Devil's Claw (5 page)

“Never mind,” Joanna said. “I’ll go check on him myself.”

“Keep me posted,” Tica advised. “If you need backup, just call.”

Putting down the phone, Joanna considered what to do next. She didn’t like the idea of leaving Jenny alone in the house while she went to investigate. Still, worried about what she might find at Clayton Rhodes’ place, Joanna didn’t want to take her daughter along, either. And, as late as it was, it would take too much time to call someone to come stay with her.

Walking over to Jenny’s bedroom door, Joanna noticed a tiny slash of light showing along the floorboard. As soon as she turned the doorknob, the light disappeared. “Jenny,” Joanna called across the room. “Are you still awake?”

Doing an excellent job of feigning being awakened out of a deep sleep, Jenny turned over and switched on her bedside lamp. “What’s wrong?” she mumbled.

“I need to go check on Mr. Rhodes,” Joanna said. “Will you be all right if I leave you here by yourself for a while?”

Making no further pretense of having been asleep, Jenny sat up in bed. “Really?” she asked excitedly. “You’d do that? Leave me here alone?”

“If it bothers you, I can maybe call someone to come—”

“No, Mom. Don’t. I can stay by myself.”

“You’re sure. I’ll lock the doors when I leave. I probably won’t be gone very long, and you’ll have the dogs—”

“It’s okay, Mom,” Jenny interrupted with a smile. “I’ll be fine.” With that, she settled back down on the pillow. “And thanks,” she added.

“Thanks?” Joanna asked.

“For the early birthday present.”

Joanna was mystified. “What early birthday present?”

“For treating me like a grown-up even if I’m not.”

“You’re welcome,” Joanna said. “I’d better go.”

“Well, go then,” Jenny urged. “What are you waiting for?”

“I’m going,” Joanna replied. “Don’t rush me.”

“Be careful,” Jenny said.

Feeling her throat tighten, Joanna took Jenny’s hand and squeezed it. “I will,” she said. “Sleep tight,” she whispered, reaching up to switch off the lamp. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”

Leaving the room, Joanna found herself fighting back tears.
Be careful.
That’s what Jenny had said. Those words were never far beneath the surface in law-enforcement households. They were especially hard-hitting in a family like Jenny’s. Her father, Andy, had died at the hands of a drug smuggler’s hit man, and her maternal grandfather, Sheriff D. H. “Big Hank” Lathrop, had perished after being hit by a drunk driver. The last part of that sentence was never spoken, but it was always understood.
Be careful so you don’t go away and never come back.

In her own bedroom, Joanna unlocked the rolltop desk where she kept her weapons. Her Colt 2000 had proved undependable and had been relegated to the status of collector’s item. As an engagement present, Butch had prevailed on her to replace that and her backup Glock 17 with a new pair of Glocks, a 19 and a 26 with interchangeable magazines.

Joanna’s trip to Clayton Rhodes’ place wasn’t really an official police matter. It was more a case of a concerned neighbor looking in on someone else. There was no reason to show up armed to the teeth like some latter-day gunslinger. Still, if something was amiss up the road, it was best to be prepared. In the last few months, Cochise County had been overrun with hundreds of undocumented aliens making their illegal and dangerous journey from Mexico into the States. It wasn’t at all out of line to worry that maybe Clayton had run afoul of a gang of UDAs more interested in the easy pickings of banditry than they were in harvesting strawberries or melons.

Leaving her shoulder holster with its heavy-duty 19 where it was, Joanna strapped on the compact 26 in its inconspicuous small-of-back holster. Then, putting the denim jacket back on and adding both her cell phone and flashlight, she hurried out the back door, carefully locking it behind her.

After clambering into her county-owned Blazer, Joanna headed for the Rhodes place. As the crow flies, Joanna’s house and Clayton Rhodes’ were little more than a mile apart. To get there, however, Joanna had to drive almost five miles of rough dirt road—first from her house out to High Lonesome Road, north on that for the better part of two miles, and then back up another winding road into the hills.

By now the nearly full moon, high in the sky, cast a silvery glow over the nighttime landscape. That was something Joanna appreciated, and something that caught most city dwellers unawares. People who live in the artificial glow of streetlights have no idea that away from the pollution of manmade light, a full moon can make the nighttime desert bright enough to render headlights unnecessary.

Clayton Rhodes’ house dated from pre-air-conditioning times and had been built into the cleft of Mexican Canyon where it was naturally sheltered during the worst of the Sonora Desert’s afternoon heat. Carefully nurtured cottonwoods had grown up around the house, adding a much-needed layer of summertime shade. As Joanna drove into the silent yard, those cottonwoods, still bare-branched, stood like ghostly sentinels with their arms stretched skyward. The windows of the house were totally black. The only light was the eerie reflection of moon glow off the house’s old-fashioned tin roof. There was no sign of life. Joanna remembered that, months earlier, Clayton had sold off the last of his livestock and taken his arthritic old dog, Biddy, to the vet to be put down.

“Won’t be gettin’ me another dog, neither,” he had told Joanna then. “I’m too dang old. Wouldn’t be fair.”

And so, in Clayton Rhodes’ yard, there was no welcoming chorus of barking dogs to announce Joanna’s arrival. Nor was there any sign of a parked vehicle to indicate someone was at home.

Here, as on High Lonesome Ranch, the yard had been fenced to keep out marauding livestock. Joanna parked the Blazer in the gravel outside the closed gate. Before getting out of her vehicle, she pulled the radio’s microphone out of its holder. “Tica,” Joanna told the dispatcher. “I’m here now—at Clayton Rhodes’ place. It looks pretty much deserted. I’m about to go inside.”

“As in breaking and entering?” Tica asked.

“The man’s in his eighties,” Joanna returned. “He may be inside, sick or hurt. I know for a fact that Clayton isn’t much of a believer in locking doors. But if it comes down to breaking in, I’m not above doing it.”

“I’ve contacted Deputy Howell,” Tica responded. “She’s on her way, but she’s coming from Saint David, so it’s going to take some time for her to get to you.”

Leaving the Blazer idling where it was, Joanna let herself in the gate, walked up onto the creaking porch, and knocked hard on the wood-framed screen door. “Clayton,” she shouted. “Are you in there? Are you all right?”

She reached down and took hold of the knob. It turned easily in her hand and the door swung open, squawking noisily on elderly hinges. The house smelled musty and unkempt. Clayton had been a widower for years. Clearly he wasn’t very interested in doing much of what he always considered “women’s work.”

“Clayton,” Joanna called again. “Are you in here? Are you all right?”

No answer. Using her flashlight, Joanna located an antique push-button light switch. She pressed the upper button and an equally antique hanging light fixture with a single bulb cast a wan glow around the dingy room.

Making her way across a threadbare rag rug, Joanna walked through the dining room and into the kitchen, where she found Clayton’s antique wood-burning stove cold to the touch.

“Clayton?” she repeated. Still nothing. He wasn’t in the kitchen or on the screened back porch, either. Leaving the kitchen behind, Joanna hurried back through the sparsely furnished living room to check the two tiny bedrooms and the spacious bathroom that had been carved out of what had once been a third minuscule bedroom. Nowhere did Joanna see anything out of order. There was no sign of a struggle—nothing that indicated Clayton Rhodes had left his home under any kind of duress.

Shaking her head, Joanna went back outside. She had been listening so intently for a reply to her continuing calls that her hearing seemed to have been tuned to a higher level than when she had first exited the Blazer. Now, in addition to the steady rumble of the Blazer’s engine, she could hear something else as well—the sound of another vehicle. It was muffled and faint and stationary—with none of the rises and falls in engine noise that would have occurred in a vehicle making its way on the rough road that wound up Mexican Canyon from High Lonesome Road.

Bounding back to the Blazer, Joanna quickly switched off the engine and then stepped back outside to listen once again. Without interference from the Blazer’s idling engine, the muffled sound Joanna had heard was much clearer now. Following it, she walked toward a collection of outbuildings, including the sagging clapboard barn with a lean-to shed that Clayton used as a makeshift garage to shelter his beloved vintage Ford pickup truck that dated from the early fifties. As she neared the shed, Joanna smelled the heavy scent of exhaust and the distinctive odor of an overheated engine.

Sprinting now, she raced up to the windowless shed and tried the door. Nothing happened when she yanked on the outside handle. Too heavy to be raised by hand, the door refused to respond to her pulling. Pounding on the garage door, she shouted again. “Clayton! Are you in there? Answer me!”

This time Joanna heard no answer other than the continuing low growl of an idling engine. She turned and raced back to her Blazer. First she grabbed up the ax and crowbar she kept in the back cargo area. Then she paused long enough to use the radio.

“Tica,” she said urgently. “Send an ambulance. I’m pretty sure Clayton Rhodes is locked in his garage—with a car engine running.”

Back at the garage, Joanna made short work of beating a hole in the door. As soon as she did so, a thick cloud of acrid exhaust boiled out around her. Holding her breath, she crawled in through the jagged hole and felt her way through the oily exhaust up to the front of Clayton’s old pickup. Through the murk she could just make out the shape of a human body slouched over the steering wheel. Blindly she reached in, felt along the dashboard for the ignition key, and switched it off.

Only then did she reach for Clayton. As soon as she touched his cold, lifeless hand, she knew it was far too late. By then she had run out of breath. As soon as she breathed, her lungs filled with smoke. Coughing and choking, she stumbled back outside, pulling out her cell phone and dialing as she went.

“Nine-one-one,” Tica Romero responded. “What are you reporting?”

“Cancel that ambulance,” Joanna told the dispatcher. “It’s too late. Clayton Rhodes is dead.”

CHAPTER 3

Tonight the big story was from Tennessee, where some kid had gone berserk and had shot up a school bus, killing the driver as well as two children and injuring three others before some of the other kids on the bus tackled the shooter and wrestled the gun out of his hands.

“He was just a regular kid,” a tearful principal was saying into the microphone someone had shoved in his face. “Something of a loner, but he never gave his teachers any trouble. This just came at us out of the blue, with no warning.”

“See there,” Wayne said. “Now they’re turning school buses into war zones. You should stop driving that thing, Aggie. The way kids are today, it’s too dangerous.”

The stricken principal’s words had already chilled Agnes Hooper’s heart.
Loner,
she thought.
Never gave teachers any trouble.

“That’s what people say about Lucy Ridder behind her back,” Agnes said softly. “That she’s a loner.”

Wayne turned away from the blaring television set and studied his wife’s face. “Lucy Ridder,” he said thoughtfully. “Isn’t she that Indian kid who lives with her grandmother out on Middlemarch Road?”

Agnes nodded. “Lucy’s the last one off my bus in the afternoon and the first one on in the morning.”

Wayne covered his face with both hands. “Dammit, Aggie!” he exclaimed. “I wish you could quit that damned job. Just haul off and quit. Walk away from the whole stupid mess.”

But they both knew quitting wasn’t an option. Driving a school bus didn’t pay beans, but the benefits were good. And it was Agnes Hooper’s medical benefits with the Elfrida Unified School District that were keeping her husband alive.

“You know I can’t do that, hon,” she said calmly. “It’s just not in the cards.”

Wayne shook his head. “It’s not right,” he said. “I’m the one who should be out working and taking care of you. That’s how life’s supposed to be, not the other way around. The last thing you should have to do is be out dealing with a bunch of crazy kids day in and day out!”