Paradise Lost (21 page)

“Dora’s dead,” Joanna blurted out.

“Dead,” Jenny repeated as all color drained from her trice. “She’s dead? How come? Why?”

“She must have run away from the foster home,” Joanna said. “Someone hit her with a car.

When Grandma Brady said you were out riding Kiddo, I was so afraid . . . That’s where the Gs are now—out looking for you.”

“But, Mom, I was just out riding, why should you ...” Jenny drew back. “Wait a minute. You think the guy who killed Dora might come looking for me next, don’t you!”

Joanna and Jenny were mother and daughter. It wasn’t surprising that the thoughts of one should be so readily shared by the other, although, in that moment, Joanna wished it weren’t true. Saying nothing, she merely nodded.

“Why?” Jenny asked.

“Because of what happened in Apache Pass,” Butch said, stepping into the fray. “Your mother and I are afraid that whoever killed Connie Haskell may have targeted you and Dora.”

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“But why?” Jenny repeated. “Dora and me didn’t see who did it or anything. All we did was find the body.”

For once Joanna resisted the temptation to correct her daugh-ter’s grammar. “You know that,”

she said quietly. “And so do we. The problem is, the killer may believe you saw something even though you didn’t.”

Just then Joanna’s Eagle came wheeling into the yard, with Jim Bob Brady at the wheel. The car had barely come to a stop before Eva Lou was out of it. With her apron billowing around her, Eva Lou raced toward Jenny.

“There you are, Jenny,” she said. “I’m so glad to see you! When we couldn’t find you, I was afraid—”

“She’s fine, Eva Lou,” Joanna interjected. “Jenny’s just fine.”

That’s what she said, but with Dora Matthews dead, Joanna wasn’t sure she believed her own reassuring words. Neither did anybody else.

It was a grim family gathering that convened around the dining room table at High Lonesome Ranch. Joanna began by briefly summarizing what Frank Montoya had told her about Dora Matthews’s death.

“Supposing what happened to Dora and what went on in the Apache Pass case are connected,”

Jim Bob began. “How would the killer go about learning the first thing about Jenny and Dora?”

In response, Butch retrieved a copy of Sunday morning’s Ari-zona Reporterfrom the car and handed it to Jim Bob Brady. Once he finished reading, Jim Bob sighed and shook his head.

“‘That still doesn’t say for sure that the cases are connected.”

“That’s right,” Joanna agreed. “But we can’t afford to take any chances. As of now, Jenny, consider yourself grounded. You don’t go anywhere at all unless one of us is with you. No more riding off on Kiddo by yourself. Understand?”

A subdued Jenny nodded and voiced no objection.

“What about us?” Eva Lou asked. “1 )o you want us to stay on?”

Joanna glanced at Butch, who gave his head an almost imper-ceptible shake. “No,” Joanna said.

“That’s not necessary. We’ve disrupted your lives enough as it is. You go on home. We’ll be fine.”

“All right,” Jim Bob said, “just so long as you all know you can count on us if you need to.”

“Has anybody found Dora’s mother?” Jenny asked.

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Joanna shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Are you going to?”

“I’m sure we will.”

Jenny stood up and pushed her chair away from the table. “Then maybe you should go back to work,” she said, and left the room. At a loss, and not knowing what else to do, Joanna got up and followed her daughter into her bedroom, where she found Jenny lying facedown on the bed.

“Jen?” Joanna said. “Are you all right?”

“You said she’d be safe,” Jenny said accusingly. “You gave me Scout’s honor.”

“Jenny, please. I had no idea this would happen.”

“And now you’re saying that if I stay home, I’ll be safe?”

“Jenny, Butch and I—”

“Just go,” Jenny interrupted. “Go away and leave me alone. You let someone kill Dora. You’d better find out who did it before I’m dead, too.”

Stung by the anger and betrayal in Jenny’s voice, Joanna retreated. A few minutes later she was outside by the Crown Victo-ria, struggling to fasten her Kevlar vest, when Butch came out of the house.

“Jenny will be all right,” he assured her, once he had unloaded the luggage. “You go do what you have to. Don’t worry about her.”

Tears welled in Joanna’s eyes. “Jenny blames me for what happened. I told her last night that I was sure Dora would be safe, but I was wrong. She wasn’t safe at all, goddamn it! She’s dead.”

“No matter what Jenny said, Joey, and no matter what you may think, what happened to Dora Matthews isn’t your fault,” Butch said.

“I think you’re wrong there,” Joanna told him. “I’m not first in line for that; I’m second—right behind my mother.”

As soon as Joanna was back on the highway, she looked at her watch. Almost two hours had passed since she had last spoken to Frank Montoya. In the world of crime scene investigation, two hours was little more than a blip on the screen.

Picking up her radio microphone, she called in to Dispatch. “Is Chief Deputy Montoya still out at the crime scene on High way 90?” she asked.

“He sure is, Sheriff Brady,” Larry Kendrick told her.

“Good. Let him know I’ve left High Lonesome Ranch, and I’m on my way.”

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As she drove, Joanna battled to control her churning emotions. Under most circumstances, where someone else’s crisis was concerned, Sheriff Brady could be calm and completely unflappable. To her dismay she was now learning that her law enforcement training counted for little when her own family was threatened.

It still shamed Joanna to recall how completely she had fallen apart in those first awful minutes when she had come home to High Lonesome Ranch to find her dogs poisoned and her own home virtually destroyed by the frenzied anger of a drug-crazed woman. Joanna had surveyed Reba Singleton’s rampage of destruction with her knees knocking, her heart pounding, and with her breath coining inn short harsh gasps. It had taken time for her to separate the personal from the professional before she could gather her resources and go out and deal with the troubled woman herself.

Driving from the ranch to the crime scene, Joanna once again had to make that tough transition.

She had to put her own worries about Jenny aside and focus instead on finding Dora Matthews’s killer and Connie Haskell’s killer, knowing that once the perpetra-tor—or perpetrators—were found, Jenny—her precious Jenny—would no longer be in danger.

An hour later, as she approached the clot of emergency vehicles parked along Highway 90, she felt more in control. Slowing down, she noted a road sign announcing that Sierra Vista was twenty-three miles away. As she made her way through the traffic backup, Joanna found herself wondering how it was that Dora Matthews—a thirteen-year-old with no driver’s license—had made it more than twenty miles from her foster home in Sierra Vista to here.She sure as hell didn’t walk, Joanna told herself.

Minutes later, she parked behind Frank Montoya’s vehicle, a Crown Victoria that was a twin to hers. Deputies had coned the roadway down to one lane and were directing traffic through on that single lane while investigators clustered in the other lane and on the shoulder. Walking in the traffic-free left-hand lane, Joanna stopped beside Detective Ernie Carpenter, who stood staring off the edge of the highway.

“Hello, Sheriff,” Ernie said.

“What’s going on?”

“The victim’s still down there,” he said. “Jaime’s just finishing taking the crime scene photos.

Want to take a look before they haul her out?”

The last thing Joanna wanted to see was a young girl’s lifeless body. “I’d better,” she said.

Had she tried, Joanna probably could have seen enough without ever leaving the roadway.

Rather than taking the easy way out, though, she picked her way down the rocky embankment.

At the bottom, standing with her back to the yawning opening of a culvert that ran under the highway, Joanna looked down at the sad, crumpled remains of Dora Matthews.

Totally exposed to the weather, the sun-scorched child lay faceup in the sandy bed of a dry wash. Her lifeless eyes stared into the burning afternoon sun. Her long brown hair formed a dark halo against the golden sand. She wore a pair of shorts and a ragged tank top along with a single tennis shoe and no socks. A knapsack, its contents scattered loose upon the ground, lay just beyond her outstretched fingertips. The ungainly positions of Dora’s limbs sickened Joanna and made her swallow hard to keep from gagging. Her twisted arms and legs lay at odd angles
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that spoke of multiple broken bones inside a savagely mangled body.

Breathing deeply to steady herself, Joanna turned away and joined Frank Montoya and George Winfield, who stood just inside the opening of the culvert, taking advantage of that small patch of cooling shade. “What do you think?” she asked.

“Looks like a hit-and-run to me,” Frank said. “I’ve had deputies looking up and down the highway in either direction. So far we’ve found no skid marks, no broken grille or headlight debris, and, oddly enough, no tennis shoe. Whoever hit her made no effort to stop. I wouldn’t be surprised to find we’re dealing with a drunk driver who is totally unaware of hitting, much less killing, someone”

Like a drowning victim, Joanna wanted to clutch at the drunk driver theory, one that would mean Dora’s death was an awful accident. That would mean Jenny wasn’t really in danger. But Joanna didn’t dare allow herself that luxury. Instead, she turned to George Winfield.

“What about you?” she asked.

“You know me,” George Winfield said. “Until I have a chance to examine the body, I’m not even going to speculate.” He looked at his watch and sighed impatiently. “Jaime Carbajal drives me crazy. He’s slower than Christmas. Even I could take those damn crime scene pictures faster than he does.”

It was Sunday. Joanna suddenly realized that George’s impa-tience with Jaime was probably due to the fact that this crime scene call was keeping Eleanor Lathrop’s husband from attending one of his wife’s numerous social engagements. Joanna’s simmering anger toward her mother, held in check for a while, returned at once to a full boil. Rather than lighting into George about it, Joanna simply turned and walked back up to the roadway. Frank Montoya, read-ing the expression on her face, followed.

“Something wrong, Boss?” he asked.

“My mother’s what’s wrong,” she said heatedly. “That little girl wouldn’t be dead right now if Eleanor Lathrop Winfield hadn’t opened her big mouth and gone blabbing around when she shouldn’t have.”

“You don’t know that for sure.”

“I don’tknow it, but it’s a pretty fair guess. There are times when private citizens should mind their own damned business. Now, please bring me up to speed.”

“Don’t be too hard on private citizens,” Frank counseled. “One of them may have just saved our bacon.”

“What do you mean?”

“Someone found Connie Haskell’s car. The call came in from Tucson a few minutes ago.”

“Where was It?”

“At the airport in Tucson. Some little old lady, on her way to Duluth to see her daughter, made
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a 911 call on Saturday morning. She reported what she thought to be blood on the door of the car parked next to hers in the airport lot. The call got mishandled, and nobody bothered to investigate it until a little while ago. The woman’s right. It is blood, and it’s also Connie Haskell’s Lincoln Town Car. It’s being towed to the City of Tucson impound lot. I tried to get them to bring it down to Bisbee, but that didn’t fly. Casey Ledford is on her way to Tucson to be on hand when they open the trunk. She’ll be processing the vehicle for us. Not that I don’t trust the Tucson crime scene techs,” Frank added. “But they don’t have quite the same vested interest in that Town Car that we do.”

“Well, at least we’re making progress somewhere,” Joanna said. “Is it possible Connie Haskell’s killer could be the carjacker after all?”

Frank shook his head. “I doubt it. The UDAs who were picked up in the other hijacked cars sure weren’t heading for any airport.”

Joanna considered his answer for a moment. “All right then,” she said. “Let’s assume for the moment that whoever’s doing the carjackings isn’t involved with this. What do we know about Connie Haskell’s husband? Are we sure Ron Haskell is actually in residence at Pathway to Heaven? Or, if he was there, do we know if he still is?”

“It’s called Pathway to Paradise,” Frank corrected. “And wethink he’s there. The guy who runs the general store in Portal says one of the residents came in on Thursday morning and hit him tip for some telephone change.”

“That could have been Haskell, all right,” Joanna said.

Frank nodded. “But when Jaime and Ernie tried to gain admittance to Pathway, there was an armed guard who wouldn’t let them inside. He also refused to verify whether or not Haskell was there. He said all patient records are confidential and that only authorized visitors are allowed on the grounds. In the process he made it abundantly clear that police officersaren’t authorized under any circumstances.”

“Unless they have a court order,” Joanna added.

“Right.”

“What about checking with the airlines to see if somebody named Ron Haskell flew out of Tucson between Thursday night and the time the car was found?”

“I’m sure we can check on that tomorrow,” Frank said.

Joanna thought for a minute, then made up her mind. “Let’s go then,” she said. “You’re with me, Frank. There’s no sense in our standing around second-guessing Jaime and Ernie. They both know what they’re doing.”

“What about the press?” Frank asked. “They’re going to want a statement.” Frank Montoya’s duties included serving as the depart-ment’s media-relationsofficer.

“For right now, forget them,” Joanna told him. “Until we locate Sally Matthews and notify her of her daughter’s death, you’ve got nothing to tell the media. Besides, the longer we keep Dora’s death quiet, the better.”

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“Where are we going then?” Frank asked.

“To Paradise,” Joanna said.