SNEAK PREVIEW — TROUBLE IN VALDEZ COUNTY

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Somewhere North of the Rio Grande

If an oasis of tranquility is what you are looking for, you’d be wise to avoid the rugged borderlands between Texas and Mexico, especially at night. 

Transnational commerce never sleeps along the winding, serpentine swathe of territory separating the two neighboring countries, where certain entrepreneurs prefer the cover of darkness while transporting their products to eagerly awaiting markets. 

This night was no exception. 

It was pitch black outside, and what little light there was came from the thin sliver of moon overhead. The lack of visibility was both a blessing—they could not easily see her—and a curse, since she could not see them, either. She had long since lost track of time. 

Battered and bruised, the desperate young woman clawed her way through the open field, hoping against hope that she could create more separation between herself and the people searching for her. Sharp branches from the dense mesquite brush snagged her clothing and tore at her skin, leaving long, bloody lacerations covering her arms and legs. 

She was too numb from exhaustion to feel the pain any longer. 

Her fresh, hundred-dollar manicure—she had gotten it the day before in preparation for a college friend’s wedding this weekend—was now a ragged mess of broken, splintered fingernails, the dark red color now a mixture of polish and blood.

Her breathing was ragged, and her heart felt as if it was about to explode.

For the past hour, the woman had been scrambling for her life. She had originally been part of a group of thirty women—all of them young, blonde, and attractive—who were being smuggled southbound from Austin to a consignee in Monterrey, Mexico. 

From there, well, who really knew? South America. Asia. Middle East.

Her abductors had stopped periodically along the way to allow the women to rest. She had slipped away from the group to respond to the call of nature, but when she heard them gathering everyone to continue the journey, she decided to hang back out of sight, just to see if she was missed.

She was not, at least not for several minutes. 

She immediately realized this might be her only chance to escape from these horrible people—whoever they were—and flee into the night. She had no idea of where she was, or where she was going, only that she needed to get as far away from these monsters as she could. 

She tried to be as quiet as humanly possible as she methodically increased the separation from the group, understanding that they would eventually notice she was missing and send someone to find her. Her ever-increasing exhaustion caused her to stop every three or four minutes, where she would remain deathly silent, listening for any sign they were looking for her, while she gathered her strength to carry on. 

For the most part, all she could hear was the monotonous droning of cicadas, interrupted only by the occasional howling of coyotes out on their evening hunt for food. 

Every so often, she could hear the faint sound of humans in the distance. She could not see them in the darkness of the moonless night, but the sound of their voices traveled well in the cool, crisp night air.

There seemed to be two of them, both speaking in Spanish. 

She knew from her recent trek with the caravan of abducted women that they were armed with what appeared to be high-tech crossbows that would allow them to kill without being heard. Judging from the intensity of the sound, she could tell they were closing in on her. One of them was singing—painfully off-key—the popular Mexican folk song, “La Cucaracha.”

Her breathing was ragged and her throat raw from extreme exertion. She found herself stopping ever more frequently to catch her breath. She was barefoot, having lost one of her shoes during her desperate scramble for life through the dense brush. Her calf muscles burned. The throbbing pain from her bloody, battered feet was almost unbearable.

She took three slow, deep breaths, exhaling quietly through her nose, before continuing her flight away from the sound of her pursuers. 

A cold burst of wind hit her from the east, reminding her that it was almost Thanksgiving. On the South Texas Plains, that meant cold nights. The wind also carried the pungent odor of a nearby squadron of javelinas —often called stink pigs—that made breathing even more of a struggle. 

While Javelinas may look like pigs and smell like skunks, they are neither. In fact, they are part of the same family as the hippopotamus, although not anywhere near as large…about the size of a sixty-pound dog.

Every once in a while, she could hear the sound of the two men in the distance, laughing loudly and appearing to be enjoying themselves. Occasionally, one of them would call out to her, referring to her as señorita.  

She had no clue as to where she was. She just knew that if they caught her, she would almost certainly pay a steep price.

* * * * *

Her head bowed, her hands on her knees, she gasped for air, not knowing how much longer she could keep running. 

She was exhausted and every muscle in her body was on fire. The good news is that she had not heard their voices for at least five minutes. Nor could she detect any bouncing lights that might be coming from their flashlights. 

Maybe I’m safe, she thought to herself.

She stretched out her arms, reigniting the sharp pain from the lacerations inflicted by the scrub brush. 

She knew that she still had to keep going, but for the first time in hours, she began to believe she might live to see the sunrise.

That was the instant before a twenty-two-inch carbon crossbow arrow pierced her chest while traveling at four-hundred-forty feet per second.

* * * * *

CHAPTER TWO

Sheriff Hanna Neumann-Martinez had a noon yoga class three days a week, so she was just arriving back at work when her cellphone rang. 

“Hey, Hanna, it’s me, Charlie Barcelona,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “We’ve had a fatal accident out here at the Yeager Ranch. One of our hunting groups found a dead body. It doesn’t appear to be one of our guests, but we’re double-checking now just to make sure.”

Carlos “Charlie” Barcelona was the current chairman of the Valdez County Javelina Harvest, which over the years had transitioned from an annual get together for the local bubbas into an international charitable event that last year raised more than fifteen million dollars to help combat teen drug abuse in rural Texas. 

This year’s Harvest had exactly one hundred hunters participating at an entry fee of ten thousand dollars each.

She opened the bottom desk drawer and tossed her embroidered Mexican handbag inside before closing the drawer and sitting down in her black, ergonomically designed desk chair. She was not your typical Texas border county sheriff, not by any stretch of the imagination. 

First off, she was only twenty-seven, a full thirty years younger than the previous sheriff, who had retired suddenly and moved north with his wife to Fredericksburg, over in the Hill Country. 

Unlike just about everyone else in town, she was not from Valdez County, having moved to the South Texas Plains from Austin just two years earlier when her newlywed husband was hired by the city of Arroyo Seco to be its economic development director. 

At five-ten, she was taller than most women around town, and was thin as a rail. She typically wore her long blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, and favored flashy, colorful eyeglasses. Today, she had chosen deep purple cat-eye frames, which complemented the wildflower print shirt she was wearing with her skinny jeans. 

Rather than the cowboy boots favored by most folks in this part of Texas, she preferred to wear expensive hiking boots imported from Europe. She wore her badge in a leather holder hooked over her belt.

As she would often say, you can take the girl out of Austin, but you can’t take the Austin out of the girl.

“Who died?” she asked, trying to appear nonchalant, when in truth her heart was racing at ninety miles an hour. This would be her first death case since her surprise election as sheriff six months earlier in a contest that was a classic testament to the unexpected consequences of low voter turnout. 

“We don’t know,” he said. “I’m pretty sure she was not one of the guests, though.” 

She had never met Barcelona before her decision to run for sheriff a year ago. Most people in town seemed to like him, and he had always been nice to her. Still, there was something about him that did not sit easy with her.

“How did she die, Charlie?”

“Shot with a crossbow, dead to the heart. I was going to send a doctor out there just in case, but the guide in charge of the group that found the body assures me she’s dead.”

“Is he positive? I mean, is the guide a doctor or a nurse or something like that?”

"No, but he spent a year in Afghanistan as an infantryman, so I’m pretty sure he would recognize the basic symptoms.”

While it was not uncommon to occasionally run across the lifeless bodies of people trying to sneak over the border, those were generally due to a combination of exhaustion and exposure. Valdez County was far enough off the beaten path that drug runners did not seem to use it because the transportation infrastructure on both sides of the border in that area was minimal. Arrest records seemed to confirm that belief.

At least, that was the conventional wisdom passed along to her by the senior deputies in the Valdez County Sheriff’s Office. She figured they must know what they’re talking about. After all, why would anyone lie about something like that?

Granted, cross-border traffic in the county had increased dramatically in the past year or so—as it had all along the Rio Grande—but she felt the majority was small groups of families desperately hoping for a better life. 

As her most experienced deputies frequently explained to her, the bulk of the high-volume drug traffic crossed the border elsewhere, where it could be quickly moved along into the interior of Texas and beyond. That made perfect sense to her, so she never questioned the basic premise.

The hunting guide had told Charlie the dead woman was neatly dressed, as if she had just come from work or a date. Perhaps she was a terrorist, or maybe even a troublesome bureaucrat or journalist who had run afoul of one of the cartels and been executed and dumped in the middle of nowhere. 

“Do you have any idea about who shot her?” the sheriff asked, trying to imagine what an experienced law enforcement officer might say at a moment like this. 

This was not the first time she had inwardly questioned the rashness of her decision to run for sheriff. 

“No, and that’s the crazy thing, Hanna,” he said, calling her by her first name. Like most folks in the county, she was sure he still found it hard to believe that this young girl was actually the Valdez County Sheriff. "Nobody saw who shot her…and it is possible she may have been dead for a while.”

“Imagine that…nobody saw nothing,” she said sarcastically, attempting to sound like a grizzled old pro. In fact, all she knew about law enforcement was what she had seen on television and in the movies. “Well, I can be out there in about half an hour. In the meantime, do me a favor and secure the crime scene…and make sure nobody touches anything.”

“No problem. I can do that.”

“And bring everyone in from their hunting sites to the main encampment,” she said, starting to warm up to the prospect of her first real live death case. “Make sure everyone is accounted for, and whatever you do, don’t let anyone leave.”

As soon as she hung up the phone, she had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. To say that she would be conducting this investigation by the seat of her pants would be a major understatement. 

She was nervous, and more than a little bit scared.

* * *  * *