“I’m
“We had another carjacking on I-10 yesterday afternoon, over near Bowie.”
Joanna sighed. This was the sixth carjacking along the Cochise County stretch of the interstate in as many weeks. “Not again,” she said. “What happened?”
“A guy named Ted Waters, an elderly gentleman in his eighties, had pulled over on the shoulder to rest because he was feeling a little woozy. Some other guy came walking up to the car and knocked on the window. Waters rolled it down. As soon as he did, the young punk reached inside, opened the door, and pulled Waters out of the car. He threw Waters down on the side of the road and drove off. Border Patrol stopped Waters’ vehicle this morning at their check-point north of Elfrida. It’s a late-model Saturn sedan. At the time it was pulled over, it was loaded with seven UDAs. My guess is that the people in the car this morning had no idea it was stolen.”
“Coyotes again?” Joanna asked.
People who bring drugs and other contraband across the border are called mules. For a price, coyotes smuggle people. Since vehicles involved in smuggling of any kind are subject to immediate confiscation and impoundment, it had suddenly become fashionable for coyotes to use stolen cars for transporting their human cargo. That way, when the vehicles were impounded, the coyotes were out nothing. They had already been paid their exorbitant smuggling lees, and someone else’s main wound up in the impound lot. “What time did all this happen?” Joanna asked.
“The carjacking? Four in the afternoon.”
“Good grief!” Joanna exclaimed. “The carjackers have started doing it in broad daylight now?”
“That’s the way it looks,” Frank said.
“How’s the victim doing? What’s his name again?”
“Waters, Ted Waters. He’s from El Paso. He was on his way to visit his daughter who lives up in Tucson. He was banged up a little, but not that much. Had some cuts and bruises is all. He was treated at the scene and released. We called his daughter. She took him home with her.”
“Was Mr. Waters able to describe his assailant?”
“Not really. The first thing the guy did was knock off the old luau’s glasses, so he couldn’t see a thing. Waters said he thought he was young, though. And Anglo.”
“The border bandits are hiring Anglo operatives these days?”
“It doesn’t sound too likely,” Frank replied. “But I suppose it could be. We’re asking Border Patrol to bring the car to our impound yard instead of theirs, so Casey can go over it for prints later this morning.”
Casey Ledford was the Cochise Sheriff’s Department’s latent fingerprint expert. She also ran the county’s newly installed equipment loaded with the AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) software.
“Let me know if she comes up with something,” Joanna said. “I’ll put the phone on buzz instead of ring. That way, if you call during a meeting, I’ll go outside to answer or, if necessary, I’ll call you back. What’s DPS doing about all this?”
“After the first couple of carjackings, the Department of Public Safety said they were heeling up patrols on that sector, but so far as I know, that still hasn’t happened,” Frank told her. “We’re the ones who took the 911 call on this latest incident, and our guys were the first ones on the scene. By the time the first DPS car got there, it was all over.”
“Who is it at DPS who’s in charge of that sector?” Joanna asked.
“New guy,” Frank answered. “Name’s Hamilton, Captain Richard Hamilton. He’s based up in Tucson.”
“Do you have his number?”
“No, but I can look it up,” Frank offered.
“I’ll do it,” Joanna told him. “But I won’t have time to call him until later on this morning, when
