Road to the Innocent

By Lee McCarthy

Cassie Fletcher is a rising nature photographer who has left everything behind and moved with her horses and dog to a ranch in Arizona to take advantage of the beautiful landscape. But everything changes the day Cassie witnesses a horrific crime and captures the moment on film. When she is spotted by the perpetrators, a deadly pursuit follows. On a desperate run for her life, Cassie crosses the dangerous open range to find help and avoid capture by Mexican coyote, Chaco Gonzales. Cassie soon finds an unexpected protector in an old Navajo who attempts to lead her to the authorities and her parents. But when her parents fall into the clutches of the killers, Cassie’s only hope is in a United States marshal plagued by his past. Now Cassie must risk everything to save her parents and find her destiny in untamed territory tainted by evil. In this gripping tale, a photographer embarks on a perilous quest for help after she witnesses a shocking crime in the Arizona desert.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jan 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9781483463483

Book preview

adventure.

CHAPTER 1

T he low-slung, dark-bellied rainclouds threatened to dump their contents any minute as Cassie Fletcher drove desperately from the scene she had just witnessed. Part of her wanted a deluge to cover her retreat and tracks, but she was terrified of getting stuck in the sand and being found.

Nature made its own decision. The desert was ready for a drink. The rain came down so hard that the ground couldn’t absorb the water fast enough. Flash flooding soon started.

Cassie’s heart was in her mouth as her old, white truck fishtailed wildly down the slippery road. She couldn’t see through the windows that were sheeted with water to check her mirrors for pursuit by the monsters she had accidentally stumbled upon a few miles back. Why did I pick today to photograph the vivid colors of the rock cliffs? she asked herself. The light of course was the answer. And it was the light that had betrayed her presence—the overcast which always gives photos the gift of perfect distinction.

Cassie’s day had started as usual—rising before dawn, making coffee, feeding the horses, and rechecking her photos from the day before. Old fashioned it might be, but she preferred to have her own darkroom where she could retreat, breathe in the familiar smells of fixer and developer, and watch her pictures magically appear. Her parents always said she was born with a camera in her hand. They had never doubted her potential.

Cassie had been born and raised on a ranch outside Denver., Colorado. Her parents, Don and Peggy Fletcher, had had a very successful practice as physical therapists and had the luxury of setting their own hours. They spent their free time taking Cassie skiing or on horse camping trips all over the western United States. They raised their daughter in a strong Christian faith; they had taught her to give more to others than what she received and to believe in herself and her talents. After Don and Peggy gave Cassie her first camera, it became clear that photography was her future.

Earlier that morning as she settled her small form into the old porch rocker and sipped coffee, Cassie knew it would be the perfect day to shoot the pictures she wanted. The rising sun was mostly obscured by thunderheads as they marched across the October morning sky. As she looked west, what she considered to be her cliffs materialized and reached up majestically to catch the few rays of light reflecting all the hue and color she could wish for.

Cassie had moved to Arizona six months earlier. She had hauled all she had, including three horses and one dog, to take possession of a small, remote, fixer-upper ranch she had purchased about an hour outside of the town of Page. She had chosen that part of Arizona for its famous and beautiful landscape. What more could a photographer ask for in the land of the Grand Canyon, Vermillion Cliffs, and Colorado River?

At age twenty-six, Cassie was watching her star rise rapidly in the world of nature photography. She had also watched the star she assumed was her future with Matt Darnell plunge to earth, its light slowly extinguished by cruel and demeaning words. Matt couldn’t deal with Cassie’s success while he was drowning in his inability to make a name for himself as a photographer. She had met Matt in a human-form class at the University of Colorado in Denver and had fallen hard for his long, lanky frame, brown eyes, and sardonic smile. With her petite figure, short, curly, auburn hair and startling green eyes, Cassie and Matt looked the perfect match. Though she heard a little voice warning her not to jump in too quickly, she had thrown caution to the wind and had entered into a fast, passionate relationship with Matt.

After Cassie and Matt graduated with Bachelor’s Degrees in Fine Arts, Matt moved into Cassie’s house on several acres outside Denver. Her parents had gifted the property to her when they retired. They were through with the cold winters and wanted a warm, dry environment. With Cassie well on her way to a successful career, Don and Peggy sold their practice. The family had loved their camping trips to Arizona, so Don and Peggy bought a small ranchette in Cave Creek, an upscale horse community about thirty miles north of Scottsdale, where they spent the cooler months riding, hiking, and camping. They would pack up their horses and gear and spend the rest of the year at what they liked to call their headquarters, a larger ranch they had purchased outside Sedona. Cassie and her parents had a very close relationship and when work allowed, she would often fly down to Arizona for a visit; otherwise they talked on the phone most every day.

At first, Matt seemed to accept Cassie’s horses and her dog Mo, a Queensland heeler, but soon, he began grumbling when he had to feed the horses and take care of Mo when Cassie was busy traveling to promote her photography portfolio.

Cassie had chosen to ignore the signs that all was not well with their relationship and had focused on her work. After several local and regional shows featuring her photography, she started getting the calls she had dreamed about. She was soon away on shoots, traveling nationally and internationally to work with top nature publications and being paid handsomely for her work.

At first, the barbs and snide remarks Matt threw her way on her return from shoots were easy to shrug off; Cassie put it down to Matt’s having missed her. But when she and Matt were invited to a friend’s gallery opening, Matt had too much to drink and made an unforgivable scene by taunting Cassie and berating her in front of their colleagues. Acting like a petulant, jealous child, he loudly and drunkenly accused her of spending most of her time on her back in magazine CEOs’ secret boardrooms and suggesting that’s where her talent lay.

The gallery had gone silent. Cassie, not about to sink to Matt’s level, had kept her mouth shut. She simply stepped up to him, slapped his face, and with chin held high, silently and gracefully exited the room.

Later, recognizing he had gravely insulted his meal ticket, Matt apologized profusely and begged her forgiveness, even going so far as to propose marriage. Cassie realized history would repeat itself. She refused Matt’s apologies and demanded he move out.

It took weeks to evict the man, and more than once, she caught him trying to slip some of her camera equipment into his duffle bags. Cassie was blessed that her work didn’t restrict where she resided, so once Matt was gone for good, she sold her Colorado property.

Cassie hadn’t anticipated her property would sell as fast as it did, so when her best friend, Caitlyn Somers, insisted that Cassie and her animal family stay at her ranch, Cassie gratefully accepted. After a lot of prayer and soul searching, she decided to broaden her horizons. She checked out numerous listings and found exactly what she was looking for—a little but perfect Arizona ranch. It was extremely remote, on the Navajo reservation and not far from the beautiful Echo Cliffs. The sixty acres with its small ranch house and old but sturdy barn was just right. Cassie could ride, hike, and shoot photos all over the endless desert. Though she regretted moving from her friends, especially Caitlyn, it didn’t take her long to load up and head in the direction her parents had taken.

Once settled, Cassie easily slipped back into the routine of shooting for her magazine employers; demand for her photos was high, which suited Cassie just fine as the memories of Matt still stung. Immersing herself in her work, planning for future improvements to her property, as well as keeping her horses legged up had been just the ticket.

Until that morning.

As her truck threatened to slide into the flash flood of raging water to her right, Cassie tried to soothe Mo, who sensing her fear, was whining and licking her hand. She was scared to death, but having the dog with her at least gave her a small sense of comfort. Again, she tried to look for pursuers through her blurred, rain-washed mirrors. Failing to see anything, she turned her attention to making her way through the muck racing across what was once a road while images of the massacre she had witnessed flashed before her eyes.

CHAPTER 2

E arlier that day, Cassie thought she might miss out on the lighting she was after, so she had called Mo and run to the truck, taking off down the long, sandy drive that led from her ranch. Several faded, old roads led in different directions, but Cassie knew the one she wanted. She put the old truck into four-wheel drive, and after a slow thirty minutes, she reached her destination. The lighting was perfect! The sun shot just one beam of light through the thickening clouds, and everything stood out in bold relief. The reds, purples, blues, and vivid golds were leaping from the faces of the towering Echo Cliffs.

Deciding to leave Mo in the cab due to the area’s nasty desert puncture vine, Cassie swung out of the truck, camera gear in hand, and started shooting. She couldn’t get enough and kept walking through the gently rolling mesquite and sage-covered ground. Losing track of time, she suddenly looked up and realized a downpour was imminent. She would have to hustle to get back to her truck to avoid getting drenched. That’s when she saw an old van and a line of people, maybe twenty, kneeling in the sand. Curious, Cassie put her long telephoto lens up and ascertained they were young men, women, and children.

The unthinkable happened. Three men stepped out from behind the van with what looked like automatic rifles. To her horror, they methodically shot every person in the group. Though she was absolutely terrified, her photographer instincts kicked in. Her finger kept the camera shooting. But the lighting betrayed her. The camera flashed in the darkening morning. That was all it took; one of the men caught the flash and turned. He spotted Cassie, lifted his rifle, and took a wild shot at her and started running at her.

She froze for a second before spinning and sprinting to her truck, staying low and ducking as bursts of rifle fire whined through the air. Though small and agile, her panicked flight caused her to stumble over sage and she crashed into mesquite, whose thorns tore at her clothing and skin. Despairing she was being overtaken, she risked a look back and saw the armed killer had fallen behind. She desperately sucked air into her burning lungs, got to her truck, jumped in, and sped off through the brush. Looking back, she saw the man had seen her truck and its color and was sprinting back to where he had left the killing. Then the heavens opened up.

Once Cassie regained control of her truck, she vainly tried to look through the shroud of rain to figure out where she was. In her haste to get away, she hadn’t noticed in which direction she had gone. She couldn’t distinguish any landmarks through the downpour. But then, as is the way with desert storms, the rain suddenly dropped off and the sun struggled to part the clouds. Reddish-brown water and debris were running everywhere, speeding through widening furrows that had so shortly before been baked, spider webbed, cracked earth. Large pools of standing water had gathered on the flats of sand. If Cassie hadn’t been so terrified, she would have reveled in the fresh-washed color that sprang out around her.

Finally, with just enough sunlight, she could see the vague shapes of the cliffs in the distance, got her bearings, and drove as fast as possible through the slow sand that dragged at her tires, dodging piles of uprooted desert litter as she made her way home. With no sign of pursuit, she pulled into the barnyard and swiftly backed the truck into the barn, barred the doors, and raced to the house to call the authorities. Mo trailed worriedly behind her.

Cassie noted the silence the minute she ran into the house. From past experience she knew the storm had knocked out her power.. She checked her phone. It was out too. She hadn’t bothered to upgrade her old cell phone as service where she was was sketchy at best; the land line was her only means of communication with her employers, friends, and parents.

Nervously looking out the open front door, she saw it had started to pour again. Acutely aware of her need for help, she called Mo and ran to the barn. She fumbled with the big wooden bar across the twin doors. She jumped into the truck and started driving wildly back toward the distant highway. About five miles out from the ranch, to Cassie’s horror, her tires failed to grab sand as she hit a huge standing lake of water. Her truck slewed sideways over a small embankment with just enough speed for the truck to slowly roll over on its side.

She and Mo were tangled up on the driver’s side—Mo on the floor and she mashed up against the door. She felt warm blood on the side of her face. She touched the wound. It seemed superficial. She ran her hands over Mo’s short, stiff coat. Aside from being scared, he appeared fine.

She struggled up the bench seat, pulling the dog by his collar. It took all her strength to push the passenger door up. Falling to the ground, the two were immediately soaked by a fast-running stream of water and the rain. She scrambled to her feet and looked around to see if the killers were anywhere near. Seeing nothing, she tore a portion of cloth from her shirttail to stanch the wound at her hairline. She and Mo started trotting back the way she had come. Cassie despaired that the killers would spot her truck in the wide open and figure she wasn’t far off.

CHAPTER 3

B ack at the killing site, the three men were laboriously digging in the wet sand to create a trench for the dead immigrants. That was their trade—charging enormous fees to smuggle men and families out of Mexico and driving their van full of innocents to a remote desert area, robbing them, and killing them.

Chaco Gonzales growled at his men, Daniel Ruiz and Eduardo Vargas. We must dig faster and then find that woman. She could ruin everything!

Chaco was not about to let some nosy female destroy his lucrative business; the woman’s photos would reveal their faces; they had never needed to mask on this side of the border because they never left witnesses.

It was not the first time the gang had used this site. Chaco looked through the rain at the barely visible hillocks randomly scattered in the distance. He was satisfied with the site as the white sagebrush, pigweed, and Arizona thistle were quick to spread and help camouflage any disturbances. Due to the woman witnessing the execution, this was possibly the end of this particular burial site, but Chaco had others. He smugly contemplated the vastness of the Arizona desert.

Born in abject poverty to illiterate parents who had made their sparse living from wheedling and begging their neighbors or tourists for a few pesos, Chaco Gonzales grew up the hard, hungry way. From the time he was a boy, Chaco couldn’t wait to escape the acrid, tobacco-infused cardboard walls of his parents’ shanty that perched precariously on a hillside in Juarez, Mexico. He could barely tolerate his peyote-chewing father and his whining mother, who seemed continuously pregnant.

Chaco had learned quickly that if you ran with the bad boys, you picked up useful tidbits of criminal knowledge. He learned how to artfully steal a few pesos, which he kept hidden from his avaricious parents. As a teenager, kicked out early from the overcrowded excuse for a house, he picked up small jobs from local gangs and saved every peso short of starving. He swore to himself he would someday be rich and spent hours fantasizing how he might accomplish his goal.

One day as he was sitting on a bluff overlooking the Rio Grande and idly watching his people wait in the sludge of the river for a chance to dash across the border to El Paso, Texas, he got an idea. His cunning mind, sharply developed by his tenacity to learn the ropes and stay alive, realized he could make money charging people for smuggling them across the border without detection from the ever-present Border Patrol.

Chaco Gonzales became a coyote, a smuggler of illegal immigrants, and he and his partners in Mexico had become very rich preying on the innocent. The immigrants paid $4,000 each to cross the border on foot, and Chaco charged them an additional $2,000 for their ride to safety and a new life. They did not know they were headed for lonely graves in the desert covered with lime to keep the animals off and to hasten decomposition.

Chaco was a greedy man, but he paid his hired accomplices well. With continual promises of future riches, he ensured their loyalty. He needed his men to be trustworthy as well as having a thorough knowledge of the Arizona territory they were working in. Chaco heartlessly justified his bloody crimes by claiming he was releasing stupid people from their miserable, poverty-stricken lives. He had exclaimed to his men in mocking laughter that he was saving the United States from a burgeoning population of more mouths to feed.

He wasn’t the first to dispose of desperate people trying to cross the border, but so far, he and his men had eluded the authorities by carefully plotting their pickup and disposal sites as well as having someone on the inside. He also regularly rotated his recruiters in Mexico and kept them masked to avoid them being identified by anyone related to the immigrants they smuggled across the border.

His men vetted the immigrants well, choosing only those who were seeking new homes and lives in America and who had at least some means based on how they were dressed and if they wore jewelry. Mexico was overrun with criminal young men trying for the border, but Chaco wisely avoided assisting them across as they could easily turn on him and his men. So far, by paying his employees well and keeping his head low, he had not been reported to the Mexican authorities, and once the ignorant innocents had crossed the border, they were his. Arizona had become his state of choice.

As Chaco bent to his task, he contemplated his immediate problem—finding the female witness who could turn his business upside down. Those thoughts led directly to another—the drug cartels in Mexico. A fast-rising cartel by the name of Jalisco New Generation was crowding him; they were trying to find new places to smuggle their drug products into the United States. They dealt in human trafficking too; Chaco had stumbled across some of their people near what he considered his area of business. Though the cartel’s headquarters was deep in Mexico, Chaco resented their growth and interference, but he also knew they were just as dangerous and ruthless as he was. They wouldn’t hesitate to take him or his carefully orchestrated operation down.

Once finished with their grisly job, the men got into the van and drove off in the direction where Chaco had seen Cassie. Cursing loudly, Chaco realized that the downpour had washed away any sign the woman may have left behind. Nothing was distinguishable. If he had not known the country so well, even he might get lost.

Keeping the oversized van from getting stuck meant a long and laborious drive back the way they had come. They had to stop twice to stack debris under the tires to release the van from the quicksand-like muck. Not once did the men think of the tears and pleads for mercy from their victims. Other than their driving need to find and silence the woman, they were already thinking of the next trip to the border.

Soaking wet with her head wound pounding, exhausted by fear and the slow, sloppy hike back to the ranch, Cassie desperately needed rest, but finding a way to get to help was her priority. Furiously thinking, she remembered her horses but dismissed the idea. However, there was no other method of travel; she hadn’t been at the ranch long enough to think about buying an ATV let alone needing anything other than her trusty old truck. She had a critical decision to make. She realized she had to take one of her horses. Her three horses weren’t young, but they were sturdy, broke, quarter horses with deep chests and good, solid bone. Cassie decided on Sam, her fifteen-year-old chocolate gelding.

She changing into dry clothing, grabbed her hat and slicker, and hastily bagged her precious camera with its incriminating evidence. She stuffed a bottle of water and a couple of power bars into her pockets and bolted from the house toward the barn and horse pen in the back. Calling Mo, she snagged a halter off a peg, caught Sam at the feed bin, and dragged him to the tack room. Tying Sam to a post, Cassie ran back to the feed corral and threw an extra couple of hefty leaves of hay into the rack for her other two horses, Cuervo and Kit. The horses had access to a turn-out field and normally continual piped water to their trough. She prayed the power would be restored soon, but it was a 300 gallon trough, full to the brim, and with the continuous rain, the two horses should be fine. Sensing Cassie’s anxiety, Sam was dancing around, uncertain about the negative vibes oozing from his mistress’s normally relaxed and quietly moving body. Trying to sooth Sam with soft words, she threw a pad and saddle over his broad back, hooked her camera bag over the saddle horn, and stowed her short supplies in her saddlebags. With shaking hands, she got Sam’s headstall over his ears and bitted him up. Ruefully, she looked over at the dusty, cobweb-covered clay thrower she used for shotgun practice sitting in the corner and wished she had her shotgun, but she had left it in Sedona with her dad to take it to a gunsmith for an inertia spring replacement. Shaking her head at the loss of her weapon, she two-handed the saddle horn and flew into the seat.

Sam pounded out of the barn into the rain. Cassie had her hands full trying to keep him from bolting as he continued to sense her fear, and Mo wasn’t helping with all his barking and jumping at her side. She couldn’t immediately think which way to go. She couldn’t go out her own road as the chance of running across the three men was too great. She would have to head out across the desert. She hadn’t had a chance to get to know anybody due to her constant travel; now she prayed she would find somebody living nearby in the sparsely populated area.

Chaco recognized the overturned truck. He knew the woman was on foot and couldn’t be too far ahead. Her partially obscured rain-filled boot prints led off to the east, though Chaco could see nothing in the distance. He had no idea where she was headed. He turned to Daniel and Eduardo with an evil grin on his flat, pitted face. Let’s track her down.

The van pulled ahead, but the wet sand continuously sucked the tires down, making their progress difficult. Chaco grew increasingly agitated. He felt his prey slipping from his grasp.

CHAPTER 4

D eputy US Marshal and Special Agent Drew Pearson threw a sheaf of papers down on his scarred desk, frustration and anger etched on his face. Based in Tucson for the last four years, Drew had been more than successful at apprehending illegal immigrants and sending them back across the border, but he was currently stonewalled. He was stalking a true monster, a ruthless man suspected of smuggling hundreds of illegal immigrants into the United States who was also wanted for the murder of a ranching family that had lived close to the border. The man’s name was Chaco Gonzales. He had repeatedly eluded Drew.

Beneath a shock of unruly, sandy-blond hair shone dark-blue eyes that complemented his easy smile, but that smile became grim and his eyes darkened to a flinty gray when his thoughts turned to his quarry. At six two and a fit 190 pounds, the thirty-year-old had chased and wrestled down his share of criminals. He wouldn’t be described as handsome, but there was a ruggedness about the man that made women turn their heads for a second look.

Drew’s fellow officers respected and held him in a bit of awe having witnessed what kind of justice he doled out to the bad guys. In that part of Arizona, the men who dealt with some of the scum who came their way were known to get a crick in their neck that prevented them from turning their heads while a little extra justice was served up in the form of a powerful roundhouse punch.

Turning back to the latest reports that told him nothing, Drew stared at the picture of Chaco Gonzales on the wall. The guy was downright ugly with the eyes of the devil himself. Drew pulled another grainy photo from a file on his desk and imagined Chaco as a squat Gila monster—dark, slithering, evil. He grimaced and chuckled at the same time thinking Chaco’s mother must have fainted at the sight of him at birth. But Drew did not underestimate the criminal. What lay under Chaco’s shaved head and scarred face was a crafty, wily mind that knew no compassion or love but just cruelty and wanton disregard for human life. Chaco was also suspected of kidnapping, rape, human trafficking, and the possible murder of no fewer than a hundred illegal immigrants.

Prior to returning to Tucson, Drew had attended and graduated from Arizona State’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law in Phoenix. Being so close to the border, he had a morbid fascination with the stories of the increasing influx of illegal immigrants, some of whom had committed crimes of theft and robbery as soon as they got to the States. He had compassion for those who sought work and were willing to become legal citizens, but he had a profound hatred for those who came to commit heinous crimes against his fellow Americans.

Drew came by his