Bitter Crossing (A Peyton Cote Novel) Read Free

in El Paso you could be a one-person team every shift because something happens just about every shift. The northern border is different. Teamwork is more prevalent here. Sometimes you work for weeks with nothing to show for it. I’d like to see this station make a big bust, too. But not by gambling on the likes of Kenny Radke.”
    “I understand the differences, and I’m a team player.”
    “You sure about that? When I interviewed you for this position, you told me you wanted to move back to Garrett for your son. I understood that to mean you knew what you were giving up. If you need the adrenaline rush, this might not work out.”
    She thought about Tommy, who’d be waking soon. In the four months since returning to Garrett, Peyton had yet to find a suitable house to purchase. So she and Tommy were staying with her mother, Lois, who conveniently provided childcare. Convenient or not, staying with her mother was getting old. Even more frustrating than life in her mother’s guestroom, Peyton wanted to be the one to make Tommy breakfast. But it wasn’t to be. Not this morning. She hated it when her roles—as single parent and agent—conflicted.
    She pinched the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. “I got a bad tip. That’s all this is, Mike. Don’t read anything more into it.”
    But she knew he was right on at least one thing: she had rolled the dice on Kenny Radke, and he’d burned her, a rookie mistake.
    Informants in this town of 1,100 were about as easy to come by as a heat rash in January. And who should she find creeping down a dirt road near the border in a rusted Aerostar van the previous week? Kenny Radke, with a dime bag in his glove compartment. No way she’d confess to using the dime bag as leverage with Radke.
    She wasn’t an adrenaline junkie. Radke had just burned her. And she’d discuss that with him very shortly.
    She leaned back in her seat and exhaled. “DEA says BC Bud is being grown in Youngsville, New Brunswick. Entering here, going to Boston and New York.”
    “Straight down I-95?”
    She shrugged. “Possibly. Know how many logging trucks and potato trucks go down I-95 each day? I was thinking maybe Radke told someone, and they changed plans.”
    “And left a baby instead? On the coldest night of the fall? Someone must have left her to freeze.”
    “I don’t think so. If they wanted her to freeze, why leave her where someone would see her? Why not just throw her in the river or leave her behind a tree?”
    “Jesus, that’s bleak.”
    “Nothing surprises me anymore.” Her eyes left Hewitt’s. Through the window, the sun was rising over the Crystal View River. The dark water looked cold. “In El Paso one time I saw a mother let her baby drown so she could make it across the Rio Grande. I think someone wanted me to find this little girl.”
    “You, in particular?”
    “I was there. I walked the perimeter once, never saw the baby. Someone sure timed it perfectly.”
    “So whoever left her was watching you, which explains how you didn’t see the drop. Did you use motion sensors?”
    She shifted in her chair. He wouldn’t like the answer. “I had night-vision goggles, and I was sign-cutting on foot.” Her ability to sign-cut—reading the landscape, instinctively noting what should and should not be there, spotting tracks and aging them—had been a big reason for her BORSTAR accolade.
    “We have those detectors for a reason, Peyton. They cost a damned fortune. Anything on the wire to help us ID the baby? Missing persons reports? Anything?”
    “Not yet. I talked to the state police and DHHS. It happened so close to the border that, if it’s okay with you, we’re going to be in on it, too.”
    “Which explains why they’re both calling me.”
    “ Something is going on near the river,” she said. “That’s our border. We need to know what.”
    When she left Hewitt’s office and crossed the bullpen, Scott Smith looked up from typing. “Anything I can