the wallet?” Otto asked.
“No clue.”
“In the backseat of Cassidy Harper’s car,” he said.
Marta groaned.
Josie nodded and sat down at her desk. “Doesn’t know how the wallet got into her car.”
“And the boyfriend doesn’t want her talking to the police,” Otto said.
“She claims she went hiking because she wanted to be outside. She just happened to find a dead man. Then we search her locked car and find a man’s wallet lying on the floor of her backseat,” Josie said.
“She says she’s never seen it,” Otto said.
Marta rolled her eyes. “Of course not.”
Josie pitched her pen on her desk, frustrated with Cassidy’s unwillingness to help herself.
Otto pointed to the sketchpad in front of him. “From the angle of the bodies, it appears she crawled toward the body, then passed out about five feet from him. Her story works, we just can’t figure out why she was there.”
“Any idea how the man died?” Marta asked.
“He’d been there a few days, so cause of death is anyone’s guess,” Josie said. “The scary part was, he had sores on his arms. Multiple open lesions. Cowan’s talking about some kind of flesh-eating disease.”
Marta looked horrified. “The stuff where entire villages are killed?”
“Cowan was pretty evasive,” Josie said.
“He wasn’t his usual chipper self, if that tells you anything,” Otto said.
Josie smiled. “Leave Cowan alone. You know how lucky we are to have a coroner in a town this size who actually knows something about dead bodies?”
Otto glanced at his watch and Josie noticed it was after nine o’clock. After working second shift this evening, she and Otto had to turn around and work first shift in the morning. They drew up a quick list of priorities for Tuesday morning and she and Otto left Marta to finish out the night on her own—one of the many hazards of an understaffed, underfunded border police department.
* * *
Charcoal gray light hovered over the horizon as Josie drove home from work. The rain had momentarily slowed to a drizzle but a downpour loomed in the thick layers of clouds. Josie rolled her windows down to smell the wet earth, a smell she associated with a sense of longing and dread. She loved the sound of raindrops on her roof, listening to the deep endless roll of thunder across the desert, and watching the sheets of rain travel across the land like a curtain being drawn across a stage. But the aftermath would be ugly. Mud and sand would be on the roads for days, making travel on the back roads time-consuming, and in some areas impossible. She would start tomorrow helping the crews assess the damage to determine if roads needed to be temporarily closed until the county trucks could plow. She had a meeting scheduled with Sheriff Martínez and Smokey Blessings, the county maintenance director, at 7 A.M. to discuss plans. Smokey was married to Vie, and was her laidback opposite. He was built like a grizzly bear with a full beard and thick head of hair, but his demeanor was kind and always polite.
Josie turned right onto River Road, the best paved road in Artemis, and saw that it was already covered with debris. Most of the town’s roads were gravel, some just worn paths through the desert, or arroyos that were used only during the dry seasons. They were even harder to clean after a major storm.
Josie drove slowly and enjoyed the balmy temperature and moist air on her face. She turned onto Schenck Road and caught a glimpse of Dell Seapus’s ranch, tucked into the foothills of the Chinati Mountain range, just beyond her own home. Dell had deeded her ten acres to build a house on after she brought back his prized Appaloosa horses that a band of horse thieves had taken to New Mexico. Dell was a seventy-year-old bachelor, short and wiry, stooped and bowlegged from too many years on horseback. He was also Josie’s closest friend.
Josie looked at her house with pride as she approached. It was a small, rectangular adobe with a deep front porch. She and Dell had framed the house with brick over a two-month period, and she had hired an old Navajo Indian to plaster the faded pink exterior. Pecan timbers were used for the front porch and lintels. Josie had oiled and hand-rubbed the wood to a deep brown patina. The house looked as if it had been there for a hundred years.
As she pulled into the driveway her headlights caught Chester trotting down the lane from