Dead to Rights

by J. A. Jance

“That may be,” Joanna conceded, “but I’m telling you this, Mr. Voland. The search for Hal Morgan’s ‘second man’ isn’t a wild-goose chase until I say it’s a wild-goose chase. Is that clear?”

  He looked at her for a moment as if he was prepared to argue. Dick Voland wasn’t any better at losing than he was at winning. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “You’re the boss.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “And now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll go home. It’s been a long day.”

  She drove straight to her in-laws’ house, picked up Jenny, and then headed out to the Safeway in Don Luis for an abbreviated grocery-shopping trip. Bread, milk, eggs, juice, fruit, luncheon meat. “What are we having for dinner?” Jenny asked as they hurried up and down aisles, stacking items into the cart.

  “How about chorizo, eggs, and flour tortillas?” Joanna suggested. Jenny made a face.

  “What’s the matter?” Joanna asked. “The last time we had it, you told me you loved chorizo.”

  “It’s okay,” Jenny said. “But eggs are for breakfast. Why couldn’t we eat with the G’s? Grandma was making stew. She said there was plenty.”

  “We can’t eat with Grandma and Grandpa every night, even if they invite us,” Joanna told her daughter. “I know they don’t mind, and Grandma is a wonderful cook. But still, it’s an imposition. We don’t want to wear out our welcome.”

  “But we hardly ever have real meals anymore,” Jenny complained. “Not like we used to when Daddy was alive.”

  Jenny’s quiet comment flew straight to her mother’s heart. It was true. When Andy was alive, mealtimes had been important occasions—a time and a place to reaffirm that they were a family all by themselves, separate and apart from his parents and from Joanna’s mother as well. In a two-career home, breakfast and lunch had been catch-as-catch-can in the breakfast nook and the same had held true when Andy was working graveyard or night shifts. But when all three of them had been home for dinner together, the meal had automatically turned into an occasion. Much of the time, they would set the dining room table with the good dishes and with cloth napkins—for just the three of them.

  In the months since Andy died, eating at the dining room table by themselves was something Joanna and Jenny had never done. There it was too painfully clear that Andy’s place was empty. Quick meals of scrambled eggs or grilled cheese sandwiches eaten in the breakfast nook didn’t carry quite the same emotional wallop. Until right then, however, Joanna hadn’t known Jenny was felling deprived. Maybe it was time to reconsider the chorizo option.

  Mentally calculating what staples she still had at home, Joanna dropped a package of pork chops into the basket, along with a container of deli-made coleslaw and a bottle of sparkling cider.

  As Jenny and Joanna headed for the checkout line, their cart almost collided in the freezer aisle with a cart pushed by a man named Larry Matkin. Larry, a Phelps Dodge mining engineer, was fairly new to town, although Joanna had seen him several times at various civic meetings around town. Matkin was a member of the Rotary Club, but he had visited Joanna’s Kiwanis club to give a talk on the prospects and economic implications of P.D.’s reopening mining operations in the Bisbee area. He was a tall, lanky guy with reddish-brown hair, glasses, and a prominent Adam’s apple. His speech had been dry as dust.

  “Sorry,” Joanna said with a laugh. “You know how it is with women drivers.”

  Matkin, stacking typical bachelor fare of frozen TV dinners into his cart, seemed to see no humor in her comment. He didn’t smile in return. “It’s okay,” he mumbled. “No harm done.” For a moment it looked as though he was going to say something more, then he changed his mind. With his face flushing beet-red, he turned his attention back to the frozen-food case.

  “What was the matter with that man?” Jenny asked, as they reached the check-out stand. “It was only a little bump. Why’d he get so mad?”

  “What makes you think he was mad?” Joanna asked.

  Jenny wasn’t a child to be easily thrown off track. “Didn’t you see how his face turned all red?”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean he was mad,” Joanna explained. “It could be he’s shy.”

  “Maybe it means he likes you then,” Jenny theorized.

  Joanna looked down at her daughter in shock. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “But it could happen, couldn’t it?” Jenny insisted. “He might ask you out. What then? Would you go?”

  Unsure how to answer or even if she should answer this unforeseen dating question, Joanna was saved by the timely intervention of the check-out clerk. “Paper or plastic?” she asked.

  Joanna wanted to leap across the check stand and hug the woman. “Paper,” she replied gratefully. “Definitely paper.”

  TEN

  HALFWAY HOME, with the groceries safely stowed in the back, Joanna was still mulling over the implications behind Jenny’s disturbing question when the child lobbed yet another one in her direction.

  “Did you catch him?” Jenny asked.

  “Catch who?” Joanna asked, mystified by a question that was so far from what she’d been thinking.

  “The guy who killed Dr. Buckwalter.”

  “No,” Joanna answered truthfully. “We’re working on it, but I’m afraid Detective Carpenter didn’t make all that much progress today. He’s been up in Sunizona working on another case.”

  She realized as she said the words that she wasn’t giving Jenny a very comprehensive or detailed answer. As such Jenny probably didn’t find it very satisfactory, but it was the best Joanna could do. When Andy had been a deputy, Jenny had always shown a precocious interest in his work and in everything that went on in the department. When she had asked those kinds of questions of him, Andy had been only too happy to respond. He had always answered with a no-holds-barred candor that Joanna found disquieting even then. In the present circumstances—with the scars from Andy’s death still so near the surface—such questions and their accompanying answers bothered her even more. Joanna always worried that something she might say would bring up topics that would be painful to Jenny and hurtful to her as well.

  Driving through the last glimmers of twilight, Joanna clung to the steering wheel and worried where Jenny’s inquisitive mind would take them next.

  “It’s my birthday pretty soon,” Jenny said.

  Mistakenly assuming this was nothing but another one of Jenny’s mind-bending changes of subject, Joanna let her guard down. “Not for another three months yet,” she returned.

  “What are you going to get me?” Jenny asked.

  Joanna shrugged. “Three months is a long time,” she said, “I haven’t given it all that much thought.”

  “Well,” Jenny said, sitting up straight and folding her short arms across her chest. “I already know what I want for my birthday.”

  “What?”

  “What I told you before—Dr. Buckwalter’s horse. Kiddo. Daddy said I could have a horse someday. He promised. Besides, Kiddo will be lonely without someone to love him. What if he gets sold for dog food or something?”

  “Jenny,” Joanna said firmly. “Nobody’s going to sell Kiddo for dog food. But you have to understand what’s going on here. I’m all alone now—alone and overloaded. Between work and home, I can’t take on one more thing without falling apart. There’s a whole lot more to taking care of a horse than scratching him on the nose when you feel like it and giving him a carrot once in a while.”

  “That’s not true!” Jenny spat back at her.

  “It is true,” Joanna insisted. “Horses require a lot of hard work.”

  “Not that,” Jenny said. “What you said before. About being alone. You are not alone. You have me, don’t you?”

  Moving as far away from her mother as possible, Jenny scrunched up against the passenger’s door and stared wordlessly out the window. Joanna sighed. Another night; another firefight.

  Parenting, Joanna thought to herself, sure as hell isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Aloud she
said to her daughter, “I didn’t mean that—the alone part. All I’m saying is that there are already too many chores…”

  “I want a horse,” Jenny said. “You’re just being mean. If Daddy were alive, he’d let me have Kiddo. I know he would.”

  By then they were coming down High Lonesome Road and slowing for the turnoff that led off into the ranch itself. There was nothing Joanna could say. She had already learned, just as Eleanor Lathrop had before her, that it’s impossible to win an argument with a dead parent. From Jenny’s perspective, Andrew Roy Brady was perfection itself. By comparison, Joanna was drab, ordinary, and desperately flawed by the responsibility of sometimes having to say no.

  Joanna slowed to a stop. “Just go get the mail, Jenny,” she said wearily. “We’ll talk about this again in the morning when we’re both not so tired.”

  Without a word, Jenny shoved open the door, leaped down to the ground, and then darted back across High Lonesome to the wagon-wheel mounted mailbox Andy had been so proud of. Joanna sat waiting in the idling Blazer. She could have been watching Jenny in the rear-view mirror. Instead, she was looking up the road and waiting to see if the dogs would come galloping out of the darkness into the glow of her headlights and wondering whether or not they’d be sidetracked by the lanky jackrabbit that usually set the pace for an evening race through the valley.

  Joanna was just beginning to notice how long Jenny was taking when the car door opened. “Mom?” Jenny said. Her voice was so tentative, so unlike her, that Joanna realized at once something was wrong.

  “Jenny!” she demanded. “What’s the matter? Are you all right?”

  “Somebody’s here,” Jenny said, her voice still strangely uncertain. “She’s got me by the arm, Mom. She’s hurting me.”

  Alarmed, Joanna spun in her seat. Across from her, outside the car door and just beyond the dim orange glow cast by the overhead light, stood Jenny. Beside her was the huge hulk of an oversized human being. Had Jenny not used the word “she,” Joanna would have had no way of knowing whether or not the apparition was male or female.

  “Get in the car, Jenny,” Joanna ordered.

  “I can’t,” Jenny whispered back. “She’s got me by the arm.”

  “Who are you?” Joanna demanded of the stranger. “What do you want?”

  “I don’t mean you nor your little girl no harm,” a woman’s voice said. Her words had the slow, soft cadence of someone who, at some time in her life, had lived in the hill country of east Texas. “I got to talk to you, Sheriff Brady,” the woman continued. “I got to talk to somebody.”

  Despite the curiously soft-spoken speech, Joanna sensed a very real menace lurking in the barely whispered words. There was a peculiar intensity—a hopeless urgency—in the voice that came from that ghastly mound of flesh. It was the voice of someone with nothing left to lose. That realization caused the skin to prickle on the backs of Joanna’s arms. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Everything about the woman screamed, “Danger! Danger! Danger!”

  Twisting and turning, Jenny tried ineffectively to escape the woman’s grasp, but she held on tight.

  “Who are you?” Joanna asked again, knowing even before the woman spoke exactly what her answer would be—what it had to be.

  “My name’s Hannah Green,” she said. “I believe some of your people are looking for me, Sheriff Brady. They all think I kilt my daddy.”

  “And did you?” Joanna asked.

  That instinctive question shot out of Joanna’s mouth long before she considered the consequences of the question or the implications of any possible answers. Hannah Green was, after all, a homicide suspect. She was a person who should have been read her rights before there was any exchange of information. But Hannah Green also posed a very real threat to both Joanna and Jenny. In those circumstances, the Miranda ruling went straight out the window.

  Still squirming, Jenny started to whimper. “Let go. You’re hurting me.”

  If she heard her, Hannah Green gave no sign. Her whole being was focused on Joanna. “Of course I kilt him,” she said. “I kilt him because he deserved it. And you woulda done the same thing if’n he’d treated you the way he treated me. Daddy was mean, you know. Just as mean as he could be.”

  Joanna’s heart fluttered in her throat. In those first few moments of rising panic, dozens of conflicting thoughts whirled through her brain. This was exactly what had happened to Andy. He, too, had been accosted on this same road, less than a mile from home. For some unknown reason, he had let down his guard long enough to give his killer a fatal opening. Now it looked as though Joanna had made the same mistake. She, too, had fallen prey to that false sense of security—a kind of phony King’s X—that comes from being “almost home.”

  What would all those textbooks she had read up at the Arizona Police Officers’ Academy have to say about this kind of situation? Call for backup? Of course, but how? And who? What backup would she find, way out here, five miles from town? Joanna’s closest neighbor was Clayton Rhodes, her handyman. But he would already have come to the High Lonesome, done his evening chores, and gone back to his own place a mile farther up the road.

  Joanna was unable to tell whether or not the woman was armed or what, if any, harm she intended to do Jenny. Trying to grapple with how to respond, Joanna found herself in an impossible situation—one with no clear-cut choices, no absolute right or wrong.

  She was still fighting panic and searching for direction when Hannah Green spoke again.

  “Me an’ the little girl here is gonna catch our deaths if we don’t get inside real soon, ma’am.”

  The woman sounded calm enough. Afraid of doing something that would provoke her, Joanna swallowed her fear and tried to brazen it out.

  “Get in, then,” she ordered. “Both of you.”

  Without having to be urged a second time, Jenny scrambled into the middle of the front seat while Hannah Green heaved herself up onto the steep running board. For a moment, Joanna considered floor-boarding the accelerator, but with the woman’s iron grip still fastened to Jenny’s upper arm, that wasn’t an option. A jackrabbit start would have thrown the woman to the ground, but she might have pulled Jenny out of the truck with her.

  The pungent stench of body odor filled the Blazer as Hannah Green sank heavily onto the seat. She was a wide load of a woman, wearing a lightweight quilted flannel jacket that didn’t quite fasten around her expansive middle. Under that was a dress—the gored skirt of a housedress of some kind. Her feet were clad in worn loafers and sagging white anklets. Her right hand—the one that wasn’t inexorably attached to Jenny’s arm—was buried deep in the pocket of her jacket. Joanna wondered whether there was a weapon concealed in the folds of that enormous jacket. In the end, she simply assumed there was one. There had to be.

  That assumption didn’t change when Hannah let go of Jenny’s arm with the left hand and reached across her own body to pull the door shut. Between them on the seat, Jenny whimpered again and rubbed her arm.

  The thought of a gun in the hands of a suspected killer terrified Joanna Brady. Not for herself. After all, she was wearing a set of soft, custom-made body armor. In a gunfight, she would have the benefit of whatever protection the bullet-resistant material had to offer. On the other hand, Jenny, the little blond-haired person sitting directly between Hannah Green and Joanna, had nothing at all—no protection whatsoever.

  In the limited confines of the Blazer’s front seat, in a confrontation where Jenny was bound to be caught in the crossfire, Joanna’s own weapons were worse than useless. Neither the sturdy Colt 2000 in its underarm holster nor the palm-sized Glock 19 she wore in a discreet small-of-back holster—would do the least bit of good.

  Sick with her own impotent terror, Joanna bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. Shoving the Blazer into gear, she sent it surging forward. The truck rattled over the uneven iron rails of the cattle guard with tooth-loosening force as they started toward the ranch house. The car door had been open lon
g enough that a sudden chill had settled into the Blazer’s interior. Even so, as the heater geared up to reheat the inside of the vehicle, Joanna noticed the palms of her hands were so sweaty she could barely control the slick surface of the bucking steering wheel.

  Make her talk, Joanna coached herself. That was the prime directive when it came to hostage negotiations—getting the perpetrator to talk. “How did you get here, Mrs. Green?” Joanna asked, forcing her voice to sound as normal as she could make it under the circumstances.

  “Hitchhiked some.” Hannah’s terse answer was little more than a grunt. “Walked the rest of the way.”

  “But why did you come here?” Joanna asked. “Why come to my home instead of my office?”

  “Didn’t plan on comin’ here at all,” Hannah said. “Not at first. When I left the house, to my way of thinkin’, I was lightin’ out for Old Mexico. Changed my mind, though. Got halfway there and decided crossin’ the border was a bad idea. That’s just like me, though. Changin’ my mind. Daddy always said that was one of the reasons I’d never amount to nothin’. He said I never stuck to any one thing long enough to make it work.” There was a slight pause before she added, “Not till now.”

  “Why were you going to Mexico?” Joanna asked.

  “Come on, Sheriff. I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid,” Hannah said. “I thought I could run away. Go down there and hide. Like they do in the movies sometimes—they go to another country and lie low for a while. The cops are lookin’ for me, aren’t they? That Detective Carpenter?”

  Joanna didn’t answer. Just then Sadie and Tigger appeared in the middle of the road, racing toward the Blazer. Two pairs of bouncing, glowing eyes caught in the beam of the headlights. When the dogs finally reached the vehicle, they gamboled around it, barking in a joyous ritual of greeting before once again racing off toward the house.

  “Heard them dogs earlier,” Hannah Green said. “They was raisin’ a ruckus. I didn’t want to have nothin’ to do with ’em. That’s how come I waited back there, back by your mailbox.”