Rattlesnake Crossing (18 page)

And not a moment too
soon, Joanna thought, watching her go.

“Can I see you tonight?" Butch asked.

Joanna shook her head. She hadn't told Marliss about the serial-killer part, and she wasn't going to tell Butch, either. "I can't promise, what with everything going on at work and with Esther in the hospital in Tucson. Even if I did say yes, I couldn't give you any guarantees about what time I'd finish up. That's one of the reasons I feel so rotten about last night. You were stuck out there on the porch by yourself for all that time."

"After living up around Phoenix, I thought it was gloriously quiet. Believe me, I enjoyed every minute of it. I especially got a kick out of watching that storm off to the east, the one that put on such a light show and then never let loose with a smidgen of rain. 'Full of sound and fury' and all that jazz."

Daisy dropped off both a traveler coffee cup and the bill.

Butch snagged the bill away before Joanna could touch it.
"So how about it?" he added, not taking no for an answer. "How about if I show up at your house about the same time I did yesterday—say seven or so. And when you get home, we'll see what time it is and decide what to do then."

She wanted to say no, but he had come all that way and would be here for just a couple of days. It was only natural that he wanted to spend time with her. "All right," she agreed. “But if you come out to the house, don't wait on the porch. There's a key hidden in the grass. Use it to let yourself in. That way, if I get hung up, at least I'll able to let you know what's going on."

"A key hidden outside?" Butch asked. "Are you sure that's safe?"

Joanna laughed. "It's in the grass just to the right of the front-porch step, hidden under a plastic dog turd—a very realistic-looking plastic dog turd. Believe me, with Sadie and Tigger around, nobody's going to suspect that dark brown pile lying there in the grass isn't the real McCoy."

"I suppose not," Butch said. "Come to think of it, maybe I'll double-check before I pick it up."

Finishing the last of her orange juice, Joanna stood up. "Sorry to have to eat and run like this."

He waved her away. "It's fine," he said. "But if you don't mind, I'm going to hang around and drink my last cup of coffee here. I'd take one with me but coffee and motorcycles don't necessarily go together."

Grabbing both her purse and the Styrofoam cup, Joanna dashed toward the door. She was in the Blazer and headed uptown when she realized Butch Dixon hadn't told the truth to Marliss Shackleford. He had said that his business was up in Phoenix. But the phone to the Roundhouse Bar and Grill had been disconnected. His
business used to be in Phoenix,
Joanna thought.
But it isn't anymore.

By the time she was up over the Divide, however, she had stopped thinking about Butch and was back to worrying about the case. Picking up the radio, she asked Dispatch to put her through to Detective Carbajal.

"What's happening?" she asked.

"I've been on the horn to Maricopa County," he told her. "According to the sheriff's office up there, we've got a possible."

"A case with the same MO?"

"Unfortunately, yes. It's old—from two years ago—and it's still open. A fourteen-year-old named Rebecca Flowers was found up near Lake Pleasant north of Sun City. Shot first and then ... well, you know the rest."

"No leads?"

"None so tar. And my guess is nobody looked very hard. Rebecca was a street kid, a drugged-up runaway from Yuma. And since it hadn't happened again as far as anybody could tell, there wasn't any reason to take it very seriously."

"Until now," Joanna said. She switched on her blinking red emergency lights and pressed the gas pedal all the way to the floor.

"Right," Jaime agreed hollowly. "Until now."

"You've talked to Ernie?"

"Yes, and her Highness, Dr. Daly, too," Jaime replied. "You were right. I managed to catch her between autopsies. They're both on their way right now. Depending on where you are and where they are ..."

"I'm just south of Tombstone," Joanna said.

"Then you'll probably be here within minutes of one another."

"Where are you meeting them?"

"They're coming straight here. I gave them directions. It's the same little track we took last night, the one off Pomerene Road right across from Rattlesnake Crossing. You'll come to a Y where we turned right last night. Go left this time. It'll lead you right here."

Still wearing her work clothes, Joanna had come dressed for next-of-kin notification rather than crime-scene investigation. Still, if that was where everyone else was going, she would, too.

"Listen, Jaime," she warned Detective Carbajal, "this is going to be a high-profile case. We're going strictly by the hook on this one. I don't want any procedures skipped or skimped. You got that?"

"Got it, Sheriff Brady," Jaime said. "I hear you loud and clear."

As she finished with Detective Carbajal, Joanna was fast coming up on Tombstone proper. She slowed slightly, but not much. Her next call was to Frank Montoya, still closeted in his office back at the department. "Frank," she told him, "I need your help. Get on the horn to Motor Vehicles and track down some information on Daniel Berridge."

"The guy who's wife is missing?" Frank asked.

"The guy who's wife is dead," Joanna corrected. "S and R just found the body. I want you to check out his date of birth and then compare it with a retired race-car driver by the same name, a guy who once drove in the Indy 500."

"You think they're one and the same? What gives you that idea?"

"A little bird told me," Joanna said. "Check it out. Let me know as soon as you can."

Even though it was summer, as she passed Tombstone's elementary and high schools, she slowed down some more just to be sure. Then, when she reached the Chevron station, she whipped across two lanes of traffic and pulled in, threading her way past two out-of-state minivans loaded to the gills with kids, dogs, and luggage.

Parking as close to the rest-room door as possible and leaving her lights flashing, she whipped her suitcase of freshly laundered just-in-case clothes out of the back of the Blazer. It would be far easier to change clothes in a restroom than it would be at the crime scene. Less than two minutes after ducking into the rest room, she was outside again. Dashing toward the Blazer, she almost collided with a little boy of about seven or eight who stood next to the door.

"Lady," he said, wiping an orange circle of soda onto his shirtsleeve, "how come you got those flashing lights on the front of this car? You a cop or something?"

Joanna unlocked the door with her remote key and stalled her clothes and the suitcase back inside. She was in a terrible hurry. II would have been easy to ignore the kid, but in the interest of good public relations, she stopped long enough to answer him. "Or something," she said.

"What does that mean?" he persisted. "Are you or aren't you.? "

"I'm a police officer," she said. "Actually, I'm the sheriff."

"No, you're not," he said. "My dad just took me to see the O.K. Corral. Wyatt Earp's the sheriff."

"Wyatt Earp was a marshal," Joanna corrected. "But that was a long time ago. Now I'm the sheriff." She reached into the Blazer and pulled one of her business cards out of the packet she kept on the windshield visor. "See there? That's my name. It says Sheriff Joanna Brady."

"Darren," a shorts-clad woman called. "What are you doing? Come get in the car."

Darren studied the card and then glanced briefly in his mother's direction, but he didn't move. "A girl can't be a sheriff!" he said finally. "They grow up to be mothers and stuff, not sheriffs."

"Darren," his mother called again, "come here this minute!" Still Darren didn't move.

"You'd be surprised," Joanna told him. With that she climbed into the Blazer and took off. When she looked in the rearview mirror, she saw him still standing there, gazing thoughtfully after her as though what she had told him was more than his young mind could fathom.

That was exactly when she turned on her siren full blast—when she did it and why as well, telling herself,
The devil made me do it.

Darren's obnoxious image stayed with Joanna long after she had turned the curve and erased him from sight. He was only a couple of years younger than Jenny, yet he was being brainwashed into believing sexual stereotypes that sounded as if they had stepped straight out of the fifties—from one of the old sitcoms like
Leave It to Beaver
or from a
Little Lulu
comic book.

Let's hope Darren and Jenny never meet, Joanna thought. If he ever tried spouting that stupid stuff to her, she'd probably punch the little twerp's lights out. And it would serve him right.

CHAPTER TWELVE

As Joanna headed north toward St. David with Darren's image still fresh in her mind, she was struck by a sudden pang of loneliness. Missing Jenny terribly, she grabbed up the cell phone and let the auto dialer call the Unger farm outside Enid, Oklahoma. All she wanted to do was talk to her daughter, to reassure herself that Jenny was holding her own against her hooligan cousins. But there was no answer, and by the time the Ungers' answering machine was about to begin, a radio transmission was coming in from Chief Deputy Montoya.

"What do you have for me, Frank?" she asked.

"All I can say is, that little bird of yours is right on the money," Frank told her. "Katrina Berridge's husband, Daniel, is indeed retired Indy driver Danny Berridge."

"That's what I was afraid of."

"Ruby Starr and I were just finishing working over the menus for next month, but if there's something else you need me to do ..."

"Actually, there is," Joanna replied. "You and Dick Voland both better hotfoot it over to this new crime scene on the Triple C north of Pomerene. There's going to be lots of media attention on this one, and I'll want you to be on tap from square one. I'll brief you both once you get there."

When Joanna herself reached the crime scene, Detective Carpenter and Dr. Daly were already on-site and on the job. In the sheltering shade of a thicket of mesquite just short of the river bed, Dr. Daly was using what looked like a finely screened butterfly net to capture flies. Meanwhile, Ernie had gone up to the first crime scene on the ledge to confer with the evidence techs who were there working on the previous night's burial mound. By the time Joanna was ready to approach the body, Fran Daly was bent over it, carefully tweezing what looked suspiciously like maggots into a small glass vial.

Lost in concentration on her grisly work, and wearing a mask over her mouth and nostrils, Dr. Daly seemed oblivious to the sheriff's approach. Joanna had tried to steel herself in advance for what was coming, but the effort was mostly wasted. One look at the dead woman's bloody, denuded skull and gas-bloated body was enough to leave Joanna feeling weak-kneed and nauseated.

"What do you think?" she asked at last, after once again taming her unruly gag reflexes.

Dr. Daly looked up. "Well, Sheriff Brady," she said, "it's like this. I think we're looking for some asshole who has delusions of grandeur. Thinks of himself as some kind of Ernest Hemingway-style big-game hunter. She was shot from some distance away. Look here." Dr. Daly pointed at the woman's sliced shorts where a shallow wound cut from back to front across the victim's right thigh.

"That looks to me like a shot that nearly missed, one that just barely grazed her. The same goes for this one that nearly severed her left hand. My guess is he was aiming for a body shot each time and missed. It must have taken hills three shots or more to adjust for windage. After that first shot—the one on her thigh, most likely—she took off running. At least she tried to run, but she couldn't get out of range. The shot that actually killed her came from the back and exited through the front of her chest. From the looks of it, I'd say it took most of her heart and lung tissue with it. That one killed her instantly."

Joanna felt an involuntary chill as she remembered how the other victim—Ashley Brittany—had been rendered helpless by four deliberately placed close-range shots that had shattered her joints and left her stranded on her back as helpless as an overturned box turtle.

"In a case like this, I guess dying instantly is a blessing, isn't it," Joanna managed.

Dr. Daly gave her an appraising look and nodded. "Yes," she agreed. "I suppose it is."

"Can you tell what kind of bullet?" Joanna asked.

"From the size of the exit wound, I'd say we're looking for something one notch under a cannon."

"Something like a fifty-caliber?"

Fran Daly frowned. "Maybe," she replied. "Why do you say that?"

"Because night before last, we had reports from this neighborhood of shots being fired. Two cattle were killed and an irrigation pump was shot to hell, all of it done with what we've pretty well ascertained must have been a fifty-caliber sniper rifle."

"That happened right here on the Triple C?" Dr. Daly asked.

Joanna nodded. "This ranch, but not in this same spot. About a mile or so from here."

"But sniper-rifle kill ranges can cover that much ground and more," Fran said. "Are you thinking maybe a killer started out shooting up machinery and livestock just for the hell of it and then moved on to her?"

"Right."

Removing her face mask, Fran lit a cigarette. "It could be," she mused. "It just could be."

With that the medical examiner fell silent. The second-hand smoke from her unfiltered Camels helped to cut some of the awful odor. Somehow ignoring the gaping wound in the dead woman's chest, Joanna tried to understand exactly what had happened.

"Do you think this is where she fell?" she asked.

Fran shook her head. Using her cigarette, she pointed toward where two thin dark strands of stain wandered off across the rocky terrain. "If you follow that trail out about twenty-five yards, you'll find the kill zone. It's pretty much out in the open. He dragged her in here under the trees after she was already dead."

"So if we're going to find bullets, that's where they'll be," Joanna said. "Out there where she fell."