Scratchgravel Road A Mystery - By Tricia Fields Page 0,2

a bitch.”

Looking over his shoulder, she gasped and stifled a scream into her fist.

TWO

At noon on Monday, Chief Josie Gray followed her bloodhound outside, then locked the front door of her small adobe house in the foothills of the Chinati Mountains. She watched Chester lope up the long lane behind her house to the cabin owned by her closest friend, Dell Seapus. His place was the dog’s second home while Josie went to work. She unlocked the driver’s-side door of her dusty blue and white jeep and leaned in to start the car. The blast of hot air sent her back to the shade of the front porch while the car cooled. Her police uniform was standard garb: thick gray pants, navy blue short-sleeved shirt, and heavy black work boots that made little sense in the West Texas desert, but the mayor and commissioners were convinced they conveyed the proper image. Josie wore her uniform carefully pressed and the brass polished. She recognized that her public image as chief of police had to remain impeccable on every level. Not everyone thought a thirty-three-year-old woman fit that role.

She pulled her cell phone out of her uniform shirt pocket and called dispatcher Louise Hagerty, to log on for second shift.

“Anything going on?” she asked.

“Otto’s taking a report at the Gun Club. Tiny called and said somebody stole all the trash cans from behind his store.”

Josie sighed.

Lou told her she was cleaning out the refrigerator and wanted Josie to tell Otto to quit leaving open Coke cans on the shelves. Lou was a forty-seven-year-old chain smoker with a voice like sandpaper who complained about having to work as secretary, detective, intake officer, custodian, and psychologist on top of her real job as dispatcher. But Josie knew Lou was first rate at all her various tasks, and probably would have complained bitterly if someone tried to take one away from her.

“I’ll talk to him,” Josie said. “I’m going to drive by the watchtower before I come into town. Call me if you need anything.”

With the steering wheel cool enough to touch, Josie backed out of her driveway onto Schenck Road, the gravel lane that led to her and Dell’s property. The Chihuahuan Desert spread out before her, sparsely marked with cactus, scrub bushes, and pinyon pine, with not another house in sight for miles. Josie drove slowly down the lane, appreciating the quiet and the solitude.

She glanced down at the gold medallion that lay in the tray on her console; her father’s ten-year award for his service as a police officer. It was the only memento she had of her father’s work as an officer and she kept it with her, a talisman to protect her on the job. Her father had been killed in a line-of-duty accident when she was eight, and in her own mind, it had always been a given that she would become a cop as well. Looking out at the lonely desert before her she knew the job was a good fit. She preferred watching people to talking with them, asking questions rather than answering them.

* * *

Cassidy Harper wiped the sweat out of her eyes with the sleeve of her T-shirt and turned to face the road, a quarter mile back through scorched desert sand, to where her water bottle sat in the front seat of her car. With thirty minutes before Leo returned home, there was no time to turn around.

She pulled a folded piece of paper out of the front pocket of her shorts and stared at the words she had heard two days ago. At one thirty in the morning she had awoken to the sound of Leo’s voice in the other room. She got out of bed and crept down the hallway to see him sitting in the dark on the living room floor, hunched over the phone. She had only caught pieces of his conversation before the fear of being caught eavesdropping forced her back into bed. But she’d grabbed a pen, and a paperback book from her nightstand, and in the light from the digital clock she scribbled down fragments of the conversation she had heard on a blank page: I’ll take … to Scratchgravel Road. Half mile before River Road, on the right. A quarter mile downhill. Can’t see … from the road.

Then he’d disappeared for three hours. Gotten in his car and driven away without waking her up or leaving her a note about where he was going. Cassidy had