by Brenda Novak
Benita knew what that something was; she’d seen a silencer before. Her brother hadn’t always lived the kind of life he was living now that he’d settled down and had a couple of kids.
“Someone’s awake,” José said. “They’ll see you. You’ll get caught if you shoot us. Let us go.”
The stranger didn’t seem the least bit worried. Chuckling deep in his throat, he tossed his cigarette on the ground and fired so fast Benita didn’t realize he’d pulled the trigger until José collapsed. Her husband’s hand clenched, dragging her to the ground with him, so the shot intended for her went over her head. But that was all he could do to help. In the next second, he made a funny noise and went still, and she knew the man she loved, the father of her unborn child, was dead.
“You killed him!” she wailed, crouching over his body. “You killed him!”
“Hey, what’s going on out there?” A woman had opened the door of the trailer and called out in English. Although Benita couldn’t understand her words, she thought the interruption would make the man run away. But it didn’t. With a curse, Cowboy brought up his gun and aimed again.
“This oughta teach you spic cockroaches to stay in your own damn country,” he ground out, and pulled the trigger.
Benita felt a flash of pain between her eyes. Then she felt nothing at all.
2
The sun was just beginning to creep over the horizon when Sophia St. Claire brought her cruiser to a skidding halt at the dusty group of drab to not-so-drab trailers a mile outside of town. She’d thrown on her uniform and dashed out of the house as soon as the call came in. But she was too late. The people who lived here had abandoned the comfort of their homes to gawk and were standing in the middle of the crime scene.
“There goes whatever evidence I might’ve been able to collect,” she grumbled. But why get upset about it? If this was the work of the same killer she’d already been chasing, chances were he hadn’t left any evidence to begin with. In the past six weeks, someone had killed ten—now twelve—people in three different incidents, all UDAs or undocumented aliens, and walked or driven off into the night. Whoever it was didn’t attempt to bury the victims or hide their corpses, even when he had the chance. His earlier targets hadn’t been discovered until more than a week after their deaths.
As she turned off the engine, the small crowd, all of whom had glanced up when she arrived, watched her with pinched and worried expressions. They were obviously aware of the gravity of the situation. But they didn’t seem to realize that they should move away from the bodies. Maybe the CSI shows weren’t always one hundred percent accurate on forensic procedures and techniques, especially when it came to timelines, but surely these people had seen enough TV to know they shouldn’t contaminate the crime scene? It wasn’t as if they lived in some bucolic Mayberry R.F.D. The people here, mostly Mexican Americans with some whites and a few American Indians thrown in, were as rugged as the land. What with drug trafficking, human trafficking, gangs who had ties to the Mexican Mafia, racial disputes and a local chapter of the Hells Angels roaring around, blowing through stoplights, breaking speed limits and looking for trouble, this was almost a war zone.
Catching a glimpse of two prone bodies, she winced and jerked her door open.
Debbie Berke, the woman who’d called to report the shooting, met her as she got out. “Sophia, they’re dead,” she said. “They were killed instantly. Wasn’t no reason to get the paramedics out here.”
Sophia wasn’t surprised to be addressed by her first name. Only thirty, she hadn’t been chief of police for very long. And most of these folks had known her since she was a baby. Debbie’s late husband had been the veterinarian who’d operated on Toby, her family’s dog, when Sophia was fifteen, and eventually put him down. “I understand. I’ve called the medical examiner.”
“He’s on his way?”
“That’s what he said.” But Sophia doubted he was in any kind of hurry. Some of the sentiments Dr. Sandy Vonnegut had expressed at the last crime scene led her to believe he didn’t consider the death of illegal aliens to be much more distressing than roadkill.
She hollered for the crowd to step back at least twenty paces.
With their brown skin and inky black hair, the victims were, as expected, Mexican. One was a man, the other a woman. The male victim lay facedown in the dirt. They both had on several layers of clothing—long-sleeved shirts with dirty work pants—and tennis shoes, all secondhand quality at best. Sophia couldn’t see where the man had been shot; any blood was hidden beneath his body. It was the woman who gave away the manner of death. She lay on her back, staring up at the sky with a perfect hole in her forehead. That hole oozed a slim trickle of blood. The woman’s heart had stopped almost immediately….
They were young. Too young to die. Especially like this.
Sophia crouched next to them, checking each for a pulse. It was a pointless gesture. They were both dead; that was obvious. But she went through the motions, anyway, hoping…
Finding Debbie to be absolutely correct, she stood and studied their surroundings, searching for anything that struck her as odd or out of place. An object left behind. An object taken. Tire tracks. Except for the fact that this incident had happened much closer to town, the scene looked exactly like the two she’d visited during the previous month and a half. The killings had occurred on a barren patch of desert too rocky to reveal tire tracks or footprints. And from what she could see so far, the perpetrator had left nothing behind but the bodies.
“What do you think?” Debbie murmured over Sophia’s shoulder. The expectation in her voice suggested she believed Sophia could pull the killer’s name out of thin air.
With a sigh, Sophia took a pad and pen from her shirt pocket and guided Debbie away from the bodies. She wanted to talk to her and anyone else who might’ve seen or heard something. She also needed to enforce the perimeter she’d created and, as long as she stood close to the victims, the others would come closer, too. “Can you tell me what happened?” she asked.
“I heard a—a noise.”
A siren wailed in the distance. One of her two deputies, Grant—who’d been on duty last night—was on his way, bringing the yellow police tape he’d accidentally put in his car instead of hers the last time they’d been through this. “What kind of noise?”
“At first, I thought it was a wounded animal.” She paused. “I know there’ve been other murders like this. Everyone’s talking about them. But you just never imagine—” she shrugged helplessly and tears welled up as she gazed at the corpses “—you just never imagine it can happen right outside your door.”
Sophia laid a comforting hand on her arm. “It might be easier if you don’t look,” she said, and shifted positions to block Debbie’s line of vision. “Take a minute, if you need to. We can continue whenever you’re ready.”
Dashing a hand across her cheeks, Debbie struggled to control her emotions. “I heard a cry. It frightened me, so I got up and walked through my house. Everything seemed fine. I peeked out the window, but it was too dark to see, and I didn’t want to go outside. I told myself there wasn’t anything to worry about and started back to bed. But then I heard voices. They seemed to be arguing. One belonged to a woman.” She lowered her voice. “That made me think Earl and Marlene had had another fight.” She jerked her head to indicate a couple standing in their bathrobes staring, in a dazed fashion, at the lifeless bodies, but it wasn’t necessary for her to point out who the Nelsons were. Sophia knew them by name. She knew almost everyone who lived in the mini trailer park. Although her financial circumstances had been much better, she’d grown up less than a mile away.
“They haven’t been getting along so great since he lost his job,” she explained, after which her volume edged up to normal again. “Once I thought I knew what the problem was, I lost my fear and stuck my fool head out to see if I could get them to settle down. That’s when I heard two thumps, right in a row. A woman cried out in Spanish and I knew it wa
sn’t Marlene.”
“You couldn’t see anything?”
“Nothing. It was pitch-black out here. And I had the lights on inside, which didn’t help.”
Sophia wanted to groan in frustration. Why couldn’t they catch a break? “Can you remember what the woman said?”
“I don’t speak Spanish. You know that.”
“What did it sound like?”
“To me, it was gobbledygook.”
As long as Debbie had lived in Bordertown she hadn’t been able to pick up any Spanish? That should’ve surprised Sophia, but it didn’t. For the most part, there were clear lines of demarcation between the two nationalities, despite almost constant contact. “So then what?”
“I ducked back inside, called Earl and grabbed my shotgun. I keep one in the closet in case I need to scare off a mountain lion or a javelina or what have you. But by the time Earl rolled out of bed, and I found ammunition, whoever had killed these poor people was gone.”
“You didn’t see anyone in the area?”
“No.”
Damn it! “What about a car or truck?”
She motioned around her. “Just what you see here.”
“Did you hear a vehicle?”
She shook her head. “But I wasn’t listening carefully because I was so frantic to find my ammo.”
“Do you think whoever did this could’ve left on foot?”
“I figured they must have. So I jumped in my old truck and drove around for a bit, but I couldn’t see a soul. And I’m sort of glad,” she admitted, tears filling her eyes again. “I wouldn’t want to come face-to-face with the kind of man who could do this.”
Sophia was thinking they probably bumped into him on a variety of occasions. Bordertown had shrunk drastically from its former silver-mining days. Now it had a population of only three thousand. And, judging by the location of the other murders, which were all in the surrounding desert, she guessed the killer lived nearby.
“Why would anyone do this?” Debbie asked.
That was the one question Sophia found easy to answer. “Hate.”
“But who could hate enough to kill absolute strangers? I mean, yeah, maybe these people were breaking the law. I get tired of the situation with the illegals, too. We all do. But some of them are just plain…desperate. You can hardly fault them for wanting to be able to put food on the table!”
“This killer feels justified.” Sophia could sense it in the way he left the bodies. He didn’t rape or rob or beat them. He didn’t touch his victims at all. He exterminated them like vermin. And the fact that he didn’t bother to even throw some brush over their bodies told her he was proud of his actions.
“It must be someone new to the area,” Debbie guessed.
She couldn’t imagine a friend or acquaintance committing such a heinous act. But Sophia wasn’t so sure. It didn’t have to be a stranger. She’d witnessed enough racism to understand it could be anyone. Or maybe this wasn’t what it appeared to be. She had plenty of political enemies who wanted to discredit her—one man in particular. Creating a high-profile case like this, a case she couldn’t solve fast enough to defuse the ticking time bomb of public sentiment, would be one way to do it. There were plenty of other possible scenarios, too. Although she’d previously considered border patrol a federal issue and hadn’t gotten too deeply involved in it, she knew the ranchers and farmers in the area were angry about the damage caused by the droves of illegal aliens who crossed their land.
“I don’t think he’s new.” Something about the confidence with which this killer acted made Sophia believe he’d been around for a long time, that he was intimately familiar with the region and its politics, and that his hatred of illegal immigrants had recently been honed and sharpened. Which was why her thoughts again turned to the man who’d most like to see her fail. Leonard Taylor. Because of a situation with a Mexican woman, a UDA—or undocumented alien—Sophia had the job he felt should be his….
“You’re saying it’s someone from around here?” Debbie gasped.
“I’m saying it could be. Maybe the killer had a run-in with a UDA that went badly, or he was robbed by one, or his wife left him for a Mexican or cheated on him with one. He might even have lost his job to someone who wasn’t supposed to be in the country.” Or he didn’t become chief of police as he’d always hoped thanks to an illegal immigrant who claimed he’d raped her.
“Anything could be a trigger,” she added. Because of their random nature, hate crimes were some of the most difficult to solve. That meant she had to do the nearly impossible—before this killer could strike again. Lives depended on it. Her job could depend on it, too.
Douglas was larger. Why couldn’t all of this have happened fifteen miles to the east?
“I hope you’re wrong,” Debbie murmured.
“Thanks for your help. You think of anything else, give me a call.”
Determined to take a closer look at the ground on which they lay, Sophia returned to the bodies. Although the perpetrator had collected his shell casings when he’d killed before, she doubted he’d done it here. Now that she’d spoken to Debbie, she figured he wouldn’t have had the time. He’d shot these people knowing there was a trailer forty feet away with an occupant who’d just called out to him.
The fact that Debbie’s shout hadn’t saved their lives showed a distinct lack of fear and no respect for law enforcement. That was another reason she thought Leonard, or one of his supporters, might be involved. This killer definitely wasn’t worried about any threat she might pose. He was bold. And he was growing bolder by the day.
Suddenly, she saw it. The glint of metal in the dirt.
Cautioning everyone not to move, she jogged back to her squad car and got the small forensics kit she kept in her trunk. Then she used a pair of metal tongs to gently lift a spent shell casing from the small rocks that’d previously concealed it.
“Handgun,” Earl volunteered.
Sophia hadn’t realized he’d stepped up behind her. She shaded her eyes. “Looks like it.” It was the right size for a semiautomatic. And there was a distinctive bulge in the web area forward of the extractor groove. She was no ballistics expert, but she knew any deformity might tie it to a specific gun.
After dropping it in a small paper sack, she managed to find two other casings that had fallen into some thorny mesquite. She’d expected a total of two, but this proved there were three shots. All the casings had the same defect; they’d come from the same gun.
She was closing and marking the bag when Officer Grant Noyes, a twenty-three-year-old fresh out of the academy in Phoenix, arrived with the crime-scene tape. He blanched when he saw the bodies and turned a bit green. He had a weak stomach. But he had to learn to deal with the pressures of the job. She needed his help.
“Set up a perimeter,” she said.
Another car came toward her, this one a black sedan. The Cochise County medical examiner. Apparently, Dr. Vonnegut had decided to show up without making her wait too long.
While the M.E. parked and climbed out of his car, Sophia got her measuring tape, her video camera and her digital camera. She needed to take photographs and a video of the bodies before anyone touched them. She needed to take photographs and a video of the whole area. And she needed to include a scale so prosecutors could recreate the scene, if necessary. She didn’t have the forensics team a larger city might have. She had her two deputies, and until the FBI officially responded to her request for help, she had the assistance of a detective from the Cochise County sheriff’s substation in Douglas. Dinah Lindstrom lived in Sierra Vista five miles away, but she’d been raised in Bordertown. Sophia hadn’t yet notified her that there’d been another killing. The intentional oversight wouldn’t improve their relationship, which was strained at best. But Sophia worked for city council, not the sheriff’s office. And considering the fact that Dinah Lindstrom had been one of Leonard Taylor’s biggest advocates, she couldn’t be sure the detective was really on her side, even now
.
“What’ve we got?” Vonnegut, clearly unhappy, frowned as he trudged toward her. Fortunately, unlike Lindstrom, he didn’t seem to have any particular affinity for Leonard, or none that she knew of, anyway. It wasn’t as if she and Vonnegut had ever been enemies. But no matter how many times she dealt with him, they never became friends, either. He seemed a little too proud to be accessible. At the very least he was impersonal.
“Two vics, both dead,” she replied.
“Same killer as last time?”
“Same M.O. UDAs shot in the desert and left where they fell.”
“What’s with the guy who’s doing this?” he grumbled when he was close enough that he couldn’t be overheard by the others.
“Seems to me he’s dissatisfied with the immigration problem.”
“But if he gets caught, he’ll go to prison. What’s the point? For every one he shoots, there are thousands who’ll cross the border right after. Patrols pick up six hundred a day. Even conservative estimates suggest they miss twice that many.”
“Hence, his frustration.” Frustration that could easily cause Taylor’s anger at what his victim had cost him to boil over. Considering that anger, she’d often feared he might try to hurt her. But if anyone else wondered about Leonard’s culpability, she hadn’t heard, and she hadn’t mentioned it herself. First, she needed proof. Otherwise, she’d be criticized for having some sort of vendetta against him. His friends had already accused her of making up the rape she’d reported on behalf of the illegal alien who would never have come forward without her—all to “steal his job.”
After telling Grant to keep the bystanders out of the way, she walked Vonnegut over to the bodies.
“Maybe it’s not an American who’s doing this,” he said as he knelt next to the male. “Maybe it’s a Mexican drug lord settling old debts with poor mules or runners who tried to sell the dope they carried and keep the money.”
