Rattlesnake Crossing : A Joanna Brady Mystery (9780061766183)

by Jance, Judith A.

  “You’re saying he committed suicide. Did you find a note?” Joanna asked.

  “Good as,” Fran said.

  “And what would that be?”

  “You saw the body, didn’t you?”

  Joanna tried to recall the chaotic scene in the bedroom with the dead man lying naked on the bed and Belle Philips shaking him, shaking and shrieking.

  “Yes,” Joanna replied.

  “So you saw the lesions?”

  Reminded now, she recalled that one detail, the series of angry red marks on the man’s white skin—on his chest, belly, and thigh. She had noticed them only long enough for them to register as some kind of surface wounds, but that was just before Belle had leaped on the body, collapsing both the bed and the floor into the darkened crawl space below. In all the confusion that followed, that single detail had slipped out of Joanna’s consciousness.

  “I saw something,” Joanna admitted. “They looked like wounds of some kind, stab wounds, maybe.”

  “Not stab wounds,” Fran Daly insisted. “Lesions. Whenever I’ve seen lesions like that before, they’ve been on AIDS patients. I can’t be sure without blood work, of course, but I’m guessing that the autopsy will bear me out on this. Clyde Philips might still have been able to get around on his own, but he wouldn’t have been able to for long. He was suffering from AIDS—full-blown AIDS. Instead of hanging around to fight it, he used the bag and his belt and took the short way out. I don’t know that I blame him. If I were in his shoes, I might very well do the same thing.”

  “But without a note,” Joanna objected, “how can you be sure? And what about his guns?”

  “Guns? What guns?” Fran Daly asked.

  “The guns in his shop,” Joanna explained. “Clyde Philips was a gun dealer. He had a shop out back, behind his house. It should have been full of guns. But it wasn’t. From the way it looks, sometime in the last few days somebody’s cleaned the whole place out. Taking an armload of stolen weapons into consideration, I would have thought we were dealing with a robbery/murder.”

  Fran ground out the remains of her half-smoked cigarette into the ashtray and then, before Joanna could stop her, the medical examiner removed the ashtray from the dashboard and tossed the contents out the window. Joanna watched in the rearview mirror, hoping there were no live embers left to start a fire.

  “That’s what happens when people who don’t know what they’re doing jump to erroneous conclusions,” Fran said as she slammed the ashtray back into place. “From that point on, the accuracy of the whole investigation goes right out the window.”

  Joanna could see that once Fran Daly herself made an assumption—erroneous or otherwise—there was no changing her mind. Sheriff Brady considered volleying back some smart-mouthed response to that effect or raising hell about her tossing out her smoldering cigarette debris, but after a moment, she decided not to. Save your breath, Joanna told herself. Dr. Fran Daly was the way she was. No amount of crystal-clear argument on the sheriff’s part was going to change the woman. Instead, Joanna concentrated on her driving and considered the implications of what Fran had said.

  Who knows? Maybe she’s right about Clyde Philips. Maybe he really did commit suicide. And if it turns out one of today’s two murder victims wasn’t murdered, maybe the second one—whoever she is—wasn’t, either.

  After leaving the river, the three-vehicle caravan traveled up and up through deepening twilight and steep, trackless terrain. Finally, Mike Wilson stopped his Bronco directly behind Eddy Sandoval’s. Putting the Blazer in park and switching off the engine, Joanna stepped outside and stood staring at a solid wall of sheer and forbidding cliffs that jutted skyward far above them.

  Just then a low rumble of thunder came rolling across the valley behind them. Here we go again, Joanna thought. Here was yet another crime scene where investigation and evidence collection would most likely have to take a backseat to Mother Nature.

  Deputy Eddy Sandoval had been sitting out of the heat in his idling Bronco. Now he came slipping down the steep hillside to meet them as Fran Daly heaved herself out of the Blazer. “Let’s get a move on,” she said. “Where’s this body supposed to be?”

  Once again Dr. Daly succeeded in tweaking Joanna. Cochise County was her jurisdiction, not Dr. Daly’s. As the ranking officer on the scene, Sheriff Brady should have been the one calling the shots. That detail of line of command wasn’t lost on Deputy Sandoval, who, without responding, glanced briefly at Joanna. She was gratified that he checked with her before answering the other woman’s question.

  “Right, Deputy Sandoval,” Joanna said, nodding her okay. “Tell us where we’re going.”

  “It’s up there.” He pointed toward the cliffs. “There’s a narrow rock shelf that runs along the base. Most of the way it seems solid enough, but just beyond the body it breaks off into a gully. From the looks of it, that’s the spot where most of the water drains off the upper cliffs. There’s been enough runoff the last few weeks that some of the cliff broke away. When it slid down the mountain, it took a big chunk of the shelf right along with it.”

  “A landslide?” Fran asked, pausing from the task of unloading her equipment from Ernie and Jaime’s van.

  Deputy Sandoval nodded. “I went down into the wash and checked to see if it looked safe for people to walk out there. I don’t think the bank is undermined, but…”

  Having just witnessed the collapse of Clyde Philips’ floor, Joanna wasn’t taking any chances. “Show me,” she said.

  Obligingly, Eddy turned and started back up the hill, past the two parked Broncos. Joanna followed on his heels. “Wait,” Dr. Daly yelped after them. “You can’t go rushing over there without me. You’re liable to disturb evidence. Let me get my stuff first.”

  Joanna didn’t bother to stop, but she did reply. “It’s been raining for weeks now,” she called back over her shoulder. “If there ever was any evidence lying around loose up there, it’s long gone by now.”

  Eddy led Joanna to the spot where he had climbed in and out of a sandy creek bed. They slogged through damp sand for some fifty yards. By the time they reached the place where the slide had come down the mountain, Joanna knew they were close to the body. She could smell it. No wonder the dogs focused in on this instead of Trina Berridge, she thought. They could probably smell it for miles. And no wonder, either, why Eddy Sandoval was waiting in his Bronco when we got here.

  For the next several minutes she examined the walls of the arroyo. In the end, she agreed with Deputy Sandoval’s assessment. As long as another gully-washer of a storm didn’t break loose another several-ton hunk of cliff face, the shelf was probably safe enough. After that, they retraced their footsteps out of the wash and then made the steep climb up to the shelf.

  Once they were out on the ledge, footing was somewhat more solid than it had been on the hillside, but it was still a long way from foolproof. Here and there, loose rocks and gravel lay along the surface, waiting to trip the unwary. The shelf was five to six feet wide and not more than three to four feet tall. The problem was that beneath that three-foot sheer drop, the rocky flank of the mountainside fell away at an impossibly steep angle. Anyone tumbling off that first three-foot cliff probably wouldn’t stop rolling for a long, long way.

  Picking her way south along the cliff face, Joanna was thankful she wasn’t particularly frightened of heights. She did worry, though, about the possibility of tripping over a dozing rattlesnake.

  “Here you are,” Eddy Sandoval said at last. He stopped and stepped aside, allowing Joanna to make her way past him and into the awful stench of rotting flesh. Fighting the urge to gag, she found herself staring down at a pile of rocks. Considering the broken cliff just above them, one might have assumed the pile had appeared there as a result of that slide. Except for one small detail. These were the wrong kind of rocks. In the wash below, Joanna had seen how the sandstonelike cliff had broken apart in long, rectangular brown chunks that looked almost as though they had been hacked a
part with a saw blade. The round, smooth rocks forming the pile, colored a ghostly gray, were river rocks that someone had hauled up the mountainside one at a time.

  The far end of the rock pile was where the slide had roared through, taking with it the rocks at that end. And there, where the river rocks were missing, lay two partially skeletalized human legs. On one of them most of the foot was still attached, while the other one was missing. At the ankle joint just above that remaining foot was a thick length of knotted rope that bound one leg to the other.

  Joanna swallowed hard. Clyde Philips might have committed suicide. This person hadn’t. She turned back to Eddy. “You told Ernie it was a woman,” she said. “But if that little bit of leg is all you can see, what makes you think it’s a female?”

  Eddy Sandoval had been hanging back and holding a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. Now he switched on his flashlight and shone it on something at Joanna’s feet, near what had to be the head of the burial mound.

  “I guess we still don’t know, not for sure, but I think it’s a pretty good guess. Look at this.”

  Peering down, Joanna found herself standing over a short, makeshift cross. The marker had been crafted by using two twigs of mesquite bound together with what appeared to be strips of cloth. Taking Eddy’s flashlight, Joanna squatted beside the cross in order to examine it more closely. It took several seconds before she realized the bindings—what she had assumed to be strips of material—were really articles of clothing: a sports bra and a pair of nylon panties. Both pieces of underwear appeared to have been white originally. Now they were stained with blotches of some dark substance.

  In the dim glow of the flashlight, Joanna couldn’t tell for sure what that substance was, but still she knew. The underwear was stained with blood. Lots of blood.

  In Sheriff Brady’s previous life, that awful discovery would have sent her reeling. Now she simply took a deep breath—took one and wished she hadn’t. “You’ve photographed all of this, Deputy Sandoval?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Good, but I suspect the detectives will probably want to take their own pictures before we start bagging and inventorying evidence.”

  As she turned to look at the bier once more, another low growl of thunder rumbled across the valley. “We’d better hurry,” she told him. “There’s a storm coming. Go back down and see if there’s anything you can help carry. And then you should probably round up as many plastic tarps as you can find just in case we get rained out before we have a chance to finish gathering evidence.”

  Nodding, Eddy Sandoval hurried away down the narrow shelf. Meanwhile, Joanna turned back to the mound of rocks and stared at the pair of protruding bones. Joanna’s law enforcement studies had taught her that there is often a message in the position of the body, especially if the murderer has gone to the trouble of posing his handiwork.

  This is posing, all right, Joanna told herself, gazing down the mountainside from this sheltered yet desolate spot, one that commanded a view of the entire river valley. It had taken time and effort to bring the rocks here, and the victim as well. This was posing, all right. With a capital P.

  NINE

  FOR THE next few minutes, standing there alone, Joanna turned her attention once again to the bones, which were visible from just below the knee down. The rope that bound the two limbs together was tied in a clumsy half hitch that would have been easy to undo—if, that is, the victim’s hands had been free and she had known anything about ropes and knots.

  If he kept her tied up, how did he get her up the mountain? Joanna wondered. Dead or alive, she couldn’t have been carried. The mountain was too steep, the path too treacherous. So did he lure her here or did he force her at gun- or knifepoint? Or did they simply meet, expectedly or by accident, up here on this ledge? Perhaps the meeting was unexpected on the victim’s part, but the presence of the rope shows advance planning on the killer’s.

  Premeditation was a necessary ingredient for a case of aggravated murder. If that was what her detectives were dealing with here, Joanna would have to make certain that every procedure was followed, every t crossed and every i dotted.

  Ernie Carpenter, lugging two cumbersome equipment cases, came huffing and puffing up the ledge. “What do we have?” he asked, setting down his load near Joanna.

  “A sicko,” she answered. “A male sicko.”

  “You’ve already decided the killer’s a male? What makes you say that?”

  Joanna was startled to realize he was right, that she had decided, but she also understood that Ernie’s question wasn’t necessarily a criticism. He wanted to understand her rationale while at the same time drawing his own conclusions.

  “Look at the rocks on the mound for starters,” Joanna told him. “Some of them went tumbling down the mountain when the slide hit, but there must be more than a hundred or so left. How much do you think each of those little hummers weighs?”

  “Ten pounds,” Ernie guessed. “Some of ’em might go as high as fifteen to twenty.”

  “Right,” Joanna said. “And look at the kind of rocks they are. They aren’t from around here. They didn’t come from the cliffs themselves. Those are river rocks, Ernie. Somebody went to the trouble of picking them out, one by one, and then hauling them all the way up here from down by the river. Even if the killer was strong enough to pack them two at a time, it still took a major effort on his part—effort and time both. So did piling them together all nice and neat.

  “Next, take a look at this.” Using the toe of her hiking boot, she pointed to the cross. “Once the rocks were in place, he manufactured this little grave marker and planted it at the head of his burial mound.”

  Ernie squatted and peered intently at the marker. “Underwear?” he asked.

  Joanna nodded. “Bloodstained underwear.”

  Ernie sighed. “We’ll bag this first thing.”

  “So call me a sexist if you want,” Joanna continued, “but I can’t see a woman doing this kind of thing—not the rocks and not making a trophy out of bloody underwear.”

  Ernie rubbed his chin. “I suppose you’ve got a point,” he allowed.

  “A point?”

  “Right,” he said. “The killer probably is a man. The next question is, was he a smart man or a dumb one?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like you said, it must have taken him a hell of a long time to drag all those rocks up here. What I’m wondering is whether he was smart enough to wear gloves the whole time he was doing it. And if not, is there a chance we’ve got some decent prints hiding in there out of the weather?”

  “You’re saying we should dust all the rocks for prints?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “But how? With a storm coming we can’t possibly take the time to do that now…”

  “The first thing we do is bring Deputy Sandoval’s Bronco as close to the bottom of the ledge as we can get it. Then we load in as many rocks as it will carry and drag them back to the department.”

  That was the moment Fran Daly and Jamie Carbajal arrived with their own loads of equipment. Mike Wilson from Search and Rescue, also drafted into the role of pack animal, brought up the rear.

  “You’re kidding!” Fran Daly objected at once. “You want to haul all these rocks out and dust them for prints? That’ll take for damned ever—all night long, probably. And I just saw a flash of lightning off over the Chiricahuas. If there’s another storm rolling in from the east, we don’t have time to catalog this whole pile of rocks.”

  The threatening storm was a legitimate concern. Still Ernie shot Joanna an exasperated look. Around the department, Detective Ernie Carpenter was known for his easygoing, long-suffering ways. In less than five minutes’ worth of contact, Fran Daly had managed to outrun the man’s considerable capacity for patience. That, too, had to be some kind of record.

  “We’ll take the time,” Joanna insisted. “I heard thunder, too, and I’ve already taken precautions. Deput
y Sandoval went back down the mountain to gather up some tarps. We’ll go as far as we can before the rain gets here, cover whatever we haven’t managed to accumulate in the meantime, and then come back for the rest when the weather improves. Sandoval has already taken some pictures, but you’ll probably want your own. So while you three set up lights and start taking photos, I’ll go down and help Eddy and Mike position the Bronco for loading.”

  “All right,” Fran Daly said. “First we collect bugs. After that we take pictures.”

  Bringing the Bronco into position turned out to be far easier said than done. Parking it directly next to the mound would have placed it too close to the slide and to the edge of the gully as well. Rather than risk it tumbling down into the arroyo, they were forced to leave the vehicle some distance from the ledge. Only after considerable maneuvering did they finally settle on parking it with the hood facing down the steep mountainside and with the tailgates as near as possible to the ledge and rock pile for ease of loading.

  As soon as the Bronco was in place, the group formed into a line and began dismantling the pile of rocks. Grunting with effort, they passed the small round boulders fire-brigade style, hefting them from one pair of gloved hands to another. Joanna, the last link in the human chain, took the rocks Mike Wilson handed down to her. Then she pivoted and heaved them into the waiting Bronco, letting them roll across the carpeted floorboard and come to rest against either the back of the seat or each other.

  It was slow, painstaking, sweaty, and labor-intensive work. When they started, a resigned but still grumbling Fran Daly took charge of removing each boulder. Just because she didn’t approve didn’t mean she wasn’t prepared to do a good job. Not only did she take photos prior to removal of each rock, she also labeled each one after first sketching its relative position to its neighbors. That way, if it became necessary to reconstruct the mound later on in a laboratory or courtroom setting, the evidence technicians would have a blueprint for reassembling the rocky pieces of the puzzle.