Fatal Intent (Desert Heat Book 3) (13 page)

TWENTY-ONE

Before Devin could see her, Alex had another opportunity to meet with the Patriots, and this time she went prepared. Her new fake ID probably wouldn’t fool a cop or a bartender, but at least it had her fake name on it. If anyone in the group challenged her, it would give her half a chance.

She had overheard someone talking about a private Facebook group at the previous meeting, and had created an account in her fake name, posting some stuff she thought would get her noticed. Mostly it was memes with anti-Latino sayings like “Why should I have to push one for English?”  Eventually, people from Casa Grande had sent friend requests and finally an invitation to the private group, which was where she’d learned of today’s meeting.

It had been a week since she’d left the hotel without saying goodbye to Dylan, and in all that time, she hadn’t answered any of his messages. She’d forgiven him for the words that made her run away in the first place. He was right. She’d been acting like a spoiled brat.

The trouble was, she hadn’t forgiven herself, and she didn’t know what to say to him. Because the thing was, she knew he’d hate what she was planning to do today. He’d try to stop her, so she couldn’t tell him. Once she started lying to him, it was only a matter of time until it was really over. As long as she could avoid saying anything at all, maybe there was a chance he’d take her back. The messages were getting colder, though. All she could do was hope that a few more days wouldn’t cost her everything.

Just before she went to the meeting, she finally sent him a text. It said, ‘Please give me just a little time to get my head straight. I still love you. Whatever happens, don’t hate me.’ She found Lisa and Nat watching a movie in the living room, and told them where she was going. They’d supported her quest so far, but now Lisa sat up straight.

“Alex, do you really think that’s a good idea? I thought you said these guys were bad news. Murderers, maybe. How can you be sure you’re safe?”

“They didn’t recognize me last time. They think I’m Misty Jenkins, and I don’t look anything like the picture I used to have on my blog, do I?”

Lisa gave her a critical stare. “Well, no. But still… ”

“I’ll be okay, Lise. I’ll be careful.” She gave them the address of the meeting, just in case she didn’t make it home, and went out the door with more confidence. Lisa agreed she didn’t look like herself. That would be plenty, wouldn’t it?

There were fewer people at this meeting, and those who were there seemed to be more serious. The rhetoric from the previous meeting was still there, but it no longer sounded like lip service to a catch phrase. These people really hated what the unchecked stream of illegals crossing the border had done to the economy of southern Arizona.

She had to admit, there was some justification for their attitude. These weren’t highly trained or professional workers. They were carpenters, whose wages took a blow every time an undocumented worker offered to do a job for a lower price. Unskilled laborers pushed out of the job market by people who weren’t content to take one job each for low salary, but would often work three, foregoing rest for the opportunity to support a family back home and save to bring them to the land of plenty. They were landscape artists whose businesses failed because they couldn’t afford to compete with a family of gardeners able to work for next to nothing because they all lived in the same house and shared expenses.

The handful of other women there had similar stories. Housekeepers in hotels, cleaners for small businesses, servers in restaurants, all laid off because illegals would work for less. Alex hadn’t realized the other side of the story. She could see their despair, and she agreed it was unfair. None of it justified the tactics the group used, of course. But she didn’t have an answer, either. Even if she had, putting it forward while surrounded by angry men and women wouldn’t have been the way to get agreement.

Before she realized what was happening, everyone was staring at her and it became clear almost too late. They wanted her story, and she didn’t have one. “I-I’m a student,” she said, stalling for time while her mind raced.

Then she had it. “I was denied a loan because an older woman had been using my Social Security number to get medical and financial assistance.”

Stop right there. No need for more.

She closed her mouth abruptly and dropped her head as a tear of fright escaped. Thankfully, the next person took up the refrain and her lame story didn’t excite any more comment.  Mentally, she apologized to Dylan for using his mom’s situation like that. At least it had saved her, at best, some embarrassment. At worst, her lack of a reason for being there could have spelled disaster.

When the opportunity to state their issues had gone around the whole room, the leader, a man Alex hadn’t seen before, stood up and spoke. “We’ve all been screwed by these illegals. What are we going to do about it? I don’t know about you, but I’m mad as hell…”

To Alex’s surprise, the audience took up a refrain as one. “We’re not going to take it anymore!”

Again, the leader shouted, “I’m mad as hell…”

Now the group was standing, and a few individuals had climbed onto their chairs and were waving their arms as they took up the refrain, “We’re not going to take it anymore!”

Even as she joined in from a sense of personal preservation, a small part of her mind was busy analyzing this development. She recognized the phrase as coming from an old movie about her industry.
Network
, it was called.

Ironically, the film was a satire, and the character who’d coined the phrase ended up dead. She wondered if anyone here remembered that. Probably not, she concluded. No one here was old enough to have seen it in its first run, and she doubted that anyone here was intellectually inclined to view even a newer movie for anything other than its entertainment value. Who was the leader, and what was his agenda? What did he hope to accomplish with this rabble-rousing?

Alex didn’t have long to wait to find out. As the leader raised his arms in a quieting move, the chant died down as quickly as it started.

“It’s been awhile since our last demonstration,” he began, when the last of the chair-climbers had clambered down and taken their seats. “Unfortunately, we were too subtle. The girl survived, but hasn’t pointed her finger at us. We need a more visible incident this time. As usual, we want the suspicion to fall on us, but the evidence must be too little to go on. If we can frighten some of these wetbacks into going back home, it will be a start.”

Alex almost objected, but common sense prevailed at the last minute. What good would it do to point out that Dawn wasn’t illegal, or even Latino? How ignorant were these people, anyway? She restrained her indignant response, and instead started wondering how and why they wanted the finger to point at them. What evidence did they leave that would have done so, and why hadn’t it been discovered?

She was so preoccupied that she almost missed the end of the discussion. The leader and three volunteers were to come up with a plan, and the entire group would be involved in one way or another. Alex found herself assigned as a lookout for whatever was going to go down. Now she was in, but she still didn’t know, none of them did, what she’d signed up for.

When the meeting broke up, Alex caught up with one of the women. The leader had never been introduced. Did they all stay anonymous, or was she expected to know? She fell into step beside the other woman.

“Good meeting, huh?” she said, hoping the other woman would open up with no more introduction than that. It worked almost too well. The woman stopped walking, forcing Alex to stop as well.

“You’re new,” the woman said, in almost accusatory tones.

Alex stood her ground. “Yeah? So?”

“So how do I know I can trust you?”

“You don’t have to.
They
do,” Alex said, indicating the meeting room with a backward jerk of her head. “Listen, I don’t have to take any shit. You don’t like new people? Fine. Sorry I spoke to you.”

The other woman hesitated only a second before huffing out a laugh. “You’ve got spunk, I’ll say that much for you. Alice Johnson,” she announced as she held out her hand.

Alex took it and shook it once, firmly. “Misty Jenkins,” she replied.

“Well Misty, to answer you, yes, that was a good meeting. Ever since Harvey went to jail, we’ve needed a guy like him to step up and lead. Looks like we’ve found him.” Alice resumed walking, with Alex hurrying to make up the step she’d lost when the other woman started off abruptly.

“So listen,” she said. “Like you said, I’m new. Am I supposed to know his name?”

“Sure, why not?” Alice asked.

“Because I don’t,” Alex said, giving a small sound of exasperation. “They didn’t introduce him. Was I the only newbie there?”

“Guess so,” Alice replied. “His name’s Jim Atkins. Joined a few months ago, and really livened up the group. We’d been kind of lost since Harvey got picked up.”

This was the second time she’d mentioned Harvey in the same context, but Alex didn’t want to seem too eager to know too much. She could look that one up on the internet, probably. Her curiosity about everything else would have to wait, too. Now that she knew for sure the Patriots were behind Dawn’s attack, she had some leverage. Only now, it looked as though she might be in a position to foil the next one. She’d have to be careful not to give herself away before she could do some real good.

~~~

Dylan was on his way to Tempe in a moving truck with the boys on the seat beside him when Alex’s text pinged him with her special ring. He didn’t dare look at it while he was moving, and it was only a few more miles to the house. Besides, she’d been ignoring his texts all week, and she might as well learn what that felt like. He kept driving.

A few of the guys from the new office had generously said they’d help him unload, and he was grateful for the help. He’d had plenty in Dodge. Friends, co-workers at the park and even Alex’s dad had come to help. He hadn’t had time to make friends in the new neighborhood yet, since the week went quickly in wrapping up his old job and preparing everything for the move.

Now he pulled up to the house in his rental truck and gladly turned the boys loose in the fenced back yard. The yard wasn’t in great shape. Looked like the previous renters had kept a dog back there. He’d look into whether his lease would allow that. A dog would be great for Juan and Davi.

He greeted the new co-workers that he was meeting in person for the first time. Chagrined he hadn’t thought of it himself, he accepted a beer from a cooler one of the guys brought. He’d order pizza about the time the truck was half-empty, and hope they didn’t make such short work of the rest that the pizza came too late.

Before long, he was directing traffic rather than unloading himself. There were so many of them he couldn’t keep up. As they sat on the porch eating the pizza, one of them asked him why he’d rented a three-bedroom house if he wasn’t giving each of the boys their own room. They’d all wondered why nothing was going in the third bedroom.

Dylan found himself explaining with a red face that his girlfriend would be moving in, and he was saving that room for her. This garnered a few good-natured jokes about why there’d be separate bedrooms for them, but since no one knew him well enough to really dig, it stayed relatively clean. When they’d finished their pizza and beer, his new co-workers gave him a cheerful goodbye and promised they’d show him the ropes Monday. It looked like he’d be able to enjoy this posting. Now if he only knew Alex’s intentions.

That made him remember she’d sent him a text that he hadn’t had a chance to look at. It was cryptic. Needed time to clear her head. And ‘Whatever happens, don’t hate me.” What the hell? What did she mean by that? He immediately called, but there was no answer.

“Call me,” he said. After a pause, he added. “I love you.”

All night he chewed on the possible meaning of that sentence. What could she be doing that could cause him to hate her? He’d managed to put the boys’ bunk bed together and get them a simple dinner of canned tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches before putting them to bed. Now he sat amongst the jumble of the living room and pondered.

The more he thought about it, the more uneasy he became. Could she be messing around with investigating the Patriots after he’d told her to stay away from them? If that turned out to be the case, he’d have some harsh words for her. Or maybe he’d just hug her tightly and thank his lucky stars she was okay.

If
she was okay.

Oh, God, let her be okay.

TWENTY-TWO

As soon as she was home and had checked in with her housemates, Alex went to the computer. Who was this Harvey her informant had mentioned? She wanted to see if there was anything on Jim Atkins, also.

Harvey Lloyd turned out to be the previous leader of the Patriots, as she’d surmised. Five years ago, he had been a suspect in the murder of his girlfriend, whose gruesome death under a speeding freight train had also taken the life of her unborn child. Harvey had mounted a defense based on his claim that her death wasn’t murder but a suicide.

Because of his involvement with the Patriots and suspected previous murders, the jury had convicted him on circumstantial evidence. A posthumous paternity test indicated he was the father of the dead woman’s child, although she was married to someone else. The woman’s name did not appear in the article.

That was odd. She’d never seen or known of an adult’s name being withheld. No newspaper would leave out that information, unless a lot of political pull or money was involved. Even if they had, someone had to know. The judge, jurors and attorneys in the case. The police. She’d have to wait until tomorrow to start digging for that information, since it was already too late at night to reach anyone who could help her.

Still puzzling over that mystery, Alex turned her efforts to finding out what she could about Jim Atkins. A simple Google search turned up over eight million hits, and Alex despaired of finding him unless his picture appeared. Even going to the images section seemed an overwhelming task. If she found his picture there, she had no guarantee of it leading anywhere with substantial information. After viewing page after page of pictures of men named Jim Atkins, Jim Adkins, Jim Akins and the occasional woman—who knew what they were doing in the results?—Alex left the site open and went to bed with sore, red eyes.

When she woke the next morning, something had clicked for Alex in her sleep. It couldn’t be, of course. The timing didn’t work out. Whatever her subconscious brain had connected during sleep, Harvey Lloyd’s dead girlfriend couldn’t have been her mother if the woman had been pregnant only five years ago.

Her mother would have been…forty? Thirty-nine at least, depending on the date of the murder. So it was possible, just not probable. She dismissed the thought as wishful thinking. Not that she wished her mother dead, but a break in that investigation would have been welcome. She still didn’t know where to start.

It was still early, so Alex ate breakfast, showered, and then started her search through the pages of Jim Atkins images again, waiting for nine a.m. when her friend in the Pima County sheriff’s department, Lt. Tom Wells, might be in his office, even on a Sunday. She hoped he would introduce her to someone in Pinal County she could use as a resource for locating the information about Harvey Lloyd’s murder victim.

Alex was starting on her second cup of coffee when she found Jim Atkin’s picture. She sucked in her breath, bringing with it a scalding sip of coffee. She choked, sputtered and jumped up to clean up the coffee she’d sprayed across the table and her laptop. Near-disaster averted, she looked again. Yes, that was definitely the man she’d seen leading the meeting.

She clicked on the picture, and then on the Visit Page button. Unbelievably, her luck held when it took her to his professional profile on a popular business-oriented social media site. What shocked her even more was the fact that according to his profile, Jim Atkins was a senior park ranger at Saguaro National Park.

How in hell had a bigoted person like the leader of the Patriots hidden himself in the mostly-liberal Park Service? Why would he jeopardize his job by involving himself in an organization that could at best be called radical, if not criminal? It made no sense to Alex. Maybe the Park Service wasn’t as liberal as she’d thought. She knew from her experience talking with and even dating some Park Service employees, especially Dylan, they were almost universally concerned about the environment, and she’d never met one she would call racist. Yet, Jim Atkins clearly was racist.

She wondered if Dylan knew him. It would be a long shot. Dylan hadn’t served at Saguaro, and hadn’t been back in Arizona for long. Still, the Park Service was like a smallish town. It seemed everyone knew everyone else. Maybe they had conventions or something. Thinking of Dylan made her remember they’d been missing each other with their messages for over a week, and he still deserved an apology from her for running out on him last weekend.

She looked at her cell phone. Eight-thirty on a Sunday morning. If she knew the boys, they’d be up and would have made sure Dylan was up to make their weekend pancake breakfast. She picked up her piece of cold toast, the meager breakfast she’d fixed to go with her coffee. The first bite was like ashes in her mouth.

What was she thinking? She could be with Dylan and the boys right now, laughing, making the pancakes and basking in family love. Instead, she was alone, estranged from her dad, incommunicado with her Nana and Dylan. She’d cut herself off from everyone she loved. She had to fix this, and fast.

Full of love and regret, she dialed Dylan’s number. This was too important for a text. A sleepy-voiced Dylan answered, and when she heard his voice, Alex choked on her tears.

“Dylan?” Her timorous question was barely audible, even to her.

“Alex, is that you? It’s about time you called. What the hell did you mean by your last text? Are you messing around with the Patriots?” Dylan’s initial sleepiness had given way to irritation, judging by his tone. Not even a hello.

Alex forgot about her apology and answered Dylan in kind. “Well, excuse me for doing my job. I need to know if you know a ranger at Saguaro by the name of Jim Atkins.”

“What? What the hell, Alex? You don’t call me for a week and all you can say is do I know some random guy? No, I don’t know him. Why? Has he asked you out?”

Alex rolled her eyes. This wasn’t going at all the way she expected, and she didn’t care for Dylan’s tone. Without answering, she ended the call. There was no point in talking to Dylan if he was going to act like this, and he didn’t know Jim Atkins, so there was nothing more to say.

~~~

Dylan stared at his phone. Un-fucking-believable. She’d hung up on him! What the hell had gotten into Alex lately? He had half a mind to drive to Casa Grande and have it out with her, but he had the boys and no support system yet in Alex’s absence. That thought didn’t even make any sense. If Alex had been here in the first place, this ridiculous phone tag wouldn’t be going on. Besides, he still had unpacking and arranging to do. He had tomorrow off to get the boys registered for the upcoming school year, and then he’d be working for the rest of the week.

Alex should be here already, registering for her next semester and maybe looking for a job. He had enough to deal with. She was an adult and responsible for her own shit.

Replaying the conversation in his mind, he realized he may have come on a bit strong. He hadn’t even said hello before he laid into her. Maybe he owed her an apology. After breakfast, he’d call back and see if he could undo the damage. Maybe he could persuade her to come up to Tempe and move in. That would get her away from those damn Patriots, if that’s what she was doing.

It would give them a chance to heal, as well. Surely, this was just a bump in the road. It had to be. He couldn’t lose her now, just when everything was working out for them to be together.

After breakfast, Davi made a nuisance of himself whining about his toys still being packed until Dylan got the kitchen cleaned up and took care of putting the boys’ room together. Juan wanted to know why he couldn’t have a room to himself when there was an empty bedroom, and Dylan had just about lost his last reserve of patience by the time he settled everyone down. He could only hope he wouldn’t have to go back on what he’d told Juan—that the extra room belonged to Alex. On the other hand, he’d prefer it if she moved into his room. He just wasn’t sure she was ready for that kind of commitment yet.

Dylan didn’t want to call Alex in this frame of mind, so he turned on the TV for some pre-season football and had the one beer he would allow himself. When the game was over, he felt able to cope with a call to Alex, even if she was still mad. The only problem was the call went straight to voice mail. That meant she’d missed at least one call. Dylan had a bad feeling about it, but he couldn’t point to anything specific. He left a message apologizing and asking Alex to call him so they could have a better conversation.