“Closed your case?” Hector said, turning to face me. “What do you mean?”
“We were down here looking for—”
“—Rachael Pestozo,” he finished. “Maines called me last week about it, wanted me to verify that she’d shown up at a local medical clinic.”
A twisting sensation under my sternum. “You’re the local contact?”
“Yeah, of course. Why else am I here?”
I sat up and slid my legs out from under the sheet, heading for the bathroom. The twisting sensation persisted.
“Yeah. Why else are you here?” I repeated, half to myself.
Silence from the bedroom. I washed my face and brushed my teeth, the question reverberating in my head. The bed creaked, and Hector appeared in the bathroom doorway. He didn’t say anything, just watched me rinse my toothbrush and tried to catch my eye.
“Rachael’s fine,” I said, refusing to consider that I wasn’t part of what had drawn him to Ojinaga. “Maines and I found her walking around town yesterday. She’s going back to Azula with him this morning.”
I was running a comb through my hair and stole a look at Hector’s face in the mirror. It froze me.
“Walking around town?” he said. “When?”
“Yesterday, right after I saw you.”
Hector’s expression didn’t relax. He shook his head. “That’s not possible. She died in December. I found out yesterday. That’s what I needed to tell Maines.”
My heart clattered into high gear and my toes went cold. “What?”
“She died in December,” he repeated. “I assume it was something to do with her surgery, but of course the clinic wouldn’t tell me anything.” He paused to rub his head and mutter, “I gotta say, the lap-band thing surprised me. Orson was after her for years to get a bypass, but she was dead set against it. I can’t figure why she would do it now, after the divorce.”
“You knew her?”
“Yeah. Well, as much as anyone did. She was pretty private, kept to herself, but ya know—people talk to bartenders.”
My toes were starting to warm back up, but there was a sour taste in my mouth. “Are you sure it was her who died? One hundred percent sure?”
“I saw the body. It was her.”
“Saw the body?” I said. “It’s the middle of June.”
Hector shrugged. “She’s still in the morgue. Ojinaga Hospital.”
The radar was on full alert now, and my doubt about the plastic-surgery story solidified. I went back into the bedroom and started getting dressed, filling Hector in on our encounter with the woman Maines and I thought was Rachael.
When I finished, Hector was standing next to the bed looking flummoxed. “You’re saying this woman got fixed up to look like Rachael so she could pose as her?”
“That’s what I’m guessing.”
Hector snorted. “Why?”
“You tell me,” I said. “You seem to be the only person in town she ever talked to.”
“She was just an ordinary person,” he said, a shrug in his voice. “Nobody who’d make you want to look like her.”
“What about the rest of her? Anything unusual in her history?”
“Yeah, sort of,” Hector said, after thinking a minute. “She mentioned it one time in the bar. Her dad was from an Indian tribe in Arizona, and after she and Orson divorced, she decided to try and get official citizenship with them and move back.”
That would be her cover story about returning to Sells. Maybe it hadn’t all been icing. “How long since she’d been home?”
“It would have to be something like twenty years,” Hector said.
That gave me some goose bumps, but I couldn’t figure out why. The O’odham kids at school had always been poorer than we were, and I’d grown up in a house with holes in the walls and an outdoor kitchen. Talk of casinos and federal support was all over the reservations in those days, but as far as I knew, none of it had ever materialized for the O’odham. If our impostor wanted Rachael’s specific identity—which the plastic surgery certainly suggested—it wasn’t for monetary purposes.
“You could hardly make up a better scenario for someone who wanted to take over someone else’s life,” I said, after a couple of minutes’ thought. “Ordinary woman, nothing remarkable about her, not well known around town, on her way to a new life somewhere no one has seen her in a couple of decades. Oh, and then there’s the conveniently dead ex-husband.”
Hector’s dark eyes jumped to my face. “Orson’s dead?”
I nodded. “Somebody shot him and stuffed his body into an old heating chase out at the Ranch.”
Hector’s face went wary, and I said, “He hasn’t been dead long enough for Connie to have been involved.”
He relaxed a little. “So does Maines think Rachael killed him?”
“Maines doesn’t know he’s dead,” I said, jamming my stuff into my bag. “We’ve got to catch him before they leave.”
CHAPTER 16
The sun came the rest of the way up while we crossed the river at Presidio to head into Ojinaga and back to the Waru. I hoped it was early enough that we’d catch Maines and “Rachael” before they left the hotel.
All manner of motor vehicle was crammed bumper to bumper along the six-lane boulevard on the Mexican side, waiting to come into the States. As we passed through the gate, going in the opposite direction, my eye caught on a familiar-looking car, and my heart sank. It was Maines’s Crown Vic.
I gave Hector a squeeze with my legs to get his attention and yelled over the traffic noise, “There they are. Turn around!”
He slowed the bike, looking for an opening in the undulating sea of metal. I craned my neck around as best I could with the bulky helmet on, and saw the Crown Vic accelerating over the bridge.
“Damn it, they just went through,” I said.
Hector made a frustrated motion with his head, trying to maneuver over to the inner lane. None of the vehicles shoving along seemed to be paying the slightest attention to one another or to the lines on the pavement, pulling to the vendor-lined curb or changing lanes without warning or regard for anything in their immediate vicinity.
Hector finally found an opening, and we headed back toward the river crossing. He swerved and threaded, ignoring the shouted and gestural objections of the other drivers, until we were at the gate.
The guards were busy with a commercial truck, and one of them held up a hand, stopping us. Hector turned off the Norton’s motor and removed his helmet. I followed suit, peering into the distance.
“Damn it,” I breathed again.
“Highway 67 to Marfa,” Hector murmured, watching a couple of German shepherds sniff the truck’s tires. “It’s the only route out. We’ll have to step on it, though.”
The truck finally moved ahead, and the guards waved us up. Hector fished out his wallet and showed them his driver’s license—Mexican, I noticed, with a fake name. I really hoped they wouldn’t want to look in the Norton’s saddlebags, where I’d crammed my duffel full of cash.
They asked Hector in Spanish whether he’d bought anything in Mexico. He laughed and said something in a dialect I couldn’t understand. The guards both grinned. They handed Hector back his license, and we were on our way.
CHAPTER 17
The cool of the morning burned off fast, and by the time we’d cleared the city limits, it felt like we were driving headfirst into a blow-dryer set on high. The road was dead flat from horizon to horizon, which would make it easy to spot Maines’s car from a distance. Hector hit an easy ninety and stayed there.
We’d just passed a sign advising that it was thirty miles to Marfa when the shimmer coming off the asphalt up ahead started to form a solid blob. I squinted, trying to make it come into focus. It divided in half, and as we covered more distance, the right half gradually started getting bigger, the left half receding until I couldn’t see it anymore. After a few minutes, I was sure that it wasn’t a mirage.
“You see that?” I yelled to Hector, above the roar
of heat blasting by.
He nodded and dropped down to the speed limit. The remaining blob was definitely a car, pulled off onto the shoulder. Something was moving between it and us. As we got closer, I saw that the moving thing was an animal.
“It’s Steve,” I said, my nerves jerking tight.
The dog was all alone. Hector geared down and stopped. Steve began to run toward us. I got off the bike and caught his collar as he bounded up.
Hector pointed his eyes at a long smear on the dog’s flank. “That’s blood.”
I straightened up and did a quick visual scan. It was maybe a hundred yards to the Crown Vic, and there were no heads sticking up above the seats. Nothing was moving anywhere out in the landscape, either.
Steve panted loudly and made whining noises, wriggling like crazy. My stomach started to hurt.
“Call 911,” I said to Hector, heading for the Crown Vic.
Halfway there, Steve broke loose and ran, prancing up against the driver’s-side door and barking. A wave of nausea bubbled up, but I swallowed it down and yanked the door open.
Maines was in the driver’s seat, slumped to one side, covered in blood from the neck down.
“Jesus Christ,” I breathed, leaning in to feel him.
He was still warm and his chest was moving. A slanted gash ran across his neck, deeper on the side facing the car door. His hand was limp at the wound, where it had apparently been holding pressure until he lost consciousness. I tore off my jacket and pushed it against his neck, climbing into his lap.
“Paramedics are coming,” Hector said from the open car door. I hadn’t noticed him following me.
“It can’t have been long,” I said, putting as much pressure on the wound as I dared. “Did you see that other car? Somebody picked Rachael—or whoever she is—up.”
Steve was standing in the shade of the driver’s-side door, looking worried. He didn’t make any noise, but kept sitting down and getting back up, occasionally putting one paw on the edge of the blood-soaked seat. Hector watched him, looking grim.
I had just started thinking how pointless what I was doing was when the sound of a helicopter faded in from the north. Hector ran out into the road, waving his arms as it came into view over the mountains. Maines was still breathing.
The helicopter set down on the center stripe, and the paramedics moved in fast. They dragged me off Maines’s inert body and began pumping blood and plasma into him like their lives depended on it. His certainly did.
A cop car bearing the legend PRESIDIO COUNTY SHERIFF materialized out of the blinding heat. Hector turned his back on it and handed me his phone. “This is yours now.”
“What? Why?”
“I used it in the States,” he said.
I started to argue, but the two flatfoots who had gotten out of the cop car were on us.
“Y’all OK?” the older one, a sturdy blonde woman, asked.
I nodded, slipping the phone into my front pocket.
The paramedics were trotting a stretcher over from the helicopter. The woman cop’s partner, a younger Latino with a friendly-looking face, gestured to Hector, guiding him away from us.
“Really?” I said, watching them. “Why would we call you guys if we had anything to do with this?”
The woman cop peered at me from under her lacquered bangs, which stood out from her forehead in a long arc.
“What’s your name?” she asked, getting her notebook out.
I gave it to her and then shut up.
She didn’t care for that. “Tell me what happened,” she instructed, her light eyes going hard.
“He’s a private detective,” I said, gesturing toward the Maines-filled gurney, which the paramedics were now pushing to the helicopter. “He was transporting a suspect who isn’t who she says she is. We were trying to catch them.”
Hector was looking our way. I hoped he had the sense to play stupid.
The cop squinted at me. “There’s a second person in the vehicle?”
“Not anymore. Another car picked her up. We saw it from way back. Too far away to tell anything about it.”
She pursed her lips, making a note.
Hector and her partner were on the other side of the motorcycle, between it and the trunk of the Crown Vic. Hector was holding on to Steve’s collar.
“Stay here,” the blonde cop said, and headed toward them.
She pulled her partner away and they held a short conference in the ditch, then she came back to me, flicking a look at the bike. “If I were to have a look in those saddlebags, what would I find?”
“A perfectly legal wad of cash,” I said.
She gave me a short, intense look of appraisal, then glanced back at the Crown Vic, her expression turning sour. “Nope,” she said, after a minute. “I don’t like any of it.”
I sighed and held out my wrists.
CHAPTER 18
They didn’t cuff us, and even let us share the backseat of the cop car. My bag full of cash went into their trunk. There was a brief shuffle while they tried to decide where to put the dog; in the end, he rode up front.
“I paid good money for that Norton,” Hector grouched at them through the security grille as we pulled away.
“Don’t worry about it, bro,” the younger cop told him.
Hector muttered something foul in Spanish under his breath and sat back. Across the seat we were sharing, he hooked his pinky finger under mine. I looked over at him, but he’d fixed his eyes on the scenery.
I spent the drive to Marfa trying to decide whether telling them I was wanted in Azula would buy us anything. It was hard to say if knowing about Benny’s BOLO beforehand would make me look more trustworthy or not. I wondered, too, what Hector’s name would bring up. All in all, it wasn’t turning into a good day.
I kept feeling like I’d forgotten something; like a door was closed in the back of my mind and something behind it kept howling to be let out. In the quiet of the cop car, I realized I’d been feeling it for a while, at least since Maines and I had gotten to the hot springs. I felt around the edges of it, trying to suss out the shape, but I was too tweaked. It would have to wait until survival mode had gone offline.
Marfa was a lot like Azula: a flat, spare little town with a wedding cake of a courthouse in the middle. It was more faded, though, as if the sun were stronger here, and somebody had poured some money into the local economy, judging from the condition of the buildings. I spotted a number of pricey-looking boutiques as we passed through the square.
About a block from the courthouse we turned into an alley and parked behind a low, tan building remarkable for its complete lack of personality. The only way I knew it was the sheriff’s office was the buzzer mounted to one side of the steel door. The deputies got us out and walked us up the concrete steps and into the air conditioning, which must have been set at about forty degrees. It felt good after the heat of the highway, but I knew I’d be freezing in about twenty minutes.
“This way,” the female deputy said, gesturing ahead of me. Hector and her partner were behind us, with Steve.
I led the pack down the anonymous hallway into a large room with fake-wood paneling and four beat-up Steelcase desks with black linoleum tops. These were paired up facing each other, with each pair dead center in its half of the room, side-on to the door so nobody could sneak up on whoever was sitting at them.
Hector and his factotum went to the pair of desks on the right, and the female deputy guided me to the left pair, indicating a side chair. Steve flopped onto the floor next to me. The cop waggled the mouse in front of the enormous CRT monitor on her desk as she sat down, waking the computer.
“Wow, that thing must be twenty years old,” I said.
Right away I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. She gave me a derisive look that was half smirk, plainly convinced I was trying to suck up.
They’d patted us down before putting us in the car, and now another uniform came in, carrying my duffel and a clear plastic ziplock bag stuf
fed with my cash. He brought these over to the female cop, giving Steve a wide berth. The dog seemed annoyed by this, but kept his mouth shut.
“Is he housebroken?” the female cop asked me, setting the cash on the far side of her desk.
I shrugged, watching her unzip the duffel and get out my wallet. There wasn’t much in it; she found my driver’s license pretty quickly and wedged it upright on her keyboard. I watched her tap my information in and then sit back to wait. It took some doing not to fidget, but I managed it with an old trick: giving myself permission to fidget if I wanted to. It’s the prohibition that makes it hard to resist.
The cop’s eyebrows rose after five silent minutes of staring at her computer screen. I couldn’t see it from where I was sitting, but she’d plainly discovered my skeletons.
“You’re”—she squinted at the screen—“you were in federal witness protection?”
Genuinely surprised, I paused a second before replying, “That’s in your database?”
“Hey, Hol,” her partner called over. “You come here a minute?”
She got up and crossed the room. I had my back to it, so I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could feel eyes on me, so I kept my hands to myself. “Hol” came back shortly, looking stressed.
I kept quiet, but it wasn’t easy. She did a little more typing on her keyboard, letting me cook. Finally, she said, “You coulda saved yourself a lot of grief if you’d told me who John Maines was.”
Careful not to let anything show on my face, I replied, “Aren’t you guys supposed to ID everybody on a scene?”
“Oh, don’t be thinking you’re in any position to get smart with me, girl,” she shot back.
I reeled it in a little. “I’m just saying, I thought you already knew who he was. Not that I have any idea why it matters.” For all I knew, they’d dialed up his trip to Cuba with Hector and were freaking out at having an international fugitive in their crosshairs.
“Texas is a small state, where county sheriffs are concerned,” the cop said. “When news goes out on the wires about one of our own, we tend to remember it.”
South of Nowhere: A Mystery (A Julia Kalas Mystery) Page 7