Free Scratchgravel Road by Tricia Fields

bad; her eyes were tired and her cheeks sagged. Marta wiped perspiration from her forehead as she hung up the phone even though the room was cool and damp from the rain.
    She opened the notepad in front of her and flipped through a few pages of notes. “I called Border Patrol. Talked to Jimmy Dare. He doesn’t know anyone using that area as a crossing point right now. And no missing persons fit the victim’s description.”
    Josie nodded. “I don’t think he was crossing the border.”
    Otto entered the office and said hello to Marta, then sat down at his computer and hit the power button.
    Josie continued, “It’s an odd one. The body was already decomposing, but we should still get a decent autopsy. Cowan’s guessing he was in his sixties. Hispanic. Nicely dressed. Western shirt and nice belt, jeans, and work boots. Expensive knife in his pocket. No luggage or extra bags. He had some money in his wallet, but his wallet was gone.”
    “How do you know there was money if the wallet was gone?” Marta asked.
    “Guess where we found 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