Midnight Crossing: A Mystery

by Tricia Fields

  Josie used the calendar she had taken from Macey Mooney and typed up the list of days that Josh had allegedly driven for Caroline and printed it. They found cell phone communication between Lilith and Big Ben on all seven occasions. Holder had what he needed.

  TWENTY

  As requested, Tyler Holder walked into the police department office at eight-thirty the next morning. He was wearing khaki pants and a white shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, and was looking much more at ease than the night Josie had slammed him with her theory on Caroline Moss running a human trafficking ring.

  “No suit today?” Josie asked.

  He smiled. “Closing arguments were yesterday. My wife was ready to throw me out of the house if that trial hadn’t ended soon.”

  “You won’t like this any better,” she said.

  “Lay it on me.”

  Josie and Otto spent the next thirty minutes presenting their case, with dates, times, and a phone chart that detailed all of the known players in the trafficking organization, including those that Townie had confirmed from Albuquerque.

  He studied the diagram for some time and finally said, “This is excellent work. I’m really impressed.”

  Josie glanced at Otto, who acknowledged the compliment with a nod. It was a huge relief.

  “How did you get the dates for the trips?” he asked.

  Josie showed him Macey’s calendar with the red x’s, and the matching dates from Big Ben’s office records.

  “You don’t have anything else to confirm travel dates? Credit card slips for gas, hotel bills, anything?”

  “Not at this point. But we do have the cell phone records to and from Lilith, who we assume is Caroline, to Big Ben in Albuquerque that match those dates.”

  “What about a murder charge?” he asked.

  “I’m confident the murder is tied to the four people from Artemis we just discussed, but we have no murder weapon, and nothing to tie any of them to the murder site that night,” she said.

  “I’m going to place a few phone calls about this one. We’ll end up with national media attention before it’s over with. I want to make sure I have my business in order before I file a warrant for her arrest. Until you hear from me, keep this under wraps. Are we clear?”

  “Understood,” she said.

  They gave copies of their documentation to Holder, and Josie and Otto sat down at the conference table, exhausted from the late night and early morning.

  “What do you think?” Josie asked, rubbing her burning eyes and yawning.

  “Personally, I think we did a hell of a job. I’m guessing Holder may take a day or two to sort this all out. He won’t hang his neck out there for a senator’s daughter-slash-mayor’s wife without knowing he’s got a good case to back him up.”

  “You realize Moss is my supervisor,” she said.

  “That’s crossed my mind many times over the past week.”

  “If she isn’t arrested? Or if the charges are dismissed?”

  “You’ll lose your job,” he said, finishing her train of thought.

  Josie took a gulp of cold coffee and slumped back in her chair, worn out with discussing the case. “My mom is headed back to Indiana today.”

  Otto winced. “She get tired of waiting around for you to visit?”

  “No, it wasn’t like that. She said she wanted to give me some space to think about her moving here. She’s ready to make the move if I give her the okay.”

  “Really?” Otto’s bushy eyebrows rose at the notion. “She’s waiting on an okay?”

  Josie grinned. “I know. She’s so much mellower than her last visit. To tell you the truth, I’m a little freaked out by all of it.”

  Otto leaned back in his chair as well and crossed his legs out in front him. “You aren’t going to get all philosophical on me, are you?”

  “I don’t even know what you mean by that.”

  “We don’t have to talk about people changing, or becoming a better person, or any of that, do we? Delores wears me out with that kind of thinking.”

  Josie laughed. “I don’t guess I have much control over any of it anyway. Not much point in discussing it.”

  “Exactly. Live your life and the rest will fall into place.”

  “Or not.”

  He grinned. “Or not.”

  “Let’s go home and get some sleep.”

  * * *

  At five o’clock the next evening Holder reached Josie on her cell phone as she was driving back to the police department from a child welfare call. A mother had scalded her little girl’s hands as punishment for eating candy when she’d been told not to. Josie was angry and she had a headache.

  “Yes, sir?” she answered when his number showed on her cell phone.

  “I’ve got an update on Caroline Moss.”

  “I hope it’s good news,” she said. “I could use some.”

  “It depends on how you look at it.”

  “Hmm. Go ahead,” Josie said, knowing already that it wouldn’t be good news.

  “I’m turning the case over to the FBI.”

  “Now?”

  “Josie. Think about the case. This isn’t just a human trafficking case taking place in Artemis. Not only does it cross an international border, but it now crosses into New Mexico and Oklahoma. This is a federal crime. They can help us track down the phone connection between Caroline and Lilith. This isn’t something for local law enforcement to handle.”

  She bristled at the comment but said nothing.

  “Obviously it’s not that you haven’t done an excellent job with the investigation, but we’ve got three different states involved, as well as Mexico and Guatemala. I don’t need to tell you what kind of hell goes into working with two foreign countries during a criminal investigation. This goes beyond me. We need help. And I don’t want to screw this up. Agreed?”

  Josie unclenched her jaw and forced a reply. “That’s fine. Just let me know what I need to do on my end.”

  “Good enough. I appreciate it. I’ll be in touch.”

  Josie hung up and banged the steering wheel. She called Otto.

  “We lost the case,” she said.

  “FBI?”

  “Holder passed it off.”

  “Damn, Josie. I know we saw this coming, but it doesn’t make it any easier to stomach.”

  “Yeah, well. I didn’t think we’d lose it this fast. And I’m pissed off. I was suspended from duty over this case, and I don’t even have the satisfaction of bringing it to a close.”

  “We’re not done. We have an unsolved murder.”

  Josie blew out a rush of air. “I know that, Otto.”

  “Okay. Well. It’s after five. I’m tired and you’re grumpy. So I’m going home before Delores threatens mandatory retirement again. Okay?”

  “All right. See you in the morning.”

  Josie hung up and continued her drive back to the department. Her anger fired her adrenaline, so she maintained her course to the PD. She pulled in front of the department and texted Nick. She’d lost track of his schedule and couldn’t remember if he was going to be at her house that night.

  Working late. Where are you? She paused before she clicked send. It seemed like a pathetic question to ask someone you cared about, but one of the positives with Nick was that he took her for the mess that she was.

  Ten seconds later he texted back. In Mexico. Surveillance tonight. Remember?

  Now I do. Love you.

  Love you too. Enjoy that warm bed. I’ll be sitting by a trash can in an alley.

  She smiled, imagining him crouched down in an alleyway, wearing his black Kevlar and ski mask for disguise and warmth. He could be scary as hell when he wanted to be, and she had to admit, she liked that about him.

  Josie waved hello to the night dispatcher, Brian Moore.

  He was on the phone, so he passed a stack of mail to Josie as she walked by and mouthed a silent hello. When she got to the office she found Marta working on a case report at her desk.
r />   Josie opened a pull-top can of fruit cocktail and poured it into a bowl. She drank the juice and ate the fruit for her dinner as she filled Marta in on the latest from Holder.

  “Sorry to hear that,” Marta said. “Why don’t you go home and give your brain a rest. Get a good night’s sleep and start fresh tomorrow.”

  “I can’t. I’m too pissed.”

  Josie finished off a package of cheese and peanut butter crackers and spread the phone documents out across the conference table, on top of the phone diagram, and stared at the numbers and the timeline of phone calls for a long time.

  She went back to the night of the murder and examined Josh’s calls. He had not placed a call to Lilith that night. And Lilith had not called anyone after three that afternoon. She hadn’t talked to any of the other suspects that day, or since then.

  Josh had placed several local calls the day of the murder, and received several from Macey earlier in the day. The last call he received that day had been at 6:37 p.m., from a local number Josie didn’t recognize. Josie typed the number into a search engine but got nothing in return.

  Next, she pulled out Big Ben’s phone records and studied them again. He had placed and received hundreds of calls on his cell phone over the past month, most of them with the area code for Albuquerque, New Mexico. Josie ran her finger down the list of area codes and stopped at 432, a West Texas number. She checked the number against Josh’s, Macey’s, Ryan’s, and Caroline’s numbers, but it didn’t match up. That meant Ben had been called by another person in West Texas.

  Josie compared that number to the number that had called Josh Mooney at 6:37 p.m. the evening of the murder. The numbers matched.

  “Damn. Marta. Come here.”

  Josie ran through what she had just discovered and Marta clamped a hand on Josie’s shoulder. “How do we trace that number down?” she asked.

  On a whim, Josie pulled her cell phone out and typed the number in to see if it registered as one of her contacts. The contact Mayor Moss appeared.

  “Son of a bitch,” she whispered, and held her phone up for Marta to see.

  * * *

  Marta sat down heavily in the chair beside Josie. Her forehead was bunched into worry lines. “The mayor called Big Ben one day before Renata was killed.”

  “And that was several days before I went to his office to tell him about Caroline being involved. So he obviously knew about this before I showed up. It’s probably why he took my gun and badge away. He wanted to block the investigation.”

  “I just can’t believe this,” Marta said.

  Josie went to her daily notes logbook on her desk and flipped through it. “Did I mention to you that Mayor Moss stopped by here before all this broke loose to say the mayor’s office had received a weird voice message?”

  Marta frowned and shook her head. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”

  “It wasn’t a big deal at the time. He said the message was about something bad going on in town. He said Helen accidentally deleted it.” Josie found the note in her logbook and looked up at Marta. “He stopped by the office the morning of the day we found the body in the pasture.”

  “Why would he say that to you, knowing Caroline was mixed up in this?” Marta said.

  “Maybe Moss has been a part of the organization all along. Maybe he was trying to deflect attention.”

  She and Marta sat down at the table and stared at the phone records from Big Ben until the numbers blurred. Examining the calls over the past year, they weren’t able to find any other from Mayor Moss, nor did they find any additional calls from Big Ben to the 432 area code.

  “Mayor Moss?” Marta said. Her voice was breathy, unbelieving. “Caroline was shock enough.”

  “It’s not that he has a high regard for women; he obviously doesn’t. But he defends the law. That’s the part of his personality that always felt genuine to me,” Josie said. “It was the part of his personality that I respected. This is the kind of news that makes you question everyone.”

  “What do we do now?” Marta said.

  Josie looked at her watch. It was almost eight p.m. She wanted to call Otto, but refrained. “Holder told me to stand down while he turns the investigation over to the FBI. I want to go home and think on this tonight. I’ll wait until morning to turn Holder’s world upside down.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Josie drove home, fed the dog but skipped her own supper, and then climbed into bed at nine o’clock, where she lay on her back staring at the ceiling. Her mind flitted from Nick sleeping in Mexico, to her mom driving back to Indiana, to five women traveling from Guatemala, to Josh Mooney in lockup, until she finally got out of bed and dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt to take Chester outside for a walk.

  Behind the house, Chester hit on a scent and zigzagged around the backyard sniffing out a jackrabbit or some other little animal. Josie decided she didn’t have the energy for a walk, so she took advantage of the bright moonlight and sat on the ground with her back against a large rock to watch Chester scout out the yard.

  She allowed her gaze to travel out across Dell’s pasture and wondered how long it would take her to view the field with the same sense of serenity she’d once had. A day spent working with twisted dopers like Josh and Macey Mooney slipped out of her mind when she and Chester took off into the desert, looking for nothing but interesting rocks and glimpses of wildlife or a bright blooming flower thriving in the midst of sand and dust. Now she looked into the pasture and the vivid image of two young women fleeing for their lives from men intent on capturing or killing them ran like a movie through her brain.

  Josie thought back to the night she’d gone to town for the water meeting. The night the killers obviously knew she wouldn’t be at home. The killer who knew she had an interest in the county water supply. As a cop with limited resources, she didn’t own enough ground to be personally affected, but her neighbor Dell sure as hell did, and the killer had to have known that. The meeting was about the amount of water allowed to be pumped from an individual’s well, and the use of meters to determine depleting groundwater usage. The meeting became heated on both sides, from water conservationists to ranchers trying to save fragile crops and livestock. Josie watched men and women who had been friends and neighbors for years face off against each other in a battle that would end friendships before it was over. She ran through her mind the various people she had seen at the meeting, people who had stood at the microphone to speak from handwritten notes they’d carefully prepared, to the hotheads in the back of the room catcalling. Then she wondered who wasn’t at the meeting. Who was missing that should have been there? Who might have skipped the meeting in order to hunt down and kill a woman?

  She felt the blood drain from her face as she mentally checked off the list of speakers that night. Who was the one person in town who lived for moments in the spotlight? Who loved controversy and the chance to stand as a voice of reason in troubled times? And he hadn’t spoken that night. Josie realized she hadn’t seen him at all.

  She pulled her phone out of her sweatshirt pocket and checked the time. It was 10:11 p.m., too late to politely call, but she couldn’t wait until morning.

  She dialed Smokey Blessings, who had given the opening address at the water meeting, and then introduced the speakers throughout the night. He answered on the second ring.

  “Smokey, it’s Josie. I apologize for calling you so late at night.”

  “It’s no problem. Everything okay?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m trying to piece together a timeline, and I’m hoping you can help me.”

  “Sure.”

  “Remember back to the night of the water usage meeting?”

  “How could I forget?”

  “I’m trying to think back to the speakers that evening and I don’t remember Mayor Moss being there that night.”

  “Hell, no, he wasn’t there. Why do you think I had to mediate that meeting? I sure as hell didn’t want to. I hate public speaking.”

  �
��Why didn’t he do it? It seems like he’d have wanted to be there.”

  “He was supposed to. We’d been planning that event for weeks. And he was going to lead it. Then he calls me at about one o’clock that afternoon and says he and Caroline have to leave for El Paso. Like, right then. Some kind of family emergency came up. He asked me to lead it—despite knowing I hate that kind of thing.”

  Josie was quiet for a second, taking in the information. She was certain that she’d seen Caroline’s phone calls for the night of the murder, and they had been placed locally. “Thanks, Smokey. I appreciate it.”

  “Sure.”

  “And I appreciate you making things right with the media, about my suspension. It meant more to me than you can probably imagine.”

  “We’re not done with the mayor,” he said. “But I suspect this conversation may lead to further developments, so we’ll hang tight.”

  “I think that’s a wise decision.”

  This time, when Josie got Chester situated on his rug, and she flipped the bedside lamp off, she fell asleep within minutes of laying her head on the pillow.

  * * *

  Josie was in the shower at five the next morning, anxious to get to work. When she arrived she fired up her computer and went back to the same phone records she and Marta had left on the conference table the night before. Josie found Caroline’s records and saw that she had placed one call from her cell phone to Mayor Moss’s cell phone the night of the murder at 9:52 p.m., and received one from him at 9:59 p.m. Both calls were listed on the phone record as “voicemail” calls. If they had traveled to El Paso together for a family emergency, wouldn’t they most likely have been together, instead of leaving each other voicemails? She had to find some way to confirm whether the trip to El Paso was a sham.

  Josie kept a close eye on her watch, and at exactly seven a.m. she called a representative with West Texas Mobile whom she knew only as Janet. But she knew Janet well enough to know that she worked the seven-to-three-thirty shift, on a Monday-through-Friday schedule.

  As the only carrier with a significant number of towers in one of the most remote parts of the country, West Texas Mobile had a monopoly on phone service in Artemis and Arroyo County. It made accessing phone records for local investigations a much easier task to accomplish. And several times in the past, Janet had provided quick access to phone records before a subpoena could be issued and granted. Josie was careful not to abuse the favor the woman provided, but an unsolved homicide was justifiable in Josie’s mind.