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

by J. A. Jance

  Trying to help her navigate the descent, Garth aimed the flashlight in her direction. His rescuer wore a leather jacket that was several sizes too big for her, but other than that she appeared to be naked. Her feet were bare, and she was so painfully thin that she reminded him of photos he’d seen of starving prisoners hanging listlessly on the fences of Nazi concentration camps.

  “Turn off the light,” she told him. “It’s not helping. I can see better without it.”

  That surprised him. How was she was able to see in the dark when he couldn’t?

  “Do you know anything about first aid?”

  “No,” she said. “Do you?”

  With him giving directions, she used the scissors from the first-aid kit to cut off his pant leg. They replaced the belt tourniquet with a proper one. Latisha cut open one packet of the clotting agent and sprinkled the powder into the wound. Then, donning latex gloves, she applied pressure to the wound for the specified amount of time—a seemingly endless three minutes—before covering the wound with a layer of compression bandages.

  During the entire process, it was all business between them—a period of total concentration with no small talk. By the time they finished, Garth realized that the sky was gradually turning gray overhead. His leg still hurt like hell, but thanks to her he might live long enough to see the sunrise.

  As the light changed, he realized how very young and frail she was, and barefoot, too. And underneath that bulky, oversize jacket, she was entirely naked—an awkward reality for him but one she didn’t appear to notice.

  Once the bandaging was complete, she sank down onto the ground beside him with her whole body quaking. It was easy for Garth to attribute the chills to her state of undress. He had a spare uniform in the Tahoe. It would be huge on her, but no more so than the jacket she was already wearing. Still, he hesitated to mention it.

  “Thank you,” he said instead. “My name is Garth—Garth Raymond. What’s yours?”

  “Latisha Marcum.”

  “You’re shaking,” he said. “You’re freezing, and you’re probably in shock.”

  “I’m hungry,” she answered. “I need some food, but I lost my kibble in the wreck. The container broke.”

  “Your kibble?” he said. “What’s kibble?”

  “Dog food,” she answered. “I brought some kibble along, and water, too, but the containers either spilled or broke during the wreck.”

  “Wait, you eat dog food?” he asked in disbelief.

  “It’s all he ever gave us to eat.”

  “He who? The guy who shot me?”

  Latisha nodded. “We called him the Boss,” she said simply. “That’s what he made us call him.”

  That was when the light finally dawned. Garth had heard some of the talk when he’d come on duty that afternoon—idle speculation that the field of bones might have something to do with a serial killer who first abducted young women and held them prisoner before murdering them. He realized now that Latisha had to be one of those, but instead of being dead she was a survivor.

  “How long were you with him?” he asked.

  Latisha shrugged. “What month is it now?”

  “The end of November.”

  “Since March, then,” she said. “He picked me up in New Orleans a while after Mardi Gras ended. He drugged me, put me in the cab of a truck, and brought me here. I’ve been here ever since.”

  Garth took a breath. “Thank you so much for the help,” he said. “We’ve stopped the bleeding, but it hurts like hell, and I might still go into shock. We need to get me to an ER as soon as possible. Can you help me make it back up the bank?”

  Without answering, Latisha got up and walked to the far side of the wrecked truck. She came back a few minutes later wearing a pair of boots that appeared to be at least two sizes too large. Then, with shoes on her feet, the two of them began the long, slow climb out of the ravine. It was a daunting struggle. The clotting powder seemed to be working, so Garth loosened the tourniquet, releasing a storm of pins and needles into his bloodless leg. When he tried to stand on it, though, the pain was excruciating. The only way to get the job done was for him to scoot along on his butt while Latisha guided him from behind, pushing him as needed.

  They made it finally, but the superhuman effort cost them both. Crawling on his hands and one good knee, Garth made it as far as the Tahoe. There, panting and exhausted, he propped himself against one of the back wheels to rest and catch his breath.

  “You’re bleeding again,” Latisha observed.

  It was true. Blood was beginning to seep through the layer of bandages.

  “Is there another packet of clotting powder?” he asked.

  “Three more,” she said, “but I left the first-aid kit down below. I’ll go back down and get it.”

  Once again the trip down and back seemed to take forever. When she returned, Garth was redoing the tourniquet. After removing the bandage, he saw that the bleeding wasn’t as serious as it had been before. Even so, together they repeated the entire process. The pressure Latisha applied during the required three-minute wait hurt like crazy, but Garth was grateful for that. You had to be alive to know that it hurt.

  Initially his idea had been to head for the nearest ranch house and use the residents’ landline to summon help. Now, though, he realized it would make more sense to drive west on Geronimo Trail until they caught a signal and could call for help from there. That way a 911 operator would be able to send an ambulance and EMTs to meet them somewhere en route. Closing the distance would mean saving time, but considering the amount of blood he’d already lost, there was still a very real possibility of his going into shock. Garth knew he was in no condition to be behind the wheel.

  “Can you drive?” he asked.

  “I suppose,” Latisha replied ruefully, “but not very well. I already wrecked one car tonight.”

  “That’s because you were going too fast for conditions,” he told her. “We’ll take it slow—slow and steady wins the race.”

  At last the three-minute hold time was up. With Latisha standing next to him, Garth occupied himself by applying the new layer of bandages. Not wanting to embarrass her, he was careful to keep his eyes focused on what he was doing rather than on her when he spoke.

  “There’s one other thing,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re probably going to run into some other people. There’s an athletic bag in the back of the SUV, right next to where you found the first-aid kit. It’s got an extra uniform in it. You might want to put some clothes on.”

  With a gasp of shocked surprise, Latisha scurried away from him. She reappeared a few minutes later wearing both the jacket and his uniform. She’d had to roll up the pant legs to keep them from dragging on the ground. One of the boots, now devoid of its shoelace, flopped loosely on her foot.

  “I had to use the shoelace to hold up the pants,” she explained. “They kept falling off.”

  “Okay,” he said, “I think I’m better now. Let’s do this.”

  Again it took both of them working together to get him up off the ground and boosted into the Tahoe’s passenger seat. While Latisha went around to enter on the driver’s side, Garth opened a plastic bag. As she slipped onto the seat next to him, he handed her a sandwich.

  “This is one of my grandmother’s meat-loaf sandwiches—the last one I brought along,” he told her. “If you’ve spent months eating nothing but dry dog food, this is gonna taste like heaven.”

  He expected her to grab the sandwich and wolf the whole thing down at once. Instead she took a single careful bite, chewed it, swallowed it, and then put the remainder of the sandwich back in the plastic bag before handing it to him.

  “Wait,” he objected. “You mean you don’t like it?”

  “I love it,” she replied. “I’ve never eaten anything better in my life, but I’m used to eating one piece of kibble at a time. If I eat the whole thing, I’ll make myself sick, and I don’t want to waste a s
ingle mouthful.”

  “Okay,” he said, placing the bag on the console. “When you’re ready for bite number two, let me know.”

  Chapter 33

  SPEEDING BACK THE WAY HE’D COME, JIMMY ARDMORE COULDN’T believe the catastrophe that had befallen him. Not only had Latisha gotten away, he’d killed a cop. It just didn’t get any worse than killing a cop, but the guy had caught him unawares with the gun in his hand. And after that little bitch kneed him in the balls, he’d lost it—just flat lost it. Next thing he knew, the guy—a deputy of some kind—was shot to shit, lying on the ground and not moving. Where the hell had he come from?

  Jimmy knew this area like the back of his hand. He was used to driving these roads at all hours of the day and night. He often encountered Border Patrol vehicles out here, but almost never anybody from the local sheriff’s department—at least not in the middle of the night. So what was up? Was it possible somebody had located his burial grounds?

  He had left Arthur out in the open for the vultures and scavengers as a sign of disrespect. He had disposed of the first few girls by burying them in shallow graves out behind Arthur’s house. But digging in the hard-packed dirt had turned out to be too much like work. It wasn’t as if he could hire some handy Mexican to do the job for him. He’d decided to leave the last few girls with Arthur, but what if somebody had found them? What if they’d found Amelia? It was time to put the exit strategy in motion, all right, and in one hell of a hurry, too.

  He had always planned to burn Calhoun to the ground when he was ready to be quit of it—that’s why he had all those loaded gas cans. Harrison Ardmore’s final legacy would come crashing down in a firestorm of flame and ash—as close to hellfire and brimstone as Jimmy could make it. Now, though, with a cop dead and Latisha on the loose, there was no time for those kinds of niceties. Besides, somebody beset with occasional dizzy spells had no business messing around with gas cans and matches. Nope, Jimmy needed to get away fast and clean.

  Any trucker worth his salt and passing through El Paso knows the drill. Somebody strikes up a casual conversation in a truck stop or at a rest area and offers you a ton of money to deliver a load of “product” to someone somewhere else. It was always best not to know exactly what the problematic product was, and if you took the deal, you sure as hell better not renege on it. Mules who didn’t make their required drop-offs tended to drop off themselves, usually sooner than later. It was risky, yes, but it was a way to make some money on the side that didn’t have to go through the company’s books and sure as hell didn’t involve the IRS, either.

  Over the years, in the course of running that little side business, Jimmy Ardmore had made numerous connections with lots of useful people. And he had one in mind at this very moment—Tony Segura. Tony was a U.S.-based fixer for a network of Juárez drug cartels. If the price was right, he could book flights, obtain visas, create counterfeit documents, make real-estate purchases, move money from one place to another, and handle a myriad of pesky but vital details. For people interested in disappearing without a trace, Tony Segura was a one-stop shop.

  But before Jimmy could avail himself of Tony’s services, he had to get to El Paso. Now that he had killed a cop, that might not be easy.

  Two miles outside of Road Forks was a failed and long-abandoned feedlot. Most of the buildings had been gone for years, but the concrete loading dock and the earthen chute they’d used to drive livestock in and out of trucks were still there. That’s where Jimmy headed. The front gate was padlocked shut, but a bolt cutter from Arthur’s ever-present toolbox made short work of that. Jimmy parked the Subaru out of sight behind the lot’s sole remaining tin shed and then hiked into town.

  Arthur’s hand-me-down Johnston & Murphys were a little too big, and they weren’t exactly built for cross-country hiking. By the time Jimmy made it to the truck stop, he had a popped blister on his heel and the soles of his feet were killing him—damn Latisha anyway! The grinding headache was back, too, but in all the excitement the bouts of crippling dizziness had mostly abated.

  He got to the restaurant around eight and slid onto a stool at the counter just as Arlene, his favorite waitress, came on duty. “Hey there, stranger,” she said, approaching him with a ready smile. “Coffee?”

  “You bet,” he said.

  She took out her order pad. “What can I get you today?”

  “My usual, the I-10 All-American, two eggs over easy with crisp bacon, hash browns, and pancakes instead of toast. I’m going to be heading out for L.A. in a little while, and I need to stock up.”

  “Isn’t L.A. where you went last time?” Arlene asked. “Don’t you get tired of driving the same old route over and over?”

  “Not really,” he said. “Once I got to L.A., they had me run a load up to Seattle, so I had a little side trip before I came home. I was planning on taking a couple of days off to do some chores out at my brother’s place, but the boss called and needs me back on the road. Between time off or money in my pocket, money wins.”

  “Good for you,” Arlene said. “You take care now. Your food should be coming right up.”

  Jimmy sat quietly, drinking his coffee until she returned with his order. “I noticed a lot of police activity out our way overnight. Any idea what’s going on?”

  Arlene was the closest thing Road Forks had to a daily newspaper. “The way I hear it,” she said, “they found a whole bunch of bodies—seven or eight of them, maybe—out there by that dead volcano. The cops from Arizona are all over it.”

  I’m sure they are, Jimmy thought, and that means I’m out of here!

  After breakfast he walked back over to his place. He felt no sentiment about leaving it behind. He took nothing with him, not so much as a change of clothing and most especially not his cell phone. He’d be starting over from scratch. He simply locked the door and walked away.

  He started his rig and drove over to the diesel pumps to fill up. When he went inside to pay, he bought a pre-paid cell phone while chatting up the cashier, telling her the same thing he’d just told Arlene—that he was doing another back-to-back trip to L.A.

  Jimmy knew the locations of the truck stop’s security cameras, and there was one on the edge of the property that provided a clear view of the freeway interchange. He drove straight there and then up and over before turning onto the westbound entrance ramp with the security camera capturing his every move. What the security camera didn’t catch was him exiting the westbound freeway three miles later, crossing the freeway, and then driving eastbound along the frontage road until he came back to the defunct feedlot.

  He got out, removed the damaged padlock, which from a distance looked as though it were just fine. Backing up to the loading dock, he opened the door. Arthur’s nimble little Subaru had no difficulty negotiating the livestock chute or bridging the six-inch gap between the end of the loading dock and the bed of the trailer. He drove the Subaru all the way to the front of the trailer, turned off the engine, and set the parking brake. Raiding his traveling tool kit, Jimmy located the adjustable straps that he used to stabilize loads. He crawled under the Subaru, secured straps to both the front and back bumpers, and then fastened those to the pins in the tie-down rails. Once the job was done, he knew that if he had to stop someplace in a hurry, the Subaru wasn’t going anywhere.

  He worked as fast as he could, because he didn’t want to be at the loading dock of that deserted feedlot for a moment longer than necessary. One of the locals, someone who lived around here, might spot that distinctive blue Peterbilt and recognize it as his.

  Once Jimmy finished loading, he closed the back doors and headed out. At 9:05 A.M. he paused long enough to replace the chain and the still-broken padlock on the gate. Then he drove westbound on the frontage road, returning to the place where he’d exited, and he entered the eastbound freeway there. By the time he drove past the Road Forks interchange, the guy who was supposed to be on his way to L.A. was definitely headed in the opposite direction.

  He sinc
erely hoped that before anyone could figure that out, Tony Segura would have waved his magic wand and Jimmy Ardmore would be long gone. To that end, he picked up his brand new phone and called Tony. There weren’t any numbers in his contact list, but that was OK—he knew Tony’s number by heart.

  Chapter 34

  GOOD TO HER WORD, LATISHA DROVE WITH ALL THE DELIBERATE speed of a little old lady on her way to church. Once they hit the washboard surface of Geronimo Trail, every jarring bump was an agony. Garth knew that at this rate getting to Douglas would take forever, but he didn’t criticize. Instead, in order to take his mind off the pain, he pulled a tiny spiral notebook from his pocket and dug out a pencil.

  “We need to catch this guy,” he told her. “Is it okay if I ask you some questions?”

  She hesitated for a moment, but finally she nodded. “I guess,” she said.

  “You need to tell me everything you can remember,” he said. “Once we get back to the department, the detectives will need to interview you as well, but anything you can tell me now will give them a leg up in identifying the guy and tracking him down.”

  Latisha nodded again.

  “How did all this happen?”

  “He found me in New Orleans,” she answered. “I was standing right outside his car. He grabbed me, drugged me, and tied me up in the bunk of a big truck. I don’t know how long he kept me there. The next thing I knew, I was in the basement.”

  “In a basement, but where?” Garth asked.

  “I have no idea. He kept us chained in the basement. There wasn’t any light, and there weren’t any windows. There were windows upstairs, but he kept them covered with blackout curtains.”

  “So you were in the basement of a building. Tell me about it.”

  “It was old and made out of bricks, with rough planks in the floor and iron bars on the outsides of the windows.”

  “But where was it located?” Garth asked. “Did you see any road signs?”