plastic evidence bag. She also found several coins that she dropped into the bag. There was nothing else on the floor of the car except for a straw wrapper and small pieces of trash.
Otto leaned over her. “There’s a Coke machine in the corner where you can buy me a drink.”
Josie stood and wiped the sweat away from her eyes. “I might have something.”
She walked over to the trunk of her car and Otto followed. She dumped out the evidence onto the tarp and Otto hummed beside her.
“Is that Leo’s wallet?”
Josie used a pair of large tweezers to open the wallet. “No driver’s license. But there’s cash in it.” She bent over the wallet to examine the clear windowed space for the ID more carefully. “At some point there was definitely something in this space. There’s a square ridge all the way around where the license was.”
“Looks like Ms. Harper might know more than she says,” Otto said.
“Why would she take the ID and pitch the wallet in her backseat?” she asked.
Josie used the tweezers and a gloved hand to open the bi-fold brown leather wallet. A twenty and four one-dollar bills were in the bill section. She backed up to let Otto look.
“Odd amount of money for an illegal trying to cross the border,” Josie said.
“Who would steal a guy’s driver’s license and leave the twenty-dollar bill?”
“That’s assuming the license was still in there when she took it.” Josie wiped the sweat off her forehead with her arm and sighed. She dropped the wallet into another plastic evidence bag, then put her hand in her front pocket and pulled out several dollar bills. “Come on. I’ll buy you a drink.”
They walked over to an enclosed office area with a humming Coke machine. They got their drinks and each drained half a can at once.
Josie nodded absently. “You figure Cassidy found the body and took his wallet back to her car out of some kind of morbid curiosity?”
“You hear about killers keeping items as souvenirs after they kill someone.”
“Come on. You don’t see her as the killer,” she said.
Otto nudged her arm with his own. “You being sexist? She’s a cute young girl, so she couldn’t possibly kill this guy?”
“Tell me how many cute young girls you’ve arrested for murder.”
“Not my point.”
“Besides, you know Cassidy. She’s clueless. Not a killer.”
“What’s that saying about desperate times?” he asked.
Josie ignored the question. “We’re assuming the wallet is the dead man’s. Maybe it’s her boyfriend’s. Maybe he bought a new one and switched wallets out while sitting in the car,” she said. “Just pitched the old one in the backseat.”
Otto gave her a skeptical look. “He has so much extra money that when he switched his wallet out he just left the twenty-four dollars.”
She tilted her head, conceding his point.
Josie stopped at her trunk and slipped on a fresh pair of rubber gloves. “I just can’t figure why she’d take the wallet. Think about the timing. She’d have found the body, taken the wallet, walked it all the way back to the car, dumped it in the backseat, then walked back to the body in this deadly heat, and passed out from exhaustion.”
“Maybe she took the stuff and got a guilty conscience. Decided to go back,” he said.
“Still doesn’t work. If she felt guilty she would have called the police. Why walk back to a body that was obviously dead? There’s no point in that.”
“Maybe someone else put the stuff in the car,” Otto said.
“Nope. The doors were locked. All the windows were rolled up. Her car keys were on her.” Josie opened the backseat of her jeep and pulled out her camera case. “We’ll need to check if she has another set of keys.”
Josie passed Otto the 35-millimeter camera and he nodded slowly. “Here’s another one. How’d she get the wallet? The guy is lying on his back. His body is decomposing. She had to work hard to get that wallet out of his back pocket. Fight the flies and the smell. I can’t imagine the wallet being worth that kind of grief.”
“Maybe he carried it in his front pocket, along with his pocketknife,” she said.
“I thought she looked pretty disgusted with the whole idea of the dead body. Remember her face when you asked if she could identify him? She looked ill even thinking about it. I can’t see her putting her hands into that dead man’s pants pocket.” Otto looked doubtful. “Front or back.”
“And why would she dump it in