Exit Wounds (39 page)

The younger woman rose and stepped toward Joanna, holding out her hand. “Sheriff Brady?”

Joanna nodded.

“My name is Gabriella Padilla. This is my mother, Ramona Quiroz. Maria Elena Maldonado, the woman who died after that car wreck the other day, was my cousin, my mother’s sister’s child.”

“Oh, yes,” Joanna said. “Won’t you come in?”

Gabriella went back to her mother and helped the old woman rise to her feet. Her hands and fingers were twisted and gnarled by arthritis. It was painful for her to walk and painful to watch her do it. Gabriella led her into the inner office while Joanna hurriedly pulled out a chair at the conference table, which was far closer to the door than the chairs in front of her desk.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Joanna said when they were seated. She waited while Gabriella translated.

“Gracias,”
Mrs. Quiroz returned and then added something more in Spanish.

“She says it is God’s will,” Gabriella explained.

It has nothing at all to do with God’s will!
Joanna thought savagely.

“The funeral was this morning,” Gabriella continued. “In Tucson. Maria Elena’s husband, Tomas, is…well…if he tried to take them back home for a funeral, he wouldn’t be able to return.”

“He’s illegal?” Joanna asked.

Gabriella paused and then nodded. “That’s why they were coming—to be with Tomas. He paid for them to come. But since he can’t go back, Maria Elena and Little Eddie will have to be buried here.”

“I’m sorry,” Joanna said again.

Gabriella’s eyes filled with tears. She nodded. “I’m sorry, too.”

There was a pause. During the period of silence, Joanna was aware of Ramona Quiroz’s steady eyes examining her face with unblinking scrutiny.
What is she looking at?
Joanna wondered.
Is there something wrong with me—with what I’m wearing, with the way I look?

Finally Gabriella continued. “I apologize for dropping in on you like this, but I work—in the tortilla factory in Barrio Anita,” she said. “They let me have today off for the funeral. After the service, my mother insisted that I bring her here.”

“Why?” Joanna asked.

“Mother spoke to Maria Elena in the hospital. Tomas was on his way, but Mother was the only one there. Maria Elena told Mother about you—about the red-haired woman who found Eduardo and brought him to the helicopter. You are that woman, aren’t you?”

Joanna felt a lump constrict her throat. “Yes,” she murmured. “Yes, I am.”

“Maria Elena must have known she was dying. She asked Mother to come to you and ask you to please show us that spot. She wanted us to put up a cross for Eduardo—a single cross—but we would like to put up two—one for Eduardo and one for his mother as well.”

Still Ramona Quiroz continued to stare. She said nothing, but when Gabriella stopped speaking, the old woman nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Would you take us there?” Gabriella finished.

“Yes,” Joanna said at once. “Of course. Now?”

“Please. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

Joanna stood and went to the door. “I’m going out, Kristin,” she said.

“When will you be back?”

“I have no idea.” Joanna turned back to the two women, where Gabriella was busy translating what had transpired.

“We can take one car or two, whichever you like,” Joanna offered.

“The things we need are already in mine,” Gabriella said. “So it would probably be better if we took that.”

“All right,” Joanna said. “But if you’d like, you could bring it around here to the back, to my private entrance. That way your mother won’t have nearly so far to walk.”

Gabriella left to fetch the car. When the door closed behind her, Ramona Quiroz spoke on her own for the first time. “You are very kind,” she said. “Thank you.”

“De nada,”
Joanna replied.

“So you went out there with them?” Jenny asked. It was after dinner. Jenny was sprawled on the family room floor next to Tigger. Lucky, worn out with playing, was stretched out on Jenny’s other side. Both dogs were sound asleep. Joanna and Butch were on the couch and Lady, with one watchful eye on Butch, was tucked into a tight curl at Joanna’s feet.

“Yes,” Joanna answered. “The walls of Silver Creek are so steep right there, I didn’t think Mrs. Quiroz could possibly make it down and back up again. But she did. She was very determined. And Gabriella had brought along everything they needed—two matching crosses, flowers, a shovel.”

“And they put the crosses at the exact spot where you found the little boy?”

Joanna nodded. “Even with the storms we’ve had, I was able to show them where I found him. And that’s where they put both crosses, under a clump of mesquite. If it rains as hard as it did the other night, it could be the crosses will be washed away, but that’s where they wanted them.”

“Why did they do that?” Jenny asked.

“It’s a kind of remembrance,” Joanna said. “And it seemed like a nice thing to do.”

“Is the guy who wrecked the van even going to jail?” Jenny asked.

“I don’t know,” Joanna said. “I doubt it. I think the feds have made some kind of deal with him.”

“That doesn’t seem fair,” Jenny remarked.

Joanna looked at her daughter. At thirteen, Jenny still saw the world in terms of right or wrong, good or bad, black or white.

“It doesn’t seem fair to me, either,” Butch added.

Joanna sighed. “It’s the best we can do. If we can put the heads of the syndicate out of business and hand some of them jail time, maybe we can keep some other poor families from being slaughtered the same way.”

She stood up then. Her whole body ached. She was still paying the price for the three hours she had spent the night before lying on hard rocky ground. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “I’m so tired I can barely hold my head up.”

She went into the bedroom and slept so soundly that she never heard Butch come to bed. During the night she dreamed she was out on High Lonesome Road, attempting to plant a flower-covered cross in the middle of the road at exactly the same spot where she’d discovered Andy’s helpless body all those years ago—where she’d found her husband unconscious and lying in a pool of his own blood.

Again and again she tried to pound the cross into the hard, unyielding ground. Again and again, the rock-hard caliche rejected it. When Joanna awakened, the sun was just coming up, and her face was wet with tears. She looked across the bed to the spot where Butch lay, snoring softly. It was a dream Joanna didn’t understand, but she knew, whatever it meant, she probably wouldn’t be telling Butch about it.

Lady lay on the rug on Joanna’s side of the bed. The dog sensed Joanna was awake, and she raised her head warily as if she expected a mad dash to the bathroom, but it didn’t come. For some reason, the nausea was in abeyance that morning. Joanna reached down and patted Lady’s head, then she motioned for the dog to join her on the bed. Carefully, without disturbing Butch, Lady eased herself up onto the covers. Then, after circling three times, she nestled herself against Joanna’s body and, with a contented sigh, fell back asleep.

Moments later, Joanna did, too.

Twenty

O n Friday morning, when Joanna arrived at the county offices for the weekly board of supervisors meeting, she was astonished to find the usually empty parking lot crammed full of vehicles, which forced her to park at the far end of the lot. On her way to the door she was greeted by a milling group of protesters, all of them carrying placards. BOARD OF SUPERVISORS UNFAIR TO ANIMALS several of them said. Others said SEVENTEEN TOO MANY. And then she knew. The folks from Animal Welfare Experience were at it again, only this time they were targeting someone besides her.

At the door to the building, Tamara Haynes was busy berating Charles Longworth Neighbors, the newest and Joanna’s least favorite member of the board of supervisors. “Have you even been to Animal Control?” Tamara demanded. “Do you have any idea how shorthanded they are?”

Joanna was gratified to see the AWE activist tackling somebody else for a change. And now that Sally Delgado, one of the first office clerks, had quit the department to work full-time on Ken Junior’s campaign, Joanna was relatively sure her information leak had been plugged.

“Ms. Haynes,” Neighbors began as Joanna edged past them, “you have to understand—”

But Tamara Haynes was on a roll, and she paid no attention. “And why did you deep-six that animal-adoption program they wanted to start—the one that would have taken strays to various shopping centers in hopes of finding owners? We need to get unwanted animals off death row, and if you think we don’t vote, Mr. Neighbors, you’re in for a rude awakening. Right, folks?”

The last comment was greeted by cheers all around.

For the first time, Joanna was forced to consider that perhaps Tamara Haynes did care about animals, after all. Perhaps the demonstration outside the Cochise County Justice Center had been something more than a strictly political plot to further Ken Junior’s chances of winning the election.

“Really, Ms. Haynes,” Neighbors was saying, looking decidedly uncomfortable, while his eyes remained focused on the little diamond sparkler winking at him from Tamara Haynes’s very much exposed belly button. “As I said,” he continued awkwardly, “I’m already late for a meeting. You’ll have to excuse me.”

He broke away from his interrogator then and dodged into the building right on Joanna’s heels. “Who in the world are those people?” he wanted to know. “And why are they so upset with me?”

“What set them off was having all those animals die at the scene of that homicide last week,” Joanna told him.

“That’s certainly not my fault,” Neighbors grumbled. “I don’t see how they can hold the board of supervisors responsible for that.”

“But they know Animal Control is shorthanded,” Joanna replied. “If we’d had enough personnel to keep an eye on hoarders like Carol Mossman, she might not have ended up with so many animals in her possession at the time of her death.”

“What did you call her?”

“A hoarder,” Joanna said. “Carol Mossman was what’s called an animal hoarder. It’s a mental condition.”

“Really,” Charles Longworth Neighbors said with a concerned frown. “I had no idea. And what’s this about all that adoption nonsense?”

“It’s not nonsense,” Joanna returned. “The more pets we place in adoptive homes, the fewer we have to euthanize.”

They were nearing the boardroom now. Charles Longworth Neighbors appeared to be lost in thought. “How many people do you think were out there?” he asked.

“Out in the parking lot? Fifty, I suppose,” Joanna answered.

“On a Friday morning,” he mused. “That’s quite a few. Do you think they really do vote?”

In that moment Sheriff Joanna Brady understood exactly what was at stake. Charles Longworth Neighbors had been appointed to fill out someone else’s unexpired term. Now he faced the prospect of running for election on his own and based on his own record.

In the years since her election, Joanna Brady had learned a little about politics herself.

“I’d be amazed to think they didn’t,” she said. “Vote, that is. And if they can summon this many folks for a Friday morning rally, who knows how many votes they can muster?”

This was news Charles Longworth Neighbors clearly found disturbing. “We should do something about this,” he said.

“Yes,” Joanna agreed amiably. “We certainly should.”

“Do you have any ideas?”

Yes,
Joanna thought,
like breaking Animal Control out of the sheriff’s department and putting Jeannine Phillips in charge.

“One or two,” Joanna said.

“Good, good,” Neighbors said distractedly as he held the boardroom door open for Joanna to enter. “Write up something on that and get it to me, would you, please? I’ll put it on the agenda for next week.”

“Sure,” Joanna said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

She took her seat in the room and waited for the meeting to get under way. It was hard not to smile. After all, doing what it took to give the AWE vote to Charles Longworth Neighbors was also going to help Sheriff Brady.

Frank Montoya showed up just as the meeting was called to order. He leaned over to her and asked, “What’s going on? You look like you just won the lottery.”

“Tell you later,” she said.

The meeting that morning wasn’t as bad as meetings sometimes were, but when Joanna emerged just before noon, she wasn’t surprised to see that the protesters had evaporated in the face of the hot sun. She checked her phone and found she had five missed calls. Scrolling through them, she discovered they were all from home. She called there immediately. Jenny answered on the second ring.

“Hi, Mom.”

“What’s going on?” Joanna demanded. “Is anything wrong?”

“No,” Jenny said. “Everything’s fine. Butch and I just got back from taking Lucky to the vet. Dr. Ross says Butch is right. Lucky is stone-deaf. She gave us the name of a book on sign language for dogs. She said we might be able to train all the dogs to respond to hand signals. Wouldn’t that be neat?”

“Yes, it would. Is Butch there?”

“No. He’s in town. He said that if you called, he’d meet you at Daisy’s for lunch.”

“Want to grab some lunch?” Frank asked, coming up behind her.

“Sorry,” Joanna told him. “It turns out I’m having lunch with my husband.”

As she drove to Daisy’s, Joanna had to pull over at the traffic circle to let a funeral cortege go past. She knew whose funeral it was—Stella Adams’s—and she was glad the windows in the limo following the hearse were dark enough that she couldn’t see inside. She was glad not to see Denny Adams and his son, Nathan, coping with their awful loss. She had read in the paper that the services for Stella Adams would be private, but still, it seemed wrong that more people weren’t there. This was a time when Dennis and Nathan Adams needed people around them—even if they didn’t want them.

As the procession with its woefully few cars drove past, Joanna said a small prayer for Dennis and Nathan Adams and for all the remaining Mossmans as well.

It was a subdued Joanna Brady who arrived at Daisy’s Café. Butch was seated in their favorite booth, the one at the far corner of the restaurant. He was grinning from ear to ear.