by J. A. Jance
“I’ve got some news for you,” he said. “Based on the seriousness of the situation, I was able to get the Doña Ana M.E.’s office to move our boy Ardmore to the head of the line. Cause of death is a concussion. Manner of death accidental.”
Joanna was incredulous. “They’ve already done the postmortem?”
“Yup, according to the doc here, Ardmore showed signs of having come in recent contact with the business end of a stun gun. He also had a slow brain bleed from a previous injury, so even the slightest blow to the back of his head would have killed him. When the airbags deployed and slammed his head against the back of the seat, he was done for. Incidentally, his death just happens to have spared Arizona and New Mexico huge amounts of money. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”
“Thanks for the info,” Joanna said. “Since we’re about to hold a presser here, let me go pass this along to our Media Relations officer.”
She caught up with Ernie out in the hall, where he was raiding the break room for chairs and hauling them into the conference room off the lobby. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Where’s Tom?”
“He’s in the ICU. Chest pains.”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m serious and I’m back,” Joanna told him, “and I’ve got some important info for you from Sheriff Trotter over in Hidalgo County.”
Chapter 49
THE CLATTERING OF CARTS AND TRAYS OUT IN THE HALLWAY AWAKENED Latisha. Because of her still-aching tooth, they’d given her something to help with the pain, and it had put her out like a light. For the first time, she’d slept without dreaming—without hearing the fading thumping of Amelia’s fists pounding on the inside walls of the freezer.
The night nurse had warned Latisha that she was a falling risk and wasn’t to attempt walking to the restroom on her own, so she pressed the Call button. She was still hooked up to an IV, and the nurse—her name was Barbara—had to escort both Latisha and the IV into the bathroom. When Barbara helped her out of bed, she stood for a moment and looked down at her feet. The gnarled toenails were gone. Her feet no longer looked like disfigured claws, and overnight the weight of the single sheet hadn’t hurt. She suspected that was the other reason she’d slept so well.
After pointing out the grab bars Latisha could use if needed and directing her to press the Call button when she was done, Barbara left her there alone. Latisha stood transfixed in front of the mirror, staring at her own face. Without her hair it might have been her mother’s face looking back at her, or even her grandmother’s.
But seeing the face reminded Latisha that her mother was coming today—her mother and Lyle both. They had called and left a message while she’d been in the OR the previous afternoon. Their plane was due in Phoenix at midnight. They would overnight there and be in Bisbee by eleven that morning. And then, Latisha realized, she would need to find a way to talk to them about what had happened.
Would she be able to tell the whole story? Would they want to hear it? Would they be able to forgive her for the way she’d behaved toward them, the things she’d done? And if they couldn’t forgive her, what would happen to her then? Regardless, when they got there, Latisha wanted to look her best. Marianne had stopped by the previous evening and dropped off a scarf—a bright blue scarf that she said was a shade called “Bisbee blue.” By the time her parents showed up, Latisha hoped to be wearing it.
Before she left, Barbara had placed a little makeup kit on the counter next to the sink. Inside Latisha found a toothbrush—a brand-new toothbrush—and a tiny tube of toothpaste. She brushed her teeth, carefully avoiding the broken tooth. Her gums bled. Dr. Lee had told her that was to be expected. He had also told her that the dentist would be coming today to deal with her tooth. And a psychologist. She would be coming, too.
Dr. Lee had told Latisha that she might be suffering from something called PTSD. Latisha had heard about that before. She thought it was something that only happened to soldiers, but Dr. Lee had said she was a prime candidate. And he also said that talking with a stranger and telling her story might help her move beyond the hours and months of torture in the Boss’s basement. And maybe he was right. She’d told the story twice now—first to Garth and later to Marianne—and already those dark days seemed to be receding, as though the terrible things that had happened to her back there had happened to someone else.
Latisha pressed the button, and Barbara reappeared almost immediately. “Are you ready to get back into bed?”
“Is Garth still here?”
“Deputy Raymond? Yes, why?”
“Can I go see him?”
“Let me get you a wheelchair.”
“If you’ll help me, and if it isn’t too far,” Latisha said, “I think I can walk.”
Garth was sitting up in bed, eating breakfast. His grandmother was there, too. Latisha had already met Juanita Raymond. She had come by yesterday afternoon to say that her grandson was out of the operating room, in the recovery room, and that he was going to be fine. She had also delivered two more meat-loaf sandwiches, which Latisha had eaten slowly, over the course of the afternoon and evening.
“Good morning,” he said, smiling at her. “I’m glad to see you’re up and around. They won’t let me out of bed yet.”
“I came to say thank you,” Latisha said. “Thank you for saving my life.”
“No problem,” Garth Raymond told her with a grin. “On that score I believe we’re even steven.”
Barbara helped Latisha back to her room and into bed. She brought in a breakfast tray with scrambled eggs and ham and hash browns and toast and orange juice. It was a feast—more than Latisha could eat—and when she’d eaten her fill, she pushed the tray away and slept some more.
Chapter 50
JOANNA BUGGED OUT OF THE PRESS CONFERENCE A FEW MINUTES early, raced home, and spent half an hour feeding Sage. It turned out to be good timing for both mother and child, and a lot less complicated than using the breast pump. She showed up at the hospital a good fifteen minutes before Latisha’s parents were due to arrive, so she popped into the ICU long enough to say hello to Tom.
“You gave us quite a scare,” she said accusingly.
“I know. Sorry. How did the press conference go?”
“It was a three-ring circus. Marliss was surprisingly subdued, but Ernie did all right.”
“See there?” Tom said with a smile. “I told you he’s a natural.”
“Enough about the case,” Joanna said. “What about you?”
“I’ve got a blockage,” he said. “I’m going to need a stent. I’m sorry about this, Sheriff Brady. I know you were counting on me—”
“And you came through with flying colors,” Joanna said. “What you need to do now is concentrate on getting well.”
“It was really rough,” Tom said. “What he did to all those girls . . .”
Shaking his head, he left the rest of it unsaid, but Joanna knew that the mental anguish caused by what Tom Hadlock had encountered the day before would be far more difficult to banish than a chest pain which could be easily remedied with the simple installation of a medical device. One was a wound to the body, while the other had damaged his soul.
“By the way,” Joanna added, “Deb told me to give you a message. You remember that chair you were sitting in yesterday, the one in Calhoun?”
“Right,” Tom said, “the one under the tree. What about it?”
“She said that as they were getting ready to head out, she took a look at that chair and saw something that looked suspicious to her. She brought it back to the lab, sprayed it with luminol, and guess what?”
“What?”
“It lit up like a Christmas tree. She thinks Arthur Ardmore was sitting in that chair at the time someone shot him.”
“So Jimmy assumed Arthur’s identity and has been masquerading as him ever since?”
“That’s how it looks.”
Tom breathed a sigh of relief. “At least now we know where it happened
.”
Leaving Tom behind, Joanna arrived at Latisha’s room a few minutes later, where she found the patient sitting up in bed with a bright turquoise blue scarf wrapped around her head. The improvement in Latisha’s appearance between yesterday and today was nothing short of remarkable.
“You came!” Latisha said.
“Of course I came,” Joanna replied. “You asked me to, didn’t you?”
“But where’s your baby?”
“Sage is at home today with her father.”
“But she was with you yesterday,” Latisha objected.
“Yesterday I was on maternity leave. Today I’m working.”
There was a flurry of activity out in the hallway, and a man and a woman charged into the room. The woman raced past Joanna without a sideways glance and rushed straight to Latisha’s bedside, smothering the girl in a heartfelt embrace, while the man hung back, as if uncertain of his reception. He was the one Joanna approached with her hand outstretched.
“I’m Sheriff Joanna Brady,” she said.
“And I’m Lyle Richards, Latisha’s stepfather.”
“Your stepdaughter’s one brave individual,” Joanna said. “She escaped the clutches of a very dangerous man, and in the process she ended up saving the life of one of my deputies.”
“Yup,” said Lyle. “That’s our girl.”
“Lyle,” a small voice called, summoning him from the far side of the room. Stepping away from Joanna, Lyle turned and approached the bed.
“How are you doing?” he asked, almost as though he were inquiring after the health of a total stranger. “I hear you’ve been out making like a superhero.”
“I’m not the superhero,” Latisha told him. “You’re the one who saved me.”
A look of utter astonishment crossed Lyle’s face. “Me?” he asked in disbelief. “How did I save you?”
“I remembered some of the words you used to say to me, the ones I always thought were so stupid,” she told him. “And remembering them gave me courage.”
“What words?”
“ ‘God helps those who help themselves.’ ”
“That one?” he asked with a chuckle. “If that’s what did the trick, I’m not the one who saved you. My mother did, because she’s the one who gave those words to me.”
“What you said,” Latisha told him, “and your pancakes. When we were locked in the basement and chained to the wall with nothing to eat but dog food, the other girls—Sandra and Sadie and Amelia—and me, all we did was talk about food. Sadie talked about her grandmother’s fried chicken. Sandra remembered her foster mother’s chocolate-chip cookies. Amelia was all about her grandmother’s tamales. As for me? I told them about your Saturday-morning pancakes. Do you still make them?”
“I haven’t made them in a very long time,” Lyle admitted. “Not since you’ve been gone, but I will again, once you’re home, I promise.”
“Have you ever had tamales?” Latisha asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Many times.”
“Where did you get them? In St. Louis?”
“When I enlisted in the army right out of high school, I ended up being stationed just a few miles from here, at Fort Huachuca. I ate tamales all the time.”
“Do you think I’d like them?”
“Your mom and I will go out later, find one, and bring it to you,” he said. “That way you’ll be able to decide for yourself.”
“But tell us what happened,” Lou Ann said. “From the beginning. You really had to eat dog food?”
As they pulled chairs close to their daughter’s bed, ready to hear her story, Joanna realized that although Latisha had wanted her to be there to begin with, they were gathered as a family now, and her presence was no longer required.
“If you’ll excuse me,” she said, edging her way toward the door, “I’ll be on my way.”
She was gone seconds later, and it seemed unlikely that any of them noticed.
Chapter 51
FOR JOANNA THE NEXT TWO DAYS FLASHED BY IN A FLURRY OF paperwork and complicated logistics with quick stints of motherhood squeezed in around the edges. She spent a good deal of time working closely with the M.E. At Joanna’s suggestion one of the first things Kendra Baldwin did was contact a victims’-rights organization from Phoenix, putting them in touch with Rosa Moreno in order to facilitate getting Amelia Salazar’s remains shipped home to her grandmother in Mexico.
At the moment it was far too soon for the M.E. to have established the identities of any of the three individuals whose bodies had been found buried behind Arthur Ardmore’s place in Calhoun, although Kendra remained hopeful that the same kind of miracle that had allowed her to identify Amelia would happen again.
“Who knows?” she said. “Maybe lightning really will strike twice in the same place.”
Unlike Latisha, neither Sadie Jennings nor Sandra Locke had ever been reported missing. Sandra’s mother, Margo, was located living in a halfway house in Lodi, California. She was fresh out of jail, without a job, and completely broke. With no home of her own, she had nowhere to bring Sandra and no money with which to do so.
“I always figured Sandy was lying dead somewhere,” Margo said, “so you could just as well go ahead and bury her wherever she’s at. It don’t matter to me.”
“I’ll talk to Norm Higgins over at the mortuary,” Joanna said when Kendra reported what Margo had said. “I’ll see what we can do.”
Sadie’s parents were both dead. Sadie’s father had died of a drug overdose, and her mother had succumbed to hep C months earlier while still in prison, so Kendra was currently on the trail of a distant cousin in hopes that, if she could manage to get a genetic profile from the DNA-extraction kits, familial DNA would provide a positive identification.
The Department of Public Safety had launched an inquiry into whether or not Deputy Raymond’s injuries were the result of an officer-involved shooting. The GSR tests Tom had ordered had completely exonerated the young officer on that score.
On Wednesday morning Joanna was present when both Deputy Raymond and Latisha Marcum were released from the Copper Queen Community Hospital. Raymond was going home to Elfrida to recuperate, while Latisha was scheduled to fly back to St. Louis with her parents. Since it was the day before Thanksgiving, the fact that they’d been able to find tickets to fly home at all, let alone three seats together, had been something of a miracle.
Before they left, Joanna managed to take Lyle Richards aside. “From our preliminary survey of the situation, it looks as though there’s a considerable amount of Ardmore money hiding out here and there. You might want to consider enlisting the services of a good attorney as well as a good forensic accountant. I’m a sheriff, not an attorney, but I think there’s a strong likelihood Latisha could sue the Ardmore estate for damages due to wrongful imprisonment.”
Lyle nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll look into it.”
A few minutes later, as Juanita Raymond and Lyle Richards went about completing and signing all necessary release paperwork, Joanna noticed that Garth and Latisha were sitting off to the side, waiting to be wheeled out of the hospital. Joanna was gratified to hear them chatting away as though they were old friends.
“So what are you going to do now?” Garth asked.
“I want to go back to school,” Latisha told him. “I think I want to become a teacher.”
“Good for you,” Garth called over his shoulder as a nurse grabbed the handles on his chair and wheeled him toward the door. “Stay in touch, and I’ll be sure to send along Grandpa Jeb’s meat-loaf recipe.”
“Wait a minute, I thought that recipe was your grandmother’s.”
“It is,” Garth replied, “but Grandpa is the one who gave it to her.”
When it came time for Latisha to be wheeled out to Lyle’s rental car, Joanna walked along beside her. “I never knew that cops could be so nice,” Latisha murmured.
She was settled in the backseat by then, but the car door was still open.
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br /> “We do our best,” Joanna said.
“When you find out the names of those other girls, will you send them to me?” Latisha asked. “I’m praying for them without names right now, just like you told me. It may not make any difference to God if I don’t know their names, but it would make a difference to me.”
“You’ll have those names as soon as we do,” Joanna assured her. “I promise.”
On the home front, Butch had been busy, too. He’d slipped back into his role of stay-at-home daddy as easily as putting on an old shoe. You would have thought he’d been taking care of newborn babies all his life.
On Tuesday he’d managed to get out of the house long enough to do all the shopping necessary to create their Thanksgiving feast. He had picked up a supply of new baby bottles and some formula as well. Joanna intended to breast-feed Sage as long as possible, but as the guy who’d be left holding a hungry baby if Mom couldn’t get home in a timely fashion, Butch wanted to be equipped with a backup plan already in place.
As promised, Denny was fully involved in the preparations. By midafternoon, when it came time to bake pumpkin pies, Butch put Denny in charge of cleaning the pumpkin seeds so they could be roasted. While he was doing that, Butch went in search of Joanna.
He was surprised to find her standing in front of the bookshelf in his study, emptying the shelves of her father’s journals and loading them into a box. “Hey,” he said, “why are you boxing those up? I thought you were going to read them.”
“I thought so, too,” Joanna said ruefully, “but then I went to see Tom in the ICU. That business out in Calhoun really affected him. He’s going to be carrying that burden around with him for the rest of his life. And I’m sure the same kinds of things happened to my dad. He confided in these books—he put his whole heart into them—the good stuff and the bad stuff. I’m packing these away, not throwing them away. Maybe someday, after I retire, I’ll be able to read them, but not right now. I’ve got enough of my own stuff to carry around. I can’t afford to carry his, too.”
Butch thought about that for a moment before he nodded. “Gotcha,” he said finally. With that, he turned and headed back toward the kitchen. “Hey, Denny,” he called as he went. “Are you done with those seeds yet? We need to get them in and out of the oven so I can start on the pies.”
