Body Heat (Dept 6 Hired Guns 2)

“You killed him!” she wailed, crouching over his body. “You killed him!”

“Hey, what’s going on out there?” A woman had opened the door of the trailer and called out in English. Although Benita couldn’t understand her words, she thought the interruption would make the man run away. But it didn’t. With a curse, Cowboy brought up his gun and aimed again.

“This oughta teach you spic cockroaches to stay in your own damn country,” he ground out, and pulled the trigger.

Benita felt a flash of pain between her eyes. Then she felt nothing at all.

2

The sun was just beginning to creep over the horizon when Sophia St. Claire brought her cruiser to a skidding halt at the dusty group of drab to not-so-drab trailers a mile outside of town. She’d thrown on her uniform and dashed out of the house as soon as the call came in. But she was too late. The people who lived here had abandoned the comfort of their homes to gawk and were standing in the middle of the crime scene.

“There goes whatever evidence I might’ve been able to collect,” she grumbled. But why get upset about it? If this was the work of the same killer she’d already been chasing, chances were he hadn’t left any evidence to begin with. In the past six weeks, someone had killed ten—now twelve—people in three different incidents, all UDAs or undocumented aliens, and walked or driven off into the night. Whoever it was didn’t attempt to bury the victims or hide their corpses, even when he had the chance. His earlier targets hadn’t been discovered until more than a week after their deaths.

As she turned off the engine, the small crowd, all of whom had glanced up when she arrived, watched her with pinched and worried expressions. They were obviously aware of the gravity of the situation. But they didn’t seem to realize that they should move away from the bodies. Maybe the CSI shows weren’t always one hundred percent accurate on forensic procedures and techniques, especially when it came to timelines, but surely these people had seen enough TV to know they shouldn’t contaminate the crime scene? It wasn’t as if they lived in some bucolic Mayberry R.F.D. The people here, mostly Mexican Americans with some whites and a few American Indians thrown in, were as rugged as the land. What with drug trafficking, human trafficking, gangs who had ties to the Mexican Mafia, racial disputes and a local chapter of the Hells Angels roaring around, blowing through stoplights, breaking speed limits and looking for trouble, this was almost a war zone.

Catching a glimpse of two prone bodies, she winced and jerked her door open.

Debbie Berke, the woman who’d called to report the shooting, met her as she got out. “Sophia, they’re dead,” she said. “They were killed instantly. Wasn’t no reason to get the paramedics out here.”

Sophia wasn’t surprised to be addressed by her first name. Only thirty, she hadn’t been chief of police for very long. And most of these folks had known her since she was a baby. Debbie’s late husband had been the veterinarian who’d operated on Toby, her family’s dog, when Sophia was fifteen, and eventually put him down. “I understand. I’ve called the medical examiner.”

“He’s on his way?”

“That’s what he said.” But Sophia doubted he was in any kind of hurry. Some of the sentiments Dr. Sandy Vonnegut had expressed at the last crime scene led her to believe he didn’t consider the death of illegal aliens to be much more distressing than roadkill.

She hollered for the crowd to step back at least twenty paces.

With their brown skin and inky black hair, the victims were, as expected, Mexican. One was a man, the other a woman. The male victim lay facedown in the dirt. They both had on several layers of clothing—long-sleeved shirts with dirty work pants—and tennis shoes, all secondhand quality at best. Sophia couldn’t see where the man had been shot; any blood was hidden beneath his body. It was the woman who gave away the manner of death. She lay on her back, staring up at the sky with a perfect hole in her forehead. That hole oozed a slim trickle of blood. The woman’s heart had stopped almost immediately….

They were young. Too young to die. Especially like this.

Sophia crouched next to them, checking each for a pulse. It was a pointless gesture. They were both dead; that was obvious. But she went through the motions, anyway, hoping…

Finding Debbie to be absolutely correct, she stood and studied their surroundings, searching for anything that struck her as odd or out of place. An object left behind. An object taken. Tire tracks. Except for the fact that this incident had happened much closer to town, the scene looked exactly like the two she’d visited during the previous month and a half. The killings had occurred on a barren patch of desert too rocky to reveal tire tracks or footprints. And from what she could see so far, the perpetrator had left nothing behind but the bodies.

“What do you think?” Debbie murmured over Sophia’s shoulder. The expectation in her voice suggested she believed Sophia could pull the killer’s name out of thin air.

With a sigh, Sophia took a pad and pen from her shirt pocket and guided Debbie away from the bodies. She wanted to talk to her and anyone else who might’ve seen or heard something. She also needed to enforce the perimeter she’d created and, as long as she stood close to the victims, the others would come closer, too. “Can you tell me what happened?” she asked.

“I heard a—a noise.”

A siren wailed in the distance. One of her two deputies, Grant—who’d been on duty last night—was on his way, bringing the yellow police tape he’d accidentally put in his car instead of hers the last time they’d been through this. “What kind of noise?”

“At first, I thought it was a wounded animal.” She paused. “I know there’ve been other murders like this. Everyone’s talking about them. But you just never imagine—” she shrugged helplessly and tears welled up as she gazed at the corpses “—you just never imagine it can happen right outside your door.”

Sophia laid a comforting hand on her arm. “It might be easier if you don’t look,” she said, and shifted positions to block Debbie’s line of vision. “Take a minute, if you need to. We can continue whenever you’re ready.”

Dashing a hand across her cheeks, Debbie struggled to control her emotions. “I heard a cry. It frightened me, so I got up and walked through my house. Everything seemed fine. I peeked out the window, but it was too dark to see, and I didn’t want to go outside. I told myself there wasn’t anything to worry about and started back to bed. But then I heard voices. They seemed to be arguing. One belonged to a woman.” She lowered her voice. “That made me think Earl and Marlene had had another fight.” She jerked her head to indicate a couple standing in their bathrobes staring, in a dazed fashion, at the lifeless bodies, but it wasn’t necessary for her to point out who the Nelsons were. Sophia knew them by name. She knew almost everyone who lived in the mini trailer park. Although her financial circumstances had been much better, she’d grown up less than a mile away.