Rattlesnake Crossing

by J. A. Jance

  Turning off the water, Joanna stepped out of the tub, wrapped a towel around her dripping body, and stared at her image in the steam-fogged mirror. "I don't believe it," she told her reflection. "The shoe is on the other damn foot now, isn't it!"

  And it was true. Joanna Brady had changed. Without realizing it, she had turned into a real cop, into someone for whom a homicide investigation became paramount and took precedence over everything else. Shaking her head, she staggered out of the bathroom. How the hell did that happen? she wondered.

  Naked and still damp, she fell into bed. She was so exhausted that she should have dropped off right away. But she didn't. She kept seeing that bare, bony skull glowing tip at her in the glare of Ernie Carpenter's battery-powered trouble light.

  Finally, after an hour, she got up, went out to the kitchen, and poured herself a shot of whiskey, emptying the last of the Wild Turkey that Marianne Maculyea had brought her the night Andy died.

  That, too, reminded Joanna of other times, of times Andy had come home work-exhausted, had gone to bed, but had tossed and turned and been unable to sleep. How many times had she hassled him for that, too? she wondered now. How many times had she given the man hell for sitting in the kitchen in the dark late at night-for sitting and brooding?

  "Sorry, Andy," she said aloud, raising her glass in his memory. "Please forgive me. I didn't know what I was talking about."

  Had there been more booze in the house, she might have been tempted to have another drink. As it was, though, she drank only the one, and then she went to bed. She might have tossed and turned some more, but the whiskey, combined with the hard physical labor of moving all those rocks, made further brooding impossible.

  She lay down on the bed, put her head on the pillow, pulled the sheet up around her shoulders, and fell sleep. Not sound sleep. Not a deeply restful sleep, but sleep haunted by vague and disturbing nightmares that disappeared as soon as she awoke and tried to recall them.

  Considering all she'd been through that day, maybe that was just as well.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The phone awakened her. Groggy from restless sleep, she almost knocked it on the floor before she finally managed to grasp the handset and get it to her ear. "Hello?"

  "Joanna, I'm sorry," Angie Kellogg apologized. "I woke you up, didn't I?"

  "It's all right," Joanna said, squinting at the clock. It was almost seven; the alarm would have gone off in a minute anyway. "What's up?"

  "I'm at Jeff and Marianne's," Angie said. "I'm taking care of Ruth."

  Joanna sat up in bed. "Esther isn't in the hospital again, is she?"

  "She is," Angie replied. "And it's the most wonderful thing-wonderful and terrible at the same time. Jeff and Marianne got a call from the hospital last night. A heart became available. A little girl in Tucson drowned in her grandparents' pool. That's the terrible part, but for Esther, it's going to be wonderful."

  As a wave of impatience washed over her, Joanna clambered out of bed. "If that's what was going on, why didn't Marianne say so when she called?"

  "You talked to her then?" Angie asked.

  "No, she left a message, but I should have known."

  "Known what?" Angie asked.

  "That something was going on. When I got the message I decided it was too late to call her back. What time did the hospital call?" Joanna asked.

  "Right around midnight," Angie replied. "Marianne called me just as I was closing up at one, and asked if I'd come look after Ruth. I told them I'd be right over."

  Helping rehabilitate Angie Kellogg, a former L.A. hooker, had been a joint project assumed by both Joanna Brady and Marianne Maculyea. After escaping virtual imprisonment at the hands of a sadistic hit-man boyfriend, twenty-five-year-old Angie had been totally without resources when she first landed in Bisbee.

  Taken under Joanna's and Marianne's protective wings, Angie was making a new life for herself. Bartending for Bobo Jenkins was her first legitimate job. With Jeff Daniels' help, she had purchased her own car-a seventeen-year-old Oldsmobile Omega-which she actually knew how to drive. She owned her own little house, a two-bedroom, in what had once been company housing for Phelps Dodge miners. For topping on the cake, she also had a boyfriend-a real boyfriend-for the first time in her life. Baby-sitting on a moment's notice both for Jeff and Marianne and for Joanna was Angie's way of repaying her benefactors for all they had done for her and for all the many blessings in her new life.

  "What can I do to help?" Joanna asked. "Who's going to look after Ruth when you have to go to work?"

  "I already talked to Bobo about it," Angie said. Bobo Jenkins was the African-American owner of the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge in Bisbee's famed Brewery Gulch, where Angie worked as a relief bartender. "He said I could take both today and tomorrow off. And I talked to Dennis. He says he'll come to town early on Friday so he can take over when my shift starts."

  Angie had met Dennis Hacker, a British-born naturalist, through a mutual interest in bird-watching. Originally, Angie had been fascinated by his Audubon Society-funded project to reintroduce parrots into their former habitat in the Chiricahua and Peloncillo mountains of southeastern Arizona.

  Knowing that the man had spent years living a hermitlike existence, Joanna had been concerned that Hacker's interest in the young woman didn't go far beyond her lush good looks. She had been reassured, however, by the fact that as time passed, Hacker continued to find any number of excuses for driving into Bisbee several times a week from his camp in the Peloncillos. She knew that the possibility of a blossoming romance between Angie and Dennis was anathema to some of the grizzled old-timers who frequented the Blue Moon. Having established what they considered to be squatters' rights around Angie, they regarded the lanky, blond Hacker as an unwelcome interloper, one who might very well carry Angie away with him.

  Now, though, Joanna realized that the relationship between Angie and Hacker was verging on serious. "You mean Dennis would do that?" she asked. "He'd come baby-sit a two-year-old in your place?"

  "Of course he would," Angie answered confidently. "Why wouldn't he?"

  Why indeed? Most men wouldn't volunteer to do that on a bet, Joanna thought. She said, "So you don't need any help from me? With Ruth, I mean."

  "Not right now. Marianne left me a list of ladies from the church who'd be willing to help out, but for the time being, I've got it handled."

  Joanna glanced at her watch. "Did Marianne say what time they'd be doing the surgery?"

  "This morning sometime," Angie responded. "That's all I know."

  "I'll head into the office right away," Joanna said. "I'm hoping I’ll be able to slip up to Tucson a little later today. Which hospital?"

  "University," Angie said.

  Joanna swallowed hard. That was the same hospital in Tucson where Andy had been airlifted after he was shot-the place where he had died the next day. Joanna had never wanted to go back there; had never wanted to set foot in another one of their awful waiting rooms. But still, for Jeff and Marianne-for little Esther-she would. She didn't have any choice.

  "I'll be there," she said. "As soon as I can get cut loose from the department."

  Ignoring the dogs and without even bothering to go to the kitchen and start coffee, Joanna headed for the bathroom. With everything that had happened in Cochise County in the past two days, there would be plenty to do, plenty to stand in the way of her getting out of the department on time, to say nothing of early.

  By a quarter to eight, she was at her desk, mowing through the stack of unanswered messages that had come in the previous afternoon. By five after eight, she had corralled Dick Voland and Frank Montoya into her office for the morning briefing.

  "I guess you heard about Clyde Philips," she said as Frank settled into his chair.

  Montoya nodded. "If he's dead and his shop's been cleaned out, I don't suppose we'll be buying sniper rifles from him, no matter what."

  "When you talked to him, he didn't happen to mention how many of those thin
gs he had on hand, did he?"

  Frowning, Frank considered a moment before he answered. "Now that you mention it, I believe he told me there were three individual weapons we could choose from, ones he had available for immediate delivery."

  "Great," Joanna said. "That's just peachy."

  Voland came in holding computer printouts of the previous day's incident reports. "So what all's happening, Dick?" she asked.

  "Not too much. S and R's been up and out since six of the A.M.," the chief deputy replied. "Still no sign of Katrina Berridge. The evidence techs are on their way to the crime scene to pick up anything we may have missed last night. Detective Carbajal will meet them there and lead them in. Ernie is going up to Tucson to be on hand for the two autopsies. Dr. Daly has scheduled them back-to-back this morning, one right after the other."

  Joanna didn't shirk from most law enforcement duties. One of the precepts of leading by example was that she didn't ask her officers to do things she herself wasn't prepared to do. The lone exception to that was standing by during autopsies. That was one official task she was more than happy to delegate to her detectives.

  Joanna leaned back in her chair. "All right, then," she said. "Let's get started. We're having a tough time around here at the moment. Do we have any deputies we can spare from Patrol to augment Search and Rescue?"

  Voland glowered at Frank Montoya. The Chief Deputy for Administration was charged with overseeing the budget. In that role, he had been conducting an unrelenting campaign to keep Dick Voland's Patrol Division pared to an absolute minimum.

  "You're trying to get blood out of a turnip," Voland said. "Frank here has us running so close to the bone that I don't have anybody I can spare. And if I bring in off-duty officers, we'll he dealing with overtime all over again."

  In these kinds of internal turf wars, Joanna often found herself agreeing with Frank and his budget considerations. This time, however, she had to come down in favor of Dick Voland's need for additional manpower.

  "You're going to have to cut us a little slack here, Frank," she said. "Dick's going to have officers running two homicide investigations and conducting a search-and-rescue operation in addition to working our normal caseload. He has to have extra help. If that means overtime, that means overtime."

  Frank nodded. "You're the boss," he said. "I'll see what I can do."

  "Speaking of normal caseload," Joanna added, "what else went on overnight?"

  "Not too much," Voland answered. "We had somebody-teenagers, most likely-shooting up road signs out on Moson Road."

  "Road signs but no livestock and no people, right?" Joanna asked.

  "Right," Voland replied. "Two speeders, a couple of DWIs, a reported runaway from out east of Huachuca City, and that's about it. Nothing serious."

  "No illegals?"

  "Hard as it is to believe, nobody picked up a single one last night."

  "God," Joanna said. "What else? Any leads on that truck hijacking over by Bowie? Has anybody been in touch with Sheriff Trotter's office over in New Mexico?"

  "I have," Frank volunteered. "No leads so far. The driver isn't exactly eager to talk about it. He's evidently married and doesn't want his wife to know that he stops along the road to pick up naked hitchhikers."

  "That's hardly surprising," Joanna returned. "If I were in the wife's shoes, I wouldn't be any too thrilled, either." She addressed her next question to Frank. "How did the grievance hearings go?"

  "Pretty well," he said. "At least they're put to rest for the time being. Some of the old-time jail guards still haven't figured out that women are in the workforce to stay. There were three different complaints, all of ' em about Tommy Fender. He's forever telling off-color jokes and making snide comments. The women finally had enough. After I heard what they had to say, I hauled Tommy into my office and gave him a second warning. I told him to cool it. I let him know if he wants to stay around the department long enough to see his retirement, he'd damned well better shape up."

  "Do you think he will?" Joanna asked. "Shape up, I mean."

  Frank shrugged. "Who knows? I wouldn't hold my breath. I tried to put the fear of God in him, but if he doesn't fly right and we have to fire him, we'll be stuck between a rock and a hard place. We are anyway. If we ignore what he's doing, the women take us to court for sexual harassment. And if we end up firing him over it, chances are he'll take us to court for wrongful dismissal. Either way, it's going to be a mess. And as for those two provisioners-"

  "I don't have time to talk about the provisioners, Frank," Joanna interrupted. "And I don't want to talk to them, either. Since you and the cook are the ones most closely involved, it makes a lot more sense for the two of you to meet with them and make a decision. I have total faith in your ability to decide who we should go with and where we'll get the best deal."

  "You're right about that," Dick Voland grumbled. "Montoya's such a cheapskate, you'd think every dime he spends comes out of his own personal pocket instead of the county's."

  "And you should be properly grateful," Joanna told Dick, biting back the urge to smile. "After all, if you'd been in charge of the budget last year instead of Frank, there would have been approximately two weeks at the end of the fiscal year that we all would have been without paychecks, which wouldn't have been any too cool. Now, if that's all, you two clear out and let me get started on my paper."

  Squabbling as usual, the two men left the office. For more than an hour Joanna whaled away at paperwork-proofing and signing off on typed reports, scanning through the agenda for the next board of supervisors meeting, reviewing two requests for family leave. Good as his word, Frank Montoya had delivered the September rotation-and-vacation schedules. Those had to be gone over in some detail and signed off on as well. It was boring, time-consuming, but necessary work. The better part of two hours had passed and Kristin had just come into Joanna's private office with that morning's collection from the post office when the phone rang. Without Kristin at her desk to intercept the call, Joanna answered it herself.

  "Sheriff Brady," Ernie Carpenter said, "I've got news."

  Joanna glanced at her watch. "Don't tell me Doc Daly's already finished up the autopsy."

  "Hardly," Ernie replied. "But that doesn't mean she hasn't made progress. We've got a positive ID on the girl from the ledge. Her name's Ashley Brittany. She's a twenty-two-year-old oleander activist from Van Nuys, California."

  "An oleander activist?" Joanna said. "What's that? And how did Fran Daly pull this one out of her hat? Considering; the condition of the corpse, I figured this was one ID that would take months or even years."

  "First things first. The Pima County ME is a big supporter of the FBI's National Crime Information Computer. They're on this program to make sure all their missing persons' dental records get registered. In fact, I think some professor at the University of Arizona finagled a federal grant to help them do it."

  "I remember reading something about that."

  "So in Pima County, it's automatic now. Once people go on the missing-person's roster, their dental charts go into the computer. This Ashley Brittany was reported missing a month ago, although she may have been gone longer than that."

  "May have?"

  "That's where the oleander comes in. She was part of a federal grant, which they call a federal study, sponsored by the USDA."

  "The feds are looking for oleander? What's the matter?" Joanna asked. "Have people stopped smoking grass and started smoking oleander?"

  "It's poison."

  "Of course it's poison. But then, according to what my mother always told me, so are poinsettias. Maybe oleander's getting the same bum rap."

  "I wouldn't know about that," Ernie replied. "But somebody back in D.C. came up with the bright idea that oleander is killing wildlife out in the wilds of California, Arizona, and New Mexico. They commissioned a study, and that's what Ashley was doing. She was working on a summer internship sponsored jointly by Northern Arizona University and the USDA. The Pima County Sher
iff's Department found her camper and her pickup truck parked in Redington Pass three weeks ago, but they never found her."

  "Because she wasn't anywhere near Redington Pass," Joanna said.

  She was thinking about the sign posted outside the Triple C. About no trespassing for employees of the federal government or for people giving information to the federal government. And about the conflicting layers of regulation that, according to his wife, threatened to strangle Alton Hosfield's efforts to keep the Triple C alive and running.

  "Who owns those ledges along the river?" she asked.

  "I don't know," Ernie answered. "I'm not sure where the boundary lines are. That land looks as though it might belong to the Triple C, but that may not be true. Once I finish up with Doc Daly, I could check with the county recorder's office and see who the legal owner is."

  "Don't bother," Joanna told him. "You stick with the autopsies. I can check with the county recorder's office. Give me a call, here or on my cell phone, when you finish up with Dr. Daly."

  "Okay," Ernie said. "Will do."

  "Speaking of autopsies, what's happening on that score?"

  "Because of the dental chart deal, Dr. Daly decided to do the girl first. That one's done. She's taking a break and then she'll do Philips."

  "She told you she thinks he's a suicide?"

  "She said something to that effect, but we'll see."

  "Good," Joanna said. "Keep me posted."

  She put down the phone and sat staring out her office window at the lush forest of green grass and fully leafed ocotillo covering the steep, limestone-crowned hillsides be-hind the justice center. She had seen Alton Hosfield's No Trespassing sign, but was it possible he had made good on the implied threat by killing some poor girl out earning a college degree through doing an oleander survey? That seemed so silly as to be almost laughable. Still, Joanna knew enough about the supposed Freeman Movement to be worried. She had heard a few of them interviewed on television. A lot of what they had to say made sense-up to a point-but it was what went beyond good sense that worried her. Maybe Ashley Brittany's oleander study had been the straw that broke the camel's back. Maybe her very existence had pushed Alton Hosfield over the edge.