by J. A. Jance
The vast majority of them came with the burning desire to come to the United States and make something of themselves; to grab some small part of the American dream. As for the smugglers? By and large they were in it for themselves alone. They spared no thought and even less sympathy for the lives of the people they put in jeopardy.
Sometimes the illegal immigrants had paid money to be crammed into speeding Suburbans or rental trucks that crashed during high-speed chases and spilled dead and dying people in every direction. Sometimes illegals were taken to overcrowded houses and held as prisoners until their relatives could raise enough additional money to free them. But most of the illegals Dan encountered were the poorest of the poor—the ones who walked, making their way across the border and through the broiling desert, walking on bleeding feet and often dying of thirst in the process.
Several times Dan had come across the bodies of people who had fallen victim to heat and thirst and had been left behind to perish in the desert. Of those, Dan now recalled the three young women he had found dead. All had been in their late teens or early twenties. There was no sign of homicidal violence. All had died of natural causes—if sunstroke and dehydration could be considered natural. One of them had appeared to be five or six months pregnant at the time of her death.
Looking at her, waiting for the medical examiner’s van to find its way there, Dan had been outraged. “What the hell were you thinking?” he had demanded of the lifeless corpse. “What made you think that whatever you’d find here for you and your baby girl was better than what you had at home?”
That case had gotten to him—and still did. He wished he’d found her soon enough to save her and maybe even the unborn child. He still wondered about them from time to time. Where did they come from? Did the baby’s father have even the smallest inkling of what had happened to them? Was he already here in the States somewhere, waiting for them to show up and wondering what had happened to them? Or was he back home in Mexico? Maybe he was a creep and she had run away from home trying to escape from him.
As far as Dan knew, the lifeless victim had never been identified. She had been buried in an unmarked grave in the pauper’s corner of a Tucson cemetery. Dan had asked to be notified about the burial, and he was. He went to it wearing his full dress uniform. It seemed to him that he owed the poor young woman that much.
There was only one other person in attendance—a woman dressed entirely in black. Catching sight of her, Dan hoped she might be a relative. That hope lasted only until the end of the brief service. As Dan walked away from the grave site, the woman fell into step beside him.
“What the hell are you doing here?” she had demanded.
She was a middle-aged Anglo woman who shook her fist in Dan’s face as she spoke. Fortunately for her, Dan hadn’t brought Bozo along to the cemetery with him.
“I’m the one who found her,” he said. “I came to pay my respects.”
“Respects, my ass,” she retorted. “You guys are the ones out there killing these poor people.”
Dan had simply turned and walked away. Later he had read about an organization of women who made it a point to have a visible presence at the funeral of every illegal who died attempting to cross the border, and not just the ones who died on the reservation, either. They called themselves the WWC—Women Who Care.
The Shadow Wolves had another name for them. They called them witches.
Komelik, Tohono O’odham Nation, Arizona
Saturday, June 6, 2009, 10:15 p.m.
69º Fahrenheit
On his way back from The Gate, Dan stopped on the shoulder periodically and scanned the surrounding desert with his night-vision goggles. The temperature had plummeted. When he was outside the truck he was glad to slip on a windbreaker. There was plenty of southbound vehicular traffic heading to the dance at Vamori, but not much northbound. For a change, there was no sign of walkers or of overloaded SUVs, either.
On the far side of Baboquivari, the full moon was turning the sky a lighter shade of gray, but it would take time for the moon itself to gain enough altitude to be visible over the crest of the hulking mountain barrier.
At Vamori, Dan turned into the parking lot and made his way through the collection of parked cars in search of any vehicles that didn’t fit in with the pickups and aging minivans that were the preferred mode of reservation transportation. Driving with the window open, he smelled the wood smoke from the cooking fires outside the feast house. A generator roared somewhere in the background, providing electricity to light the dusty dance floor and to power the speakers for the thumping chicken-scratch band.
On his side of the car, Bozo whined. “Smells good, doesn’t it,” Dan told him. “We’ll stop at the next wide spot in the road and have that sandwich.”
That opportunity came a few miles later as they neared Komelik. The turnoff where he had noticed activity earlier seemed to have had several visiting vehicles since he had stopped to look at the tracks on his way south.
That seemed as good a reason and place to stop as any. Leaving Bozo in the vehicle, Dan squatted in the road and examined the new tracks that overlaid the old ones. He could pick out another pair of sedan tracks along with another vehicle, probably an SUV. It was possible that the vehicles might belong to illegal traffickers of some kind, but with the dance going on only a few miles away, it could mean something as harmless as someone stopping off to have a few beers without drawing the attention of the Tohono O’odham Nation’s Law and Order.
“Come on,” he said to Bozo as he opened the door and unfastened the dog’s harness. “We’ll eat later. Let’s go have a look.”
Just then the moon finally crested the mountain, and the desert lit up in a wash of silvery light. Distant strains of music from the dance, mostly a faint drumbeat, traveled on the still night air. Other than that, the night was quiet. Eerily quiet.
Dan could smell something—a flowerlike perfume, although he couldn’t imagine what kind of flower would be blooming way out here in the middle of nowhere. The two things taken together—the strange scent on the air and the silence—struck Dan as odd. Bozo, too, seemed uneasy. He growled softly and the hackles rose on his neck. Attuned to his dog’s every mood, Dan reacted accordingly as the hair on the back of Dan’s neck rose as well.
“What is it, boy?” he asked. In answer, the dog whined again.
“Let’s go see.”
Keeping hold of Bozo’s leash, Dan moved forward. A quarter of a mile into the desert, Dan caught sight of a vehicle, a Chevrolet Blazer with Arizona plates. It sat parked just behind a small white sedan. That meant that the people in the two vehicles were here together. It also meant that if something bad was going on, Dan could be outnumbered two to one or more, although really, Bozo’s presence evened those odds.
Despite the pair of vehicles and the probable number of people, there was no sign of laughter or conversation in the vast moonlit wilderness, and no sign of movement, either. That was another oddity. If people were sitting around drinking beer, there would be talking and laughter and, most likely, cigarette smoke as well.
Dan approached the Blazer warily. The back passenger door was open. Glancing inside, Dan caught sight of a child’s booster seat of some kind and a child’s plastic pinwheel. On the floor were a pair of tiny tennis shoes, but there was no sign of a child.
“There’s a little kid out here somewhere, Boze,” Dan said reassuringly to the dog. “So it’s probably okay.”
But Bozo didn’t act like it was okay. The dog was still on high alert, which meant Dan needed to be on alert as well.
In front of the sedan, Dan caught sight of the first real sign of trouble. Two women’s purses lay open and empty in the ground, with a collection of stuff—lipsticks, papers, photos, ID cards, and credit cards—scattered all around. He also spotted two men’s wallets.
There were two purses and two wallets. That told Dan that he had stumbled on a robbery—a robbery with at least four victims. Was it still in progres
s? He touched the hood of the sedan. It was still warm, as in daylight warm, but the engine had been off long enough to cool down. That meant that the vehicle had been parked here for some time.
Far more wary now, Dan drew his weapon but kept a tight hold on Bozo’s leash. “Quiet,” he whispered to the dog. “Heel.”
Leaving the debris field and the Blazer behind, dog and man stepped forward again. Ahead of them in the desert he saw a glow that wasn’t moonlight and wasn’t firelight, either. It was possible he was seeing lights from another vehicle—the bad guy’s vehicle—but the light was more diffuse than headlight beams would have been. No, the glow came from some other source, and it wasn’t all in one spot. Parts of it seemed to flicker a little while another part was steady, but there was still no sound at all, nothing but an unnerving silence.
Dan knew that whatever had happened was bad. His first move should have been to turn around, return to his Expedition, call in his position, and radio for help. But he also knew that help of any kind was miles away. If there were people here who were being held against their will, he, Dan Pardee, was their only hope. Waiting for backup could take too long.
Walking silently, Dan and Bozo rounded a thick clump of mesquite. Beyond that they caught sight of some of the light source. On either side of a rough path and set about eight feet apart were glowing luminarias. They had been lit for some time. The small candles in the sand-filled paper bags were beginning to sputter and go out. Some of them had already done so.
Dan knew that luminarias were used mostly in celebrations, so this event, whatever it was, had started out as a party of some kind, a party that had gone terribly wrong. Beside him, Bozo strained at his leash. The dog’s ears were pricked forward, his body tense.
Dan knew that perps were often more scared of facing dogs than they were of facing weapons. For one thing, bullets could go astray. Dogs, on the other hand, hardly ever missed their target.
Right now, the only thing Dan and Bozo had going for them was the element of surprise. It was possible that the bad guy was long gone. It was equally possible that he had relieved his victims of some booze in addition to their purses and wallets and was now passed out somewhere nearby. There were plenty of stupid bad guys out there—ones who got drunk or high before they bothered getting away.
Dan had utmost faith in Bozo’s innate sense of what constituted danger and what did not. His response to threats was immediate and unrelenting, complete with biting jaws and snapping teeth, but he posed no peril to people who were harmless. That was part of what made Bozo so valuable. Some dogs can sniff out tumors or sense oncoming seizures. In Iraq, Bozo had demonstrated an uncanny ability to sense danger—to perceive and unmask a potential suicide bomber hiding inside a woman’s burka.
He was doing the same thing now. Kneeling down, Dan released the catch on Bozo’s collar.
“Show me,” he whispered.
Most police dogs are trained to charge forward, barking a warning as they go. Not Bozo. He sprang forward, silent and lethal, and went racing down the candlelit path with Dan behind him in hot pursuit. Unlike the dog’s lightning paws, Dan’s feet made an ungodly noise, enough that he might well waken whomever was sleeping.
So much for surprise, he thought.
Bozo disappeared over a small rise. Before Dan could clear it, he heard a bloodcurdling scream—a child’s scream. Dan topped the rise in time to see movement. A small flash of white raced away from him into the desert, still screaming.
The child, Dan thought. The child from the car seat. A terrified child.
“Down,” he shouted at Bozo. “Leave it!”
The dog dropped to his belly as though he’d been shot. Most of the nearby luminarias had gone out. Dan paused long enough to extract his flashlight from a belt loop. As soon as he turned it on, he saw the first body. A woman, an Indian woman from the looks of her, lay facedown on the path several feet ahead of him. Hurrying to her side, he knelt and felt for a pulse. There wasn’t one. He could see a small wound in the middle of her back, but under her he could see the pool of blood from an exit wound that had had soaked into the dirt. She hadn’t died immediately, but he knew she had bled out shortly after being shot.
Silence had descended once more. Wherever the terrified child had gone, he or she was quiet now, quiet and hiding. No wonder. Anyone who had witnessed this horror had reason to be petrified, but before Dan went searching for the frightened child, he needed to assess what he was up against.
“Right here,” Dan whispered to Bozo. Once again, man and dog moved forward as one.
Ten feet down the path they came across the next body. This one, an Indian male who looked to be in his early thirties, lay on his back. He’d been shot twice—once in the chest and once in the head. He, too, was dead.
“So the woman was running away and she was shot in the back,” Dan said, explaining what he was seeing to himself as well as to the uncomprehending dog. “This guy here probably was trying to fend off the bad guy.”
The man had been dead for some time—long enough for most of the visible blood to dry. Dan knew that meant there was a good chance that the perpetrator had taken off, but maybe not. Perhaps that was only wishful thinking on his part. Just to be on the safe side, he didn’t holster his weapon. The last of the luminarias burned out, but a steady light still glowed in the distance.
The path rounded a looming clump of mesquite. There Dan found something that made no sense. The remains of a cloth-covered dining table and two chairs lay on the ground surrounded by a scatter of broken glassware, dishes, and silverware. Two still forms lay on either side of the fallen table, forms Dan suspected were also bodies.
Closer examination proved that to be true. These two, presumably Anglos, appeared to be an older couple somewhere in their sixties or maybe seventies. It looked as though the two of them had been seated at the table when they were attacked. The woman lay next to one of the chairs, as though she had been taken by surprise. It appeared to Dan that the man had sprung forward to fend off the attacker and had been shot full in the face.
Dan squatted on his haunches and looked around. These two victims, like the other two, had been dead for some time, even though the coppery smell of blood still lingered in the air, along with that same pervasive scent of flowers.
Bodies and flowers, Dan thought. Like a funeral.
“So where’s the kid?” Dan muttered to Bozo.
Standing up, he looked around, shining the flashlight in every direction. There was no sign of the child, but whoever it was had fled in the direction of the still-glowing light, the steady one, which was now just beyond another low rise.
“Hello,” he called. “I’m a police officer. Border Patrol. Where are you? Let me help you.”
There was no reply, but that was hardly surprising. If the kid had been here earlier and had seen all these people being shot, no wonder he had run away when he caught sight of someone else carrying a drawn weapon.
“Come on,” he said to Bozo. “We’ll look for the kid in a little while. Right now we need to call this in.”
Together they jogged back to the Expedition, where Dan radioed into Dispatch, letting them know what he’d found and giving the location of the crime scene as well as the condition of the four homicide victims.
Seconds later, Paul Jacobs, the night-watch supervisor, came on the line. “Drug deal gone bad?”
“Unlikely,” Dan answered. “Maybe a straight-out robbery.”
“Could it be we’ve got members of rival cartels duking it out?” Jacobs suggested.
“No,” Dan said. “I don’t think so. I don’t know that many elderly Anglo drug dealers. Besides, there’s no sign of a weapon on any of the victims, and no sign of the shooter as well.”
“Should I set up roadblocks?”
“I doubt it,” Dan said. “It’s probably too late for those to do any good. The killer’s back in Tucson by now or else in Mexico.”
“You told Dispatch the victims are both
Anglo and Indian?”
“Yes,” Dan said. “Two of each.”
“Dispatch is contacting both Law and Order and Pima County?”
“That’s right. There’s a dance at Vamori tonight. Law and Order probably has a presence at that.”
“Is it possible these four people left the dance and came to that location to do some partying?”
“They weren’t together,” Dan said. “There were only two chairs.”
“Chairs?” Jacobs objected. “I thought you said this was out in the middle of the desert.”
“It is. It looks to me like the Anglo couple was having a picnic—at a table with a white cloth and good dishes. I’d say the Indians just happened by. I recognize both vehicles. The Lexus I’ve seen poking around here off and on when I was working day shift. As for the Blazer? I’m pretty sure it belongs to an Indian who lives somewhere around here. I think his father runs cattle in the area.”
“You called in the vehicle information?”
“Yes,” Dan said. “Records has it.”
Bozo whined again, looking off into the desert. Dan’s heart beat hard and fast in his chest. Maybe he was wrong and the killer was still lurking out there somewhere in the dark.
Bozo made as if to head off into the brush. Dan called him back.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Come here.”
“Who are you talking to?” Jacobs wanted to know. “I thought you said there was no one else at the scene.”
“It’s my dog,” Dan said into the radio. “I’ve gotta go.”
He slammed the microphone down. “Bozo,” he ordered. “Right here!”
If the killer was still out there, Dan had the ultimate secret weapon—Bozo. If this turned out to be nothing more than a game of hide-and-seek with a petrified little kid, Dan Pardee could trust Bozo to handle that as well.
