Alex up to?”
Dylan huffed. So she’d called everyone in the world except him. He swallowed his pique and answered, “Your guess is as good as mine, but it looks like she’s trying to investigate the Patriots, from the inside. Wells called. We think she’s in trouble.”
“That’s what I gathered, but she didn’t say what kind. Does she need me?”
“She may. Seems she might have gotten mixed up in one of their ops, and it’s a bad one. Murder in Pinal County, just west of Casa Grande. Wells says it looks like a Patriots hit.”
“Oh, shit,” Rick uttered.
“That’s what I said, and you can say it again. If she’s not in trouble from the Patriots, she’s in trouble with them. You want to head over there?”
“Guess I’d better. Are you going to be there?”
“Can’t man, I’m in Tempe with the boys. Don’t know anyone here. Alex was supposed to be my babysitter.” Even as he said it, Dylan kicked himself. That wasn’t the reason he’d wanted Alex to move in, not the most important one anyway. Was that the way she’d seen it? No wonder she’d been mad! “Look, I’ll see what I can do. Wells is on it, too. I’ll try to keep you posted.”
Dylan felt as helpless as he’d ever felt. His first instinct was to rush to her rescue, but he didn’t even know where to start looking. No matter what happened, he needed to start building a new support system right away. Especially if Alex was going to keep getting in scrapes like this.
~~~
Once Alex believed she wasn’t under suspicion and stopped looking over her shoulder, she started thinking this wasn’t all bad. Maybe she could get some information. There were about a dozen people in the house, most of them women, surprisingly enough. There were more women here than had been at the meeting.
Some of them must be inner circle, maybe privy to this morning’s events. There were several large bedrooms lined with bunk beds and each having its own bathroom, so there’d be room for a separation of the sexes for sleeping, and hopefully some privacy in the bathroom. Right now, there was a knot of women in the kitchen making dinner for everyone and the rest were arrayed in small groups in the huge family room, talking quietly among themselves.
Alex drifted to the edge of one of the groups, where the participants looked a little older. With any luck, these people would have been in the organization longer, and she could learn something about their history and motives. She especially wanted to know how it had morphed from an anti-Latino organization to anti-anyone brown.
They took little notice of her, which suited her just fine. The less she had to interact, the less likely it was that someone would look at her more closely and discover her makeup secrets or that she might say something inconsistent and make them suspicious.
The man speaking seemed pumped by the success of today’s operation. “I’m telling you, it’s like the old days. Goddam wetbacks will learn to keep their poison on their own side of the border. Just like Harvey meant it to be.”
At the mention of Harvey, Alex sharpened her attention while appearing to remain relaxed and indifferent. One of the women said, “I always wondered how they got that conviction. Nothing left of that body but bones. How the hell did they know it was his girlfriend, anyway?”
Alex wanted the answer to that question, too. She’d thought the body was recovered from the railroad tracks. It was just a skeleton?
“That was a weird thing. No train operator ever came forward to admit they’d hit someone. Out in the middle of nowhere like that, she wasn’t found until they sent someone to repair the tracks right there. They found part of her, then called the cops.”
Alex shuddered. The woman had been cut into more than one piece, then, presumably by the train passing over her. This was a far different picture than the articles had mentioned. She wondered how they’d known the woman was pregnant, and what kind of paternity test they’d been able to conduct. Fortunately, the woman who’d asked the first question kept asking more, and they were the same ones questions on Alex’s mind.
“Well, her pelvis was complete, and between the hip bones was a tiny partial skeleton. I don’t know all the science, but they did some tests, trying to figure out who she was. Never did establish it for certain.”
“Then how did they