Body Heat

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 wasn’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.”

“That’s highly unlikely.”

“It’s possible.”

She wasn’t optimistic about his theory. Except for the fact that the couple had been killed execution style, the murders didn’t suggest it. As far as she could tell, this wasn’t Mexico’s problem. It was their problem. “There’s no evidence to support it. The victims all crossed the border from Mexico, but that’s about the only thing they have in common. Most of the people we’ve identified came from different regions and had no contact with organized crime. All the indications are that they didn’t previously know one another, either.”

“I’m still hoping it’s a drug lord,” he muttered. “Because if this is a vigilante, it’s going to get ugly around here.”

Sophia grimaced. “Take a look. It’s already ugly.”

“Yeah, well, unless you can stop this guy, it’ll get worse.”

“Thanks for stating the obvious.”

He rolled the male onto his back. The victim had a goatee and the tattoo of a cross on his neck. A bloodstain indicated he’d been shot in the chest, but he hadn’t bled much more than the female.

“Son of a bitch knows how to make quick work of it.”

Vonnegut was talking about the killer, of course. Sophia had noticed that, too, but she wasn’t impressed. “A bullet at point-blank range is pretty effective.”

Crouching beside him, she began to search the victim’s pockets. Sometimes UDAs carried voter registration cards. These cards seemed to hold more significance to Mexicans than the same thing did to Americans. Maybe because they included a photo, in addition to the standard name and address.

Unfortunately, this guy didn’t have any ID. Sophia found five hundred pesos—roughly the equivalent of fifty bucks—tucked into his right sock, as well as a piece of paper with a phone number that had a Tucson area code.

Suddenly light-headed, she swatted at the flies buzzing around the bodies and rocked back to fill her lungs with air that wasn’t pregnant with the smell of stale sweat and unwashed clothing. She hadn’t searched the woman yet, but she needed a moment to recover or she was going to be sick. Judging by the nausea roiling in her stomach, she was as pale as Grant had been the first time he saw one of the bodies.

“Why do you live here?” she asked Dr. Vonnegut while watching Grant finish with the yellow tape.

He was busy getting a body temperature. “What’d you say?”

“Why do you live near the border if you hate Mexicans?”

“I don’t hate Mexicans. I just want them to stay in their own country. Besides, my wife is from around here. And I like to be able to golf year-round.”

“Makes sense.”

“What about you?”

Breathe. Mind over matter. Do not embarrass yourself. These are not dead humans. These are…objects.

Squeezing her eyes closed, she turned her face up to the sun. “I’ve got family here, too,” she said, but she wasn’t talking about her mother and stepfather or her older brother. He didn’t live there anymore, anyway. She was thinking about Starkey. These days, she hated the Hells Angels and everything they stood for, hated that she’d ever had anything to do with them. She and Starkey had gotten together her junior year in high school, when her stepfather had moved in. Since her mother wouldn’t believe her complaints, and her older brother was away at college, Starkey had provided a deterrent to her stepfather’s advances. No one dared mess with her once Starkey came into her life. They knew there’d be hell to pay. She’d enjoyed the protection, as well as rolling on his Harley and wearing all that leather. But the longer she’d stayed with him, the more certain she was that she didn’t want to be an “old lady,” as the Hells Angels referred to their women. Determined to become a full patch member, Starkey was getting more and more committed to the club, which was so involved in drug and gun trafficking that she faced a different kind of risk from the one posed by her stepfather.

So she’d broken free, moved out on her own and migrated to the opposite extreme—law enforcement. After feeling so vulnerable, both at home and with Starkey’s pals as she became more aware of what they were really like, being able to protect herself had meant everything to her. She loved being a cop. But there was one person from the Starkey era she couldn’t let go of, and that was Starkey’s son, Rafe. She didn’t care that he wasn’t technically hers; she’d taken care of him those three years she’d been with Starkey—especially the two years she’d lived with him—and she wouldn’t walk out on the boy. His real mother was a crackhead who’d sell her soul for another bump. In many ways, Sophia was all Rafe had.

And she loved him. It came down to that.

“Someday I’m going to move,” she added, and forced herself to search the dead woman. There was nothing in her pockets except some nuts and a folded piece of paper with several words written in Spanish.

Sophia expected it to be a paper prayer. A lot of illegal immigrants carried them. But it wasn’t. It was a love note.

Although Sophia wasn’t fluent in Spanish, she could read and understand most of what she heard. She’d taken two years of Spanish classes in high school and she’d come into contact with it almost constantly since, via the ranch hands who frequented her stepfather’s feed store and the Mexicans she apprehended. Fortunately, that was enough to be able to decipher the few sentences she saw written there.

“You’re beautiful. Will you marry me? I love you. José.”

This woman had left behind everything she owned except this note? That meant it had to be important to her. She was wearing a thin gold band. It wasn’t very expensive, but it was a wedding ring all the same. Obviously, she’d said yes to that proposal.

Tears welled up in Sophia’s eyes. Trying to hide her reaction, she ducked her head, but Dr. Vonnegut immediately caught on that something was wrong.

“Hey, you okay?”

She averted her face. “Fine. Just doing my job. Why?”

“You’re acting strange.”

Was it so strange to experience grief for these people? To feel that their deaths mattered?

She swallowed in spite of the lump clogging her throat. “I think the guy’s name was José.”

“José what?”

“That’s what I have to find out. And this—” she gazed at a face that, in life, would’ve been as pretty as the note suggested “—this was his wife.”

“Dumb wetbacks,” he mumbled.

Sophia whirled on him before she could stop herself. “Shut up!” she shouted. “Just…shut up!”

Anger quickly replaced his initial shock. “You’re not cut out for this job. I knew it when they hired you,” he said. Then he got up, removed his plastic gloves and stomped away, leaving the bodies to the boys from the morgue, who put bags around the victims’ hands, in case they could recover some sort of trace evidence, and began wrapping their corpses in clean white sheets.

Ignoring the stares of the people who’d been looking on, Sophia pinched the bridge of her nose and struggled to compose herself. She had to be careful. There were enough sexist jerks in Bordertown who thought her job should’ve gone to a man—even though the only viable candidate was a criminal himself.

Her cell phone rang. As she pulled it from her pocket, she hoped it might be Rafe. He’d give her something good to hang on to, help her get through this. But it was too early for him to be up. And as soon as she saw the incoming number, she knew a bad morning was about to get worse: It was Wayne Schilling, the mayor.

3

The voice on the other end of the phone stopped Roderick Guerrero in his tracks. Because he hadn’t recognized the number, he’d been curious enough to answer. But from the moment he’d heard the word hello, he’d known it was his father, although they hadn’t spoken in years—ever since he’d graduated from BUD/S training and received his Naval Special Warfare SEAL classification. He still couldn’t say how Bruce Dunlap had found out he was graduating, or the time and date of the ceremony. Roderick sure as shit hadn’t told him. But someone had. After all the years Dunlap had chosen to ignore him—even lied about their relationship—he’d flown to California to attend and looked on; acting as proud as any other parent. The only difference was that his wife sat at his side, her lips pressed tight with disapproval. Edna was the kind of woman who walked through town looking down her nose at everybody. Roderick disliked her even more than he disliked his father.

He didn’t know what to say and had no desire to say anything, so he hung up. He felt no obligation to Bruce. It wouldn’t have mattered if Bruce had been calling to offer him a million-dollar inheritance. Roderick didn’t want his father’s money, his advice, his legacy or his love. His love least of all. He didn’t even use his father’s name. Legally, he wasn’t a Dunlap, anyway. He was a bastard and as such had been an embarrassment to his wealthy white father all the time he was growing up. As soon as he was old enough to contest his mother’s wishes, he’d taken her name instead. She hadn’t been happy about that. He was related to the wealthiest man in town and she wanted everyone to know it. It gave her a sense of pride, a connection to something more through him.

Or maybe she enjoyed it for other reasons. Maybe she got some pleasure from knowing her son’s very existence grated on Edna. But Roderick wanted to distance himself from the Dunlaps and all they represented as much as they wanted to distance themselves from him. He was satisfied with his mother’s name. Guerrero meant warrior. That suited him better. He’d been fighting since the day he was born.

Milton Berger stuck his head out of the conference room a few feet down the hall. “What are you doing?”

Roderick had almost forgotten that his boss was waiting to be debriefed on his latest assignment.

“Nothing.” He started to slide his cell phone into the pocket of his khaki shorts when it rang again.

“Can you shut that off and get your ass in here? I don’t have all day!” Milt snapped. As sole owner of Department 6, Milt couldn’t seem to focus on any one thing longer than five minutes. He was too busy juggling. Always in a meeting or on a call, he wasn’t an average workaholic; he was like a workaholic on speed. Roderick was beginning to think the fortysomething-year-old never went home at night.

But he didn’t care what Milt did in his off-hours. Milt wasn’t the kind of guy Roderick liked spending time with. Milt had six operatives, and every single one of them thought he was a bona fide asshole. What did that say about a guy?

As his phone continued to jingle, Roderick’s thumb hovered over the red phone symbol that would send the call to voice mail. It was his father again. Why the hell was the old man making an effort now? At thirty, Roderick was no longer a dirt-poor Mexican boy with no prospects and no family beyond a weary mother who’d come into the country illegally when she was barely twenty and cut lettuce in the fields of the selfish jerk who’d impregnated her. Whatever Bruce wanted, it was too late.

But Milt’s impatience grated on Roderick almost as much as his father’s untimely call, so he answered out of spite. “How did you get my number?”

“What the hell!” Milt complained.

Roderick ignored him.

“I’ve been keeping tabs on you.”

The question that immediately came to Rod’s tongue was why, but he knew his father’s answer wouldn’t make sense to him, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear it anyway, so he went with “How?”

“Jorge mentions you from time to time.”

Jorge was Bruce’s overseer. He was also the closest thing Rod had to a grandfather and the only person in Bordertown Rod stayed in contact with. Jorge loved hearing about Rod’s undercover exploits, so Rod humored him by checking in every few months and catching up. The old man had never told him that Bruce had expressed an interest. Maybe he hadn’t; maybe Jorge was attempting to engineer some sort of reunion. It’d be like him. He’d always had a soft heart. Jorge was part of the reason Rod’s mother had never left the ranch despite her difficulties. She knew he couldn’t go anywhere else and make the money he made working for Bruce. And she, no doubt, hoped Bruce would eventually “come to his senses” and accept Rod. Mostly, she’d stayed to see her son eventually have more and be more than she could hope to give if she left. “Since when did the two of you become friends?”

“Time has a way of changing things, Rod.”

“And some things will never change. So are you going to tell me what you want?”

“To hear me out. That’s all I ask.”

Hoping his father was about to lose the ranch and needed a loan or something, Roderick decided to indulge him. To a point. “You’ve got three minutes. Make it fast.”

“I’d like you to come to Bordertown.”

This made Roderick laugh. “You’re joking, right? I’d sooner go to hell.”

“Rod, I think you might be able to help with a situation down here. If half of what Jorge tells me is true, I know you can.”