Desert Rage: A Lena Jones Mystery (30 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Cannon fire?

No. Someone pounding on my motel door. For a while I tried to ignore the racket, but that’s hard to do when your head pounds along in time.
Boom. Boom. Boom.

I opened my eyes to narrow slits and found the room full of light. Wha…? A check of the digital clock on the nightstand informed me that it was only 9:04 a.m. Damn noisy hotel maids.

“Go away!” I yelled, then wished I hadn’t. My head felt like blood would spurt from my ears any second.

“Open this door, Lena, or I’ll break it down!”

Jimmy.

I knew the man well enough to know that once he decided to do something, he did it, so with a groan I rose from the bed, staggered to the door, unlocked it, then staggered over to the nightstand. Leaning against it for balance, I dry-swallowed one of the pain pills the ER doc had given me and lay back down.

“It’s unlocked!” I yelled. More pain. I remembered reading that anything ingested took twenty minutes to get into the bloodstream. Maybe I’d be dead by then. Buoyed by that hope, I lay there and waited for the coming storm.

It arrived in the guise of one furious Indian. “Why do I have to be alerted by the police that you’ve been hurt?”

“Police? That would be…?”

“Somebody named Gwyneth Pronzini, and she sounded pissed.”

I didn’t bother to lift my head off the pillow. “Gwyn’s always pissed.”

“Yeah, well, she called fifteen minutes ago and said you probably needed looking in on. Said she’d have called me earlier, but right after she and her partner dropped you off at the hospital, they were radioed about a missing three-year-old and looked for him all night. As soon as they found the kid sleeping in the backseat of a neighbor’s car, she got on the phone to me.”

Here’s the thing about cops. They may hate each other, but in the end, they all stand together. Even when the cop is no longer a cop.

“So here you are. Well, as you can see, I’m alive. You can leave now.” I put the pillow over my head, to either dull the sound of his voice or smother myself. Either way, it was a win-win.

He snatched the pillow away. “You’re coming back to the trailer with me.”

“No I’m not.”

“Are too.”

“No…”

Strong arms heaved me off the bed and dope-walked me to the door.

“I’ll yell ‘kidnap’.”

“No you won’t.”

“Will too.”

“Won’t.”

The problem with Jimmy is that he’s so often right. Not really wanting to get him in trouble, I didn’t yell, and he hustled me all the way down the stairs without anyone noticing. By the time he dragged me into his truck, I’d stopped struggling. I just wanted that pain pill to hurry up. It finally kicked in as we turned onto the gravel road that led to his trailer, and after that, I no longer cared about anything.

***

Around one o’clock, the smell of something wonderful woke me up.

“Lunch is served,” Jimmy said, pushing a bowl under my nose.

“What’s that?”

“Pima stew.”

He turned on his heel and carried the bowl into the kitchen area. Led by the heavenly aroma, I followed, and found the table set for lunch for three.

I asked, “Who’s joining us?”

“Madeline. She’ll be here any minute. In fact, I think I hear her van coming down the road right now.” He cocked his head. “Yep. I’d recognize that rattle anywhere.”

“How…?”

“She called about twenty minutes ago, told me she’d been delivering some paintings to one of the Main Street galleries and decided to drop by our office. Then oops, she found nothing but a burnt-out shell where Desert Investigations used to be. Imagine that. Being the curious type, she went across the street to Cliffie’s gallery, and he told her what happened, so when her call to you rolled over to voice mail, she got on the phone to me. Why in the world didn’t you tell her about the firebomb?”

I rubbed my head. It still hurt, although not as badly as before. “Didn’t want her to worry. You know how she is.”

He frowned. “Well, now she’s gets to see you all beat up, with staples in your head. Good luck with that.”

Outside, a car door slammed. Steps crunched on gravel. A polite tap-tap at the door.

Jimmy liked Madeline, my former foster mother, so when he greeted her, his smile was genuine. “Welcome to my humble abode.”

Her smile matched his as she took in the Pima designs painted across the cabinetry and said, “Not so humble. Love the art.” When she turned to me, her smile faded.

“Why am I always the last to know, Lena?” Her long, dark hair, usually tied neatly behind in a low-slung ponytail, was in disarray, and the fine lines around her amber-colored eyes seemed more pronounced than ever.

After repeating the excuse I’d given Jimmy, I added, “Besides, you were all the way down in Florence. There was no point in making you drive up here.”

“Less than an hour’s drive, big deal. I’ve been going crazy ever since I saw what happened to your office. For a minute I thought…I thought…” She gulped. “Sweetie, how are you? You look like crap.”

Question: what is a mother?

Answer: the woman who worries about you.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I lied.

Jimmy’s welcoming smile turned sour. “She has sixteen staples in her scalp.”

Madeline sat down and put her arm around me. “Oh, Lena.”

“I’m fine, I’m fine.”

“The crazy woman tried to kill her,” Jimmy continued. “Back in jail now, bail revoked, cooling her heels at Tent City where it’s a hundred and fifteen in the shade.”

“Good!” Spleen vented, Madeline gave me a thoughtful look. “You’ve lost weight, too, Sweetie. Are you eating right?”

I thought of my usual diet of ramen noodles, topped off every now and then with a raspberry jelly doughnut from Bosa’s. “Of course I am. In my business, you have to keep up your strength.”

“Speaking of eating…” Jimmy said, stepping over to the trailer’s tiny refrigerator. “I’d already made some Pima stew—mutton, you know—before you called, but I’ve put together a nice big salad for you.”

“How thoughtful of you, Jimmy.” Madeline had been a vegetarian for as long as I could remember.

We ate more or less in silence until Madeline brought up the issue I’d so desperately avoided thinking about. “Jimmy said the woman who attacked you used steroids.”

“Sure looks like it.”

“Intramuscular?”

“Probably.”

She took a deep breath, then finally got around to it. “Lena, Jimmy told me that since you got her blood in your mouth, they’ll have to test you for HIV.”

For a moment I hated my partner for sharing so much. Didn’t he know what a worrywart Madeline was? “Oh, sure, but it’s just a matter of routine. While I was in the ER, they took a base blood sample from me, and just to be on the safe side, I’ll get tested again after a month. Then again after another two months. If Monster Woman is HIV positive, which I doubt she is, I’ll take one final test around the six-month mark. No big deal. This sort of thing happens all the time, and in ninety-nine percent of cases, everyone’s in the clear.” An exaggeration there, but what the hell.

“They tested her, too? This…this ‘Monster Woman,’ as you call her?”

I sighed. “Actual name, Terry Jardine. Since there was a lot of blood flying around, they probably gave her a viral load test, but those results won’t be available right away. In the meantime…”

“In the meantime, we worry,” Jimmy muttered.

“Not me,” I lied again. “I’m too busy working the Cameron case to worry about anything else.”

This started another discussion, an abbreviated one, since there was little I wanted to share with Madeline, including Juliana Thorsson’s identity. After I’d finished my recital of the basic facts of the case, Madeline said, “That poor child. Well, at least she has someone who’ll take care of her, love her.”

I thought about Ali’s uncle, about her egg donor.

“Maybe,” was all I said.

***

An hour later, her concern about me somewhat abated, Madeline left for her studio in Florence, abandoning me with Jimmy. I wasn’t happy and neither was he. I looked longingly at my laptop, which Jimmy had thoughtfully retrieved from my motel room. It was all I could do not to rush over and fire it up.

Jimmy caught me looking. “Lena, go back to bed and get some rest.” He’d already refused to let me help with the dishes, leaving me alone at the table, watching him as he put away the last dried dish.

“I’m rested enough to be bored out of my mind,” I complained. “Tell me what you’ve dug up on the Cameron suspects.”

“Forget about work. You look awfully pale.”

“I’m a natural blonde and wear lots of sunblock. Tell me about Kenny Dean Hopper’s family. Any other murderers lurking around in their gene pool?”

“They’re the salt of the Earth.” Yet something in his expression told me there was more to the story.

“But? C’mon, Jimmy. I met Kenny’s father. The man has a temper.”

“The problem isn’t the father.”

I raised my eyebrows. “His mother?”

“Oh, all right. Let me go into the office, get the printouts…”

“I’ll go with you.” I rose from my seat.

He stepped in front of me and crossed his arms across his broad chest. “Absolutely not. It’s too cold in there and I’m not taking any chances with you, so sit your ass back down.”

I’d never heard Jimmy swear before; Pimas were known for their clean speech. Out of shock, I sat my ass back down.

A minute later I held a stack of printouts in my hand. I stared at the pages for a few moments, then confessed, “I can’t read this.”

“Vision still blurry, huh? Well, that’s what you get with a concussion.” He took the papers from me and set them on the table. “I’ll sum up, then. When Estella Hopper, Kenny’s mother, was sixteen—she was Estella Vargas then—she and her boyfriend, one Sean McKitteridge, got drunk at one of those desert parties and stole a cherry 1968 Jag XKE and wrapped it around a telephone pole on Camelback and Thirty-fifth Avenue. Sean died at the scene, Estella escaped with minor injuries. She wound up serving six months.”

I digested that for a moment. “But she wasn’t driving.”

“They popped her for car theft and underage drinking.”

“Still, a pretty stiff sentence for that, considering she was a minor and all.”

“Not when there’s a vehicular homicide involved.”

“More like vehicular suicide,” I muttered. “Anything else?”

“Not so much as a blip on the radar. Looks like she stopped going to desert parties, and a few years later, while working on her AA at Phoenix College, she met and married Emery Hopper, who became the father of the ill-fated Kenny Dean. But like I said, Emery’s clean as a whistle, never so much as received a parking ticket.”

If it wasn’t for bad luck, Mrs. Hopper would have no luck at all. First her boyfriend gets himself killed drunk driving, then her son murders five people and she and her husband have to attend his execution. What a life.

“Next?”

A wry smile. “Ah, yes. That would be the Family Hoyt, they of the attack dogs and the baseball bat-swinging Bubba. How much do you want to know? Their list of transgressions is lengthy.”

I put my hand to my staples. They still throbbed. “Read on, big man. I’ve got nothing else to do.”

He cleared his throat. “It’ll be easier if I take them one by one, according to the severity of the crimes. Sidney Hoyt you already know about. He burned his wife and babies alive to collect on the insurance, thus earning a visit from the esteemed Dr. Arthur Cameron in the Death House. Sidney’s previous crimes included a nickel in Arizona State Prison for three Circle K robberies. In the last, he shot and wounded the female clerk, but the clerk—unlike Sidney’s unfortunate wife and children—recovered. By the way, Sidney’s brother Horace, who I’m betting is the one you refer to as Bat Boy, played backup in the robbery, and he, too, wound up doing five years. Horace has had several more scrapes with the law since then: three DUIs, two Assaults with Intent, one Resisting Arrest, and a half-dozen or so domestic violence calls before his wife—Edith is her name—sent him home to Mama Hoyt. I’ll get to Mama later.”

Oh, great. Even the mother had a sheet. “There were two more brothers, I believe.”

“Yes indeedy. Gilman Hoyt, the baby of the family, blew himself up in a meth lab he was running in a Phoenix apartment. Once he was released from the hospital, he served seven years.

“And then there’s Chester, the eldest. A failed liquor store robbery, for which he did two years. He is now suspected of running a dog-fighting ring, but they haven’t found the venue yet. At one point, all four Hoyt brothers were residents of the state pen at the same time, which made it kind of homey in a way. Which brings me to Mama Hoyt.”

“Wait a minute. Where’s Papa? Something tells me the four brothers weren’t virgin births.”

“Mr. Something is right.” A small smile. “Earl Hoyt was beaten to death in a barroom brawl one month before the birth of bouncing baby Gilman.”

“A Hoyt as victim. What a refreshing change.”

He shook his head. “Not really. Earl started the fight, which spread to such an extent that the detectives couldn’t figure out who supplied the fatal blow. He’d cold-cocked a man who innocently brushed up against him on the way to the men’s room, and a couple of the guy’s buddies didn’t take kindly to that. You ready for Mama now?”

“Lay it on me.”

“Two shoplifting convictions, earning her a thirty-day stay for each in Tent City, and one three-year-long visit to Perryville for identity theft. She’s on parole as we speak. Oh, and you’ll like this, she’s currently the Maricopa County president of M.W.A.—Mothers for a White America.”

Jimmy was right. I liked it. I liked it so much it made the staples in my head hurt, and only with difficulty did I finally manage to stop laughing.

“The best and the brightest,” I said, winding down to a snicker.

He snickered back. “Yea, verily.” Then his voice turned solemn. “The Youngs, different story. Before Maleese Young was executed for capital murder, he’d received two parking tickets, one for double parking after he’d stopped to help a cat that’d been hit by a car. The cat survived. He took it home and gave it to his daughter Janeese. As for his wife, not even a parking ticket. Same with the daughter. Both of them clean right down the line, no ties to any fringe organization, unless you count the mother’s membership in United Methodist Women as ‘fringe.’ And before you ask, it’s the same story with the DuCharmes, the DuCharme chocolates family. Other than the cop-killing Blaine, who went nuts after he got hooked on crystal meth, no one in the family has ever had a police record. Their memberships are confined to Kiwanis and Rotary, and they’re regular contributors to several charities, among them St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, Meals On Wheels, and Adopt-A-Pet. Good people, it sounds like.”