Brenda Novak - Body Heat

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.