Field of Bones: A Brady Novel of Suspense (Joanna Brady Mysteries)

by J. A. Jance

  Butch paused then, as if to take a breath. “Oops,” he added, finally noticing from Joanna’s long silence that he’d been in full-on rant mode. “Did I go too far and step in it?”

  Butch seldom had that much to say, but on those rare occasions when he did, Joanna had learned to pay attention.

  “No,” she told him. “I don’t think you went too far at all.”

  When I was growing up, what I wanted more than anything was to be a Texas Ranger, because being a Texas Ranger was the exact opposite of anything my worthless father would ever be or do.

  When I left home and came to Arizona, hoping to work in the mines, that’s one of the reasons I settled on Bisbee—because this is where Texas John Slaughter came. Cochise County felt like the Old West to me. Tombstone was here—the town too tough to die. The shoot-out at the O.K. Corral was here, and so were Wyatt Earp and the Clanton Gang. I wanted to be part of it.

  Last week I saw an ad in the paper that the sheriff’s department is hiring. I’m close to the top of the age bracket to get in, so it’s pretty much now or never. When I checked out the pay scale, I can see it would mean a big drop in pay compared to what I make working underground. Ellie and I would have to cut corners, of course, but we could probably make it. When I mentioned it to Ellie, she hit the roof. Why would I even think of giving up a sure thing like working in the mines to go to work as a cop?

  Except that’s what I’ve always wanted to do—be a cop, and if I can keep the bills paid and food on the table, why the hell not? Yes, Ellie’s my wife, but why should she get to say where I spend eight hours a day of my life for the next umpteen years? Because working underground in the dark is not a walk in the park. It’s a dirty, mind-numbing, soul-killing job. Sure, there’s a lot of high jinks and joking around and banter and stuff, but the guys in the stopes sure as hell don’t want their kids working underground. They want them to go on to college and get an education and make something of themselves. Do as I say, not as I do.

  If we still had our son, I’m sure I’d feel exactly the same way and do everything in my power to keep him from choosing “the sure thing.” I’d want to encourage him to go after what he wants to do—what makes him happy rather than what pays the bills.

  But of course we don’t have our son. He’s forever lost to us. We don’t have any kids at all and most likely never will, so again, why shouldn’t I do what I want to do?

  I don’t think this is the kind of discussion Ellie expected me to have when she gave me this journal and told me to “talk to the book.” But it turns out that talking to the book is helping me. It’s making me think about stuff that I might not think about otherwise.

  The deadline for applications is next week. We’ll see what happens.

  Unable to read any further, Joanna closed the book, turned off the lamp, and sat in the quiet darkness of the living room, thinking. Lady, Joanna’s rescued Australian shepherd, lay on the sofa beside her while Jenny’s deaf black Lab, Lucky, sprawled at her feet. With Jenny away at school, Lucky now literally dogged Joanna’s heels wherever she went.

  Absently stroking Lady’s soft coat, Joanna realized that in reading that passage she had just caught a glimpse of her father on the cusp of making a life-and-death decision, and one that had indeed cost him his life years later. It was the same decision Joanna herself had made nine years earlier, and the circumstances of their separate decision-making processes couldn’t have been more different.

  At the time her father had been a married man—for all intents and purposes a childless married man—with no hint that another child, Joanna, would ever come into his life. He had entered law enforcement as the fulfillment of a lifelong ambition. His working underground had been a chore, one he had done out of duty—to support the woman who’d given up so much to marry him—and he’d gone into law enforcement over her express objections. Being a deputy was something D. H. Lathrop had wanted, something Eleanor had not.

  Joanna had landed in law enforcement almost by accident—not because it was what she’d always wanted to do. She hadn’t chosen that profession because her father had been a cop, and not exactly because her husband had been a cop, either. Her first husband, Andrew Roy Brady, had been a deputy sheriff who had gone to war with his boss at the time, Sheriff Walter McFadden. Andy had decided to run for office against what he regarded to be a corrupt administration, Joanna had supported his effort without really understanding how deep the corruption ran or how dangerous it could be.

  When candidate Andrew Brady was gunned down in a hail of bullets and subsequently died, Joanna hadn’t even considered the idea that she might run for office in his place. She didn’t remember for sure if it was at Andy’s funeral or at the reception afterward when someone had first broached the subject of her taking up Andy’s cause and running for office in his place.

  At first it seemed like a joke to her. She was a widow—a single mother with a nine-year-old child. And yet after more and more people asked her, she finally agreed—not because she thought she’d win, not because she had wanted to win, and certainly not out of an overriding desire to be sheriff. It had simply seemed right somehow. And when she finally did win, that had seemed right, too.

  Now she was sheriff in the same way her father, D. H. Lathrop, had been sheriff. He’d earned it, and so had she—by doing the job. And that’s how she thought of herself now—as a sheriff rather than as a wife or a mother or a woman or anything else for that matter. Where had that come from? Was it in her DNA? Had D. H. Lathrop bequeathed his own law-enforcement ambitions to his daughter? Was that her inheritance?

  And that being the case, what kind of inheritance was Joanna leaving her own children?

  A tiny wail of protest from Sage’s nursery indicated it was time for one final round of nursing and diaper changing before Joanna could go to bed. It was also time for her to stop ruminating about being a sheriff or a wife or a daughter and concentrate on being a mother.

  Chapter 7

  THE VOICES OF THE OTHER GIRLS HAD OFFERED SOME SMALL MEASURE of comfort in the darkness. They told one another stories; kept one another company. After Amelia showed up, she sometimes sang to them. Her songs were always in Spanish. She said they were ones she had learned from her grandmother. Latisha hadn’t understood a word of them, but Amelia had a pretty voice, and Latisha liked hearing her sing.

  Sadie, who managed to make jokes out of almost everything, had said it was like sitting around a campfire telling ghost stories, only there was no fire and no marshmallows. With Latisha on her own, there was still no fire, and instead of ghost stories or songs there were only ghosts.

  She remembered that one of her teachers at Christ the King—a nun named Sister Martha who hadn’t worn a habit—had told the class that all civilizations had their origin stories—tales that told where they came from and why. The same thing was true of the girls in the basement.

  “I don’t think I was the first,” Sandra had told Latisha early on. “I think someone else was here before I got here, but she was gone before I came along.”

  “But where did you come from?” Latisha had asked. “And when?”

  “From California,” Sandy replied. “It was winter and raining. I was living with a couple of girls in a tent in a homeless camp in Orange County when a guy came through recruiting for a PHT.”

  “A what?”

  “A panhandling team. He said he’d give us a place to stay and something to eat. Each morning he would drive us around in a van, drop us off at various locations with handmade signs, and then come back to pick us up late in the afternoon. Once we divided up that day’s take, he’d give us a ride back to the crash pad. There were nine of us squatting in a bank-owned two-bedroom house, but we all had beds and running water, so it beat sleeping on the beach. It beat being here.”

  “How did you meet him?” Latisha asked.

  They all knew who “him” was—the Boss. They didn’t know his name, but he was the man who had brought them here, the lord o
f their universe, the one in control, the one with the power of life and death.

  “The house was in Valencia, but we mostly worked freeway entrances, gas stations, truck stops along I-5. I liked the truck stops best. Most of the drivers were good guys. It was a really cold day in January, and I was working the entrance to a Flying J. There had been snow on the Grapevine, so there were lots of trucks parked and waiting for the weather to clear. I was standing outside, shivering—not having a decent coat and looking cold and miserable always made for better money. So this guy comes out of the restaurant and hands me a cup of hot chocolate—at least that’s what he said it was. I was cold, and the cocoa was warm, so I drank it. And it tasted good, but right after I drank it, I started feeling funny. The next thing I knew, I woke up in a bed behind the cab of his truck, tied hand and foot with duct tape over my mouth.”

  “And you?” Latisha asked, facing toward the sound of Sadie’s voice even though Sadie herself was invisible.

  “I was hitchhiking in Oregon,” came the answer. “I’d gone to Oregon with a guy I knew. Charlie was older than me, but he had a car, a job offer in Portland, and he was willing to take me along for the ride. I wanted out of North Carolina in the worst way, and off we went. I didn’t find out until days later that he was into drugs big time. When we got to Oregon, naturally the job offer didn’t pan out. We were living in a homeless camp in Portland when Charlie died of an overdose. It was cold as hell, and I didn’t know anyone there, so I decided to head back home—hitchhiking. I didn’t get far. The Boss offered me a ride somewhere south of Eugene. And here I am.”

  “When was this?” Latisha asked.

  “Charlie died on Valentine’s Day. The Boss picked me up a few days later.”

  “So we were about a month apart, then,” Latisha said. “He got me the middle of March.”

  “Where?”

  “New Orleans.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  For a time Latisha didn’t answer. She hadn’t been a Catholic when she attended Christ the King, but she had learned a lot about what was a sin and what wasn’t. Begging wasn’t a sin, and neither was hitchhiking. Working as a whore on the streets? That was a sin, all right.

  And how had it happened? At Christ the King, they’d given her an achievement test and then had put her back a whole grade. Even with kids a year younger than she was, school had been a struggle. If she’d started there earlier, it might have worked, but by middle school she was already so far behind that she just couldn’t catch up.

  So she attended Christ the King, but she didn’t make friends there. She preferred hanging out with kids from the neighborhood. When it came time for her to start high school, Lyle pretty much gave up trying to fix her, and he let her go to University City High School with her friends. The other freshmen were fourteen. She was a year older, and that’s when she met Trayvon Littlefield. He was a really cool guy, a friend of a friend of a friend, who happened to be a gangbanger visiting from out of town. He had a fancy car—a black Camaro—several gold teeth, plenty of money, and lots of tattoos. He treated Latisha like a queen, promised to give her whatever she wanted, and told her everything she wanted to hear—including the idea that her parents were out of line and holding her back. He said he wanted to take her far away from University City and give her the life of her dreams.

  Naturally, Lyle and Lou Ann had hated the guy. They told her that Trayvon was scum—a no-good, useless excuse for a human being. Latisha fought with them over that, arguing that they were wrong, wrong, wrong about him, but of course it turned out they hadn’t been wrong at all. Soon after running away with Trayvon, she learned that the guy she’d thought of as Prince Charming wasn’t. He was nothing more than a pimp who took her to New Orleans, threw her out on the streets in the French Quarter in the middle of Mardi Gras, and expected her to earn her keep.

  And that was how she had come to be here. A year later she was a seasoned pro, and that’s when the Boss had found her—still working the streets. He’d pulled up next to her in a big black SUV. They had conducted their business in the usual fashion, negotiating terms through his open passenger window. As she climbed inside the vehicle, Latisha had wondered what would happen if the john turned out to be an undercover cop. Unfortunately, she wasn’t that lucky.

  No sooner had she slid onto the passenger seat and shut the door behind her than she felt the sharp prick of a needle biting into her bare thigh. That was the last thing she remembered for days on end. She had vague memories of being confined to a bed, a bunk of some kind, in a moving vehicle—a big truck, most likely. However long the trip had taken, it had been just like Sadie’s. Latisha had been bound, gagged, and sedated for most of it.

  By the time she landed in the dungeon, Latisha was seventeen years old and had already had two abortions. She knew what her mother would say about that. And Lyle, not to mention the nuns at Christ the King.

  “I was turning tricks,” Latisha admitted aloud at last.

  “Hey,” Sadie said. “Are you still here? You were quiet for so long that I thought you’d gone to sleep—or maybe Scotty had beamed you up.”

  “Who’s Scotty?”

  “You don’t know Scotty? You mean to tell me you never watched reruns of Star Trek on TV?”

  “Never.”

  “Your loss, then,” Sadie said. “Stick with us, girl. We’ll teach you everything you need to know.”

  But Sadie with her funny jokes was gone now. So was Sandy with her talk of chocolate-chip cookies, along with Amelia and her sweet-voiced songs.

  Amelia Salazar, the last to arrive, had landed in the basement months after Latisha and sometime in the summer, since a thunderstorm had been raging outside. When the Boss carried her downstairs that first time, they’d both been soaking wet.

  Amelia was sixteen at the time, and the youngest of any of them. Orphaned at an early age, she’d grown up living with her grandmother, Cecilia Diaz, on a desolate plot of land located on an unnamed road west of Juárez, Mexico. Everyone knew that many of the young girls who went to Juárez to find jobs were never heard from again. It was what had happened to Amelia’s mother. Fearing that history might repeat itself and out of concern for her granddaughter’s safety, Cecilia had sent Amelia to El Paso to live with her aunt, Rosa Moreno.

  Rosa, Cecilia’s older daughter, was lucky enough to have a green card. Antonio, the husband who had made her green card possible, had long since disappeared, but Rosa remained in the States. She had a job as a maid at a marginal motel on the outskirts of town and assured her mother that the owner would give Amelia a job, too, once she turned sixteen.

  A week after her sixteenth birthday, Amelia turned up at the border crossing. She’d had enough documentation to be allowed to walk through customs and into her auntie’s arms, where she promptly became yet another illegal immigrant in a population of illegal immigrants. The under-the-table wages that the motel manager paid her were far greater than she would have been able to earn in Juárez, and she was thrilled to be able to send money home to her grandmother.

  On the Fourth of July, she had left Aunt Rosa’s trailer and walked a few blocks away to where some of the neighborhood kids were setting off fireworks. Later, walking home along Castner Drive, she’d been approached by a man in an SUV who pulled up beside her and asked directions. When she went to talk to him, he grabbed her by the arm and hauled her into the vehicle.

  “There’s a pattern here,” Sandra said. “He did this in January, February, March, and July. What about the other months? Or maybe there were others before he found us.”

  “Maybe they got away,” Latisha suggested.

  “I don’t think so,” Sadie said. “Maybe he just didn’t bring them back here.”

  But Latisha wasn’t buying it. “I still think they got away,” she insisted.

  It’s what she wanted to believe. It’s what she had to believe.

  Chapter 8

  THE CARAVAN OF VEHICLES THAT LEFT BISBEE HEADING FOR THE Pelonc
illos bright and early on Saturday morning might well have been dubbed a criminal-justice parade. Detective Deb Howell led the motorcade in her Tahoe, intent on picking up June and Jack Carver from their home in Douglas. That way, with Jack along to provide directions, she could lead the other investigators to the crime scene.

  Dave Hollicker, Joanna’s chief CSI, was next in line, behind the wheel of the county’s new Ford Transit evidence van. Next up came the medical examiner, Dr. Kendra Baldwin, driving her all-wheel-drive Honda CRV. Dr. Baldwin had two morgue assistants, officially known as dieners. One of the two, a guy named Ralph Whetson, followed his boss in the morgue’s official vehicle, a Dodge Caravan, a minivan everyone in the department routinely referred to as “the body wagon.”

  Acting Sheriff Hadlock brought up the rear of the procession, driving the Yukon that had once been Joanna’s. That had been passed along to him in anticipation of the delivery of a new Ford Interceptor SUV, which was due to make its appearance about the time Joanna was scheduled to return from maternity leave.

  Tom was one of the veterans in the department, and he looked the part of an Arizona sheriff. The man had a middle-aged girth to him. The Stetson he customarily wore concealed a receding hairline and his sparse gray comb-over. He had hired on as a deputy back in the day when D. H. Lathrop was still running the show. Hadlock had moved out of patrol and into jail management early on in the four-term administration of D.H.’s successor, Walter McFadden.