Body Heat

“I’m hoping a ballistics expert can tell us the make of the gun.”

“Unlikely. There might be fingerprints, though. Have you checked?”

“I’m leaving that for the crime lab.”

Lindstrom returned the sack with the shell casings. “Anything else?”

“Five hundred pesos. A love note. And a number.” Sophia slid the paper she’d just used to make that call across her desk so Lindstrom could see it.

“That’s not a lot to carry across the border.”

“They generally don’t have much, do they?”

Lindstrom frowned as she considered what she’d been told. “He should’ve had a lot more money on him, close to sixteen hundred dollars. People who cross the border don’t pay their guides until they’re safely across, and it’s not cheap.”

“This couple must’ve had friends or family waiting for them, someone who’d pay when they arrived.”

“You don’t think they were robbed?”

“No.”

“Where was the money?”

“In the male victim’s right sock.”

“He could’ve been robbed,” she insisted. “He might have started out with more. But considering the smell of these people after walking so long in the hot sun, I wouldn’t want fifty bucks badly enough to fish it out of his sock, either.”

“He wasn’t robbed. I’d bet my life on it.”

“Fine.” Leaving the note on the desk, she leaned back. “Who’s at the other end of the line when you call that number?”

“No one yet. I got voice mail. A man, someone with a strong Mexican accent says, ‘Leave a message.’ I didn’t.”

“Any idea what part of Mexico these people came from?”

“No, but I’m guessing they crossed via Naco. It’s the closest port of entry.”

“You could be wrong about that. With the current security measures, more and more coyotes are taking their patrons farther west, near Sasabe.”

Sophia shook her head. “That’s a forty-five-mile walk and can take several days. These people weren’t on their feet that long.”

“How do you know?”

“They weren’t totally dehydrated.”

Lindstrom’s voice turned sharp again as she arched her eyebrows. “They’ve done the autopsies already?”

Once again wishing the FBI would hurry with their promised task force, Sophia grappled for patience. “Dehydration causes your blood to…boil, for lack of a better word. When people who are dehydrated die, even if they actually die of other causes, blood will often ooze from the orifices of the face. There was none of that with these two. They didn’t have any water with them, so they’d been walking long enough to run out of whatever amount they’d been carrying—and I’m assuming they were carrying some because they’d be crazy not to. But they hadn’t been out for days. They weren’t severely dehydrated. They probably came through Naco hoping to reach High way 90 where someone could pick them up, but somehow got off course.”

“More guessing.”

“Yes.”

“So…are you going to contact the Mexican consulate? Or should I?”

“Go ahead.” Sophia was pretty safe letting Lindstrom handle that part. It required a diplomat more than it required a cop. She didn’t see Lindstrom as diplomatic, but if it saved her from being the bearer of bad news—why not? “Tell them I think the first name of the male victim is José and the woman was his wife.” She lifted a hand, explaining before Lindstrom could say anything. “José signed the love note, and the woman was wearing a ring.”

Sophia held the note up for her perusal. Lindstrom studied it, gave a curt nod to signify that she was through, and Sophia put it back on the desk.

“Meanwhile, you’re going to do what?” Lindstrom asked.

“I’m going to use a reverse directory to see if I can get a name to go with this number. If I can track down the owner, maybe he can tell us more about our victims. I’m also sending the casings to the state crime lab, as I mentioned. Then I’m leaving for Naco.”

The last comment distracted Lindstrom, as Sophia knew it would. “Not on the Mexican side.”

“Of course on the Mexican side. Isn’t that where the coyotes are? I don’t know very many people who are trying to sneak across the border into Mexico.”

Lindstrom leaped out of her chair. “But you’re not supposed to leave the country!”

“We have to take a few risks if we want to figure out who killed these people.”

“You think it was a coyote?”

“Not necessarily.” Sophia thought it was Leonard shooting these Mexicans, that he was completely cracking up. Considering the timing and the fact that all the killings fell within her jurisdiction, she didn’t feel it could be anyone else. He was her only enemy, and he had a very good reason to hate UDAs. But logic suggested these murders could also be perpetrated by a renegade border patrol agent who’d grown a little too sick of his job. If that was the case, the UDAs who tried to cross but were caught, and people who worked in the smuggling industry, might be able to tell her more than anyone on the American side. Maybe they’d encountered an agent who was acting peculiar or who was particularly aggressive.

It was a long shot but, at the moment, long shots were all she had. “In any case, a new perspective can change everything.”

“You won’t have any perspective if you get yourself killed. My husband works for the DEA, Chief St. Claire. Trust me. It’s dangerous down there these days. He tells me that all the time. You don’t want to go to Mexico.”

Was Lindstrom really concerned for her safety? Or was she afraid Sophia would solve the case and salvage her job? “Like I said, we have to talk to people on both sides. I need to figure out exactly where our victims came from and how they crossed, meet the people they met while there’s still a chance they’ll be remembered.”

“You could get some, if not all, of that information from the person who has that number.”

“Maybe, maybe not. At this point, I don’t even know if I’ll be able to reach him.” She picked up the phone. “Hang on.” She tried the number; again, there was no answer. But this time she left a message. Then she accessed a reverse directory via her computer to see if she could come up with a name.

“It goes to a prepaid cellular phone,” she said. Which told her nothing. It wasn’t even anything she could trace.

“Maybe he’ll call back.”

“Maybe he will. But I’m not going to sit around and wait.”

“You can’t go into Mexico,” Lindstrom insisted. “What about the other victims? Surely there’s more work to be done there.”

The other victims didn’t offer the same opportunity. By the time they’d been found, their bodies were severely decomposed, too decomposed for a photograph to help with identification or anything else. Documents recovered from the bodies had identified some, relatives who’d contacted a foreign ministry field office in Mexico had identified others, but she still didn’t have information on three of them. And time was running out. Mayor Schilling had said so just this morning. He’d hinted that he was under a lot of pressure, that he didn’t know how long he could keep the city council and Bordertown’s most powerful citizens behind her. But he’d been hoping to replace her with someone “proven” from the beginning, even before they were dealing with a serial killer. To him, she’d always been a stopgap because of her age and now he was convincing others.

He didn’t spell out exactly how much time she had left, but she knew it wasn’t much. Soon she’d be fired. And then it wouldn’t matter that she’d ousted an officer who was as bad as the criminals he went after and had become the youngest chief of police in the state. She’d be publicly shamed and out of a job, single-handedly setting back the cause of women in police work here, in southern Arizona, by a decade or more.

“The Mexican consulate already posted on SIRLI whatever we could supply as far as physical descriptions and came up with nothing,” she said. SIRLI was the Spanish acronym for a computer system that allowed the Mexican consulate to upload information that could be viewed by staff at the Mexican foreign ministry offices—not only in Mexico but throughout the world. “Unless someone comes forward to say they’re missing a brother, a father, a friend, we have little hope of determining the identity of those earlier victims.”