Page 40 of The Girl from Devil's Lake
Garth Raymond raised his hand. “What about trash DNA?” he asked.
“Good suggestion,” Casey said. “I’ll check with Waste Management. If he has an account with them, I’ll find out what day it’s collected.”
“When’s Roper’s next scheduled visit to the migrant camp?” Jaime asked.
“According to Captain Peña, it’ll be next Friday, a week from today,” Joanna told them. “Arturo assures me that while Roper is in Sonora, his guys will have eyes on him.”
“Between now and then we have to sit on our hands waiting to see if he grabs another kid?” Tom Hadlock asked. “That sucks!”
“I agree,” Joanna said. “It does suck.”
But Tom was on a roll. “What time does the Free Store truck come back across the border?”
“Early to midafternoon,” Casey answered.
“That means this must have happened in broad daylight with plenty of people coming and going,” Tom continued. “How the hell did he smuggle the kid across the border without anyone noticing? If somebody had tried to grab me when I was that age, I would have screamed bloody murder.”
“Maybe Xavier went willingly because he was bribed with something he wanted—like the shoes, for instance,” Deb suggested. “Or maybe he was incapacitated.”
“According to Dr. Baldwin, he had a perimortem contusion that might have rendered him unconscious.”
The room went quiet once more. “Anything else?” Joanna asked, but when she examined the somber faces gathered around the table, no one answered.
“Okay,” she said. “This is where we are. Until we know for sure that Stephen Roper is our suspect, he remains a person of interest. It’s possible that another informant may come forward with additional information, so keep your eyes open and ears to the ground. Who knows? We might get lucky, because luck is what it’s going to take to get justice for Xavier Delgado and his grieving mother—luck and a whole lot of hard work.”
Joanna Brady was the last person to leave the conference room. Before she exited, she made sure that every vestige of Stephen Roper’s name had been erased from the whiteboard. When it came to possible leakers, there was nothing to say the culprit couldn’t be a janitor as opposed to one of her officers, and she didn’t want to take any chances.
Chapter 20
Bisbee, Arizona
June and July 1976
Four days after leaving Minnesota, Steve Roperarrived in Bisbee, Arizona, and checked into a motel called the San Jose Lodge. When he asked the clerk about the establishment’s name, she pointed out through the glass door to where a distant, solitary mountain peak rose up majestically out of an otherwise flat desert landscape.
“That’s San Jose Peak,” she told him. “It’s in Old Mexico.”
Never having heard the term before, Steve was puzzled. “Old Mexico?” he repeated.
The clerk gave him an exasperated look. “This is Arizona,” she explained. “New Mexico is just to the east of us, and Old Mexico is to the south. That’s what we call them around here, old and new.”
“Okay,” Steve said. “I’ll try to remember that.”
His room was a long way from deluxe, with questionable carpeting and a worn, flowered bedspread. There was an air-conditioning unit under the window, but dry heat or not, the outside temperature was still somewhere in the mid-nineties. Since the room faced due west, the laboring AC barely made a dent in the hot, still air.
Prior to leaving home, Steve had placed a long-distance call to Bisbee, asking Information for the number of a local real estate office. As a result of that call, he’d been in touch with a company and hadboth the name and address of a prospective agent, one Linda Mulligan. Since he had no idea how to get to the real estate office in question, he went back to the registration office to ask the desk clerk.
“That’s easy,” she said. “Their office is in the lobby of the old Lyric Theater.” Then she gave him a small one-page map, pointing out where he was and showing him how to get to what she called “Upper Bisbee.”
Because he had come to town on Highway 80 via Lordsburg and Rodeo, New Mexico, Steve had approached Bisbee from the east, through terrain that had been relatively flat. Now he backtracked far enough to reach a grassy traffic circle, went two-thirds of the way around that, and then drove uphill past what appeared to be the back side of a run-down business district. The local map indicated that neighborhood was called Lowell. Then he traversed a long flat curve of roadway that appeared to have been carved out of the gray-green innards of a mountain. According to the map, it was an open-pit mine called Lavender Pit. After that the twisting road began climbing again, eventually bringing him into the midst of some steep, red shale mountains dotted with low-growing shrubs. There he entered another business district, this one designated as Upper Bisbee.
The clerk at the hotel had helpfully drawn an X on the map to indicate the exact location of the real estate office. The marquee overhead indicated the building had once held a movie theater, but now it advertised the name of the real estate company rather than promoting some current offering from Hollywood.
Inside, Steve found a series of four desks scattered around what had once been the theater’s lobby. A middle-aged blond-haired woman was seated at one, which, to Steve’s way of thinking, had most likely been the location of a long-gone popcorn machine.
“May I help you?” the woman asked.
“I’m looking for someone named Linda Mulligan.”
