Skeleton Canyon (21 page)

Still, what choice did she have? Treading carefully, she picked her way across the rain-slick blacktop and positioned herself on the far side of the road. Through the pouring, slanting raindrops, no vehicles were visible as far as she could see in either direction. It looked as though it was going to be a long damned wait.

She stood in the rain for what seemed like a very long time. Peering blindly off to the east, she didn’t even hear the car bearing down on her from the west until it was almost upon her. When she did hear it, she turned just in time to see a VW bug flash by. It looked like Marianne Maculyea’s car. Sea foam green was the right color, but ...

A few feet beyond where Angie stood the VW’s brake lights flashed on. Skidding dangerously back and forth across the center line, the car came to a stop and then the backup lights came on.

Angie ran forward, meeting the vehicle just as Marianne rolled down the window. “What are you doing here?” Angie asked.

“What do you think? That I’m out for a Sunday ride?” Marianne asked. “I’m looking for you. I came as soon as I could get loose from coffee hour. Climb in. You’re soaking wet.”

Summoning as much dignity as she could, Angie walked around to the far side of the car and got inside. “I knew they were looking for me,” she said. “I heard the sirens, but I didn’t want them to find me.”

“Why not? It’s pouring rain.”

Angie’s eyes filled with tears. “Because Dennis Hacker made fun of me,” she said. “I told him who and what I was and he laughed.”

Reverend Marianne Maculyea put the VW into a sharp U-turn and then shifted back up to speed. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” she said kindly. “Tell me about Dennis locker. I don’t know who this guy thinks he is, but he sounds like a creep in need of having his lights punched out.”

It took several minutes for the body and Doc Winfield’s satchel to be loaded into the Eagle. After that a series of several backing maneuvers were necessary before Joanna could turn the Eagle back down the ridgeline. In the rearview mirror, she saw the investigators scouring the ground where the body had been hauled up over the cliff. She was just picking her way past Ernie’s van when the detective came huffing up behind her.

“On the way back to Bisbee, Jaime and I will stop by and see this Ignacio Ybarra down in Douglas.
^”

Joanna nodded. “You think you’ll be able to find him all right?”

“Are you kidding? Half of Jaime’s relatives live in Douglas. Finding him won’t be a problem. What about going to see the O’Briens? Do you want us to handle that, too?”

Joanna considered his offer. She had already done one cowardly thing by letting Frankie Stoddard handle the initial notification, which, by rights, should have been a function of the sheriff’s department. It would have been all too easy to let Carpenter and Carbajal go and take the brunt of David O’Brien’s wrath. Easy, but not fair. Joanna had been the one who had insisted on following procedure. Regardless of whether or not the twenty-four-hour rule had made any difference in Brianna O’Brien’s survival, it was only right that Joanna should take the heat for that decision.

“After I drop the body off at the morgue, I’ll go home, clean up, and change. Call me as soon as you get in. We were the ones who went out to see the parents yesterday. We should be the ones to go there today.”

Ernie gave her a half-assed salute that was at once both mildly teasing and respectful. “Right, Chief,” he said. “I’ll give you a call as soon as we hit town.”

As he backed away from the car, Joanna started to roll up the window. Then she thought better of it. Instead, she left it down. The smell of moisture sweeping across the parched desert was a welcome antidote to the smell of decaying flesh that leaked through the thick folds of the body bag and permeated the air.

“I appreciate this,” George Winfield said as they started down the mountain. “The truck might have done the job, but you’re right. It wouldn’t have shown the proper respect.”

“What about the autopsy?” Joanna asked. “How soon can you do it?”

“Tomorrow,” Winfield answered. “Unless you need it sooner.”

“No,” Joanna said.
^“
Tomorrow will be fine. You’ll be able to tell when she died?”

“Friday, between nine and ten,” George said confidently. Joanna was impressed. “You can tell that just by looking at the body?”

George Winfield shook his head. “No, by looking at her watch,” he said. “It stopped at nine fifty-one on Friday, June fourteenth. It could have been broken during the initial attack or during the plunge off the mountain. I’d say from the condition of the body that disposal took place within an hour or so of lime of death.”

“I see,” Joanna said. In a way, she was relieved. It salved her conscience a little to know that Brianna had already been dead long before Joanna herself had taken refuge in the twenty-four-hour rule. What she had or hadn’t done once she and Ernie had been summoned to Green Brush Ranch would have made no difference in whether or not Bree O’Brien survived.

By the time the Eagle neared the big wash, the storm was starting in dead earnest. First came hard, wind-driven drops that pounded into the dry earth and sent up little puffs of powdery dust. Then came a cloud of needle-sharp hail while jogged forks of lightning crackled across the sky. After that, the sky seemed to open up and the rain fell in torrents. The laboring windshield wipers couldn’t come close to keeping up.

Lack of visibility forced Joanna to slow to a crawl.

“Unbelievable!” George shouted over the roar of the wind, rain, and thunder. “I’ve been here for months and never knew it could storm like this.”

Going into the big wash, Joanna stopped at the crest of the Bill to examine the roadbed. The process of extricating the van had torn it up, leaving great gouges in the sand. If the wash started running, those deep, gaping holes would fill first. Peering through the windshield, she spotted a new set of tracks that detoured around the damaged roadway. Deciding those had most likely been left by Frankie Stoddard leaving and the two deputies corning, Joanna followed them. She heaved a sigh of relief when they were safely across.

Winfield looked. behind them.
^“
Are those washes really dangerous? I keep suspecting that all the flash flood nonsense is so much hooey—something old-timers tell new arrivals just to scare their pants off and keep ‘em in line.
^”

“They’re not nonsense,” Joanna told him. “When you see a sign that says DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED, don’t. A wash like the one back there can fill up with water in less than a minute. In fact, in less than sixty seconds it can swallow a car.”

“How can that be?” George asked. “It doesn’t look that deep.”

“The sand liquefies in the water,” Joanna explained. “What looks like a foot-deep little drop right now can turn into a six-or seven-foot killer during a storm. People drown in them all the time.”

“No shi—” Winfield stopped himself. “No kidding,” he corrected.

Joanna looked across the seat at George and smiled. In the last several hours, they had worked so hard together and in such a focused, purposeful manner, that all personal considerations had somehow melted away. They had been sheriff and coroner working together as professionals. Now, his small verbal slip brought the personal back into view.

“It’s all right if you use the word
shit
around me,” Joanna assured him. “You don’t have to edit what you say and you certainly don’t need to apologize. I’m a big girl. I’ve heard it all before.”

“It’s just that . .”

“That’s one of the differences between my mother and me,” Joanna continued. “On occasion, with enough provocation, I’ve been known to use that particular expression myself and a few that are worse. I don’t believe, however, that any of those words have ever passed Eleanor Lathrop’s lips. As far as know, she’s never moved a whit beyond a heartfelt ‘My stars and garters.’“

George smiled and nodded. They reached the fence then. Joanna waited while George climbed out into the driving rain lo open the gate. When he stepped back inside, he was soaked to the skin.

They were almost to the turnoff at Apache before he spoke again. “Why do you call her that?” he asked.

“Why do I call my mother Mother?” Joanna asked.

“No. Why do you call her Eleanor?”

Until George pointed it out, Joanna wasn’t even aware of it. She had to think about her answer for some time before she save it. “I’ve always called her that,” Joanna said.

“Do you call her that to her face, or is it just when you speak of her to other people?” George persisted.

Again, Joanna considered her reply. “I don’t suppose I’ve ever called her that to her face,” she admitted honestly. “But it is how I talk about her, and it’s how I think about her, too. As Eleanor.”

“I see,” George said, nodding thoughtfully and rubbing his thin, “So what you’re saying is that it’s not so much a matter of disrespect as it is a matter of distancing.”

And because the questions and George Winfield’s resulting conclusion came far too close to home, Joanna had to lash out sit him.

“She I tied to hold me too close,” Joanna snarled. “She tried to smother me.”

For a long time after that, while they traversed the rest of the gravel track into Apache and then for several miles after they turned onto the blacktop, they drove through the curtain of pouring rain with neither of them saying a word.

“Ellie isn’t doing it anymore,” George Winfield said at last. “I believe she’s willing to let you go, Joanna. Isn’t it about time you did the same?”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

By the time they reached Douglas, Joanna realized she had been wrong in her assumption about that first storm of the season. The rain wasn’t soaking in after all. Water came down in such a swift deluge that there wasn’t time for soaking. The dips on Highway 80 northeast of Douglas were already trickling with water that, Joanna knew, could turn into a torrent at any time once runoff from higher elevations drained into the willies and washes.

In Douglas proper, the highway’s railroad underpass was closed—for good reason. Years earlier, the highway department had painted markers on the wall in foot-long increments in order to measure and warn otherwise unsuspecting motorists of the water’s dangerous and potentially lethal depth. Joanna was surprised to see that the water filling the Southern Pacific underpass—murky, reddish brown stuff topped by a loamy white froth—had already topped the four-foot mark and was still rising.

“Now I see what you mean,” George Winfield murmured as the Eagle sat idling next to the yellow-and-black sign that stated the all-too-obvious—DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED.

Southeastern Arizona’s summer thunderstorms are often fierce but brief. For some reason, this one, after that first incredible outburst, had now settled into a steady downpour. George Winfield’s clothing, still damp from getting out to open the gate, made the windows inside the Eagle keep steaming up. Unfortunately, because the air-conditioning compressor wasn’t working, neither was the defroster. As they waited in the detour line to be routed around the flooded underpass, Joanna thought she glimpsed Marianne Maculyea’s 1960s vintage VW far ahead of them.

Seeing the car reminded Joanna that Marianne hadn’t shown up in Skeleton Canyon. Had she been there with the Search and Rescue Unit looking for Angie, Joanna surely would have heard about it. Something serious must have come up in Bisbee, Joanna reasoned. It wasn’t like Marianne not to show up in person when one of her friends and/or parishioners was in trouble.

Thinking of Angie reminded Joanna once again of just how wrong she could be. And how often. This supposedly welcome rain storm was turning into a veritable flood. Instead of spending an unauthorized weekend with her boyfriend, Brianna O’Brien was dead—at the hands of person or persons unknown. And Dennis Hacker, who had struck her as a nice man, had turned out to be a jerk instead.

You’re batting a thousand, old girl,
Joanna told herself.
just keep it up.

At the Double Adobe turnoff, Joanna stopped to let George Winfield into his own vehicle. “Do you want to transfer her into my van now?” he asked before opening his door. “‘That way you could go straight home from here.”

Joanna shook her head. The rain was still falling. The coroner’s office up in Tombstone Canyon was housed in a former funeral home that came complete with a covered portico. “I’ll take her the rest of the way to your office,” Joanna told him. “That way she won’t get wet, and neither will your satchel.”

“‘Thanks, Joanna,” George told her, climbing out. “See you there.”

The usually dry creek in Mule Gulch was running bank to hank where it crossed the highway, and there were fallen rocks anti muddy debris on the roadway in the high cuts between there and Bisbee. Wanting to report the hazard and summon someone to clean it up, Joanna reached for her radio. For the dozenth time that day, it wasn’t there. Her ability to communicate with Dispatch was at home in the Crown Victoria, parked in the yard of High Lonesome Ranch.

That does it,
she thought.
Budget or no budget, I’m getting a cellular phone.

It was almost four in the afternoon as Joanna made her way up Tombstone Canyon. That wasn’t easy, either. The deluge had washed what looked like at least one vehicle down Brewery Gulch. It was stuck in the subway, a massive storm drain designed for just such occasions. Driving past emergency vehicles and personnel out in the downpour trying to pull whatever it was out, Joanna couldn’t help being grateful that this latest incident, whatever it might be, was inside the Bisbee city limits rather than outside. That made it someone else’s problem, not hers.

She realized then that she was hungry. Not just hungry—starving. She’d had nothing to eat all day long. She had missed Eva Lou Brady’s Sunday dinner, which had probably been something wonderful like a pork roast or fried chicken. Health-conscious badgering might have persuaded the Colonel to change a few things at KFC, but there had been no change in Eva Lou’s philosophy of what was appropriate fare for Sunday dinner.