Midnight Crossing (19 page)

“You can’t trust him. He signed on for the trip. Then things got tough and he quit.”

“Who went with you on Sunday, into Monday morning?”

“Nobody. I went by myself.”

Josie was getting frustrated. She looked over and saw Otto scowling at Josh.

“Let me get this straight. You drove out
alone
to the location where Renata was murdered, on the
day
that she was murdered, and you’re telling me you had nothing to do with her murder later that night?” she asked.

“That’s what I’m saying. I didn’t
want
to kill her. I wanted to
deliver
her. I don’t make money off dead girls. Right?”

“Here’s the way I see it,” Josie said. “You wanted to capture both women and deliver them both, but you couldn’t. You tried several different days and couldn’t catch them. So you panicked. You were afraid these women were going to get to me and tell me what happened to them. Which of course is exactly what happened, and look at the trouble you’re in now. So you decided, if you couldn’t catch them, you’d kill them.”

Greene broke in, “That’s enough.”

Josh cut him off. “That’s not what happened! I wasn’t worried about that at all! They don’t have any documentation. No ID. They’re too afraid of getting deported to go to the authorities. I just wanted to get them in the van so I could make the delivery and keep my job. I did not shoot that woman!”

“When did you tell your boss that the two women had escaped?” Josie asked.

“I sent her a text message the day after it happened.”

Josie jotted a note on the pad in front of her to get a subpoena for the phone records. “Did the police take your phone as evidence last night?”

“You don’t see it on me, do you?” he said, looking down at his orange jumpsuit.

Josie ignored his sarcasm. “I need to know who your boss is. I’m finding it hard to believe you don’t at least have an idea who she is.”

“Go talk to Ryan. He seems to know who she is.”

Josie gave Josh a skeptical look. “Ryan told us you set him up for this trip. He said he met you at a party at Cici’s place.”

“That’s where we met. That’s where I told him the details. The drive, how many days it would take, what he’d be doing. But it was the boss lady who told me I’d be working with him. I’d never met the guy before.”

“How did she tell you about him?”

“She sent me a text. Told me Ryan’s name and told me to contact him. She said he’d be expecting my call. So I called and told him to meet me at Cici’s.”

*   *   *

After the interview, Josie completed the proper paperwork to keep the chain of evidence clear and retrieved Josh Mooney’s cell phone. She and Otto walked out to the parking lot, clear on their next move without needing to discuss it.

“I’ll drive,” Otto said.

As he started his jeep, Josie called Turf and Annuals and asked for Lisa.

“This is Lisa. Can I help you?”

“Hi, Lisa. It’s Josie Gray.”

“Hey, how’s it going?”

“Can you tell me if Ryan’s working today?”

“He is. You want to talk to him?”

“I do. But I want to talk in person. Will he be leaving for lunch soon?”

“No. He always eats here. Brings his lunch.”

“Okay. Please don’t mention our visit to him. We’ll be there in a few.”

*   *   *

On the drive to Turf and Annuals, Josie opened Josh’s phone and discovered he’d wiped it clean before the police had gotten to it.

“How’d that bastard get his phone clean as he was driving down the interstate with a van full of Guatemalan women?” Otto said.

“I hear there’s an app that’ll wipe everything on your phone clean with one click.”

“Bastard.”

“I talked to the prosecutor this morning about the subpoena. We’ll get his records.”

Otto parked in front of the office, and Ryan walked out with his head hung low. Lisa stood in the office doorway, arms crossed over her chest, obviously irritated. Josie couldn’t blame her. The cops showing up twice in one week didn’t look good for business.

Standing in the shade of the office building, but out of earshot from Lisa, Josie said, “I thought you were being straight with us last night. That was the deal we made. It’s why we cut you loose. Remember that?”

His eyebrows shot up. “I was! I told you the truth!”

“I don’t think so. I think you left out a big piece of the puzzle for us.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You told us Josh set you up for the transporting job.”

“He did. I met him at Cici’s party. Lots of people saw us there together.”

“But he didn’t tell you about the job. Someone else did.”

Ryan became very still. Josie thought how similar people were to animals in the way they reacted to fear, as if remaining motionless might somehow hide their guilt.

“Who told you about the job?” she said.

His gaze shifted across the parking lot to the greenhouses, but he said nothing.

“This is a bad idea,” Otto said. “You cooperated last night and you saved yourself a lot of trouble. You don’t want to hold back now.”

The corner of Ryan’s mouth lifted in a humorless smile and he shook his head slowly. “This all started by somebody offering to help me out. Somebody I thought I could trust.”

“How’d that work out for you?” Josie said.

“Not good.”

“Then you’d better come clean with us before this person takes you down with her.”

He looked at Josie then, and she knew she had him. He’d caught the reference to the female.

“She said she’d destroy me if any of this ever got out. That was the exact word she used. Destroy.”

“She’s a criminal, Ryan. Why do you care what she—”

“She’s not a criminal! That’s why I can’t say anything! No one would believe me anyway.”

“If you’re straight with us, it won’t matter who she is. If this woman is transporting women from Guatemala to Texas for a profit, then she’s clearly breaking the law. It’s that simple,” Otto said.

Ryan glared at him and said, “Caroline Moss.”

Josie felt like she’d been kicked in the gut. The mayor’s wife. The woman voted Citizen of the Year for Arroyo County. The same woman who offered to pay for Isabella’s plane ticket to Guatemala.

“You’re saying that Caroline Moss approached you about driving the van to transport those women?” Otto asked.

“See! You don’t believe me! I told you.”

“This is a serious allegation,” he said.

“No kidding! It was serious when she said she’d destroy me too.”

“Why don’t you back up and start at the beginning. When did she contact you? Where were you? You tell us everything you can think of,” Josie said.

He leaned his head back and groaned. “It doesn’t matter what I do. I am so screwed.”

“What did you just tell me last night? You were going to get your act together. This is how you start.”

He blew out air in frustration and kicked at the dirt before he finally opened up. “I’ve known Caroline since I was a kid. She and the mayor are friends with my mom and dad. They do some wine-tasting thing every month together. We’ve been on vacations with them. So when I got in trouble this fall at school she sent me a card and basically told me to hang in there. That it would all work out.”

“When was this?” Josie said.

“A month or two ago. After I left school. Then she stopped by here one day like she was looking around for plants. But I think she came to see me. She said she knew I was having a bad time, and that she had a way for me to earn some extra money to help pay back my parents. I was like,
Yeah, that’d be great
. It was weird, though. I could tell she was nervous about talking to me. Then she was like,
Listen, if you do this, you can’t tell anyone what you’re doing
. She told me to come up with a story about helping a friend of mine to move here from Mexico.” Ryan crossed his arms and leaned against the building, his expression unbelieving. “I thought she was shipping dope from Mexico. Then she says it’s girls. She’s helping these girls from Guatemala who have these terrible lives, and she’s figured out how to help them get jobs here.”

“When she was explaining this, did it surprise you that she would ask something like this from you?” Josie asked.

“Not really. I mean, she’s always doing some charity thing. That’s how she described the whole thing. She said the girls didn’t have the money for passports and all that. She was going to get them here first, and then help them get paperwork and all that. She wanted to help them become citizens and get jobs.”

“Legally it doesn’t work that way. You get the documents first,” Josie said, trying to figure out if Ryan was that naïve.

“I don’t know how it works. I didn’t care either. I mean, it was Caroline. She wasn’t going to do something that could get us into trouble.”

“But she said she’d destroy you if you told anyone?”

“That came later. After the girl got shot. She came to the house when she knew Mom and Dad were gone. She was shaking, had tears in her eyes. She kept asking me what happened, and I kept telling her I didn’t know. The girls just escaped, and now one of them was dead. Then she got mad at me, like the screwup was my fault! I was like, seriously? I was driving a van with a lunatic who wanted to have sex with anything that moved, and
I
screwed up?”

“Do you think she had anything to do with the murder?” Josie asked.

He curled his lip at the question. “No. She was freaking out. I think she thought she was helping those girls, and Josh just fouled it all up.”

“Do you think Josh shot Renata?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it constantly. I mean, he’s the only one who makes sense to me. But I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t there.”

“Have you been in contact with her since she came by your house?”

“No. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone about anything. That’s when she put a finger in my face and said she’d destroy me if I talked about it to anyone, including my parents.”

Josie glanced at Otto, who shook his head once, signaling he was done. “We’ll be in touch,” she said to Ryan.

“Are you going to tell her that I told you about this?” he asked.

Josie considered him for a moment and realized she wasn’t able to offer him any reassurance. “I just don’t know at this point.”

When they’d gotten to the jeep, Otto slammed his door and looked over at Josie. “What the hell are we going to do?”

“This is gonna get ugly.”

TWELVE

Josie called Marta and asked her to have burritos from the Hot Tamale delivered to the police department. Otto dropped Josie by the jail so she could pick up her jeep. By the time she arrived at the department the delivery kid was just pulling up with a paper bag full of food.

Upstairs, they spread out their lunches around the conference table and popped the tops of soft drinks while Josie dropped the bombshell.

“Caroline Moss.”

Marta’s jaw fell open and then snapped shut. “You’re putting me on.”

“I wish I was.”

Marta dropped into the chair in front of her burrito. “I just don’t know if I can believe that. I mean, I never liked the woman, but I always thought she was basically a good person. That her heart was in the right place.”

“Maybe her heart
is
in the right place,” said Otto. “The way Ryan talked, she was trying to help those women.”

Josie gaped at Otto. “You don’t seriously believe that, do you?”

He talked around a massive bite of burrito. “I’m just repeating what Ryan said.”

“Human trafficking is a federal offense. She knows that. And even if she somehow twisted her participation into something humane, she hired Josh Mooney, who apparently raped at least two of the women he was hired to protect. That goes way beyond irresponsible.”

Otto began nodding and raised his hand to stop her. “Calm down.”

“What do we have, beyond Ryan’s word?” said Marta.

“Nothing,” he said.

“I’ll subpoena Josh’s, Macey’s, and Caroline’s cell phone records, but they’ll be throwaway phones. We may ping one in her cell phone area, but that’s about it. We won’t connect Caroline to Josh and Macey,” Josie said. “Unless Caroline paid for a throwaway phone with a personal credit card.”

“She’d be more careful than that,” Otto said.

“Unless she figured it was a throwaway number that would never be traced back to her. It’s hard work covering your tracks. People get bogged down in the details and forget about the never-ending paper trail,” Marta said.

“Meanwhile, we’ve got the testimony of an eighteen-year-old kid versus the mayor’s wife, who is also a philanthropist and well-respected senator’s daughter,” said Josie.

“And we have three displaced women, a murder victim, and a witness to the murder who refuses to talk about it,” Otto said.

“Then let’s go to the source,” Marta said. “Yesterday, when I dropped Isabella off at the motel, I pressed her to give me contact information for her family. She confided that she didn’t want to tell us who her family was because Josh had said their families would be killed if any of them left before reaching their destination. She finally gave it up, but she didn’t want to. He played terrible head games with those girls.”

“He’s a sick bastard,” Otto said.

“It gets worse. She said he would read one of the girls’ names off a list, and then read her family’s address as a threat. Letting the women know how much control he had.”

“That’s the same story that Ryan told us,” Josie said.

“What are you getting at, Marta?” Otto asked. “Are you suggesting we call the women’s families and ask who they contacted to organize their trip to the U.S.?”

“Sure. What could it hurt? I have Isabella’s information. I should be able to get the rest too.”

“Make the call,” Josie said. “Just let them know the women are safe, but in custody. They should receive a phone call with more information within the next few days.”

*   *   *

Marta spent the next thirty minutes on the phone with Isabella’s mother. The conversation took place in Spanish, so Josie and Otto had to wait for the recap after the call ended.