The Killing Place, page 14
“First thing? We need to go now.”
Stuart faced her. “Alexa, look at yourself. You can barely stand. Your eyelids keep fluttering as if you’re going to fall asleep right here and now. It’s midnight and other than a couple of hours sleep in the car going to Benson, I can’t remember the last time you slept. You’re done.”
“We need—”
“We need to crack this case. Yes. But we can’t do that if you’re like this. I’m not exactly a hundred percent myself, but you’re recovering from wounds that should have you on medical leave for the rest of the month. We’re getting a motel here, we’re sleeping until seven in the morning, then we’re checking for new information, and we’ll take it from there.”
Alexa opened her mouth to object, and realized that he was a hundred percent right. Her thoughts had become muddled, her movements uncertain, and her body was a husk of pain. She needed sleep, then they could go at it in the morning.
On impulse she checked her phone. A call from her eldest brother Wayne. Melanie’s husband. She could leave that to tomorrow. It couldn’t be anything crucial that she had to deal with right this instant.
Probably Melanie nagging her husband to ask her for an interview. Melanie had been badgering her about that for months. That could certainly wait until morning.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Alexa’s alarm clock went off at seven a.m. the next morning, tearing through a dreamless sleep. She groped with a groggy hand and finally found the snooze alarm.
She didn’t hit that to gain another ten minutes of sleep. She hit it because she felt so exhausted that she was afraid of falling asleep against her will and not waking for hours. Stuart would probably let her do it, too. If he couldn’t act like a boyfriend, he’d act like a nanny.
As soon as she hit the snooze button, her fears were realized as her arm fell to the mattress as heavily as a toppling marble column, and she instantly fell into a professionally inappropriate dream about her partner.
The snooze alarm blared again just as things got really interesting. She groaned, reached for the snooze alarm, and almost hit it again, tempted to discover what came next.
Instead she slapped the off button and forced herself to sit up. The final flesh tone images faded from her mind and she let out a big yawn.
Alexa sat for a moment in the darkness. Before she’d gone to bed, she’d made sure the curtains were drawn tight so as not to let any light in.
What the hell was that? Why am I dreaming about him?
Because he’s been making puppy dog eyes at you. That put the idea in your head. Stress and exhaustion did the rest.
Now that she had hit on an answer she could accept, she turned on the lamp on the bedside table, squinted at its unwelcome light, and fumbled for her phone.
Nothing from Stacy. What’s wrong with that girl?
She did have another call from Wayne, one from her father, and three from her other brother Malcolm.
That got her worried. Malcolm had struggled with mental health and substance issues all his life. Had there been some sort of drama involving him?
She saw there was a report from the Tubac police as well. That could wait until she was fully conscious. Family first. Hopefully it would be nothing.
But who should she call? Not Malcolm. If the trouble involved him, and it usually did, then she should find out what’s going on first before trying to handle him.
Dad? No. The gruff old rancher would just gripe about him being a “sissy” who needed to “grow up.”
She’d call Wayne. The level-headed one.
His phone rang and rang.
He must be out with the cattle or horses.
She was about to hang up when he answered, sounding out of breath.
“Alexa! Sorry. Wrestling with a steer.”
Alexa smiled. Although she had never regretted her career choice, sometimes she missed the simpler life of the ranch.
Simpler, but certainly not easier. It took a lot to wind as strong a man as Wayne. It must have been a pretty tough steer.
“So what’s up?” Alexa asked, praying Malcolm hadn’t relapsed. He’d been doing so good at staying clean.
“Wait. You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Oh God. I am so sorry, Alexa.”
“What?” A hundred possibilities flashed through her mind, each one worse than the last.
“The news report.”
“What news report?”
“I am so mad, I’m not even speaking to her. You know, I love her, I always will, but I’m thinking I made a mistake. Stabbing family in the back like that. How could I be married to someone who could do that?”
“Jesus, Wayne, tell me what’s going on!”
She could hear her big brother take a deep breath, as if steeling himself. “Melanie did an exposé on the U.S. Marshals Service.”
“Oh God,” Alexa groaned.
“It was a total attention grab. She said she was concerned as your sister-in-law, that’s the excuse she gave, and that’s sure how she played it on TV.”
“If she was concerned, she’d leave me alone like I’ve asked her to, ten million times.”
“Made good TV, though. She even managed a couple of tears.”
“Tears?” The only time Alexa had seen her cry was when one of the dogs chewed on her Gucci bag.
“Yeah. She said Marshal Hernandez was acting like a slave driver, working you to death. She said how you were on a case right now when you should be recovering from that attack. She went into some gruesome detail about your injuries, she even got pictures from somewhere, and talked about the previous attack too.”
“She gave the attackers notoriety? That’s just going to encourage more of them!”
“Damn right it will.”
“Where the hell did she get pictures?”
“I don’t know. You’re lying on a hospital bed. You look sedated. Someone must have taken them while you were out.”
“The nerve! If I ever found out who leaked those, it will be their ass! Wait. She mentioned Hernandez? By name?”
“Yeah. Spent a lot of time on him, as a matter of fact. Got some stock footage of him walking into that building of yours in Phoenix, running in slow motion as he turned his head to look at the camera. Played some ominous music in the background. Made him look real spooky.”
“Ugh. This just gets worse and worse.”
“Talked about your partner too. Hinted that Stuart has PTSD and that Hernandez is driving him too hard too.”
“Stuart doesn’t have PTSD.” At least I don’t think so. I’ve never asked him. Why haven’t I asked him?
“Well, she didn’t come right out and say it, because then she could get sued, but she said something like ‘serving our country for two tours of intense combat in Iraq and then Marshal Hernandez’s new collaboration never give him a rest.’”
“This is a total hatchet job. And this was on her regular spot?”
“No, it was a special investigation piece after the regular news. Had its own header and everything. And she said it was a continuing investigation.”
Alexa gasped. “My God, Wayne. What do I do?”
She usually didn’t ask her older brother for advice. Their paths had diverged so much neither sibling really had much advice to give to each other, but this situation was totally unprecedented.
Alexa had dealt with bad press before. A couple of news agencies had questioned her conduct when she beat a suspect on camera, but when it was revealed that Drake Logan had sent the guy to take her out, opinions quickly shifted.
Melanie had even helped with that, talking about the perp’s long criminal record and background of violent behavior. Of course she pumped up her own reputation by constantly mentioning her own relationship with Alexa, but at least the media hack had been on her side.
Not anymore. Now she was simply grabbing attention at Alexa’s expense.
And at Stuart’s expense. And Hernandez. And both agencies.
This could seriously compromise not only the case, but her standing in the agency. Not to mention the fragile collaboration between the U.S. Marshals and the FBI.
And why had Melanie called it “Hernandez’s collaboration?” He hadn’t formed it. He was only their direct supervisor. That made it sound like if anything went wrong, it was all his fault. What did Melanie have against Hernandez, or was he simply an easy target?
“Damn, Wayne. What do I do?” she repeated.
“I don’t know. I’ve chewed her out up one side and down the other. Doesn’t do any good. She just says she’s looking out for family. Looking out for herself, more like. I don’t know, Alexa. We hardly see each other anymore, she doesn’t want kids and I do, and then this.”
His voice, usually so strong and sure, trailed off.
Alexa suddenly realized that this wasn’t just her problem. Her brother’s marriage was falling apart. He wasn’t the kind to talk about feelings, or relationships. This, however, had grown too big to hide. He’d never mentioned wanting kids before, but of course Melanie was too self-centered to think about something like that. And now she had committed the cardinal sin—betraying family. No one in the Chase clan could forgive her for that.
Least of all Alexa.
Melanie was hurting her, and hurting her brother too. Hurting the whole family.
Secretly she found herself wishing Wayne would divorce her. As soon as she felt that, she rejected it as unworthy. That was something Melanie and Wayne had to figure out between themselves.
“I’m sorry things are going badly between you two,” Alexa said.
“Yeah, well, we had a big blowup over this. Over the phone. She hardly ever spends weekends at the ranch anymore, and she says she can’t this weekend either. Work, she says. Probably working on the next spot for her damn exposé.”
“Are you going to go down?”
“You know I hate Phoenix. And I got too much to do up here. We can’t afford to hire more hands and Dad’s not as strong as he used to be. Hides it, or tries to. It’s obvious, though.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I could help.”
“You got your own thing going and that’s fine. You’re too big for this little old ranch anyway. Catching crooks in Germany and France and all that. We’re proud of you. Never forget that. Especially Dad. Brags about you to the Sunday afternoon gang.”
That brought tears to Alexa’s eyes. The Sunday afternoon gang was a group of old ranchers who hung out on the porch every week spitting tobacco and complaining about the federal government. She had no idea Dad bragged about her to his cronies, or even mentioned her at all.
“I’ll try to visit as soon as I can,” she said.
“That would be great. And bring Stacy. That girl brightens up the place.”
Alexa slumped. “I’ll try.”
“And about this whole news report thing, to answer your question I don’t know what you should do. Don’t confront Melanie, that’s for sure. She’ll lay a trap for you and anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of television.” He chuckled bitterly at his own joke.
“Dad and Malcolm called.”
“Yeah, about this. Malcolm’s beside himself. I’ll calm him down. You know he’s doing everything in the chicken coop these days?”
“He’s helping? Great.”
For the longest time, Malcolm did little but languish in his room. As his therapy and twelve step work progressed, he began to take long walks and practice yoga and meditation. It drove their traditional father crazy. The fact that he was taking part in the work around the ranch, even if it was light work, was a major step.
At least something’s going right.
That thought reminded her of the case. She pulled her phone away from her ear to check her messages. A new email had come in from Doctor Whitaker, the forensics expert up in Flagstaff, and a text from Stuart saying, “Meet you in the diner next door in fifteen minutes.” That had been five minutes ago.
“Look, Wayne, I have to go. I got another case.”
“So it’s true you’re on a case.” He sounded surprised.
“Yeah,” Alexa replied, somewhat defensively.
“Oh.” Wayne didn’t say anything more, but that one syllable spoke volumes.
“I’m fine,” Alexa said. “Stuart’s doing all the physical stuff.”
“Good.”
He did not sound convinced.
“Talk to you soon.”
“And I’ll talk to Melanie again. Fat lot of good that’ll do.”
“Thanks. Love you.”
“Love you too, sister.”
She hung up, rubbed the last of the sleep out of her eyes, and hopped into the shower.
Alexa decided she’d ignore Melanie for as long as she could. She had a case to solve, and at the rate the two killers were going, they’d have to solve it by tonight if they didn’t want another body on their hands.
Melanie’s TV station would love that.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Alexa and Stuart had ended up back at the beginning. They sat studying documents in the Witness Security Program offices just downstairs from the U.S. Marshals office in downtown Phoenix.
Alexa had sent a status report to Hernandez and got a brief reply saying he’d give them whatever resources the agency could spare. No mention of Melanie’s character assassination masking as a news report, even though he must have heard about it. She kept glancing at the door, expecting him to come down and talk. He didn’t.
She found that more intimidating than if he had burst in and chewed her out.
Dr. Whitaker had sent a full report. He had taken it upon himself to visit all three murder sites and examine all the victims, crisscrossing the state to help with this unprecedented case. It made her deeply grateful that she and Stuart weren’t the only people burning the candle at both ends.
He confirmed that it was the same two attackers in all three incidents, and confirmed that they had gotten sloppy in the last attack in Tubac, leaving clear footprints in several spots in their route across the desert. His report included their shoe brands and sizes, their approximate height and weight, and the fact that the man was slightly pigeon-toed. He also gave them the make and model of their vehicle—a Ford Fiesta from either 2019 or 2020 with old tires and a slow oil leak.
All this was good evidence that would break through most defenses in court, but it couldn’t point the way to the killers or save that baby they’d kidnapped. The knowledge of that spurred Alexa and her partner on.
And that effort led them to make an interesting discovery.
All the reports on Witness Security cases had to have a U.S. Marshal oversee and sign off on them. This would include initials on each page of the report with a date, and then a signature page appended to the back with full agent details. Often the particular U.S. Marshal would change over time as duties shifted, but every form had these signature pages.
Except for several from each of the murder victims for a three-year period.
In those cases, all of the signature pages were missing, and the initials had been scraped off with what looked like a penknife.
“I don’t know how you do things in the U.S. Marshals,” Stuart said, “but if you pull this in the FBI you’re lucky to stay out of jail. You sure as hell lose your job.”
“Same with us,” Alexa replied, looking at the altered paperwork with her skin tingling. Altering case paperwork was a federal crime.
They checked the paperwork from earlier and later and found names and signatures for the agents involved at that time. She recognized the earlier one as a Marshal who had since retired. He had been in poor health in his final years of service and had probably been given this job so that he could man a desk most of the day. The later one was a Deputy Marshal who was off in Mexico at the moment working with the federales on a drug trafficking case. That’s why she was on the case and not him. It was common for Marshals to juggle several different responsibilities at once. They needed to rely on colleagues to cover for them every now and then.
Alexa gave him a call. The phone rang several times before his answering service came on. Frustrated, Alexa left a message, explaining that she was investigating the murder of one of his witnesses and needed some urgent information.
Something told her not to mention that three of his witnesses had been killed, or that what she really wanted to know was what happened to the records. Surely he must have noticed the deletions. Why hadn’t he reported it?
“Hopefully he’ll get back to us soon,” Alexa said as she turned to Stuart.
She found him holding one of the papers up to the light, bending it this way and that.
“What do you have?”
“Trying to make out the impressions from the previous page. Notice how the scrapings aren’t all in the same exact spot? I’m hoping that one was set far enough above or below another that we can find the initials.”
“Good idea,” Alexa said. She picked up her own set of papers and tried the same thing.
It turned out not to be so easy. The Marshal had been annoyingly consistent about where he or she put their initials and date. Also, whoever scraped off the information had gone past the limits of the writing, taking more space than they needed to.
Alexa suspected that was no accident.
After a few minutes, Stuart showed her one of the pages, angling it up to the light so a faint impression on the left of the rubbed out space could be seen. A curved line open to the right got lost to a deep impression from whatever had been used to scrape the writing away.
“Looks like a C or a G,” Alexa said.
“That’s what I’m thinking. It’s too open to be an O or a Q.”
They got back to work. Eventually Alexa found two straight lines peeking out of the righthand side of the erasure. She showed it to Stuart.
“Must be an F,” she said.
“Unless they wrote their E like a mutant. So G.F. or G.E. Couldn’t be that hard to narrow it down.”
Alexa got on the database and didn’t find a match. No G.F. or G.E. had worked for the Southwestern branch for the past thirty years.
Stuart faced her. “Alexa, look at yourself. You can barely stand. Your eyelids keep fluttering as if you’re going to fall asleep right here and now. It’s midnight and other than a couple of hours sleep in the car going to Benson, I can’t remember the last time you slept. You’re done.”
“We need—”
“We need to crack this case. Yes. But we can’t do that if you’re like this. I’m not exactly a hundred percent myself, but you’re recovering from wounds that should have you on medical leave for the rest of the month. We’re getting a motel here, we’re sleeping until seven in the morning, then we’re checking for new information, and we’ll take it from there.”
Alexa opened her mouth to object, and realized that he was a hundred percent right. Her thoughts had become muddled, her movements uncertain, and her body was a husk of pain. She needed sleep, then they could go at it in the morning.
On impulse she checked her phone. A call from her eldest brother Wayne. Melanie’s husband. She could leave that to tomorrow. It couldn’t be anything crucial that she had to deal with right this instant.
Probably Melanie nagging her husband to ask her for an interview. Melanie had been badgering her about that for months. That could certainly wait until morning.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Alexa’s alarm clock went off at seven a.m. the next morning, tearing through a dreamless sleep. She groped with a groggy hand and finally found the snooze alarm.
She didn’t hit that to gain another ten minutes of sleep. She hit it because she felt so exhausted that she was afraid of falling asleep against her will and not waking for hours. Stuart would probably let her do it, too. If he couldn’t act like a boyfriend, he’d act like a nanny.
As soon as she hit the snooze button, her fears were realized as her arm fell to the mattress as heavily as a toppling marble column, and she instantly fell into a professionally inappropriate dream about her partner.
The snooze alarm blared again just as things got really interesting. She groaned, reached for the snooze alarm, and almost hit it again, tempted to discover what came next.
Instead she slapped the off button and forced herself to sit up. The final flesh tone images faded from her mind and she let out a big yawn.
Alexa sat for a moment in the darkness. Before she’d gone to bed, she’d made sure the curtains were drawn tight so as not to let any light in.
What the hell was that? Why am I dreaming about him?
Because he’s been making puppy dog eyes at you. That put the idea in your head. Stress and exhaustion did the rest.
Now that she had hit on an answer she could accept, she turned on the lamp on the bedside table, squinted at its unwelcome light, and fumbled for her phone.
Nothing from Stacy. What’s wrong with that girl?
She did have another call from Wayne, one from her father, and three from her other brother Malcolm.
That got her worried. Malcolm had struggled with mental health and substance issues all his life. Had there been some sort of drama involving him?
She saw there was a report from the Tubac police as well. That could wait until she was fully conscious. Family first. Hopefully it would be nothing.
But who should she call? Not Malcolm. If the trouble involved him, and it usually did, then she should find out what’s going on first before trying to handle him.
Dad? No. The gruff old rancher would just gripe about him being a “sissy” who needed to “grow up.”
She’d call Wayne. The level-headed one.
His phone rang and rang.
He must be out with the cattle or horses.
She was about to hang up when he answered, sounding out of breath.
“Alexa! Sorry. Wrestling with a steer.”
Alexa smiled. Although she had never regretted her career choice, sometimes she missed the simpler life of the ranch.
Simpler, but certainly not easier. It took a lot to wind as strong a man as Wayne. It must have been a pretty tough steer.
“So what’s up?” Alexa asked, praying Malcolm hadn’t relapsed. He’d been doing so good at staying clean.
“Wait. You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Oh God. I am so sorry, Alexa.”
“What?” A hundred possibilities flashed through her mind, each one worse than the last.
“The news report.”
“What news report?”
“I am so mad, I’m not even speaking to her. You know, I love her, I always will, but I’m thinking I made a mistake. Stabbing family in the back like that. How could I be married to someone who could do that?”
“Jesus, Wayne, tell me what’s going on!”
She could hear her big brother take a deep breath, as if steeling himself. “Melanie did an exposé on the U.S. Marshals Service.”
“Oh God,” Alexa groaned.
“It was a total attention grab. She said she was concerned as your sister-in-law, that’s the excuse she gave, and that’s sure how she played it on TV.”
“If she was concerned, she’d leave me alone like I’ve asked her to, ten million times.”
“Made good TV, though. She even managed a couple of tears.”
“Tears?” The only time Alexa had seen her cry was when one of the dogs chewed on her Gucci bag.
“Yeah. She said Marshal Hernandez was acting like a slave driver, working you to death. She said how you were on a case right now when you should be recovering from that attack. She went into some gruesome detail about your injuries, she even got pictures from somewhere, and talked about the previous attack too.”
“She gave the attackers notoriety? That’s just going to encourage more of them!”
“Damn right it will.”
“Where the hell did she get pictures?”
“I don’t know. You’re lying on a hospital bed. You look sedated. Someone must have taken them while you were out.”
“The nerve! If I ever found out who leaked those, it will be their ass! Wait. She mentioned Hernandez? By name?”
“Yeah. Spent a lot of time on him, as a matter of fact. Got some stock footage of him walking into that building of yours in Phoenix, running in slow motion as he turned his head to look at the camera. Played some ominous music in the background. Made him look real spooky.”
“Ugh. This just gets worse and worse.”
“Talked about your partner too. Hinted that Stuart has PTSD and that Hernandez is driving him too hard too.”
“Stuart doesn’t have PTSD.” At least I don’t think so. I’ve never asked him. Why haven’t I asked him?
“Well, she didn’t come right out and say it, because then she could get sued, but she said something like ‘serving our country for two tours of intense combat in Iraq and then Marshal Hernandez’s new collaboration never give him a rest.’”
“This is a total hatchet job. And this was on her regular spot?”
“No, it was a special investigation piece after the regular news. Had its own header and everything. And she said it was a continuing investigation.”
Alexa gasped. “My God, Wayne. What do I do?”
She usually didn’t ask her older brother for advice. Their paths had diverged so much neither sibling really had much advice to give to each other, but this situation was totally unprecedented.
Alexa had dealt with bad press before. A couple of news agencies had questioned her conduct when she beat a suspect on camera, but when it was revealed that Drake Logan had sent the guy to take her out, opinions quickly shifted.
Melanie had even helped with that, talking about the perp’s long criminal record and background of violent behavior. Of course she pumped up her own reputation by constantly mentioning her own relationship with Alexa, but at least the media hack had been on her side.
Not anymore. Now she was simply grabbing attention at Alexa’s expense.
And at Stuart’s expense. And Hernandez. And both agencies.
This could seriously compromise not only the case, but her standing in the agency. Not to mention the fragile collaboration between the U.S. Marshals and the FBI.
And why had Melanie called it “Hernandez’s collaboration?” He hadn’t formed it. He was only their direct supervisor. That made it sound like if anything went wrong, it was all his fault. What did Melanie have against Hernandez, or was he simply an easy target?
“Damn, Wayne. What do I do?” she repeated.
“I don’t know. I’ve chewed her out up one side and down the other. Doesn’t do any good. She just says she’s looking out for family. Looking out for herself, more like. I don’t know, Alexa. We hardly see each other anymore, she doesn’t want kids and I do, and then this.”
His voice, usually so strong and sure, trailed off.
Alexa suddenly realized that this wasn’t just her problem. Her brother’s marriage was falling apart. He wasn’t the kind to talk about feelings, or relationships. This, however, had grown too big to hide. He’d never mentioned wanting kids before, but of course Melanie was too self-centered to think about something like that. And now she had committed the cardinal sin—betraying family. No one in the Chase clan could forgive her for that.
Least of all Alexa.
Melanie was hurting her, and hurting her brother too. Hurting the whole family.
Secretly she found herself wishing Wayne would divorce her. As soon as she felt that, she rejected it as unworthy. That was something Melanie and Wayne had to figure out between themselves.
“I’m sorry things are going badly between you two,” Alexa said.
“Yeah, well, we had a big blowup over this. Over the phone. She hardly ever spends weekends at the ranch anymore, and she says she can’t this weekend either. Work, she says. Probably working on the next spot for her damn exposé.”
“Are you going to go down?”
“You know I hate Phoenix. And I got too much to do up here. We can’t afford to hire more hands and Dad’s not as strong as he used to be. Hides it, or tries to. It’s obvious, though.”
“I’m sorry. I wish I could help.”
“You got your own thing going and that’s fine. You’re too big for this little old ranch anyway. Catching crooks in Germany and France and all that. We’re proud of you. Never forget that. Especially Dad. Brags about you to the Sunday afternoon gang.”
That brought tears to Alexa’s eyes. The Sunday afternoon gang was a group of old ranchers who hung out on the porch every week spitting tobacco and complaining about the federal government. She had no idea Dad bragged about her to his cronies, or even mentioned her at all.
“I’ll try to visit as soon as I can,” she said.
“That would be great. And bring Stacy. That girl brightens up the place.”
Alexa slumped. “I’ll try.”
“And about this whole news report thing, to answer your question I don’t know what you should do. Don’t confront Melanie, that’s for sure. She’ll lay a trap for you and anything you say can and will be used against you in the court of television.” He chuckled bitterly at his own joke.
“Dad and Malcolm called.”
“Yeah, about this. Malcolm’s beside himself. I’ll calm him down. You know he’s doing everything in the chicken coop these days?”
“He’s helping? Great.”
For the longest time, Malcolm did little but languish in his room. As his therapy and twelve step work progressed, he began to take long walks and practice yoga and meditation. It drove their traditional father crazy. The fact that he was taking part in the work around the ranch, even if it was light work, was a major step.
At least something’s going right.
That thought reminded her of the case. She pulled her phone away from her ear to check her messages. A new email had come in from Doctor Whitaker, the forensics expert up in Flagstaff, and a text from Stuart saying, “Meet you in the diner next door in fifteen minutes.” That had been five minutes ago.
“Look, Wayne, I have to go. I got another case.”
“So it’s true you’re on a case.” He sounded surprised.
“Yeah,” Alexa replied, somewhat defensively.
“Oh.” Wayne didn’t say anything more, but that one syllable spoke volumes.
“I’m fine,” Alexa said. “Stuart’s doing all the physical stuff.”
“Good.”
He did not sound convinced.
“Talk to you soon.”
“And I’ll talk to Melanie again. Fat lot of good that’ll do.”
“Thanks. Love you.”
“Love you too, sister.”
She hung up, rubbed the last of the sleep out of her eyes, and hopped into the shower.
Alexa decided she’d ignore Melanie for as long as she could. She had a case to solve, and at the rate the two killers were going, they’d have to solve it by tonight if they didn’t want another body on their hands.
Melanie’s TV station would love that.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
Alexa and Stuart had ended up back at the beginning. They sat studying documents in the Witness Security Program offices just downstairs from the U.S. Marshals office in downtown Phoenix.
Alexa had sent a status report to Hernandez and got a brief reply saying he’d give them whatever resources the agency could spare. No mention of Melanie’s character assassination masking as a news report, even though he must have heard about it. She kept glancing at the door, expecting him to come down and talk. He didn’t.
She found that more intimidating than if he had burst in and chewed her out.
Dr. Whitaker had sent a full report. He had taken it upon himself to visit all three murder sites and examine all the victims, crisscrossing the state to help with this unprecedented case. It made her deeply grateful that she and Stuart weren’t the only people burning the candle at both ends.
He confirmed that it was the same two attackers in all three incidents, and confirmed that they had gotten sloppy in the last attack in Tubac, leaving clear footprints in several spots in their route across the desert. His report included their shoe brands and sizes, their approximate height and weight, and the fact that the man was slightly pigeon-toed. He also gave them the make and model of their vehicle—a Ford Fiesta from either 2019 or 2020 with old tires and a slow oil leak.
All this was good evidence that would break through most defenses in court, but it couldn’t point the way to the killers or save that baby they’d kidnapped. The knowledge of that spurred Alexa and her partner on.
And that effort led them to make an interesting discovery.
All the reports on Witness Security cases had to have a U.S. Marshal oversee and sign off on them. This would include initials on each page of the report with a date, and then a signature page appended to the back with full agent details. Often the particular U.S. Marshal would change over time as duties shifted, but every form had these signature pages.
Except for several from each of the murder victims for a three-year period.
In those cases, all of the signature pages were missing, and the initials had been scraped off with what looked like a penknife.
“I don’t know how you do things in the U.S. Marshals,” Stuart said, “but if you pull this in the FBI you’re lucky to stay out of jail. You sure as hell lose your job.”
“Same with us,” Alexa replied, looking at the altered paperwork with her skin tingling. Altering case paperwork was a federal crime.
They checked the paperwork from earlier and later and found names and signatures for the agents involved at that time. She recognized the earlier one as a Marshal who had since retired. He had been in poor health in his final years of service and had probably been given this job so that he could man a desk most of the day. The later one was a Deputy Marshal who was off in Mexico at the moment working with the federales on a drug trafficking case. That’s why she was on the case and not him. It was common for Marshals to juggle several different responsibilities at once. They needed to rely on colleagues to cover for them every now and then.
Alexa gave him a call. The phone rang several times before his answering service came on. Frustrated, Alexa left a message, explaining that she was investigating the murder of one of his witnesses and needed some urgent information.
Something told her not to mention that three of his witnesses had been killed, or that what she really wanted to know was what happened to the records. Surely he must have noticed the deletions. Why hadn’t he reported it?
“Hopefully he’ll get back to us soon,” Alexa said as she turned to Stuart.
She found him holding one of the papers up to the light, bending it this way and that.
“What do you have?”
“Trying to make out the impressions from the previous page. Notice how the scrapings aren’t all in the same exact spot? I’m hoping that one was set far enough above or below another that we can find the initials.”
“Good idea,” Alexa said. She picked up her own set of papers and tried the same thing.
It turned out not to be so easy. The Marshal had been annoyingly consistent about where he or she put their initials and date. Also, whoever scraped off the information had gone past the limits of the writing, taking more space than they needed to.
Alexa suspected that was no accident.
After a few minutes, Stuart showed her one of the pages, angling it up to the light so a faint impression on the left of the rubbed out space could be seen. A curved line open to the right got lost to a deep impression from whatever had been used to scrape the writing away.
“Looks like a C or a G,” Alexa said.
“That’s what I’m thinking. It’s too open to be an O or a Q.”
They got back to work. Eventually Alexa found two straight lines peeking out of the righthand side of the erasure. She showed it to Stuart.
“Must be an F,” she said.
“Unless they wrote their E like a mutant. So G.F. or G.E. Couldn’t be that hard to narrow it down.”
Alexa got on the database and didn’t find a match. No G.F. or G.E. had worked for the Southwestern branch for the past thirty years.
