Shoot Don't Shoot

by J. A. Jance

  Jenny shrugged. “Almost everyone else in Mrs. Lassiter’s class has two parents. There are two kids whose parents are divorced. I’m the only one whose dad is dead.”

  “So?”

  “At Daddy’s funeral, everybody said how sorry they were and that they knew how I felt. But they didn’t, not really. They weren’t nine years old when their fathers died. If I tell Ceci I know how she feels, it’ll be for real, ‘cause she’s nine years old and so am I. Maybe if I tell her that, it’ll make her feel better.”

  They had reached the truck by then. Joanna wrenched open the door and tossed both her purse and Juanita’s envelope into the car. Now she leaned down and pulled Jenny toward her, grasping her in a tight hug while a sudden gust of wind blew a wisp of Jenny’s long, smooth hair across Joanna’s cheek.

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re one special kid?” Joanna asked, holding Jenny at arm’s length so she could look the child in the eye.

  “Daddy did sometimes,” Jenny answered wistfully.

  “He was right,” Joanna said. “You’re right to be concerned about Ceci. And I’ll see what I can do. If I can find out where she’s staying, maybe we could take her out to do something with us while you’re there.”

  “Like going to Baskin-Robbins?” Jenny asked.

  “Just like,” Joanna said with a fond smile.

  Joanna had spent days and nights agonizing in advance about this leave-taking. Now the moment came and went with unexpected ease and without a single tear. “I’ll miss you, Mommy,” Jenny said, hugging Joanna one last time. “I’ll miss you, but I’ll be good. I promise. Girl Scout’s honor.”

  “I’ll be good, too,” Joanna replied.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise. I’ll see you Wednesday night.”

  Jenny stepped away from Joanna’s grasp. “What’s the name of the place we’re staying again?”

  “The Hohokam Resort Hotel.”

  “Does it have a swimming pool?”

  “It’s supposed to.”

  “Come on, Sadie and Tigger,” Jenny said to the dogs. Then she looked innocently back up at her mother. “Me and the dogs’ll race you to the corner of the fence.”

  Joanna’s grammar-correcting reflex was automatic. “The dogs and I will race you,” Joanna countered.

  Jenny grinned up at her impishly. “Does that mean I get to drive?” she asked.

  The nine-year-old humor was subtle. It took a moment for Joanna to realize she’d been had, that for the first time in months, Jennifer Ann Brady had actually cracked a joke. And then Joanna was grinning, too.

  “Last one to the corner is a rotten egg,” she said, bounding into the Blazer and turning the key in the ignition. Jenny and the dogs took off running. Joanna let them win, but only just barely.

  After passing them, Joanna glanced in the mirror. The last thing she saw as she drove away from High Lonesome Ranch was Jenny, standing on tiptoe by the corner of the fence and waving her heart out. Her long hair blew in blond streamers behind her, while the two dogs danced around her in crazy circles.

  “She’s going to be all right,” Joanna marveled to herself as the Blazer jounced across the rutted track that led out to High Lonesome Road.

  A couple of stray tears leaked out the corners of her eyes as she drove, but they were welcome tears—not at all the kind she had expected.

  Maybe it was trying to drive two hundred miles on a full stomach. Maybe it was the warm autumn sun slanting in on her through the driver’s window. By the time Joanna had driven as far as Eloy, she could barely stay awake. She stopped at a truck stop for a coffee break. Reaching for her purse, she caught sight of Juanita Grijalva’s envelope and carried it along into the coffee shop. As she slipped into a booth, she tore open the flap.

  Sipping coffee, she shuffled through the stack of copied newspaper articles. Even though most of the articles were undated, as soon as she started reading them, the chronology of events was clear enough.

  The first article was little more than three inches long. It reported that the partially clad, badly beaten body of an unidentified woman had been found in the desert a few miles south of Lake Pleasant. The grisly remains had been discovered by a group of high school students ditching school for an afternoon keg party. Officers from the Peoria Police Department were investigating.

  The next article identified the murdered woman as Serena Maria Grijalva, formerly of Bisbee. At age twenty-four, she was the divorced mother of two small children.

  Joanna stopped short when she read Serena’s age. Twenty-four was very young to have a nine-year-old daughter. Joanna herself had been eighteen years old when she got pregnant and nineteen when Jenny was born. Serena had been four whole years—four critical years—younger than that.

  The article noted that Peoria Police Detective Carol Strong, primary investigator in the case, indicated that detectives were following up on several leads and that they expected a break soon.

  The third article was longer—more of a feature story. Because it was situated at the top of the page, the date showed, and Joanna’s eye stopped there. September 20. The day of Andy’s funeral. No wonder that two months later, most of this was news to Joanna. That nightmare week in September she had been far too preoccupied with the tragedy in her own life to be aware of anyone else’s. Still, the realization that Serena and Andy had died within days of each other put a whole new perspective on the words she was reading.

  When Serena Maria Grijalva left her children home alone last Wednesday night to go four blocks down the street to the WE-DO-YU-DO Washateria, she had every intention of coming right back with a grocery cart loaded with clean laundry. Instead, the twenty-four-year-old single mother was bludgeoned to death in a desert area a few miles north of Sun City.

  The mother’s absence did not initially alarm the Grijalva children, nine-year-old Cecelia and six-year-old Pablo. Ever since moving to Phoenix from Bisbee several months earlier, they had been latchkey kids. That morning, when they awoke and discovered their mother wasn’t home, they dressed themselves, fixed breakfast, packed lunches, and went to school. And when they came home that afternoon and their mother still hadn’t returned, they helped themselves to a simple dinner of microwaved hot dogs and refried beans.

  Almost twenty hours after she left home, Serena Grijalva’s supervisor from the Desert View Nursing Home stopped by the house, checking to see why Serena hadn’t reported for work. Only then did the resourceful Grijalva children realize something was wrong.

  A call from the nursing home brought the children’s maternal grandmother into the case. A missing person report from her filed with the Peoria Police Department resulted in authorities making the connection between the two abandoned children and an unidentified dead woman found earlier that afternoon in the desert north of Peoria.

  Joanna found herself blinking back tears as she read. She was appalled at the idea of those two little kids being left on their own for such a long time. They had coped with an independence and resourcefulness that went far beyond their tender years, but they shouldn’t have had to, Joanna thought, turning back to the article.

  The tragedy of the Grijalva children is only one shocking example of an increasingly widespread problem of the nineties—that of latchkey kids. Cute movies notwithstanding, children in this country are routinely being left alone in shockingly large numbers.

  Most children who are left to their own devices don’t go to luxury hotels and order room service. The houses they live in are often squalid and cold. There is little or no food available. They play with matches and die in fires. They play with guns and die of bullet wounds. They become involved in the gang scene because gang membership offers a sense of belonging that they don’t find at home.

  Sometimes the parents are simply bad parents. In some cases the neglect is caused or made worse by parental addiction to drugs or alcohol. Increasingly, however, these children live in single-parent households where the family budget will simply not str
etch far enough to include suitable day care arrangements. Divorce is often a contributing factor.

  Although Serena Grijalva’s divorce from her forty-three-year-old husband was not yet final, Cecelia and Pablo Grijalva fall into that last category.

  “Serena was determined to make it on her own,” says Madeline Bellerman, the attorney who helped Serena Grijalva obtain a restraining order against her estranged husband. “She had taken two jobs—one full-time and one part-time. She made enough so she didn’t have to take her kids and go home to her parents, but beyond food and rent there wasn’t room for much else. Regular day care was obviously well outside her budget.”

  Serena’s two minor children have now been placed in the custody of their maternal grandparents, but what happened to them has forced the community to examine what options are available to parents who find themselves caught in similar circumstances. This is the first in a series of three articles that will address the issue of childcare for underemployed women in the Phoenix area. Where can they turn for help? What options are available to them?

  “You want a refill?”

  Joanna looked up. A waitress stood beside the booth, a steaming coffeepot poised over Joanna’s cup.

  “Please.”

  The waitress glanced curiously at the article on the table as she poured. “That was awful, waddn’t it, what happened to those two little kids? Whatever became of them anyway? Their father’s the one who did it, isn’t he?”

  Joanna lifted the one page and glanced at the next one. EX-HUSBAND ARRESTED IN WIFE’S SLAYING, the headline blared.

  “See there?” the waitress said. “I told you.” She marched away from the table, and Joanna picked up the article.

  Antonio Jorge Grijalva, age 43, was arrested today and booked into the Maricopa County Jail on an open charge of murder in connection with the bludgeon slaying of his estranged wife two weeks ago. He surrendered without incident outside his place of employment in southeastern Arizona. Sources close to the investigation say Mr. Grijalva has been a person of interest in the case since the beginning.

  Two City of Peoria police officers, Detectives Carol Strong and Mark Hansen, traveled over four hundred miles from Peoria to Paul Spur to make the arrest. The Cochise County Sheriff’s Department assisted in collaring the suspect, who was placed under arrest in the parking lot of a lime plant as he was leaving work.

  Court records reveal that the slain woman had sworn out a no-contact order against her estranged husband four days before her disappearance and death. The fact that the suspect was not at work on the night in question and could not account for his whereabouts caused investigators to focus in on him very early in the investigation.

  Mr. Jefferson Duffy, father of the slain victim, when contacted at his home in Wittmann, expressed relief. “We’re glad to know he’s under lock and key. The wife and I have Serena’s two kids here with us. With Jorge on the loose like that, there was no telling what might happen next.”

  “Hey, good-looking, you’re working too hard. I’d be glad to buy you a piece of pie to go with that coffee.”

  Joanna heard the voice and looked up, not sure the words were intended for her. An overall-clad, cigarette-smoke-shrouded man was leering at her from the booth next to hers in a section reserved for professional truck drivers.

  “You look kind of lonesome sitting there all by yourself.”

  “I was reading,” Joanna said.

  “I noticed. So what are you, some kind of student?”

  Joanna looked down at her left hand. She still wore her wedding ring and the diamond engagement ring she had received as a gift only after Andy was already in the hospital dying. Seeing them made the pain of Andy’s loss burn anew. She looked from her hand back to the man in the booth. If he had noticed either the gesture or the pain engendered by his unwanted intrusion, it made no difference.

  “I’m not a student, I’m a cop,” she answered evenly.

  “Sure you are.” He nodded. “And I’m a monkey’s uncle. I’ve got me a nice little double bed in my truck out there. I’ll bet the two of us could make beautiful music together.”

  For a moment, Joanna was too stunned by his rude proposition to even think of a comeback. Instead, she shuffled the stack of papers back into the envelope. “Which truck is that?” she asked.

  “That big red, white, and blue Peterbilt out there in the parking lot.” He grinned; then he tipped the bill of his San Diego Padres baseball cap in her direction. “Peewee Wright Hauling at your service, ma’am.”

  “Where are you headed?”

  Peewee Wright beamed with unwarranted confidence. “El Paso,” he said. “After I sleep awhile, that is. It’d be a real shame to have to sleep alone, don’t you think?”

  “I see you’re wearing a ring, Mr. Wright,” Joanna observed. “What would Mrs. Wright have to say about that?”

  Peewee waved his cigarette and shook his head. “She wouldn’t mind none. Me and her have one of them open marriages.”

  “Do you really?” Joanna stood up, gathering her belongings and her check. “The problem is, I don’t believe in open marriages.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out one of her newly printed business cards. She paused beside his table, fingering the card, looking at the words that were printed there: JOANNA BRADY, SHERIFF, COCHISE COUNTY, BISBEE, ARIZONA.

  “And how will you be going to El Paso?” she asked.

  “Interstate Ten from Tucson,” he said.

  Joanna nodded. “That’s about what I figured,” she said, dropping the card on his table. “If I were you, I’d check my equipment for any violations before I left here. I’d also be very careful not to speed once I got inside Cochise County.”

  She waited while he reached out one meaty paw to pick up the card and read it.

  Because the Arizona Highway Patrol, not the Sheriff’s Department, patrols the segment of I-10 that slices through Cochise County from the Pima County line to the New Mexico border, Joanna knew her words to be nothing more than an empty threat. Still, when the man read the text on her business card, he blanched.

  He was still holding the card as Joanna walked away. If nothing else, the experience would give him something to think about the next time he tried to pick up a lone woman minding her own business in a truck stop.

  6

  Had Joanna been going to the Hohokam Resort Hotel that evening instead of later on during the week, it would have been easy to find. The only high-rise for miles around, the twelve-story newly finished hotel towered over its low-rise Old Peoria neighbors, its layers of lighted windows glowing like beacons as Joanna made her way north on Grand Avenue.

  The Arizona Police Officers Academy turned out to be directly across the street. It was also across the railroad tracks, however, and the only way to get there was to cross the railroad at Olive and then turn in off Hatcher.

  The triangular site was located in an area that seemed to be zoned commercial. Along both Seventy-fifth and Hatcher, a high brick wall marked two sides of the property. Entry was gained through an ornate portal. Two cast-concrete angels stood guard on either side of the drive. An arched lintel rose up and over behind them. One of the angels had lost part of a wing—probably to vandals—while the other was still intact. The words GOD IS LOVE were carved into the lintel itself.

  The verse wasn’t exactly in keeping with the mission of a police academy, but Joanna knew where it came from—a man named Tommy Tompkins. The Reverend Tommy Tompkins.

  For years the APOA had limped along in the deteriorating classrooms of a decommissioned high school in central Phoenix. Only recently had the academy moved to its new home in Peoria. The APOA’s good fortune came as a result of Tommy’s fall from grace. He and his two top lieutenants had been shipped off to federal prison on income tax evasion convictions. As his religious and financial empire collapsed, the property he had envisioned as world headquarters of Tommy Tompkins International had fallen into the hands of the Resolution Trust Corporation.

&n
bsp; On fifteen acres of donated cotton field, Tommy had planned to build not only a glass-walled cathedral, but also the dorms and classrooms that would have allowed him to indoctrinate a cadre of handpicked missionaries. By the time Tommy Tompkins International fell victim to the RTC, the planned complex was only partially completed. The classroom wing along with dormitories, a temporary residence for Tommy himself, as well as a few outbuildings were all that were or ever would be finished.

  When the place went up for grabs, the state of Arizona had jumped at the chance to buy the property at a bargain-basement price since the site lay directly in the path of a proposed freeway extension. While awaiting voter approval of road-building monies, the state had leased the complex to the multijurisdictional consortium running the APOA. The transaction was accomplished with the strict understanding that little or no money would be spent on remodeling. As a result, angels continued to guard the entrance of the place where police officers from all over the state of Arizona received their basic law enforcement training.

  Maybe guardian angels aren’t such a bad idea, Joanna thought as she drove across the vast, patchily lit parking lot to the place where two dozen or so cars were grouped together near two buildings connected by breezeways and laid out in a long L.

  The two-story structure built along one leg had the regularly spaced windows, doors, and lights that indicated living quarters. That was probably the dorm. Although lights were on in some of the rooms, there was no sign of life. The other building was only one story high. From the spacing of the rooms, Joanna surmised that one contained classrooms. She parked the car and walked to the end of the dorm nearest the classroom building. There, she found a wall-mounted plaque that said OFFICE along with an arrow that pointed toward the other building.

  Past a closed wrought-iron gate, Joanna discovered that the last door on the classroom building was equipped with a bell. Even though no lights were visible inside, she rang the doorbell anyway.