Rattlesnake Crossing

by J. A. Jance

  But when Ruben Ramos asked that the bag be removed so he could make a positive ID, all hope for an end of things evaporated.

  Once Fran Daly uncovered the bloody mess, Frankie's father uttered an awful groan and then simply crumpled to, the ground. Standing beside him, Joanna reached out and tried to break his fall. So did Heck Tompkins. Between the two of them, they probably helped some.

  And then, while Dr. Fran Daly abandoned her forensic duties and rushed over to administer first aid, Joanna sprinted back to her Blazer to radio for help.

  Cochise County's spree killer was no longer neglecting to mutilate his male victims.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It was only eight o'clock when Joanna stopped at the end of her mile-long driveway on High Lonesome Road. Putting the Blazer in neutral, she climbed out and then trudged across the road to pull that day's worth of personal mail out of the box. Three bills, two catalogs, and a postcard from Jenny. In the bright August starlight, she couldn't quite make out the background on the picture, but the foreground was clear enough. It featured a unicorn-a lovely white unicorn.

  Back in the Blazer, Joanna switched on the reading light and studied the picture. Then she read the message:

  Dear Mom,

  This is the prettiest unicorn I've ever seen. Grandma and I got it at a drugstore in Tulsa.

  The G's said to tell you that we'll be home sometime on Sunday. I don't know what time.

  I love you and I miss you. And I miss the dogs and Kiddo, too. Don't forget to give him his carrots.

  Love,

  Jenny

  P.S. Guess what? I kicked Rodney in the you-know-what and now he's being nice to me.

  Reading the postcard, Joanna didn't know whether to laugh or cry. She ended up doing neither one. Instead, she dropped the mail, postcard included, beside her purse on the seat and headed up the drive toward her house.

  In all the time she'd been sheriff, Joanna Brady had never been as discouraged or as beaten down as she felt that night. She had returned from the latest crime scene near Pomerene feeling totally helpless. She had stood on the sidelines and watched while EMTs from the air ambulance service loaded Ruben Ramos on board to airlift him to the cardiac care unit at Tucson Medical Center. And then she had watched the technicians from the Pima County Medical Examiner's office load yet another dead citizen from Cochise County-some other person she, Sheriff Joanna Brady, had failed to serve and protect-into the meat wagon to be hauled off to the Pima County morgue. Once again Fran Daly had scheduled an autopsy for early the following morning.

  And all the time this was going on, all the while those necessary and official tasks were being done, Sheriff Joanna Brady had stood apart from the action and wrestled with her own demons and with the grim knowledge that somewhere nearby, a killer waited, coiled and deadly as a rattlesnake, waiting to strike again.

  "You'd better go home," Ernie Carpenter had said to her at last. "There's nothing more you can do here."

  When he said that, Joanna hadn't even bothered to argue. Without a word, she had simply dragged her weary body into the Blazer and driven away. That late-summer night was devoid of all humidity. Consequently, the desert cooled rapidly. She left the windows open, hoping to cleanse the smell of death from her lungs, and from her soul as well.

  Soon, though, she found herself shivering-whether from actual cold, simple exhaustion, or a combination of both, she couldn't tell. When that happened, she rolled up the windows and opened the vent.

  Halfway up the dirt track to the house she realized that the dogs hadn't come running to meet her. That was odd. They almost always did. Has something happened to one of them? she wondered. Tigger probably tangled with the porcupine again.

  Then she caught a glimpse of the house through the forest of mesquite and saw that the whole place was ablaze with lights. Her first thought was that Jim Bob and Eva Lou must have changed their minds and brought Jenny back home earlier than they had anticipated. Except that when she came into the yard, rather than the Bradys' aging Honda, she spotted Butch Dixon's Subaru parked in front of the gate.

  What's he doing here? she wondered irritably.

  Once she had accepted that there was no way she'd be getting back to Bisbee in a timely fashion, she had called Kristin and asked her to track down Butch and tell him what was happening. She had wanted to let him know that once again, through no fault of her own, she wouldn't be able to make their early-evening date.

  That had been hours ago. She might have been happy to see him at five or six, but she wasn't the least bit thrilled at the prospect of seeing him now. She was sweaty and dirty and tired. The night before, she had washed the clothing from her crime-scene investigation bag, but oversleeping that morning meant she hadn't had time to dry the clothes and repack them. She had ventured out to the Frankie Ramos crime scene dressed in her regular work clothes. In the course of walking the rock-strewn riverbank, she had broken the heel on one shoe. That accounted for what looked like a severe limp. One stocking, the third pair she had put on that morning, had snagged on a mesquite tree branch, leaving it with a three-inch-wide ladder run that went from mid-thigh all the way down to her ankle.

  When the motion-detector yard light came on, Butch and the two dogs materialized all at once from the relative shadow of the front porch. The dogs gamboled and Butch sauntered toward the Blazer to meet her. Joanna climbed out of the truck, slamming the door behind her.

  "Long day," Butch observed. "It's about time you got home." He grinned so she would know he was just kidding.

  Temper, temper, Joanna warned herself. She wanted to be glad to see him. Maybe she was glad to see him, but she was too tired, too depleted. Joanna Brady was a foot soldier in the war against good and evil, and evil was definitely winning.

  "What are you doing here?" she asked.

  Standing with hands in his pockets and managing to look both foolish and contrite at the same time, Butch shrugged. "When Kristin called, I had already made up my mind what we were having for dinner. Or supper. Which do you call it?"

  "Dinner."

  "Well, dinner, then. So I thought, why not go ahead and bring it on out here and wait for you? I used the dog-turd key-that turd is very realistic, by the way-and let myself in. I hope you don't mind."

  "Mind?" Joanna returned. "Why should I mind?"

  "But you look worn out," he said. "And from what I heard on the radio, I can understand why. This is probably a bad idea. Tell you what, I'll just go straighten the kitchen back up, wrap up the bread, and then I'll go."

  Joanna was torn. She wanted Butch to leave, to go away and leave her alone. Unaccountably, she also wanted him to slay. "You mean dinner's already on the table?"

  “Pretty much. It's no big deal. It's the kind of supper my mother used to make on hot summer nights back in Chicago-chef's salad, some fresh-baked bread…”

  "You baked bread?"

  "Actually, I cheated. I bought one of those ready-to-bake loaves from the store. I have my own bread machine, but it's locked up in the storage unit at the moment. Still, you can't beat the smell of fresh-baked bread to make a person feel all's right with the world."

  They had been walking as they talked. When Joanna opened the back door, the two dogs darted inside. She followed, drawn forward by the magical scent of newly baked bread. As her mouth began watering, it suddenly occurred to her that at almost eight-thirty at night, maybe she was more hungry than she was tired.

  "It smells wonderful," she said. "Don't go."

  "Really?" Butch asked.

  "Really. Just give me a chance to clean up and change." Stripping off her blazer, she left it on the dryer. Then she walked into the kitchen, removing her underarm shoulder holster with her Colt 2000 as well as the small-of-back holster that held her Glock 19. She loaded both weapons into the deep bread drawer beneath the kitchen counter and then dug her cell phone out of her purse.

  As she plugged the phone into the battery recharger on the kitchen counter, she realized Butc
h was watching her-watching and frowning. "What's wrong?" she asked.

  "That's where you keep all that stuff, right there in the kitchen? Shouldn't the guns be locked up in a cabinet or something?"

  "Andy always used to lock up his gun when he came home from work, but Jenny was a lot younger then. Jenny and I talked about it a few months back. She knows enough to leave the guns alone, and when we're rushing around here to leave in the morning, it's a lot more convenient for me to finish cleaning up the kitchen and then grab them on my way out the door."

  "Oh." That was all Butch said, but it seemed to Joanna that she noted a trace of disapproval in the way he said it. That got her back up. What right does he have to come barging into the house, uninvited, and start criticizing the way jenny and I live together? She was about to say something about it when she looked through the kitchen doorway and caught sight of the dining room table. It was set with good dishes, cloth napkins, champagne glasses, and an ice bucket with a chilled bottle of champagne.

  "The idea was to celebrate buying my house," he said apologetically. "The current owner gave me permission to go there and have a picnic supper on the front porch. Since there's no furniture inside, it had to be an outside paperplates-and-plastic-forks kind of affair. Once I got here, though, and had real dishes and glassware to work with, it turned into something more elaborate. Would you like me to pour you a glass of champagne?"

  Butch stopped talking abruptly, like a windup toy whose spring had come unwound. Joanna had been ready to nail him for what she regarded as uncalled-for interference, but her momentary anger dissolved in the face of his sudden stricken silence.

  Why, he's nervous, Joanna realized. He's almost as nervous and unsure of himself as I am.

  "No champagne until after I shower," she told him.

  A few minutes later, standing under a soothing stream of hot, steamy water, Joanna felt the awful events of the day slowly drain out of her body. In her mind's eye she kept replaying that little scene in the kitchen and Butch's unspoken disapproval as she the guns away in thelie drawer. Initially the incident had made her cross, but in retrospect it opened a window onto a whole series of bittersweet memories.

  The day Jenny was born, a little girl from Douglas-a two-year-old toddler-had died as a result of playing with her father's loaded pistol. While Joanna had been in the early stages of labor at the Copper Queen Hospital in Bisbee, Andy had been down in Douglas at the Cochise County Hospital, taking a report from the bereaved parents. That little girl's death had made a profound impression on Andrew Roy Brady, new father and rookie cop. From then on, whenever possible, he had left his.357 closed up in his locker at work. The.38 Chief, his backup weapon, he had kept in a locked drawer of the rolltop desk in the bedroom.

  Only now, long after the fact, did Joanna realize how conscientious Andy had been about that. He had never once complained about the day-to-day inconvenience. He had simply done it. It struck Joanna that, in that regard, Butch and Andy weren't so very different.

  Stepping out of the shower, she toweled her hair dry and applied a few strokes of makeup. Then, wearing a comfortable short-sleeved blouse and a pair of shorts, she emerged from the bathroom and headed straight for the kitchen, where she retrieved the two guns from the drawer and started back toward the bedroom.

  "You're right," she said in answer to Butch's raised eyebrow and unasked question as she hurried past. "You and Andy are both right on this one, and I'm wrong. Even though Jenny and I talked this over, I should have been keeping the guns locked up all along."

  Butch followed her as far as the bedroom door. "Look," he said, "I didn't mean to sound like I was telling you what to do…"

  "It's okay," she said. "When you're right, you're right. Now, didn't somebody say something about champagne?"

  "Coming right up," he said. "Do you want to sip it first, or would you rather eat?"

  "Eat, I think," she told him. "Until I smelled that freshly baked bread, I didn't have any idea how hungry I was."

  In the dining room, the candles were lit. Butch held out the chair for Joanna to be seated. He poured a glass of the sparkly golden liquid and handed it to her, then poured one for himself.

  "To your new house," Joanna said, smiling and lifting her glass to his.

  "Yes," he responded. "To my new house"

  There was a momentary silence; then they started talking at once. Butch said, "I hope you like-"

  And Joanna said, "I'm sorry I-"

  They both dissolved into nervous laughter. "All right, now," Butch said. "One at a time. I hope you like chef's salad."

  "I love chef's salad," Joanna replied. "And I'm sorry I didn't get to see your house today. Maybe tomorrow."

  "Given what's been going on around here, I won't hold my breath," he said. "It's been real bad for you, hasn't it?" He handed her a basket filled with thick slices of the freshly baked bread. She took one slice-still slightly warm to the touch-and slathered it with butter, nodding as she did so.

  "This afternoon I thought I had it all figured out," she told him. "Then the whole thing fell apart on me. By the time it was over, it turned out that what I thought I knew I didn't know at all."

  "Do you want to talk about it?" Butch asked.

  "Not really. I guess what I need to do now is just forget about it. Try to keep work at work and home at home."

  Butch passed her a bowl of dressing. "It's Roquefort," he said. "My own recipe.”

  "Homemade?"

  "But of course. If it's any consolation, the same thing happened to me today. What I thought I had all figured out for Chapter One wasn't figured out at all."

  "So you've started, then-writing, I mean."

  "Everybody always says make an outline," Butch said. "So I tried that. I worked on the damned outline for a solid week and wasn't getting anywhere. Then I finally figured out what the problem is. I've always hated outlining. Always. So I threw out the outline and started over from scratch."

  Dipping a sprig of asparagus into the dressing, Joanna took a tentative bite of her salad. "This is delicious," she said, savoring the tangy flavor on her tongue.

  "See there?" Butch said with a grin. "I'll bet you thought I was just another pretty face." And then they laughed some more.

  "Seriously, though. You said you were going to write mysteries," Joanna said. "What kind?"

  "Well," Butch said, "that's what I thought I had figured out. I thought I'd write books about a kind of tough-guy cop. Now I'm not so sure."

  "Why? What changed your mind?"

  "You."

  "Me?" Joanna said. "How come?"

  "Because from what I've seen in the last few days around here, being a cop is a whole lot harder than I ever thought. And I'm not so sure I want to write about a tough guy, either. There are a lot of those in fiction, you know."

  "Are there?"

  "Sure. So maybe I'll write a book with a female protagonist instead."

  "I see. A lady detective." Joanna thought about that for a time before she spoke again. "Have you always liked mysteries?" she asked. "Did you read all those old books when you were a kid, the ones about the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew?"

  "I was a boy, I'll have you know," Butch replied indignantly. "I wouldn't have been caught dead reading a Nancy Drew."

  "But you did read the Hardy Boys," Joanna persisted.

  "Of course. Didn't everybody?"

  Again silence filled the room and they ate without speaking. Joanna, wanting to keep things light, tried drawing him out. "Have you chosen a pen name yet?"

  "Since I haven't written Chapter One yet, that seems a bit premature. So no, I haven’t"

  "Well, you should," she said. "When it comes time to start, that's what's supposed to go on the title page-the book's title and the author's name."

  "Butch Dixon," he said slowly, sounding it out. "That doesn't have much of a ring to it. Sounds like somebody who'd write auto-repair manuals. No. Butch Dixon isn't going to cut it. And Frederick Dixon isn't much better."r />
  "Then what's your middle name?" Joanna asked.

  "Why do you want to know?"

  "I just want to, that's all."

  Butch sighed. "I hate my middle name," he said. "I haven't had enough to drink to start telling people my middle name."

  "You're not telling people," Joanna objected. "You're only telling me."

  "Wilcox," he said with a glower. "Not two 1's like the town. One 1."

  "Why don't you use your initials, then?" Joanna suggested. "If you're writing about a female protagonist, people might think you're a woman. Let's say Faye Wanda Dixon."

  Butch choked on a sip of champagne. "Faye Wanda!" he repeated. "'That's awful."

  "But you see what I mean."

  "Okay, F. W. Dixon, then. That's all right, I suppose. But doesn't it sound familiar? I'm sure I know of a writer by that name."

  When they finally managed to dredge the name Franklin W. Dixon out of their Hardy Boys memory banks, they gave up eating altogether and collapsed on the floor amid gales of helpless laughter. Joanna couldn't remember laughing like that in years. It felt good. What remained of her day's awful burden lightened and disappeared entirely.

  "No wonder the name sounded familiar!" Butch gasped, wiping the tears from his eyes. "We were just talking about him. And I can still see it now, the name and the initials printed on the skinny little spines of those tan-and-brown books. What's funny is, I already owned both the F and the W and I didn't even realize it. And you're right, of course. Good old Franklin W.-F. W.-was a woman masquerading under a man's pen name, right?"

  "Right," Joanna agreed. "Turnabout's fair play."

  Eventually they got up, cleared the table, and loaded the dishes into the dishwasher. With the kitchen cleaned up and the dishwasher running, they took their last glasses of champagne out onto the front porch to sit in the swing and watch the stars. It was chilly enough outside to make Joanna wish she'd brought along a sweater.

  Butch noticed her rubbing her arms. "It never gets this cool in Phoenix during the summer," he said. "Too much humidity. Too much pavement."