Page 45 of The Girl from Devil's Lake
“That won’t be any more fun than doing the notification.”
Joanna laughed. “You’ve got that right.”
She was about to hang up but Arturo stopped her. “One more thing,” he said. “I had a brainstorm overnight. How about this? Stephen Roper has crossed the border countless times.”
“So?” Joanna asked.
“People who cross the border on a regular basis like that are known to all the border guards and are mostly waved through checkpoints with no questions asked. Right now he has no idea that he’s under any kind of suspicion, right?”
“As far as I know,” Joanna replied. “I warned my people that if any word about his being a person of interest gets out to the public, I’ll fire the leaker on the spot. Why do you ask?”
“I have a lot of pull with the border guards,” Arturo continued. “Just like everybody else around here, they’re up in arms about what happened to Xavier. So what if I told them that next Friday they should pull Roper and his Free Store truck aside for an extensive search? They can tell him that it’s routine—that on orders from headquarters they’ve now been directed to pull aside and search every fifteenth or twentieth vehicle, and his is it. Who knows what’ll happen? They might come up empty, but then again they might not.”
“But won’t he be suspicious?” Joanna asked.
“I doubt it. They’ll tell him they’re looking for drugs, weapons, or cash. Besides, he won’t be anywhere near the vehicle during thesearch itself—drivers have to sit in a waiting room inside the station while the search takes place. I’ll tell the guards involved to report their findings directly to me, but regardless of what they find, they should leave it where it is and allow Roper to go on his merry way once they’re done.”
This seemed like a novel but very tempting idea. Joanna’s people would need a search warrant in hand to go through Roper’s vehicle. Border guards don’t need warrants. Searching vehicles for contraband is their job.
“Let me think about this,” she said. “I’ll be back in touch.”
Off the phone with Arturo, Joanna headed for Casey Ledford’s lab. On the way she stopped by Kristin’s desk.
“We’ve got a positive ID on our homicide victim,” she said. “Please send out a mass mailing to our media contacts, letting them know I’ll be holding a press conference this afternoon at four.”
“Will do,” Kristin said.
Joanna found Casey and Dave Hollicker with their noses deep in their computer monitors. “What are you up to?” she asked.
“We’re still doing our deep dive into Stephen Roper. He has an email address, but that’s it. As far as we can tell, he has no social media presence. If we could look at his computer or phone, those might tell a different story, but, as you know, we’ll need warrants.”
“What if there was a way to search his Free Store truck without needing a warrant?” Joanna asked.
“I’m all ears,” Casey said.
“So am I,” Dave added.
Joanna told them about Arturo’s suggestion of having the Mexican border guards do an extensive search of the vehicle. By the time she was finished, Casey was nodding her head.
“You know, Dave and I were just talking about that,” she said. “Specifically, about what we discussed in our meeting yesterday about how Roper managed to smuggle Xavier across the border. We’re assuming that he’d been knocked unconscious. But he mightalso have been drugged. Something like horse tranquilizer would have worked, but that would require the use of a hypodermic of some kind. If I were a little kid and someone tried to poke me with a needle, I’d raise all kinds of hell, but a drug that could be dissolved in a soda would work, too.”
“Like a date rape drug maybe?” Joanna asked.
Casey nodded. “Some of those can also be inhaled in powdered form, but so can chloroform, too. That’s readily available since you can make it at home with ordinary household ingredients.
“So if the border guards’ search happened to turn up something suspicious in liquid or powder form, and if they could collect a sample and give it to me, I have a whole library of test kits here in the lab that will identify the substance.”
“In other words, you think this is a good idea?” Joanna asked.
“I do.”
At that point, Dave spoke up, adding in his two cents. “Do the border guards have body cams?”
Joanna shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Why?”
“Because if they do, and if the search came up with any kind of damning evidence, we’ll need to have an incontrovertible record of the whole thing to hold up in court.”
With that, Joanna reached for her phone and put the call on speaker.
