Bitter Crossing (A Peyton Cote Novel) (7 page)

“Peyton Cote,” Hewitt continued, “this is Susan Perry with Maine DHHS. Susan has been working on this since you found the baby.”

Peyton turned to Perry, who smiled sadly. Had she followed the interaction between Peyton and Leo Miller?

“Long day for you,” Peyton said.

Perry waved that off. It had been a long day for Peyton, too. And it would only get longer. Ironically, she’d missed reading to her own son before bed to make a meeting to discuss someone else’s baby.

Susan Perry leaned toward her oversized handbag on the floor between them, fumbling for something inside. Her head close to Peyton, she whispered, “Miller’s always fun to deal with.”

Peyton smiled.

“We ready to begin?” Hewitt asked.

“Sure.” Perry retrieved a manila folder.

Peyton noticed the other woman’s attire, a stark contrast to her own. No government-issued forest greens for her. And was she wearing Prada shoes? This woman was a social worker. Either Perry was a hell of a lot better on the Internet than Peyton, or social workers made much more than she thought.

Peyton looked at her own black boots. The damn sacrifices a woman made to enter her chosen profession.

“They’re not real,” Perry whispered, “but they look like Prada, don’t they?”

“Caught me at a weak moment. Envious as hell.”

“Am I missing something, ladies?” Hewitt asked.

“Discussing shoes,” Peyton said.

“Well, now that the important stuff’s out of the way, can we talk about the baby? Leo, you begin.”

“I requested help from the Border Patrol because I need someone who can speak Spanish to translate.”

Peyton shook her head. “When we spoke on the phone, you said that since the baby was found along the border we’d be in on the investigation.”

Miller sipped his coffee and shrugged. “And translating.”

Peyton looked at Hewitt, whose poker face offered nothing, then back to Miller. “I’m not working for you.”

“This is a missing-persons case. Those fall to us.”

Hewitt cleared his throat and adjusted a pin on his lapel. “Leo, all of us have a vested interest in this thing. DHHS has the baby, state police is tracking the parents, and the whole thing went down along the border, which is our domain.”

“We handle missing-persons cases.”

“Not if I say the infant might be an illegal alien and I get Washington involved. I don’t think you want this to go in that direction. If it does, you will have nothing to do but give parking tickets.”

Miller said something under his breath.

“What was that, Lieutenant?”

“Nothing.”

Peyton had only been at Garrett Station four months, but that was long enough to know Miller had made a wise choice.

“I realize this is a big case,” Hewitt continued, “but I spoke to the Troop F commander this morning. He knows where I stand on the issue and assured me you’d cooperate.”

“I love it when he farms me out.”

“I’ll be happy to keep that between you and me, Lieutenant.”

Perry cleared her throat. “I’ll give my report,” she said and motioned to the desk photos of Hewitt and his petite, brunette wife. “You’re probably in a rush to get home.”

Hewitt snorted at the comment, a low, ugly sound. A hushed tension descended upon the room in its wake.

“The doctor who examined the baby believes she’s about three months old,” Perry said. “Bureau of Vital Statistics has nothing on the girl, which might give credence to your illegal-alien theory. Not all states footprint babies, so there’s no national database. Maine does footprint, though, and I went through the local hospitals’ birth records from the past year. Five hundred or so babies were born in Aroostook County, fifteen to parents with Hispanic last names. But none of that matters because none match our baby’s footprint.”

Listening, Peyton looked absently at a photo of Hewitt and his wife on horseback. She’d only recently met Hewitt’s Arizona-born wife.

Hewitt followed her gaze and picked up the desk photo. “Let’s start from the other end,” he said and shoved the picture in a desk drawer. “Peyton, how did the baby get to the border last night?”

“Someone obviously left her. I think they wanted me to find her.”

“Then we’re talking abandonment,” Hewitt said.

“Dropping a baby in a field and fleeing,” Perry said, “suggests panic. Possibly a teenage mother realizing the responsibility facing her.”

“I’d call that attempted murder,” Miller said.

“Nothing about the scene gave me the impression of desperation,” Peyton said. “More like entirely calculated, like someone had watched me and timed the drop accordingly.”

“Either well-timed or lucky as hell,” Hewitt said. “When we find the parents, we can ask them all the
whys
and
hows
. But to find them, we need to figure out who the baby is. The footprints don’t match, so she wasn’t born locally.”

“If she’s Hispanic,” Peyton said, “as opposed to Italian or Native American, the parents or mother could have been working the harvest.”

“How many farms employ migrants?” Miller asked.

“Most use machinery now,” Peyton said.

“Can you look into which farms use migrant workers?” Hewitt said. Peyton nodded. Hewitt wrote that down on his pad. “We should have records of who was employed by each farm.”

“In Maine,” Peyton said, “abandoning a child under age six is a class-C felony and can get you five years. Why would someone risk that instead of putting the baby up for adoption?”

“Ironically, maternal instinct might very well have
led
to it,” Perry said. “The overwhelming sense of responsibility, the realization that as a teen you can’t live up to it all. It’s easy to be sardonic. I’ve seen mothers leave kids unattended for a week while they’re off looking for a fix. But let’s say Peyton’s right. After all, the baby wasn’t in the cold for long. So maybe this whole thing was set up. If someone planned for Peyton to find the baby, that indicates maternal instinct. Which might mean a caring mother gave up her baby. This is a sad, sad situation.”

“Sure,” Hewitt said. “But let’s not rule out the other possibility. That someone dumped her to freeze to death.”

Miller nodded. “I think we’re talking attempted murder. If someone really wanted the kid found, they’d have left her in the hospital lobby.”

“If they wanted her dead,” Peyton said, “why leave her wrapped in a blanket? Why not throw her in the river? It doesn’t make sense. Someone wanted me to find that baby. I’m sure of it.”

“This is all hypothetical,” Hewitt said. “We need to find out who the mother is.”

“I’ll check into the migrants,” Peyton said.

“Any word on the license plate?” Hewitt said.

“Stan Jackman ran the plates on the van. It’s registered to someone in Youngsville, New Brunswick, who reported it stolen a month ago. Customs has no video or documentation of it entering from Canada today. They’ll keep going through past records, try to see when it entered the US. But it probably didn’t come through Customs.”

“Of course not.” Hewitt shifted in his chair, adjusting the butt of his pistol. “It came across a field road.”

“What license plate?” Miller looked from Peyton to Hewitt.

Peyton told him what happened after she left the Picard home.

“Kidnapped?” Miller said.

“I don’t think so. She seemed glad to get away.”

“She didn’t like answering your questions,” Hewitt said, “and you weren’t even in uniform. Which means she’s probably heard them before. You found the baby near where the woman was abducted.”

“We don’t know the ethnicity of either yet,” Peyton said. “The situations may or may not be linked. And, as for the location, there’s only one port of entry in Garrett, so I don’t think location means much.”

“The woman spoke Spanish?” Perry asked.

Peyton nodded. “She looked younger than twenty-one.”

“Think she was high?” Miller said.

“Yeah. She got nervous when I asked her name. We need to question her. Local cops, state troopers, Customs, and our guys are on the lookout for the van.”

Perry shook her head. “If that woman—you say not even twenty-one, just a girl—is the mother …”

“That’s quite a leap,” Peyton said.

“But if she is, imagine the guilt she must be carrying. It would explain any drug use.”

“Mike’s right. We’re throwing around too many hypotheticals,” Peyton said. “We’ve got to talk to this woman and to the baby’s parents.”

“Hypothesizing is part of my job,” Perry said with a smile and a shrug. “Imagination can be a great tool.”

“That may be so, but a few years ago, I found this couple in the desert heading toward the US border. A hundred and fifteen degrees outside. So stoned they damn near walked right into me. I put the ties on their wrists. Neither said a word when I asked if anyone else was with them. Three days later, a different agent found a five-year-old boy sitting next to his dead infant sister in the brush a quarter-mile from where I picked up the parents. They were charged with Manslaughter. Should’ve been Murder One.”

Perry frowned. “That’s a horrible story. Why did you tell us that?”

“To show that you can’t hypothesize about human nature,” Peyton said. “We need to find the parents.”

NINE

“
W
HERE ARE YOU HEADED?”
Scott Smith asked.

Peyton, running on three cups of coffee, garbed in her forest-green wool winter field jacket, and toting a duffle, had been nearly out the door.

“I’m going to run home, grab something to eat. I’ll be back in a half-hour.”

He waved her off and stood up. “I’m not checking up on you, Peyton. I’m heading into town to grab something at the diner. Thought I’d ask if you wanted to join me.”

She looked around. Just the two of them in the bullpen. Miller and Susan Perry had left, and Hewitt’s office door was closed.

“We’re both on duty,” Smith said. “And we both need to eat. Killing a half-hour before you go out in field won’t hurt. Besides, you’ve put in a few extra hours today already. I’ll meet you there,” he said and walked past her and out the door before she could object.

She drove slowly, thinking of Smith, of her mother’s incessant remarks about her stagnant love life, and about Jeff, who was taking her house shopping in the morning and who no doubt hoped the excursion would lead to more.

She parked her Expedition across the lot from Smith’s service vehicle. No need to be side by side.

“Glad you came,” Smith said when she slid in across from him. “Coffee?”

“Please.”

He smiled at her and waved to the waitress. He was medium height with a runner’s physique. But it was his eyes that she had noticed when she’d first arrived at Garrett Station. And she noticed them again here.

“You’re from here, right?”

“Born and raised,” she said. She paused to order coffee and the chef’s salad with vinaigrette. She’d make sure to finish the coffee before the salad arrived.

“And now you’ve returned,” he said when the waitress departed.

“This is home, and Tommy needs stability.”

“You were in El Paso?”

“You know a lot about me.”

“Not really,” he said. “This is a small station. But you are our only BORSTAR agent. There are a few promotional materials kicking around.”

“Good God,” she said. “Let’s talk about you.”

“I was in Arizona. My marriage crashed and burned out there. I needed a change, and this was as far away as I could get. Plus my brother and his family are here.” He brushed a tuft of black hair away from his eye. “Still, colder than anywhere I’ve ever lived.”

“It’s not even November yet.”

“That’s what everyone keeps saying.”

The front door opened and closed, and a burst of cold air entered the diner. Peyton heard the bell and turned to see a man in a tan Carhartt jacket and a John Deere cap next to a woman in nursing scrubs. The man carried a toddler.

“Lot of farmers around here,” Smith said.

“I grew up on a farm. It’s a hard life.”

“Parents still here?”

“My mother. My father’s dead.”

“Nice being back home?”

“It has its advantages. My mother helps out a lot. She also can’t believe she raised a daughter who carries a weapon every day. To my mother, a career woman was a first-grade teacher. Success meant you married a farmer and raised a family.”

He smiled. “Hell, where did she go wrong?”

“Yeah, I know. Then you throw my divorce on top of that, and let’s just say we don’t always see eye to eye. But my ex lives here, which is partly why I came back. For Tommy. He needs a man in his life. You have kids?”

“No. Wasn’t married long enough. It’s the one good thing I can say about my marriage. I didn’t make that mistake.”

“I don’t think of it as a mistake,” she said.

“Shit, that came out wrong.” He looked down and cursed under his breath.

“I heard that,” she said, “and, no, you didn’t.”

He looked at her, blue eyes narrowing.

“You said, ‘I blew it’ when you looked down. You haven’t blown it.”

“No?”

“No.”

The waitress returned with the salads.

“Heard you’re taking a lot of shit for the Kenny Radke thing.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Just around. Also heard Radke finally got his ass kicked.”

“You know him?”

“I stopped him once. He gave me shit. I had nothing to hold him on, though. Wish I had.”

She turned toward the window. The open potato fields offered a ceaseless wind. Flurries had dusted the parking lot, and snow swept back and forth beneath streetlamps like the sand snakes she’d seen in El Paso.

“He’s in the hospital,” she said, “and it’s probably on me. I held a urine test over him to get some information. Not real proud of that right now.”

“I’m sure he had it coming. Besides, at least you feel bad about it. I know agents who get off on those power plays.”

His comment didn’t make her feel any better. The Kenny Radke predicament came down to situational ethics: She had needed information he could provide, so she made the only play she’d had. Had her decision landed the guy in the hospital?

“Nothing’s black and white in this job,” she said.