Missing White Girl

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  The place was all that was left from an ill-considered marriage to that same Tony Corbett, who had recovered from the accident except for intense pain in his hips whenever the weather changed. His family had owned it for generations. Tony was an only child, and by the time he died in prison, victim of a mattress spring sharpened into a seven-inch shiv, Peggy had grown closer to his parents than she’d ever been to him. They willed her the cabins, and she’d been running the place for more than twenty years now.

  The man—he said his name was Dana Fortier, but she wasn’t even sure that was true, since she’d called him Dana on the path a few days before and he hadn’t even appeared to hear her—had seemed so desperate, and the money he’d offered so good, that she had broken her own rule and let him take a cabin. She had even given him the one he wanted, farthest from her place, closest to the Rim. She saw very little of him after that, mostly knew he was around because his truck would pass back and forth in front of her cabin with its curtained Gem camper shell on the back.

  Still, that vibe.

  Part of it, she believed, was due to his appearance. He had dark eyes that shifted around a lot, a prominent nose and a kind, slightly nervous smile, as if he waited in constant fear of how others would perceive him. His dark hair was thinning on top but thick on his arms and what she could see of his chest, curling up out of his open shirt collar. She suspected the fur continued down his stomach and on his back too—not a look that appealed to her, particularly, but she thought it created the effect of a harmless pet.

  In addition to the visual strangeness, he smelled odd. Sweet, in a way, but not pleasant. The nearest she could come to describing it was imagining that someone had poured sugar into a carton of milk and then left it out in the sun all day.

  There was more, she knew. When she tried to parse out just what it was, all that came to mind was a photograph she had seen, as a young girl, inside a book of wartime pictures that her father had kept on a high shelf in his den. One photo in particular had burned itself into her brain, and as a girl she had found herself drawn back to it again and again, when she had the house to herself, fascinating and repulsive at the same time. It showed a mass gravesite, she couldn’t remember from which war, and bodies—some recent, some old enough that bones poked through papery flesh—being bulldozed into an open pit.

  Peggy hadn’t thought of that picture in years. But every time she looked at Dana Fortier—or whoever he was—he reminded her of it. The whole experience of having him around forced her to look back, to dredge up memories long since left behind. She didn’t find the process altogether unpleasant. Like any life, hers had had its share of hard times and sorrow, but she also had two younger sisters, both with families, whom she loved, and plenty of happy moments to look back on.

  He was up to something back there. That, she decided, was what it came down to. He wanted secrecy, not just solitude. He wanted a place where he wouldn’t be found out.

  She couldn’t have that. She didn’t want anything illegal happening on her property. Determined to learn what it was, she waited in her cabin, working on needlepoint, until she heard his truck drive past again. Rushing to the window, she watched it head out to the Rim Road and away. Sitting down again, she waited another thirty minutes, then set the needlepoint aside, donned a leather jacket against the mountain chill and struck out through the trees. Avoiding the road and going cross-country, she could be at his cabin in ten minutes.

  She would get to the bottom of this before another hour had passed.

  14

  Bridges Not Borders occupied a concrete block building that had once been a garage or a stable behind the home of Nellie Oberricht, the organization’s founder. She owned five acres near the western edge of the Douglas city limits, about four miles from the border. A concrete floor had been poured and partially covered by rugs that Buck guessed had been handmade in Mexico or maybe Guatemala. Posters adorned the walls, some showing Mexican artwork and crafts, others with simple declarations of the group’s philosophy: “A PERSON CAN NEVER BE ILLEGAL.” “HUMANITY IS NOT A CRIME.” “BORDERS = PRISON BARS.”

  Buck had met Nellie a few times, even arrested her once. He had no problem with the work her group did as long as it didn’t cross the lines of legality that had been drawn by the state. Which, he guessed, was the whole problem. Bridges Not Borders, like other humanitarian groups, provided aid for undocumented aliens. Sometimes that aid consisted of putting cases of water bottles out in the desert so that migrants wouldn’t die of thirst. Other times they got more involved—driving migrants to doctors, hiding them—and those were the acts that crossed the line.

  If the migrants didn’t cross the line—meaning the border—in the first place, or only crossed it legally, none of these issues would exist. But they did come, hundreds of thousands every year, like an ocean lapping at the American shore. The Border Patrol apprehended many of them, processing them and returning them to the Mexican side. Others got through to jobs in Maine or Arkansas or Ohio or right here in Arizona. Still others died en route. Hyperthermia in the summer, hypothermia in winter. They got lost in the deserts and mountains. Their guides abandoned them. Buck had seen too many dehydrated bodies in the desert, skin blackened and tight, whites of their eyes gone pink from burst blood vessels. Sometimes they tore their clothes off and the sun fried them lobster red. One he’d found had suffocated on dirt he had clawed from the desert floor in a deluded belief that he was drinking from a pond—the man’s mouth had gaped open, and dry soil caked his lips and swollen tongue. With luck he found them before the coyotes did, before the insects had eaten out their eyeballs and bored through their scalps. He had sympathy for Nellie’s point of view, but he wished Mexico would fix its own economy so its citizens would stop dying on his turf.

  Buck knocked once on the open door, then entered. Nellie stood up from behind a desk piled high with documents, file folders, literature. In the middle of it he could see a computer and telephone, both overwhelmed by the sheer amount of paper.

  “Always a pleasure to see you without handcuffs in your hand, Buck,” she said. She was a tall woman, five-eleven he remembered from booking her. One forty-five, although she had maybe gained a pound or two since then, but it sat well on her. Her brown hair, streaked with silver, fell straight and reached almost to her waist, accentuating her height. Her smile appeared genuine, and Buck had always found it pleasant, as he did the deep, mellow tones of her voice.

  “Hello, Nellie,” he said. “You keepin’ out of trouble?”

  “Am I supposed to tell the truth, or make you happy?”

  “Let’s just pretend I didn’t ask,” he said.

  She nodded, an action that set her acres of hair in undulating motion, and sat back behind the desk. A stack of newspapers and magazines filled the one white plastic chair for visitors. Nellie didn’t offer to clear it, so Buck remained standing.

  “But this isn’t a social visit,” she said. The smile had vanished from her handsome face, with just a hint of bemusement left in her emerald eyes.

  “No, I’m afraid it’s not, Nellie.”

  “We haven’t done anything wrong, Buck,” she said. “I mean, I know you and I don’t always agree on what’s right and what’s wrong, but I’m talking by your standards, not mine. I’ve placed some water lately, made some phone calls, even paid some visits across the border. Nothing more than that. It’s been quiet, what with the rains and all.”

  “Nellie, you know Lulu Lavender?”

  “Of course,” Nellie said. The flash of spirit in her green eyes faded as she blinked. Nellie could read people as well as any lawman, Buck had always felt, and she saw bad news on the way. “What’s happened, Buck?”

  “Lulu’s missing,” he told her. “The rest of her family’s been killed.”

  She was silent a moment, swallowing once, then blinking and looking away from Buck. Her left hand had curled into an awkward fist; her right gripped the edge of the desk so hard the knuckles whitened. After
a moment she met his gaze again, as if she had taken that brief opportunity to work out how she felt. “God damn it,” she said, her voice cold. “God damn. You don’t know who did it, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “That’s right, Nellie. I was hoping maybe you could point me in some direction or other.”

  “You’ve made a mistake, Buck. This is…I am outraged by this, I truly am. Lulu is a gentle soul, a wonderful girl with nothing but love in her heart. I can’t begin to fathom why someone would wish her harm, or anyone else in her family for that matter.”

  “I can’t either, Nellie. That’s why I came here. In case there was something you could tell me. I don’t mean to say that it was UDAs murdered those folks, but it’s within the realm of possibility, right? Or maybe some coyote, upset with her for some reason? Could she have gotten mixed up in a drug deal?”

  “Not Lulu,” Nellie said with a certainty that Buck hoped was well founded. “Never.”

  “Can you know that for an absolute fact?” Buck pressed. “I’m not looking to tangle you up in anything, but I have to know. Were the Lavenders hiding anyone out at their place? Or guiding anyone, something like that?”

  “Lulu didn’t do that kind of thing,” Nellie said. “She staffed a table up at the Farmer’s Market in Bisbee. She raised funds; she wrote letters to the newspapers. Things like that. I wouldn’t even let her go out with me into the field yet. There’s no way she would have encountered anyone like that.”

  “But people come here to the office.”

  “Family members, sure,” Nellie replied. “Those who are here legally. No one without documents is brought to this office, ever.”

  “I’d like to believe you, Nellie.”

  “I guess it’s your choice. Believe me or not.”

  Buck suspected that Nellie would lie to protect her organization and its charges. At the same time, she would take Lulu’s disappearance seriously, and he believed she would do whatever she could to help.

  “Guess I have no reason not to,” he said. “But if anything comes to mind, or if you hear anything, let me know right away, okay?”

  “Of course. If you can think of any other way I can help, just say the word. Can I ask what steps are being taken to find her?”

  “We’re doing everything we can,” Buck answered, knowing that this time he was lying to her.

  On his way back to his Yukon, he decided he would make it true.

  15

  “I need the Search and Rescue Team,” Buck said. On his way back to his office, he’d called the main sheriff’s office in Bisbee and got Irena Mendez, Sheriff Gatlin’s assistant, on the line.

  “Ed will have to authorize that,” Irena said. “And he’s in Sierra Vista giving a press conference.”

  “Irena, this Lavender girl has been missing for too long, and we’ve got nothing,” Buck said. “There’s no more time to wait. Just call ’em in and put it on me.”

  “Buck, Ed will have your ass for that.”

  Irena had a tendency to exaggerate, Buck knew. Ed would be pissed. He would rant and fume and threaten, but he would stop short of yanking Buck’s badge. Still, he could make life miserable for a good long while.

  “I’ll take that chance, Irena,” he assured her. “If there’s a footprint, a hair, a skin cell anywhere near the Lavender ranch, I want it found.” The Search and Rescue Team was composed of citizen volunteers, mostly locals with their own four-wheel-drive vehicles. They generally fanned out looking for lost hikers, wayward Alzheimer’s patients, that sort of thing. Putting them to work searching for minuscule clues on a property as big as the Lavenders’ was not typical, but Buck had run out of other ideas. His own officers had canvassed the property, but not as comprehensively as fifty or sixty people could.

  Of course, he would no longer be able to keep the murders quiet, once all those volunteers found out about them. That would be something else for Sheriff Gatlin to be angry about.

  But since he had gone this far, he figured he might as well take one more step off the cliff.

  He gave the sheriff thirty minutes to finish his press conference, studying transcripts Raul had made of Lulu’s blog while he waited, and then he dialed the cell phone of Gina Castaneda, a reporter from the NBC affiliate in Tucson. She answered on the second ring.

  “Gina, it’s Lieutenant Buck Shelton, from the Cochise County Sheriff’s Office,” he said.

  “Buck, how are you?” Gina replied. They had met several times, usually on occasions when she hoped to use him to learn more than he or Sheriff Gatlin wanted to tell.

  Not this time.

  “I’ll tell you the truth, Gina, I’ve been better.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Were you at the sheriff’s press conference just now?”

  “Yes, I’m headed back to Tucson,” she said. “Why?”

  Both of them on cell phones, then. Buck eyed the road ahead, familiar and straight, but a momentary lapse of attention could be enough time for a coyote or a cow to amble out onto the pavement. “I know it’s an awful thing, that girl being missing,” he said. “But I’ve got a situation down here that’s just as bad, and it’s not getting any attention at all.”

  “Tell me.”

  Buck took a deep breath. There would be no going back after this. “A family of four was murdered the other night, and a fifth, a teenage girl, is missing from the house.”

  “That’s horrible!”

  “It is,” he agreed. “But the press is so wound up over Elayne Lippincott that no one’s covering this crime. I need some exposure to help find this girl.”

  “Hang on a second, Buck.”

  The line went silent. Buck pictured Gina as he remembered her, with rich olive skin and intelligent dark eyes and shoulder-length hair with the sheen of black silk. Her features were sculpted, precise, as if a news director had designed the perfect on-air reporter. Her eyes were set well apart, her nose small and well shaped, her teeth white and even. The only thing that might have been considered a flaw, except Buck found it endearing, was that she had very full lips, the upper more so than the lower, in a reversal of the norm. More than once he had watched her on TV and wondered what it would be like to kiss those lips.

  “Buck?” Her sudden return took him by surprise, almost as if she had known what he was thinking.

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “We’re turning around, heading your way. Can you meet us at the crime scene?”

  Buck agreed, and gave her the address of the Lavender ranch.

  When he hung up, he filled his lungs with air again, held it, blew it out.

  He had leapt over the edge.

  And Ed Gatlin would be waiting at the bottom.

  16

  Carl Greenwell’s ranch sat almost right on the border, a few miles to the east of Douglas. There wasn’t another real city for hundreds of miles in that direction, Barry knew. New Mexico’s largest border crossing was the relatively small town of Columbus, making El Paso the next big city that way.

  And in between, as Carl pointed out, flowed a tidal wave of human traffic, the never-ending surge of migrants and drugs.

  Marc drove the Expedition along some of the ranch’s dirt trails, with Barry pointing out sights along the way: a well, a windmill, a barn containing generating equipment. In an emergency, the ranch could be entirely self-sufficient, Carl explained, off the power grid and with its own water. They even had satellite phones and Internet access. Barry didn’t quite get why Carl was so pleased by the fact that they could withstand a siege, but Carl claimed they could, and he returned to that theme time and again.

  He showed Barry six buildings, two adobe houses that looked like they’d stood for a hundred years, the others more modern corrugated steel structures that Carl said were bunkhouses, storage buildings and the like. The steel buildings had been arranged in a semicircle around the two adobes, all set in a shallow valley and sharing a common gravel driveway. A wooden observation tower stood atop the highest of
the surrounding hills. Marc tooted the Expedition’s horn, and Barry saw someone in the tower wave back.

  Tall fences topped with razor wire surrounded the entire property, more daunting by far than the border wall made from Vietnam-era landing mats. Barry had seen as they entered that two men carrying what looked like automatic rifles guarded the front gate.

  “This looks like a fort,” he commented when Marc stopped the SUV outside one of the adobes.

  “Better,” Carl said. “Because forts are owned by the government, and the American Pride Ranch is one hundred percent private property.”

  “I didn’t see anything like cattle or sheep or any of that,” Barry said.

  “It’s not that kind of ranch, Barry. Our products are freedom and security for the American people.”

  “I don’t follow,” Barry said.

  “Come on inside,” Carl offered. “I’ll introduce you around and explain.”

  As Barry followed Carl in, Marc drove the Expedition toward one of the steel buildings. Before he reached it, someone inside began opening a big door. Barry could only see darkness inside. Joe had already parked Barry’s GMC in the drive.

  The larger of the two adobe buildings had two stories, topped by a flat roof. The walls were at least a foot thick, with deeply recessed windows, and inside heavy wooden beams crossed the ceiling and offered structural support.

  The interior furnishings weren’t stylistically in keeping with the building. An institutional-style green metal table with a dozen matching chairs occupied the center of the main room, flanked by steel filing cabinets in black, tan and gray. Scuffed and stained whitewashed walls went unadorned by artwork or anything else that would indicate people lived here. A rolling chalkboard/bulletin board had maps of the region thumbtacked to it. The place reminded Barry more of a nursing home or hospital waiting room than a ranch house.