Midnight Crossing: A Mystery

by Tricia Fields

  “Physically, they’re okay. Dehydrated, mostly, but nothing serious. Mentally, I can’t begin to think how horrible this has been for them.”

  “I’m trying to balance their need to recuperate with our need to catch the bastards who are behind this.”

  Vie nodded. “Absolutely. I understand.”

  “Selena has offered to talk with the women, to get a different perspective. Can you allow that at this point?”

  “I think that would be fine. The doctor from Odessa can’t be here until tomorrow. It may do them all some good to talk about their situation.” Vie narrowed her eyes at Otto. “The women are two to a room. I’m not sure how you want to meet with them.”

  “Do you have a lounge or empty staff room that they could meet in all together?”

  She looked uncertain. “We don’t usually allow patients into the lounge, but I can just let the staff know it’s off-limits for an hour. Do you think that would be enough time?”

  Otto nodded. “That would be much appreciated.”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Selena found herself entering a nurses’ lounge where four women in hospital gowns sat around a table looking dazed. Vie had entered first and introduced Selena in English, but two of the women clearly couldn’t understand her.

  Selena sat down at the table and took a long calming breath. The expressions on their faces took her back several years, and she realized the officer had been right. She did not want to relive the feelings she’d put behind her, but as she looked into the terrified eyes of the four women staring back at her, the fear grabbed hold and closed her throat so that she could barely speak. She felt a hand on her shoulder and turned to see Vie smiling kindly at her.

  Selena cleared her throat and spoke in Spanish. “I’m so sorry for what’s happened to you, to all of you. I’m here to try and explain things. So you know what’s happening. So you won’t be so frightened.” She stopped, suddenly aware she had no idea what was going to happen to them. No one had any idea what was going to happen to them. They were one more casualty in a world where monsters preyed on the desperate.

  They stared at her, probably too tired to hope she could really help, but also too desperate to turn away.

  “I’m from Venezuela,” Selena said. “I came here like you did. I paid my way. People lied to me. Stole my money and my dreams. Men treated me like an animal. My life was gone.” One of the women shifted in her seat and looked away as if she didn’t want to confront the subject matter, but Selena continued. “I learned that when people said they wanted to help me, it was usually a lie. The police. Other girls. People who said they wanted to find me a job and place to live and food to eat? They took advantage of me. Made me do things that made me ashamed to even be alive.”

  A woman whose long black hair was in a loose braid down her back swiped away tears.

  Selena leaned into the table. “But I want you to know that I made it. I’m okay now. There are people who are good, who want to help you. The man who drove you was a devil who should burn in hell. But the people here?” She gestured toward the door. “The nurses and doctors and the police? They aren’t bad. They want to help.”

  The woman with the braid sniffed, blinked away her tears, and sat up straighter. Selena recognized her attempt to put on a strong front when everything around her was crumbling. She herself had been there too many times to count.

  The woman said in Spanish, “The police told me they were there to help. They gave me a clean bed and room to stay in. And that monster came and took me. He took all of us. How do we know he won’t be back?”

  Selena recognized the woman speaking must be Isabella.

  “Because he’s in jail. When the police stopped the van, they took him and locked him away. It’s partly why I’m here.” She paused and looked directly at Isabella, who stared back, her eyes filled with worry.

  “How do we know he’ll stay there?”

  “If you can tell me what happened, we can make sure all of the people who hurt you go to jail and stay there. But we need your help.”

  One of the women sitting at the end of the table hugged her arms around her chest and said, “What’s going to happen to us?”

  Selena sighed. “I don’t know. I wish I could say, but I won’t lie to you. I do know that you need to tell someone what happened. Someone needs to stop the people who put you through this.” She paused. “And you need to put the people who shot Renata in jail.”

  Selena watched Isabella turn her head away as if she’d been slapped. She closed her eyes and put a hand to her mouth.

  “Will you tell me what happened?” Selena said, lowering her voice to barely above a whisper, wishing she didn’t have to drag the woman through the terrifying memory.

  Isabella shook her head no.

  “Do you know who killed her?”

  She continued to shake her head no.

  “Was it Josh?”

  She began to cry, her body shaking. One of the other women wrapped her arm around Isabella’s back.

  Selena stood and walked over to the sink and ran cold water. She found a plastic cup in a cabinet, filled it with water, and handed it to Isabella. She drank the water and eventually settled down again.

  Selena sat down next to one of the women who’d remained quiet. Selena asked her name.

  “Maria.” Her eyes were bright and clear.

  Selena said, “I promise I’ll do whatever I can for all of you. But I want someone to pay for what happened.”

  Maria shook her head, looking intently at Selena.

  “People think there’s a woman who’s behind getting you here. Did you ever hear about a woman working with Josh and Ryan?”

  Maria nodded, her eyes widening in recognition, as if someone had finally understood her.

  “Did you ever hear her name?”

  She finally began to open up. “No. They never called her anything but boss, or boss lady.”

  * * *

  Selena spent another half hour with the women, but they wouldn’t talk about the trip any longer. They were more interested in Selena and her life in Texas. She could see that her story at least provided some hope. But she knew there were most likely years of struggle ahead before any of them found a life anywhere near what they had imagined when they left Guatemala behind.

  * * *

  An overnight surveillance detail took Nick back to Mexico after dinner, and left Josie sitting on the back porch watching a lonely sundown, sipping a juice glass filled with bourbon, trying not to imagine the next day, trying not to wander around her house considering the odds she was going to get fired. She watched Chester nose around a mesquite bush, most likely on the scent of a jackrabbit. Her phone buzzed and she pulled it out of her back pocket and saw Otto’s name.

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “Are you sitting?”

  “Yep. Good or bad?”

  “I’m not sure. I took the gun, bullet, and casing up to Ernie at the state police lab and called in a favor. He agreed to run ballistics and get me something, hopefully by tomorrow. I also asked him to check for latent prints.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He just called. He’s not started on the ballistics, but he ran the fingerprints and got an exact match in AFIS.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Isabella Dagati.”

  Josie drew in a sharp breath. The possibility of her being the killer was so remote it hadn’t even registered. She may have been technically a suspect due to her proximity to the body, but she’d never been seriously considered.

  “What the hell?”

  “That’s about what I said. I’d even forgotten Marta had printed her at the hospital. Ernie said there’s no doubt on the print. He hopes to run the bullet and gun tonight so we’ll have something more conclusive tomorrow.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Josie said. “Why would Isabella shoot her?”

  “You want to bring her in tonight or wait until we get ballistics in the m
orning?”

  She paused. “It’s your case.”

  “Come on.”

  “If this wasn’t such a screwed-up mess with Caroline and the mayor I’d say get her tonight. But I think we get it all together first and go to Holder with everything.”

  “Good enough,” he said. “I coordinated with the sheriff. We still have an officer posted outside the women’s rooms twenty-four/seven. Phillips is there tonight. He has strict orders not to let Isabella leave. I made contact with Homeland Security, but with all the red tape I don’t know what kind of time frame we’re looking at to get the other women sent home. I’m hoping they can continue where they are for now.”

  “Any new information about Caroline from the women?”

  “Selena Rocha talked to them. She asked if they knew anything about a female running things. The women agreed that Josh and Ryan talked about a woman they called boss lady, but they never mentioned her name. That’s as much as we got about that. Selena also asked Isabella if she could tell her who killed Renata and she broke down. Refused to talk.”

  “Damn, Otto. You realize we’re probably going to lose this case before we get it all pulled together?”

  Otto said nothing, but she knew he understood.

  “We have crimes crossing state and national lines. FBI and Homeland Security will be all over this before we’re through,” she said.

  “Then we better work like hell to figure something out before we lose control.”

  Josie heard a car coming down her road and walked around to the front of her house, where she saw Smokey Blessings pulling up her driveway. She hung up with Otto and waved as Smokey got out of his truck wearing a Stetson, cowboy boots, and a western shirt. Smokey was married to Vie Blessings, his polar opposite in life. For all the vibrancy she displayed, Smokey showed none of it. The cowboy hat was as splashy as he got, and his demeanor was as low-key as his clothes.

  He walked up to Josie to shake her hand and she noticed the worry lines across his forehead. “What the hell’s going on?” He had a slow drawl to his words, which somehow intensified their effect.

  Josie didn’t have to ask what he meant. As the city council president, he was elected to work with the mayor to supervise the chief of police. Josie knew that, without the support the council had given her, the mayor would have fired her years ago.

  “There’s not much I can tell you,” she said.

  “You better tell me something. There’s a group carrying signs outside of the courthouse about police brutality, and another group across the street on the corner with posters, chanting, ‘Save our Chief.’”

  She laughed in spite of the subject matter. “Where’d the police brutality come from?”

  Smokey looked frustrated. “Hell if I know! The mayor refuses to talk about it. We’ve called an emergency council meeting and demanded answers but he’s stalling. I want you to tell me what the breach of contract is over.”

  “I can’t tell you. It concerns an ongoing investigation.”

  “I don’t need to know the particulars of the case. I need to know what you did to be considered in breach of contract.”

  “I can’t tell you that. You can talk to Otto about the case. He’s the investigator and knows the particulars. It’ll be up to him if he wants to share details.” Josie almost smiled at the irony. She shouldn’t have shared details with the mayor, who was now out to fire her, but she was refraining from telling the person who was most able to help her.

  He rubbed his hand across the back of his neck and tilted his head from side to side as if trying to release tension.

  “I’m here to help,” he said.

  “I know you are. And you have no idea how much I appreciate it. But I’m not giving the mayor any fuel to burn my ass. Someone else can, but not me. As much as I despise that man, I love my job more. And I want it back.”

  SIXTEEN

  Chester ran to Dell’s house several times a day, visiting him anytime Josie left home, in constant need of companionship. Josie made the walk to Dell’s house when she needed to hear a sane voice.

  She found Dell in the tack room of his barn, bent over his workbench, tooling a design into the side of a saddle. He wore a pair of ancient blue jeans and a navy T-shirt that was so threadbare his skin was visible through the cotton around the shoulders. This was a man who Josie suspected had several hundred thousand dollars squirreled away, most likely in coffee cans buried behind his house, but she knew in Dell’s mind a new T-shirt was an unnecessary extravagance.

  He looked up when Chester ambled in, and smiled when he saw Josie.

  “How’s tricks?” he said, and pitched his leather punch onto the workbench.

  “You haven’t heard?”

  He pointed at the radio on a shelf above him, his only source of daily news. “Got tired of the drama. Gave it up for a day or two. What’s happened?”

  “I got suspended this morning. The mayor took my badge and gun.”

  He jerked his head back. “What?”

  “I accused his wife of something. And he views that as breach of contract.”

  “How can he get away with that kind of crap? Why do people keep voting that ass into office?”

  Josie shook her head slowly. “He’s all we’ve got. No one runs against him.”

  Dell seemed to have caught what she had said. “What’d his wife do? I thought she was an uppity-up. A big senator’s daughter, helper to the poor. All that nonsense.”

  “She may be an uppity-up, but I’m not so sure about a helper to the poor.”

  Dell motioned out into the walkway between the horse stalls. Josie sat on a bale of straw while he leaned against one of the stalls with an angry expression on his face. “What did she do?”

  Josie didn’t hesitate to tell Dell. Confidentiality was critical, but so was sanity, and Dell had been a trustworthy confidant for years.

  She described how Josh Mooney and Ryan Needleman had transported five women up from Central America based on the orders of Caroline Moss. She also described how a haul of five women could net Caroline fifty thousand dollars’ profit if all went well.

  “What are you going to do about it?” he asked.

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  He grinned. “I’m ready.”

  “You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”

  “I know enough. Let’s go kick some ass.”

  She laughed at the wicked look in his eyes. “It’s a good thing I’m a cop and not a criminal.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “I need to get some legwork done, then I’ll fill you in. We’ll leave first thing in the morning if things come together.”

  “I thought you were suspended from the case.”

  “We’ll leave quietly.”

  * * *

  It was almost nine o’clock when Josie and Chester walked back down the lane from Dell’s place. The temperature had dropped into the lower seventies and Chester was loving the cool weather, tracking scents from bush to bush, zigzagging through the pasture in bloodhound nirvana.

  Josie pulled out her cell phone and dialed Sheriff Roy Martinez’s number.

  “You hanging in there?” he asked.

  “I’ve seen better days,” she said. “Sorry to call you so late at home.”

  “Not a problem, you know that.”

  “Thanks, Roy.”

  “Anything you need, you name it.”

  “It’s sort of a big one.”

  “Bring it on.”

  “I need to talk to Josh Mooney.”

  He laughed. “That’s a big one. The mayor called me this afternoon to make it clear you were off-limits at the jail.”

  “I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t sure Caroline was all over this. I need to put that woman out of business.”

  “I’m thinking we never had this conversation.”

  Josie said nothing, hoping the silence on the other end of the phone was a good sign.

  “Meet me at the prisoner e
ntrance to the jail in twenty minutes. I’ll see what I can do.”

  * * *

  Josie drove her S-10 pickup truck and parked in the back lot, which at nine o’clock was empty aside from two pool cars and the sheriff’s SUV. Roy waved to her and she entered, feeling uneasy about the situation she was putting Roy in.

  “I appreciate this,” she said.

  He patted her on the back and pointed to a small unused office space that connected to the kitchen, deserted at that time of night.

  “I put the fear of hard time into Josh Mooney,” Roy said. “After sitting in that cell for two days it didn’t take much. He’s ready to talk.”

  “His attorney?”

  “He didn’t want one. Josh thinks he’s got this all figured out. Thinks he’s a wise guy, smarter than the rest of us. We’re just going to leave it at that.”

  “The perfect criminal.”

  “The prosecutor’s dream boy,” Roy said, laughing and shaking his head.

  “Excellent. Give me ten minutes. That’s all I need.”

  The sheriff opened the door of the office and she found Josh sitting in an orange jumpsuit, his hands lying limp in his lap, the handcuffs dangling on his thin wrists like bangles. His bleached hair looked oily and he smelled of body odor, like he hadn’t showered in a week.

  “Got yourself in a real mess,” she said.

  “Like I don’t know that?”

  “I’m glad you’re clear on that. Then I’ll get right to the important stuff. I need to know exactly where it was that you were supposed to deliver those women. I need the address and the contact person.”

  He gave her a vacant look, but she knew his brain was spinning at warp speed.

  “What if I tell you? Can you help me?”

  “What if you don’t tell me? Not a chance in hell that I’ll help you.”

  He lifted his hands a few inches off his lap and dropped them, the handcuffs clinking. “I just feel like I should get something for being good. You get things in jail for good behavior. That’s what I want.”

  Josie pursed her lips and nodded. “Okay. I get that. Then I will talk to the prosecutor, and I will let him know that you cooperated fully in this conversation. That you gave the information freely. That will definitely hold weight with Mr. Holder. Deal?”