known Leo to take drugs or even show any interest; he rarely even drank alcohol. None of it made any sense.

With fewer than 2,500 people, Artemis was a remote desert town situated on a dead-end road between two ghost towns. For an outsider, it was not an easy place to meet people, especially if you didn’t fit the mold. Cassidy wasn’t sure what the mold was, but it obviously wasn’t an out-of-work physics teacher. Leo had no friends and only a part-time research job he worked at from home. She was basically his only friend in Artemis, or so she had thought, and she couldn’t imagine who he would be meeting at one in the morning. So she had decided to investigate. She wanted proof before he had the opportunity to spin the lies she was sure would follow.

She looked back toward her car, but it was behind a low hill, just out of view. She was not good at judging distances, but she was fairly certain she had walked at least a quarter of a mile. In the heat, it felt like five miles. Twenty-two years old, and she was stalking her lousy boyfriend in the desert.

Cassidy turned away from the road and began walking toward a patch of mesquite bushes and several large boulders about fifty feet in the distance. If there was nothing there she would turn back. Her head hurt, and the sun, now directly overhead, was making her dizzy and nauseous. She could see a depression in the sand directly in front of her, maybe another quarter of a mile from Scratchgravel, and she assumed it was the crater-shaped area the kids called the Hollow. Curious, she wanted to check out the spot, but she would need to come back with water if she intended to hike any farther.

Fifteen feet from the small grove of bushes she caught wind of a horrible smell. She stopped and wrinkled her nose. It smelled putrid, like a rotting animal—not a familiar smell in the desert. She realized suddenly how hot she was. Her sweat evaporated instantly and it was difficult to measure how much water she had already lost.

Growing up in the swamps of the Everglades she had hated the dank decay that permeated everything she owned. When she left home at sixteen she hitchhiked west and stopped in Texas for the smell alone, the clean baked smell of desert dirt. She wrinkled her nose in disgust. Whatever it was now, a dead jackrabbit or coyote, it definitely did not smell clean.

There were six mesquite bushes, approximately five feet tall and just as wide, with only a sparse covering of small green leaves that allowed her to see through to the other side. Before she walked behind the first mesquite she noticed a lump. She held a hand over her eyes to block the sun’s glare and after several seconds she made out the shape of a body, a man, flat on his back.

“What the hell?” she said, her voice surprising her in the silence.

She walked quickly around the grove to the back side, then advanced several steps before her windpipe swelled with fear. She struggled to pull air down into her lungs. She put a hand to her mouth and dropped to her knees. The sand burned her skin as she crawled forward, a sickening curiosity pushing her on. Had Leo known about this man? Did he have something to do with this man’s death?

Cassidy’s long red hair hung in ringlets around her face. Sweat stung her eyes. Riding a wave of nausea she had a clear vision of her blistered body passed out beside the decaying corpse in front of her. Stray flies buzzed from the corpse toward her face in search of new prey. She watched the sand in front of her begin to move like ocean waves.

*   *   *

Josie pushed her sunglasses on to avoid increasing the spray of wrinkles around her eyes. At her age, the desert sun was just beginning to take a toll on her skin. She wore her brown shoulder-length hair straight, usually pulled back into a ponytail, which did nothing to soften her angular cheekbones and jawline. While on duty, Josie wore nothing that would draw attention to her physical appearance or gender.

She turned south onto Scratchgravel Road, toward River Road, which ran a parallel course with the Rio Grande. The river served as the fragile border between West Texas and Mexico. Across the river was Piedra Labrada, Artemis’s sister city. The fifty-mile strip of land on either side of the river was known locally as
the territory
, a once-quiet area where two cultures had shared their differences peacefully for several hundred years. The cartels had recently chosen Artemis as their route into the United States, a disaster that taxed local law enforcement beyond all available resources. Since the Medrano and La Bestia cartels had begun negotiating over territory and drug routes in the area rather than killing each other over it, her small town of Artemis, Texas, had settled back into an uncomfortable peace. People wanted to believe the brutality was over, but the memories were fresh; the fear still dominated conversations at the diner and gas stations. She knew the peace was nothing more than temporary.

Josie made a habit of climbing the fifty-foot-tall watchtower built alongside the river at least once a week at various times of day and night to keep an eye on several hot spots for illegal crossings. She looked for signs on the ground: trash bags, discarded clothing, empty water bottles—all trash left behind by illegals lightening their load as they made their way across the desert. A shallow bend in the Rio Grande had been a recent crossing point for the Medrano cartel’s gun and drug running, but Josie hoped the entrance point had been shut down with the arrests of several high-ranking leaders.

About a half mile before reaching the watchtower she spotted a light blue economy-sized car parked on the east side of the road. As she approached, she made out Texas plates. The car looked as if it had lost at a game of bumper cars; there were multiple dents, faded paint, a smashed left taillight, and a loose right fender. Josie thought the car looked like Cassidy Harper’s, a girl who had worked as a fill-in janitor at the Artemis Police Department for a few months last year. Josie had liked the girl and had offered her some advice that Cassidy seemed to want but never followed. Josie met Cassidy’s type frequently; many of the people she arrested weren’t bad, they just made horrible choices.

Josie parked behind the vehicle and surveyed the area, scanning for movement. She saw no one. She walked around the car and found all of the windows up and the car doors locked. A woman’s yellow tote bag lay on the backseat and about a dozen music CDs were scattered over the passenger seat in the front. Nothing looked tampered with. It looked as if she had parked and taken off hiking on a day forecast to hit 104 degrees.

Josie called the plate in to Lou and climbed onto the hood of her jeep, and then the roof, to view the area. A quarter mile east of her jeep she saw two shapes that she was certain were not native. The shapes were in the midst of a group of bushes so she was not able to distinguish what they were, but the coloring was off. She could make out bright yellow, and a patch of navy blue, neither of which were colors found in the desert in late July.

Worried the shapes could be people suffering from heat exhaustion, Josie climbed down from her vehicle to grab a small pair of binoculars from her glove box. Lou radioed back confirmation that the car belonged to Cassidy Harper: twenty-two years old, red hair, brown eyes, five foot four, 119 pounds, a resident at 110 River Road in Artemis. Josie told her to send Otto her way for assistance, and then got back up on the roof of her car.

She yelled Cassidy’s name twice, but saw no movement through her binoculars.

With her heart pounding now, Josie climbed back down, slid inside her jeep, and threw it into four-wheel drive. She could think of no rational reason for Cassidy to be outside. She’d lived in Artemis long enough to know this kind of heat killed in a hurry.

Resisting the urge to floor it, she drove slowly into the desert, feeling her way, sensing the movement of the tires in the sand beneath her. There were areas she wouldn’t take the jeep, even in four-wheel drive, because the sand was so soft the tires would get buried. Having never driven off-road in this area, she advanced carefully.

Josie rarely became emotionally tangled with other people’s lives but occasionally her guard slipped. Cassidy had remained in Josie’s thoughts since leaving the department. The girl lived her life by being at the wrong place at the wrong time and Josie often wondered about the situation with her boyfriend. She hoped it hadn’t just ended in tragedy.

About fifty feet from what she was now certain were bodies, Josie felt the sand give way under her tires. Rather than chance getting the jeep buried, she grabbed her water bottle from the center console and opened the door, leaving the jeep and its air conditioner running. She pulled her gun and ran toward the bodies.

As she approached it was obvious she was facing the possibility of two dead. She found Cassidy, lying on her side, her face in the sand. Josie glanced at the body lying ten feet to the left of Cassidy but didn’t bother checking vital signs. The man was already dead: swollen, deteriorating, and smelling rank. He had been there a few days. Even with the decomposition she could tell he was not Cassidy’s boyfriend.

Josie kneeled close to Cassidy’s head to block the sun from her face and placed two fingers on her neck. The girl’s face was bright red and her pulse racing. Her skin was dry to the touch and Josie feared heatstroke, which could turn fatal fast.

She pulled her portable radio out of her belt and signaled Lou.

“Call the clinic. Tell them we have a probable heatstroke. I need a medic fast. She needs IV fluids. Then call Otto. We have a dead male. Possible illegal. Body is due east of the blue Ford Focus on Scratchgravel Road. Call the coroner.”

During her time as a custodian at the police department, Cassidy had been good-natured and friendly. She had been a hard worker and Josie had hated to see her leave when their regular custodian came back from his medical leave. Jimmy was a sixty-something-year-old who was slow and quiet and rarely interacted with anyone in the department. Cassidy had been a welcome addition.

She lived with a man quite a few years older than she was, an odd guy, close to forty years old with a long scruffy beard and dark eyes that bothered Josie. During a traffic stop several years ago, he had avoided Josie’s eyes, never once meeting her gaze. She could not imagine what the attraction was for this pretty young girl.

Waiting for Lou to respond, Josie opened the water bottle and took Cassidy’s head in her hand, tilting it up, trying to wake her and get her to drink something. There was no response. She poured water over Cassidy’s face and her wrists, attempting to lower her body temperature. Cassidy’s hand moved but nothing more. Josie stood and put the water bottle in her gun belt. She bent at the knees and lifted Cassidy’s torso over her shoulder, then used her leg muscles to slowly stand and balance herself. She took careful steps through the fine sand back to her jeep. In the intensity of the afternoon heat, each breath felt like fire, but she had to get Cassidy into air-conditioning until the medic arrived.

Josie stood at a trim five feet seven inches, but the walk to the car was slow. The heat magnified every movement, slowing every bodily function. Just as she started to worry the girl would not make it in time she saw the dust of an approaching car, then the unmistakable flash of Otto’s patrol lights.

Officer Otto Podowski was sixty years old, a large man with little tolerance for the desert heat. He drove his own jeep to where Josie had parked, then ran to her and took the young woman over his own shoulder, carrying her the last forty feet to Josie’s car. She ran ahead and opened the backseat door, then helped Otto position Cassidy inside.