Read Fatal Intent (Desert Heat Book 3) Online
Authors: Jamie Jeffries
Fatal Intent (Desert Heat Book 3) (3 page)
“Promise me you won’t fall for some college jock,” he’d said, only half-joking.
“And what if I do?” she’d teased. His devastated look made her relent and kiss him until he was happy again. “You’re the only one for me, Dylan,” she’d said. He hadn’t said any more, only kissed her more and more passionately until they’d risked a quick trip to his bedroom.
They didn’t usually do that, fearful the boys would hear them and either misinterpret or carry tales to school, from whence they’d end up in the town grapevine. Neither of them had any delusions that their romance was unknown in town, but that didn’t mean people needed to know every time they… ‘got intimate’, her brain supplied. Alone in her car, she blushed.
She was being honest with Dylan, though. She had no plans to become overly friendly with another guy, even though she did want to make friends. Instead, she was hoping to uncover something interesting enough to write for another entry into the NSPA contest or others. Winning journalistic awards was a heady experience she’d like to repeat, and would look good on a future resume.
She would still be responsible for writing stories for her dad’s newspaper, as well as taking on a more active role in the student newspaper on campus. There wouldn’t be time for much fooling around, and she’d save what there was for Dylan’s visits.
She had left Dodge about an hour early, hoping to get to her new house and unload some of the stuff in her car before having to go to class. When she pulled up in front of it, one of her housemates was there to greet her.
“Alex, welcome!” Lisa beamed and Alex liked her immediately. She hadn’t met Lisa before, though she knew the other girl, Natalie, slightly. She smiled back.
“Thanks! I’m glad you’re here. I wanted to unload some of this crap before class.” Alex disappeared from the waist up for a moment, reaching into the back seat, and came out with an armload of hanging clothes, complete with hangers. Lisa led the way to her room and sat on the bed while Alex hung up the clothes.
“I hope you like it here,” Lisa offered. “We’ve had a heck of a time keeping roommates.”
Surprised, Alex turned with a question on her lips. Lisa laughed at the expression on her face and said, “It’s not really that bad. The girl we had at the beginning of the year got pregnant and went home to have the baby. Then we had one who disappeared almost immediately. Didn’t even stay for the whole month.”
“Oh, yeah? Where’d she go?” Alex asked. Just being polite—she had no real interest in the missing girl.
“That’s the funny thing. We don’t know. She was here one day and then Nat and I went to Rocky Point for the weekend. When we got back, her stuff was gone and we never saw her again. She didn’t even leave a note.”
Alex was intrigued. “Did you report her missing?”
“No, she obviously left because she wanted to, so we didn’t see any point.” Lisa laughed. “Promise if you decide you hate us, you’ll at least leave a note.”
Alex laughed, too. “You got it,” she said.
Life on campus was certainly different from what she was used to. Alex soaked it up. Because she’d stacked all her on-campus classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays to accommodate her distance from school before she moved here, she had plenty of time to engage in extracurricular activities as well as to handle her work duties for the paper at home and for the student newspaper.
The weather was warm enough again for outdoor dances and other activities she’d missed out on before, so she hardly missed being home. Even missing Dylan didn’t turn out to be a problem, as he found a way to visit her, without the boys in tow, on the second weekend after she moved.
Alex’s eyes danced as she introduced her handsome boyfriend to her new housemates. At least she didn’t have to worry about them trying to steal him, since they had eyes only for each other. So showing him off was fun. He took her out to dinner on Friday night, having driven over as soon as he delivered the boys to Wanda for the weekend.
“How long can you stay?” Alex asked.
“Wanda said to stay as long as I wanted. She’ll take them home on Sunday night and get them in bed if I’m not home. But I’d feel better if I got there before she had to do that. Say, mid-afternoon on Sunday.” Dylan pulled her closed to him for a kiss. “Unless you want to elope. Then I’ll call work and we’ll take a week’s honeymoon.”
She laughed. “You don’t give up, do you?”
“Never,” he said.
That night, he proved it. Waking up with him in what was, for now, her own bed the next morning was a treat they’d never had. In Dodge, they had stolen moments only, and now that the boys were with him, the trips to Tucson they’d taken to visit them had ceased. They took full advantage of the luxury of waking up together, rising for breakfast only after making love again.
I could get used to this.
On Sunday, she was sad to see him go, but they’d had a wonderful couple of days together with no distractions. It was just the two of them—no murders to solve, no little boys to worry about. A tiny twinge of regret pierced her happiness as she realized these times would be few. Because, no matter how she dreamed, two little boys depended on Dylan, even more than she did. And as a Park Service ranger on the dangerous Mexico/Arizona border, he was always on call for investigations when dead bodies showed up, as they did on a regular basis. For that matter, so was she, though their roles were very different and often at odds.
~~~
In recent years, it had also become home to residents of both Phoenix and Tucson wanting to escape the larger cities, representing a commute of about an hour in either direction. The nearby Gila River Indian Reservation boasted a casino, and the area was rife with National Parks, Monuments and other interesting destinations, so it was also a popular tourist destination for a relatively low-cost vacation.
To Alex, it was a major metropolitan area, more than ten times the size of Dodge and with many more times the opportunities. In no more than three or four weeks, she’d found two organizations that interested her more than any other, because both of them had an indirect but major impact on her blog. Wanda recommended Alex look up the first group, an organization dear to Wanda’s heart and one in which she’d been active as a young woman. Alex called the contact number right after Spring break, in late April.
“I’d like to speak to Dawn Redbird.”
“Speaking,” said the soft voice on the other end of the line.
“My name is Alex Ward. A friend of mine, Wanda Lopez, suggested I call you. If you don’t mind, I’d like to have a conversation in person,” Alex said. She was proud that her rehearsed line sounded professional. She was disarmed when the other voice warmed.
“Oh, yes, Alex. Wanda speaks highly of you. Sure, let’s get together. How about a Coke at the student union?”
“Perfect. What time and how will I know you?” Alex had never been in this position before, since she knew everyone in Dodge by sight, if not by name.
“I’ll be there at four. Don’t worry, I’ll know you. I’m a fan of your blog.”
That was a surprise. Alex knew she had a following, from the analytics on her host account. Somehow, she’d imagined they were from distant places. Although now that she thought of it, there was no reason to believe that. It gave her a queasy feeling that people may recognize her and she wouldn’t know.
Maybe her dad, Lt. Wells and Rick Englebright had all been right when they cautioned her about putting her photo on the blog. At the time, she’d only been thinking it would be good when she eventually applied for investigative journalism jobs. She’d figured that putting her face out there and having her own following from her blog would be an advantage. Now, she wasn’t so sure it had been a good idea.
She entered the student union cafeteria at four with her hobo bag slung over her shoulder, and looked around uncertainly. She didn’t have to wait long. A short Native girl, with beautiful eyes and long, glossy black hair approached her. “Hi, I’m Dawn. You’re Alex,” she stated, as if Alex didn’t know her own name. “Thanks for meeting me.”
Alex was already off balance. She’d asked for the meeting, but the girl before her was taking the lead, and she didn’t know how to take it back. Truthfully, she didn’t even know what Wanda expected her to accomplish. With a feeling of inevitability, she let Dawn lead her to a secluded table in a corner, where several other students sat, all Native as far as Alex could tell.
Alex knew more about the demographics of the southern Arizona Native tribes than most whites did. Especially the fact that the Tohono O’Odham, of whom both Dylan and Wanda were members, had seen their ancestral lands cut in half by the border with Mexico. Wanda and others had been waging a quiet war with the governments of both countries to allow passage of their people freely across tribal lands.
Furthermore, she knew that these circumstances resulted in disgruntled young tribesmen who were easy prey for the drug cartels. The cartels recruited them with promises of wealth so they could care for their families, as well as immunity from the laws of both US and Mexico. It was taking a terrible toll on the tribe, and Wanda was part of a movement to resolve the issues.
These people must be activists, too, though she thought they were probably Pima, from the Gila River reservation. The Pima, or Akimel O’odham, were related by ancestry to the Tohono O’odham. They were also related by language, although the dialect was different. For example, they pronounced ‘O’odham’ as ‘O’otham’. Alex wasn’t aware of their issues, though.
After introductions all around, Dawn again took control of the meeting, for that’s what it seemed to be. Rather than a one-on-one interview, Alex found herself in the middle of a protest-planning meeting.
“We know what we’re doing won’t have an impact for years, if ever,” Dawn explained to her. “But what is our alternative? For more than a century, our peoples, and I mean every tribe within the borders of the US, Canada and Mexico, have been promised things that never came to pass. We’ve been told our lands were ours, only to see them shrink when some business or wealthy rancher or miner needed them.
“Our tribe nearly starved when white ranchers and farmers north of us cut off our water. We’ve been marginalized, even those of us, like the Navajo, who were smart enough to negotiate sovereignty. We’re desperately poor and our cultures are disappearing, even our languages.
“So, we protest. We do it peacefully, not like in the old days, because Uncle Sam has clearly won. Thanks to free speech, we won’t be forgotten. We’ll go down fighting for our dignity.”
When she thought of it in that way, Alex had to admire the philosophy, as well as Dawn’s eloquent explanation of it. As a pragmatist, she hated the waste of effort. “Why don’t you do something besides protest?” she said. “Isn’t there something that will actually make the government sit up and take notice?”
“Sure,” said Dawn. “We could blow up something, but that would only land us in jail, and we can’t effectively communicate from there. We choose vocal but peaceful protest in the hope that people like you will call attention to it. Maybe someday, enough people will hear of the injustice we’ve been subjected to and things will change. Like they did for blacks.”
Alex hadn’t been around during the sixties, when everything went down with Martin Luther King and all, but she did know there was very little chance of a revolution starting in tiny little Casa Grande and reaching the level of Martin Luther King’s dream. However, she would do whatever she could to help, not only because they had right on their side, but for Dylan’s sake.
After her meeting with the protest group, who refused to give a name by which to identify them, she wrote a blog post about how unfair conditions were for these people. She then tied it into her main theme, which was naming the nameless human remains found in the desert in Arizona. She believed many or most of them were illegal aliens, trying to cross for a better life. Now, thanks to Wanda, she knew some of them were only illegal because they’d crossed without passports, having no birth certificates to prove citizenship, and couldn’t get back home except illegally.
Certainly it was a simplification. Hordes of people from further south were duped into crossing with bales of marijuana by cartels anxious to exploit their ignorance. Then you also had your professional smugglers, mules who traversed the O'odham lands with more dangerous drugs while authorities were busy chasing down the decoys.
There were no easy answers, but there were interesting questions to explore. That’s all Alex needed for her blog. Interesting questions. The rest would sort itself out, and in the process, maybe some of the unidentified remains would be identified and her quest would be complete.
Something drove her to do this, despite Dylan asking her to stop, despite her dad’s misgivings and those of Lt. Wells, the Sheriff’s department detective who had become a friend, and despite Rick Englebright’s disapproval. She couldn’t put it into words. She only knew she had to do it.
FIVE
Nothing he’d said so far had any impact on her stubborn insistence on continuing the blog, and now it was becoming more and more political. He needed to talk to her about journalistic neutrality. This post, like a few others in recent months, was a passionate denunciation of how local Native tribes had been treated in the past.
It was true there’d been injustice. His own tribe had seen much of it, and there were repercussions even now. But to the best of his knowledge, the Pima were doing pretty well now. They’d had some of their water rights restored, they had a lucrative casino that drew cash from outside the rez, and they were pretty urbanized, compared to his people.
What worried him the most, though, was the presence in Casa Grande of an organization of white supremacists, the Patriots. They’d been quiet recently, especially since the wall had been built on the Mexico-Arizona border, but they had a violent history. Dylan didn’t know whether Alex knew of it, but she needed to. If they got wind of the blog, and that the author was actually living in Casa Grande, there could be more trouble.
He looked at the picture of Alex on the site header and cursed. Casa Grande was a small town. Anyone could recognize her in a public place and put it together. She needed to get the picture down, at least, if she was going to write these inciting posts.
Just as he was about to pick up the phone to call her, it rang in his hand. Alex calling.
Talk about timing!
“Hey, baby, I was just about to call you.”
“Hi, yourself. Hey, what did you think of my post?” She sounded just like Davi when he brought home a paper with a good mark. She was seeking approval, and he was about to hurt her, but he couldn’t help it.
“How did you know I read it?” He was a coward, he admitted it. Dylan loved her bright and hopeful voice, and he didn’t want to hear it turn dull and unhappy.
“Ve haf our vays,” she said, vamping with a German accent. Sounded like some ancient actress, whose name he couldn’t remember. Marlene something?
“No, really. I just got through reading it. How’d you know?”
“Easy. I have a program that records visits to the blog. I’ve figured out your IP address.”
He shook his head again, though she couldn’t see him. When had she gotten so computer savvy? He wasn’t sure what an IP address was, but if she could figure out it was him, that made it imperative she stop this, and now.
“Baby,” he started, feeling his way carefully into what he knew could become a fight if he wasn’t careful. “I think it was kind of dangerous. I mean, I understand how you feel. I do, too. But there’s something you need to know.”
“Dylan, I swear, if you don’t quit raining on my parade… ”
“No, baby, listen. These guys, they’re right there in Casa Grande. The Patriots. You recognize the name? Do you know who and what they are?” He was beating a dead horse if she knew, but he had to try. These guys were dangerous. Deadly even. They’d killed in the past. Their former leader was doing life without parole in prison for murder.
“Yes, I know who they are. I do read what I enter in my database of unidentified remains, Dylan. They’re suspects in the murders of several of my unknown deceased. What about them?”
As he’d feared, her voice was now cold. Worse, he could picture the stubborn lift of her chin. Alex wasn’t going to back down, and it scared the shit out of him.
“I told you. They’re headquartered right there in Casa Grande. If they think you’re becoming too much of a nuisance, or gaining too much credibility and support, they’re capable of anything. I think you at least need to take your picture off the blog, Alex. Please. I can’t be there to protect you… ”
She cut him off mid-rant. “I never expected you to be here to protect me, Dylan. Don’t be ridiculous. They’re not going to come after me because of what I say, for heaven’s sake.”
“I’m not so sure of that. At least, I don’t know. Get some pepper spray and maybe self-defense lessons. I couldn’t stand it if something happened to you.” Dylan covered his eyes with his hand and dropped his head. She was going to blow this off—he could feel it.
“Don’t worry so much. I’ll be fine. So, besides that, what did you think?” She was back to happy and excited.
He’d done all he could, but he had a terrible feeling about it. With as much enthusiasm as he could muster, he said, “It was good, babe. It’s always good.”
She asked about the boys. There was nothing noteworthy to report. She asked when he was coming next, and he told her he had a thing he needed to do with Ange’s boyfriend. Maybe the following weekend.
When they’d exhausted all the current events and spent a few minutes talking about wishing they were together, Alex said she had to go. Dylan couldn’t resist telling her, one more time, to be very careful with her blog. One last ‘I love you’, and she was gone.
A few minutes later, Ange and her boyfriend, Bill Hicks, arrived. Ange was going to stay and watch the boys while Dylan and Bill took a ride over to the cop shop and consulted with Kevin Thurston. Thurston, Bill’s immediate supervisor and lead deputy of the local branch of the Sheriff’s department, had changed his attitude about Dylan after their last run-in. Now, Thurston was interested in knowing what he knew about Los Diablos. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much, but maybe now Thurston was on it, they’d learn more.
Bill left his car with Ange in case of emergency, and rode with Dylan in his Silverado to the cop shop. Thurston was already there. After handshakes all around, they got down to business.
“Dylan, I’ve got to say, I haven’t seen anything illegal going on since you pointed them out last November. Far as I can tell, they hole up in that bar most of the time. Even when they go out riding in a bunch, they stay on the right side of the law. Can’t even catch ‘em driving drunk.”
Before his two missteps with Dylan, when he refused to pay attention and even suspected Dylan of wrongdoing, that sentence would have come out heavy on the sarcasm. Tonight it was just frustration. Thurston seemed as uneasy as Dylan that a motorcycle club with ties, at least in name, to an outlaw gang from California had taken up residence in their little town.
“You ever see them bunched up around a tractor-trailer rig on their bikes? Or an SUV even?” Dylan suspected Los Diablos of a cartel connection, but in the six months or so they’d been watching, neither he nor Thurston’s department had been able to spot it. Only the memory of a Latino man with a heavy accent talking to a member of the MC at Jen Mackey’s bar the previous July kept Dylan convinced there was a connection. The others were losing faith.
“Not that we’ve seen. It would be a little obvious if we tailed them every time they rode out of the parking lot,” Thurston answered. Dylan looked at Bill for some support, but found none.
“When you have tailed them, do they ride north or south?” There were only two ways out of town on paved roads—North on highway 85, toward Phoenix, or southeast, which soon curved back slightly southwest through Organ Pipe National Monument to the border. Of course, from US 85, one could turn off on highway 86 east toward Tucson from south of town, or on highway 8 north of town, leading to Casa Grande to the east or Yuma to the west. Towns and roads were few and far between out here.
“South, mostly. Sometimes they run to Sells, on the reservation, or Gila Bend. They don’t usually go far.”
“It’s a decoy,” Dylan said. “Got to be. What’s in Dodge for them, anyway? And how do they support themselves? Do any of those guys work?”
“Don’t know. We don’t have the resources to tail every one of them, Dylan. And they’d spot that, too.” Thurston was still being civil, but Dylan could sense he was tired of the conversation.
“What if we tailed a couple at a time? I could help, on my off time.” Dylan didn’t have much hope of getting away with that one, but he was going crazy trying to figure out what these guys were doing in Dodge.
“Not without authorization, Dylan. I can’t have a civilian getting mixed up in this, especially if it turns dangerous.”
That was what he’d suspected. He had an idea. “What if you deputized me? You know I’m qualified for law enforcement, Thurston. It’s not like I’m really a civilian.”
“Look, the best I can do is ask my superiors. I know you’re qualified, you’re right. Do me a favor, though, and don’t go doing anything I’m going to have to arrest you for, before I have a chance to square it with the department. Okay?”
Dylan had to admit this new Kevin Thurston was a lot easier to work with than he used to be. There’d been a time Thurston would have thrown him in jail on a trumped up charge to keep him out of the way. In fact, he’d done exactly that before.
~~~
She even understood the hostility toward poor illegals who just wanted work. After all, it was work that US citizens needed, too, and people who hired illegals drove wages down for citizens as well, making it all but impossible for someone to make a living in some jobs anymore. Landscaping and construction came to mind. While she could understand the Patriots’ frustration, she couldn’t grasp their mindset that it was okay, even patriotic to gun people down for crossing the border illegally. She’d never understand that.
If the group was headquartered right here, would it be possible to interview some of the leaders? That would be a story worth pursuing, not to mention something she could really get her teeth into for her blog. Instead of taking Dylan’s warning to be careful around them to heart, Alex began brainstorming how she might get close enough to the group to get some insight.
Meanwhile, her new activist friends planned their next peaceful protest for Saturday, and they’d recruited Alex to document it with photos and a write-up for the school newspaper. She met with them on Wednesday to get the particulars.
“We have a permit for a march,” Dawn said to start the meeting. “We’ll gather here at the Student Union building. Everyone be sure not to block the entrances. Who’s bringing signs?”
Alex listened and took notes as Dawn expertly organized the group. It sounded as if there would be many more to march on the day of the parade. Each person here was responsible to bring a squad of up to twenty more people, and some had several other organizers under them, each with their own squads. By her estimation, it could be over two hundred people.
The majority of the marchers seemed to be Pima and the Maricopa who shared their reservation. They planned to march from the campus down East 6th Street to a nearby park, where there would be speeches. With music and a barbecue following the speeches, it seemed more like a big party than a demonstration. Alex didn’t quite see the point, but it did sound like fun.
She was glad to be part of it. This was the very type of thing she’d been missing as a commuter. Between the driving itself and her duties at the paper in Dodge, she’d never been able to participate in these gatherings. As much as she took seriously the plight of her new friends’ people, she was still a young woman who enjoyed a bit of fun, and there wasn’t nearly enough of this kind of fun in Dodge. Maybe she would even be able to tempt her housemates to join her. She’d envisioned doing things with them, but their interests were so diverse it hadn’t happened yet. They’d met Dylan, of course, and it was cool they didn’t care when he spent the night. Still, that didn’t really count as doing stuff with them.
On Saturday, Alex braided her long hair into twin pigtails and slipped on a cool sundress with a short skirt and wide straps. She slathered her fair skin with half a bottle of sunscreen and finished the look with low-heeled sandals and a floppy hat to keep the sun off her face. It was cooler than usual this time of year, but that wasn’t saying much. With the sun beating down on her from mid-morning until the rally broke up, seventy-six degrees would feel more like ninety, especially on the seven-block walk to the park, on hot city streets. Her housemates had just laughed when she invited them.
“Pool,” said Lisa. Natalie just grinned without bothering to answer. They’d invited her to go to Rocky Point with them for shrimp some time, and she’d probably go, as long as it wasn’t on a weekend that Dylan could visit. Hell of a long drive just for shrimp, though. She’d also need to get a passport first. Rocky Point was on the shores of the Gulf of Baja California, in Mexico. She’d never been, even though the locals in Dodge considered it their personal seafood market.
Alex joined the march, which, with curiosity-seekers and others like her who truly cared about the Native Americans, swelled to over three hundred people. She started out in the front of the pack, with Dawn and the other organizers, but slipped behind as she paused to take photos of the crowd and get signed permissions from some people whose faces would be prominent in the photos. She was soon trailing at the rear of the pack and regretting her choice of footwear.