Chapter 1

Sonora Desert, Arizona, Near the Border

Simon Lawson sat on the edge of the Border Patrol pickup, his feet planted inside the bed of the truck, and looked over the barren landscape. A soft breeze caused the small shrubs that littered the rocky ground to sway gently, signalling the beginning of the temperature dip that happened most nights.

Simon heaved a sigh as he thought about the rookies he’d talked to over the years, most of whom came from bigger cities in other parts of the country. They were always surprised that a place that was so hot in the middle of the day could cool off so much when the sun went down. Simon had grown up in the southern part of Arizona, only a few hours’ drive from where he currently sat watching the quickly darkening horizon. He’d explained to them how much warmth all that concrete absorbed. How, in the dry air, there wasn’t water vapor to trap the boiling heat they’d experienced during the day, letting it all vent back up into space.

Of course, some of them didn’t believe him, his country twang making the explanation seem like something he made up. They couldn’t disagree with the effect however, once they’d experienced the blistering hundred-degree temperatures during the middle of the day drop by fifty degrees overnight.

He gave himself a chuckle as he thought about Tony, the newest rookie who’d just finished the training course and was shadowing more experienced officers, learning how things worked on the border. Not that anyone was out with him now.

Simon’s partner had gotten used to him coming out to this stretch of desert a couple of times a week as the sun went down. A few months back a couple of families had gotten abandoned by the coyote that had shepherded them across the border, dropping them in the middle of a desert with a single dirty milk jug of water. Simon had been the one to stumble across the bodies on one of his patrols.

It wasn’t the first he’d seen. Occasionally the Rio Grande would bulge under heavy rains and people trying to swim it wouldn’t be ready for the surprisingly strong currents and eddies or for the plants that could tangle them up. While not a weekly occurrence, it was something a lot of the guys working the border or in one of the boats would come across. It was easier, although not easy, to deal with those deaths. Those bodies seemed almost alien, with damage from the water and animals making them seem not quite like the people they’d once been.

This had been different. He must have found them not long after the last of immigrants had passed away, before the animals had found them. He thought of the mother, her skin taking on an almost scaly texture caused by extreme dehydration. Maybe she’d been sick before they started out or maybe she’d given all the water to her kids, drinking nothing herself. From there he couldn’t keep his mind from moving to the kids. Once their mom had dropped, the heat getting the best of her, they’d just sat there. Tears using up the little water they still had even faster, until they’d slumped to the ground next to her.

Simon could remember their tiny faces, the little pink backpack with the bright cartoon character in the center, like a relic of another place.

When some people on social media or old school classmates who now lived out on one of the coasts found out what he did, they railed about cruelty and injustice. Asked how he could look into the faces of people trying to find a better life or to escape the violence of their home country, and just turn them back or put them in jail. He always just said they didn’t really understand.

It wasn’t that he was unsympathetic. He’d met these people face to face. Sure there was the occasional scumbag, but most of the people he’d caught trying to cross weren’t bad people, just desperate. He’d talked to enough of them to hear the stories about how bad things were back where they came from.

There was another side of the crossings that most people, even the well-meaning ones, didn’t understand. He’d also seen the other horror stories. Women who’d been snatched up, forced to work as prostitutes. Although calling these girls ‘women’ was a stretch since they were mostly teenagers, or some even younger. Children, a lot whom were forced to make the crossing alone, were easy targets for these monsters. Then there were the people he found beaten to within an inch of their lives. People who were seen by Coyotes as an easy extra couple of bucks, and that didn’t count what the drug smugglers did. Some people were handed over to smugglers to work as mules, a risky proposition in and of itself, or were just murdered for seeing something they shouldn’t have.

Then there were the people just swallowed up by the desert. Bones that ranchers or border patrol agents would find months or sometimes years later.

It was his sympathy that had him out at night, staring into the dark looking for the smallest sign of movement. They might hate it when he picked them up and got them shipped back across the border. People who didn’t know better might call him a monster for doing it. What Simon knew was that if he could keep anyone else from seeing a small body lying face down in the rock and sand, from seeing a man after the buzzards had gotten to him, then he’d take the hate.

Simon stood and stretched before leaning against the truck. The sun had gone down all the way now, making the standard binoculars he’d been using all but worthless as the endless horizon seeming like a mass of black. He lowered the glasses, letting them hang down around his neck as he stared into the night, and sighed.

He’d paused before getting the light-enhancing pair which would color the desert in a pale green almost daylight and let him watch for movement without having to turn on his truck lights, giving away his presence. Ever since 9-11, there’d been money for the border patrol and Congress kept upping their budgets, using ICE and CBP as a prop to show how much they loved their country and how much the other side hated it. Not that Simon minded. As long as they were able to hire more guys, pay for stuff like night optics and run drones over the mountainous parts of the border that were just too damned hard for humans to patrol, Simon didn’t care how much of a prop he was. It made his life easier and helped him do his job, and that’s all that really mattered.

He waited to change binoculars though. He liked being out here, all by himself, feeling the cool breeze wipe away the last heat of the day and listen to the animals coming out of their hides, looking for dinner. This was the America that most people never saw. No billboards, no street lights, no Starbucks, no all-night diners. Of course, he’d see plenty of that as he drove back to drop off his patrol vehicle and pick up his personal vehicle. Right now though, he could just enjoy nature.

Heaving one more sigh and he turned around to reach into the box at his feet where the rest of his equipment was stored, and that’s when he felt it. It wasn’t anything tangible, just that feeling you get when you know there’s another person right behind you.

His head whipped around, eyes widening as he looked into the face of a bearded man who’d come out of nowhere. His brain started struggling with how the man had gotten so close to him without Simon hearing anything, or even feeling the truck shift as the man had climbed up on it. His hand started to drop to the holster at his side as the knife slid into his throat, a coppery metallic smell filling Simon’s nose even as he began to choke on his own blood.

As darkness overtook him, the thought that someone would find him like he found that family passed through his mind, and then everything went black.

Alexandria, Virginia

“This isn’t yours,” Loretta Whitaker said, her voice rising in frustration more than anger.

“I just wanted to be seeing what it looked like. You can keep it. It is ugly color, anyway.”

“That’s not the... “ Whitaker started to reply before being cut off by a slamming door.

Taylor leaned his head back, squeezing his eyes shut, knowing what was going to happen next.

“You need to do something,” Whitaker said in an annoyed, but no longer yelling, tone.

“I’ll talk to her.”

“This needs to stop. I know she’s been through a lot, but she needs to start learning to respect other people’s property.”

“I know.”

Taylor sighed and stood up. It had been six months since Kara had come to live with them and this was a somewhat regular occurrence by now. Taylor couldn’t blame Whitaker for her frustration. The first two months had been very rough. Kara was prone to outbreaks of screaming, a complete defiance of any kind of structure or order, and was constantly trying to pick fights.

Things had started getting better, even Whitaker would admit to that, some of the time at least.

Kara still had quirks. She did not want to be touched, ever. No hugs, no handshakes, no contact at all if she could avoid it. She still woke up with pretty violent nightmares. Still, a lot of the anger had started to recede. They’d even recently been able to shift from three times a week therapy to just once a week, her shrink saying she was making excellent progress.

Even though the fights were down to just once or twice a week it was still tough on Whitaker, who was almost always the target. She’d been amazingly patient, not holding a grudge against the teenager and not staying mad for that long after each fight ended. It was putting a strain on their relationship.

“I’m not mad,” she said, letting out a long breath. “Just try and get her to stay out of our room. Okay?”

Taylor stopped in front of her, his arms snaking around her middle.

“I’m sorry this has been so tough on you,” he said for the hundredth time.

“I know, and it’s getting better. I just ... I’m trying not to take it personally, because of everything she...”

“She doesn’t hate you, you know that, right? She just doesn’t have all the tools you or I have for dealing with conflict.”

“I see you talked to her doctor again,” Whitaker said with a smile, knowing that wasn’t a phrase Taylor would normally have used.

“She reminded me of something.”

“What was that?”

“That not every outburst is about her past trauma. She reminded me that, besides everything else, we also took in a teenage girl. She said we should expect some push back, that it was healthy.”

“God,” Whitaker said, pulling out of Taylor’s embrace, putting her hands on her hips, and looking at the ceiling. “If I was even a tenth this bad, I really feel for my parents. I should call my mom and apologize.”

“I’d say ‘I’m sure you weren’t,’ but we both know that would be a lie,” Taylor said with a smile.

Whitaker rolled her eyes and headed towards their room, “Just go talk to her and do your thing. Otherwise, you get to live with two pissed off women.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He heard a snort come from Whitaker’s direction as he headed to the other bedroom in their apartment, glad to see she at least had her sense of humor intact.

“Kara,” Taylor said, knocking on her door. “Can I come in?”

There was a pause, then the door opened, the girl’s red hair flapping as she turned and stomped back to sit on her bed.

“She sent you to yell at me, yes?”

“It’s not like that and you know it.”

“Mne prishlos’ imet’ delo,” Kara started to say before Taylor put up a hand.

“In English, please. Your tutor asked us to keep you using it at home as much as possible, for practice.”

“Fine,” she said, her lower lip going out in a pout. “I deal with bitches before, blaming anything that went missing...”

“I thought you admitted to taking it?”

“I...”

“How are you being blamed for something going missing if you admitted to taking it?”

“Whatever,” she said, the pout becoming more pronounced.

“Early on, you demanded we stay out of your room unless invited.”

“So?”

“So, we’ve done that, right?”

“I guess.”

“Don’t you think if we’ve agreed to stay out of your stuff, and out of your room, that you should do the same thing for us?”

“I just wanted to find different color lipstick. I didn’t like any I have.”

“Did you try asking her if you could look through and borrow something?”

There was a long pause.

“Kara?”

“No.”

Taylor let out a sigh. His personality wasn’t really cut out for being the calm, rational one. If anything Whitaker should be the one to do this, she was much better suited for calm, dispassionate reasoning. He’d always been the shoot first and ask questions later kind of person. And yet, he was the only one, aside from Kara’s shrink and Mary Jane, the girl who’d been held captive with her the previous winter, that Kara could deal with on any kind of rational basis.

They’d already gone through three tutors because of it. Thank goodness Suzette Caldwell, Mary Jane’s still very thankful and very rich mother had felt the need to pay for both the tutors and the psychiatrists for Kara, in return for Kara’s help in freeing her daughter.

“Then why are you mad? Because she got mad or because she called you out?”

“I don’t ... I don’t want lecture.”

“I get that. You’ve been on your own for a long time, and you don’t need anyone telling you what you should or shouldn’t be doing, right?”