by J. A. Jance
“Waters—Detective Ian Waters. When are you coming?”
“As soon as Deb gets back from Tucson, where she went to speak to someone we now know to be the other victim’s mother. Deb should be here any minute.”
“Okay,” Frank said. “I’ll call Ian and let him know you’re on your way, then we’ll saddle up and meet you there. The house isn’t easy to find. It’s set way back on what looks like a vacant lot. The church is right next door, and you access the driveway to the house from the back of the church parking lot.”
“See you there,” Joanna said. She had returned to her own office by then. As she ended the call with Frank, Deb Howell appeared in her doorway.
“Knock, knock,” the detective said.
Joanna glanced down at her uniform. It was a little the worse for wear, having been through both water and mud as Joanna went back and forth to the crime scene. With her still sodden boots in the luggage compartment of the Yukon, she was dressed in a pair of shabby and very unofficial-looking tennis shoes, but at this point, she was reluctant to go home to change into anything else. If she stopped by in the middle of the night, she’d probably wake the whole household.
“Let’s go,” she said. “I don’t exactly look my best, but I doubt Reverend Nelson is going to be studying my feet.”
“My car or yours?”
“Yours,” Joanna said. “I have a few calls to make, starting with Dr. Baldwin. She doesn’t yet know that we’ve managed to identify the second victim.”
CHAPTER 4
DURING THE HALF-HOUR DRIVE FROM BISBEE TO SIERRA VISTA, JOANNA’S first call was to the ME. Her second was to Chief Deputy Hadlock, letting him know that both victims had now been positively identified and that next-of-kin notifications either had been or were in the process of being done. She knew this would make a huge difference in the kind of briefing paper he was preparing for release the next morning. Tom sent her a copy of his rough draft of the press release. Feeling like one of her old high school English teachers, Joanna edited it on her iPad, going through the material sentence by sentence, correcting grammar and making suggestions to improve the flow. Butch was right, of course. Media relations would never be Tom’s strong suit.
Once that was done, Joanna leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes, and actually dozed off for a moment while the GPS in Deb’s dash guided them to the address for Holy Redeemer Chapel on Busby Drive. When the car came to a stop, Joanna started awake and saw that they had pulled up next to a solitary streetlight standing in a bare dirt parking lot. A humble three-foot-tall wooden sign, painted white with black letters, said HOLY REDEEMER CHAPEL. In much smaller letters in the bottom right hand corner were the words visitors welcome. Behind it sat a fourteen-by-seventy mobile home—a single-wide. How that functioned as a place of worship was more than Joanna could imagine.
Two unmarked Sierra Vista cop cars pulled up silently beside them. Frank Montoya exited one and came over to knock on the passenger window of Deb’s marked Tahoe. Joanna buzzed down the window.
“Sorry to hear about your folks,” Frank said. “Should you even be working?”
Joanna sighed. “Thank you,” she said, “and yes, I should be working. I’m pretty sure that given the circumstances, you would be, too.”
Frank thought about that for a moment before he nodded. “Okay, then. We’ll lead you over to the house. Since Reverend Nelson knows Ian, we’ll have him knock on the door and introduce you. After that, it’s up to you.”
“Deb has already done one notification tonight, so I’ll handle this one,” Joanna said. “It’s only fair.”
When the other two vehicles pulled out, Deb’s Tahoe fell into line behind them. Joanna couldn’t help but notice, somewhat enviously, that both Sierra Vista PD vehicles were sleek, almost new, all-wheel-drive Ford Interceptors. Deb’s aging Tahoe was almost an antique by comparison, but then the sheriff’s department wasn’t nearly as flush with cash, and Joanna’s people had to deal with far more rugged terrain.
They drove to the far end of the lot and then onto a narrow dirt track that led to a house. It was a small wooden affair, long and narrow, and painted white. It was about the same proportions as the church itself, only this one sat on a permanent foundation. As headlights lit up the house, Joanna noted the old-fashioned windows and doors, realizing that the reasonably well-maintained house, sitting in the middle of a mostly empty block, probably predated the city by decades. Joanna suspected that the structure had been part of the local landscape during the lean years some sixty years earlier when Fort Huachuca had been a shuttered derelict and the sleepy town next door had been called Fry rather than the sprawling bustle of current-day Sierra Vista.
Once the three pairs of headlights shut down, it was clear there were no lights visible inside the house. “If Reverend Nelson is sitting up worrying about his missing wife,” Deb observed dryly, “he’s doing so in the dark.”
The sarcasm in the remark was obvious. “Sounds like you’ve already made up your mind,” Joanna replied.
Deb shrugged. “He’s the husband,” she said. “It’s always the husband. Shall we?”
They got out of the Tahoe together, slamming their doors in unison. At once a window toward the back of the house lit up. By the time Joanna and Deb followed Detective Waters up onto the small front porch, lights had come on in what, through gauzy sheer curtains, was clearly the living room. Detective Waters barely had time to tap once on the door before the porch light next to it flashed on and the door flew open.
“Did you find her, Detective Waters?” demanded a man dressed in a pair of blue-and-white pajamas.
“Sorry to disturb you,” Ian said respectfully. “These are Sheriff Joanna Brady and Detective Deb Howell with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department. And this is Frank Montoya, Sierra Vista’s chief of police. May we come in?”
Reverend Nelson glanced back over his shoulder as though looking for a reason to say no. A moment later, though, he stepped back and opened the door wider, allowing them entrance, eyeing each of them suspiciously as they walked past. “You still haven’t answered my question,” he grumbled. “What’s this all about?”
“You may want to take a seat, Reverend Nelson,” Joanna began. “I’m afraid we have some very bad news.”
“She’s dead, then?” he asked.
Joanna nodded. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said.
Joanna remembered all too clearly exactly what had happened to her when Jaime Carbajal had shown up at her house a little more than a week ago to deliver the terrible news that George Winfield was dead and her mother gravely wounded. That news had come completely out of the blue, and it had hit her so hard that it had been all she could do to remain upright. Since Susan Nelson had been missing for several days, news that she was dead might not come as a total shock. Nonetheless, Joanna expected some kind of emotional outburst from the bereaved husband. That wasn’t what she got.
“All right,” Reverend Nelson said, nodding. “All right, then.” He stepped farther into the room, lowered himself into a nearby rocking chair, and gestured for his visitors to take seats themselves in a tiny room stuffed with too many pieces of oversized furniture.
“All right?” a dismayed Joanna asked, settling in the easy chair closest to his rocker. “What do you mean by ‘all right’?”
“‘Let no man put asunder,’” he intoned.
“You mean you and Susan were married ‘until death do you part’?”
“Exactly,” he responded, without the slightest trace of grief. “Susan was out there doing all kinds of ungodly things and wouldn’t consider atoning for her sins. She refused to go even so far as to pray for forgiveness. Our Lord may be able to forgive Susan her sins, and maybe eventually I will be able to as well. Right now, though, there’s no forgiveness in my heart. None. She betrayed me, and what I’m feeling is something close to relief, now that I know she’s dead. I suppose I could have divorced her, you see. In fact, I probably should have divorce
d her—but then I wouldn’t have been practicing what I preach, now would I. And all those people sitting there in the pews listening to my sermons would have been able to call me a hypocrite, and rightly so.”
Reverend Nelson leaned back in his chair and studied Joanna expectantly while she studied him in return. He was a paunchy man, with a balding pate and sagging features. From the looks of him, Joanna placed him as being somewhere in his early fifties, which would have made him a good fifteen years older than his late wife.
“Well?” he demanded impatiently. “Are you going to tell me what happened or are we just going to sit around the rest of the night looking at one another? I suppose Susan must have totaled her car someplace, hopefully not with one of her lovers right there in the car with her. That wouldn’t surprise me, though, not a bit. What can you expect from such a shameless hussy?”
This was unlike any next-of-kin notification Joanna had ever done. The anger and bitterness in the air were almost palpable. Even family members who eventually turned out to be killers usually had the good sense to at least pretend to be grief stricken. There was no such charade going on here. Reverend Drexel Nelson was pissed. He wasn’t going to take it anymore, and he was obviously happy to have been spared the shameful necessity of publicly divorcing an erring spouse.
Was that enough to turn him into a suspect? Joanna wondered. Absolutely, especially since the man had already admitted to someone else that he had no alibi for the time when the murders were thought to have taken place. Right now, though, in the midst of what was clearly a next-of-kin interview, Joanna was under no obligation to tell him that he had just landed on the suspect side of the equation. In fact, her purpose now was to keep him talking for as long as possible.
Joanna glanced in Deb Howell’s direction, and gave her a nod. To her relief, the detective pulled out her cell phone and adjusted it before replying with an answering nod. The unspoken message that had passed between them meant that from this moment on, the next-of-kin interview would be recorded.
“The reason Chief Montoya and myself, along with Detectives Waters and Howell, are here tonight is not only to deliver this news but to learn whatever you can tell us about your wife’s last days as well as about her friends and associates—anything at all that would help us determine who might be responsible for what happened.”
Reverend Nelson nodded. “Of course,” he said. “I understand.”
“That being said,” Joanna continued, “do you have any idea of someone who might wish to harm your wife?”
“Besides me, you mean?”
“Yes,” Joanna said. “Besides you.”
“Not really,” he said with a shrug. “Maybe one of her boyfriends. I know she’s had several, but for the most part, I don’t know who they are.”
“For the most part?” Joanna echoed.
“I know that for a while she was whoring around with the guy who used to be the principal of the school where she works, but he left town two years ago. She wasn’t his only interest, and the board gave him a choice of leaving or being fired for cause.”
“It turns out your wife wasn’t with another man when she died,” Joanna said. “She was with a woman. Both victims died at approximately the same time on Saturday night or Sunday morning. They were found at the base of a steep cliff east of Warren.”
Reverend Nelson’s jaw literally dropped. “Another woman? Are you serious?” He ran one hand across his forehead in apparent disbelief. “I never saw that one coming. Who was she?”
“A graduate student from the University of Arizona. Her name is Desirée Wilburton, and she was a doctoral candidate in microbiology. Have you ever heard the name? Do you know of any connection between them?”
Reverend Nelson shook his head. “Never heard of her. I have no idea how they might be connected.”
“So as far as you know, your wife’s extramarital interests didn’t extend to other women?”
“I knew there were men involved, but nothing about any women.”
“How did you know?” Joanna asked.
“Easy,” he said. “I had a headache one day and went looking for a bottle of aspirin. There weren’t any in the bathroom, so I checked Susan’s bedside table, and that’s where I stumbled on a boxful of condoms. That’s what gave me my first clue. Now, I ask you, why would the wife of a man who had a vasectomy twenty-five years ago need to have a supply of condoms on hand? Once I knew that, everything went downhill. Oh, she still showed up at church every Sunday, sitting there in the second row, smiling up at me like she was sweetness and light itself. Sometimes it was all I could do to remember where I was in the service let alone stay on track during the sermons.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Saturday afternoon. We were out working in the yard. She was wearing skimpy shorts and a too-tight tank top. I told her she needed to go inside and change. I suggested that it was about time she figured out that she wasn’t a teenager any longer and maybe she should start dressing accordingly. I also told her that just because she was acting like a whore didn’t mean she should dress like one. She drove off in a huff.”
I wonder why? Joanna thought. “Did she say where she was going?”
“She didn’t have to. I knew where she was going,” Reverend Nelson replied. “To school. She did tutoring sessions there most Saturdays, working primarily with kids from her debate team. She was the debate coach, you see, and one of the reasons her teams always won is that she worked with them on a year-round basis, even during summer and winter vacations.”
“The students she generally worked with,” Joanna said. “Do you happen to know any of them by name?”
Reverend Nelson shook his head. “Nope. She mostly talked about them by first names only—Jimmy, Patrick, Bobby, Rochelle, Andrew. For all I know, that could be last year’s team rather than this year’s. You’d have to check with someone at the school to find out the names of the kids on this year’s team.”
“We’ll do that,” Joanna said. “How long has she been at SVSSE?”
“About eight years now, I think. She had worked as a substitute teacher there and at other schools in the area while she was working on her degrees. Once she had her master’s degree, they hired her full-time.”
“How old was your wife?” Joanna asked the question even though she already knew the answer
“Thirty-six.”
“And how long have the two of you been married?”
For the first time in the whole process, Reverend Nelson looked somewhat uncomfortable. He squirmed in the chair and rocked several times before he answered. “Twenty years,” he said finally.
“You married her when she was sixteen?”
Reverend Nelson nodded.
“Her family kicked her out when she was only fourteen. She showed up at the church, homeless and destitute. My first wife and I took her in and gave her a place to live. And then things just . . . well, you know . . . sort of got out of hand.”
“Your first wife’s name?” Joanna inquired.
“Anna,” he said.
“So you and Susan had an affair?”
“We fell in love, but I never touched her. Not like that—not once before we married. Anna could see where things were going, though, and so she left. She went home to her family in Michigan and got a divorce, which I didn’t contest, by the way.”
“You said you and your wife gave Susan a home. Does that mean she lived with you?”
“Yes,” he said. “Right here in the second bedroom.”
“Did she continue to live here after Anna left?”
“Yes, but as I said before, nothing untoward happened between us until our wedding night. I made sure of that.”
Of course you did, Joanna thought. Her initial opinion of Drexel Nelson which had been low to begin with nosedived to reprehensible. A homeless juvenile had shown up on the good reverend’s doorstep, seeking help, and he had taken unfair advantage of the situation. There were many ways for a t
hirtysomething adult male to manipulate an impressionable teenager without necessarily taking her to bed right off the bat.
“What about her parents?” Joanna asked. “What became of them? They should be notified as well.”
“Roger and Phyllis Judson,” Reverend Nelson said at once. “He was in the military—stationed here at Fort Huachuca. They got transferred to another post shortly after they parted company with their daughter.”
“Where are they now?”
“I have no idea.”
“Susan made no attempt to reconcile with them or to get back in touch?”
“They didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.”
“You said they threw her out. Why?”
“They said she was defiant—out of control. She’d been hanging out with a bad crowd, ditching school, doing drugs, getting into all kinds of devilment.”
“Including trouble with the law?”
“Some,” he acknowledged.
“As in sent to juvie?”
“Yes,” he answered, “but after she got her GED and was an honors student at the U of A, I was able to have her record expunged.”
“Which is how she was able to pass the background check for teaching?”
“Exactly.”
“She went back to school after you married?”
“Yes, I insisted on it. And for a while everything was fine.”
“But then it stopped being fine?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” Joanna asked.
Reverend Nelson looked uneasily from Joanna to Deb Howell. “Do I really have to talk about this?”
“We’re trying to solve your wife’s homicide,” Joanna said. “We need to know as much as there is to know.”
Nelson sighed. “When we started out, she was sixteen and I was thirty-one. At the time, the age difference didn’t seem like such a big deal. But a few years ago, I developed . . . well . . . a bit of a problem. Not fatal, and something a little blue pill can fix, but they’re very expensive. That’s when things started going downhill.
