Tombstone Courage (18 page)

Federal EEOC guidelines notwithstanding, both Ernie Carpenter and Dick Voland regarded crime-scene investigation as an all-male preserve. They had expected Dave Hollicker's roadblock to function as a No-Girls-Allowed notice, but she had ignored the warning.

It would have been easy for Joanna to take the easy way out. For her to stagger away, grope her way over to the fire truck, collapse on the running board, and wait for her head to stop swimming. Instead, steeling herself against the fainthearted impulse, she stayed where she was and kept her eyes focused full on Harold Patterson's face.

“Yes,
we
will,” she said softly, underscoring the word “we.” “Now how about telling me exactly how you propose to go about it?”

J
OANNA WALKED
back to where Yuri Malakov was sitting on the running board of the decommissioned fire truck. He moved aside far enough to make room for her. Sinking down beside him, she wiped her clammy forehead with the sleeve of her jacket and closed her eyes, trying to shut out the memory of Harold Patterson's eerily blank eyes. She wanted to forget how they had caught the glow of Ernie Carpenter's flashlight and stared dully back up at her through the darkness.

Yuri glanced at Joanna with some sympathy, and he seemed in tune with her reaction. “Is bad thing,” he muttered. “Very bad thing.”

Joanna studied his broad face. Thick eyebrows hunched over heavily lidded eyes. Although from a distance he had appeared to be relaxed and snoozing, she realized now that his carefully hooded eyes were observing everything about him with intense interest.

Ernie Carpenter, leaving the glory hole for the moment, carted a cumbersome suitcase of equipment from his traveling crime-lab van to a newly dried puddle in the road. There, on hands and knees, he was attempting to make plaster casts of
the tire tracks left in crusted mud. Meanwhile, Dick Voland stood beside Ernie's van, speaking into the radio microphone and gesturing with his other hand.

“Detective Voland is trying to locate a sump pump,” Joanna explained.

“A what?”

“An emergency pump and a generator to run it. They need to empty the water out of the bottom of the hole before they attempt to bring up either body, Patterson or the other one.”

Suddenly, Yuri Malakov was no longer lounging against the side of the truck. He loomed over Voland and Joanna, dwarfing them both. “Two peoples?” he demanded, his smoldering dark eyes boring into Joanna's. “More than one? More than Mr. Patterson?”

Joanna realized at once that she had blundered and spoken out of turn. That kind of information about an ongoing investigation shouldn't have been casually mentioned to a passing acquaintance who happened to appear at the crime scene. But it was too late to take it back, and there didn't seem to be any justification in lying about it.

She nodded. “Detective Carpenter seems to have found another body, a skeleton, under Harold Patterson. He had fallen directly on top of it.”

“Who?” Yuri asked.

“We don't know that,” Joanna answered. “The other victim has been dead for a long time—years, most likely. Until they can search the glory hole for evidence, there's no way to tell.”

Yuri Malakov lurched to his feet. “Ivy must know about this,” he declared.

“No,” Joanna objected. “That kind of news should come from one of the investigating officers, from someone official.”

Yuri shook his shaggy head impatiently. “Investigators busy. I am not busy. I tell her.”

With that, Yuri stomped away toward the Scout, leaving Joanna no choice but to trail along after him. He was a huge man. The idea of her physically restraining someone his size was laughable. Joanna glanced back toward Dick Voland, who was still talking on the radio. He would be of no help. Besides, she didn't want to tell him about this. She didn't want to admit to blabbing out of turn.

“Wait,” Joanna said. “If you'll give me a ride back down to my car, I'll come with you and tell Ivy myself.”

Yuri stopped next to the Scout with one hand possessively on the door latch. “Okay,” he agreed readily. “I drive. You tell.”

As they maneuvered past the spot in the road where Ernie Carpenter was working on the plaster casts, Joanna directed Yuri to stop. “I need to tell Detective Carpenter where I'm going.”

As if that was necessary, she thought afterward. Ernie barely glanced up when she spoke to him, acknowledging their departure with an inattentive frown. By then the homicide detective was totally focused on the solitary pursuit of obtaining evidence. Anything that removed distracting onlookers was to be regarded as a help, not a hindrance.

“That's fine,” he said, waving them away. “Tell the people down at the house to stay out of Harold's room. That goes for everyone there. Tell them to leave it alone until I have a chance to go through it.”

“Right,” Joanna said. “I'll tell them.”

At the point in the road where Dick Voland's Blazer still blocked the way, they had to abandon the Scout in favor of Joanna's Eagle. The hulking Russian had to scrunch his broad shoulders and duck his head in order to cram himself into the passenger's seat, but he did so without complaint.

While Joanna drove, he sat with his arms folded stubbornly across his massive chest, frowning and looking straight ahead, saying nothing. She looked at him from time to time and tried to decipher the troubled expression on his face.

She was surprised at the complete change in Yuri Malakov's demeanor. His appearance now was a complete 180 degrees from the way he had looked earlier, sitting relaxed and supposedly dozing on the running board of the pumper. And the change had been instantaneous rather than gradual. It happened the moment she had mentioned existence of that second body. The news had seemed to distress him in a way that went far beyond his supposedly slight connection to the Patterson clan and their troubles.

“What's the matter?” Joanna asked. “Is something bothering you?”

Yuri glanced at her suspiciously. “What means ‘bother'?”

“Bother is like worry,” Joanna explained. “Is something worrying you?”

“
Nyet
,” he answered. “Nothing.”

But Yuri Malakov, silent and brooding, certainly didn't look worry-free.

Thinking about his situation, Joanna realized it had to be dismaying to be thrown into a crisis—especially a crisis involving a murder investigation—in a place where the entire legal system was completely foreign. Not only that, he was having to sort through all the strange customs through a veil of stilted, inflexible classroom English.

Joanna's own four years of classroom Spanish—two in high school and two in college—had been difficult enough and barely qualified her to speak “menu Spanish” in unfamiliar Stateside Mexican restaurants. Had she been foolish enough to head for Spain or the interior of Mexico with only that rudimentary background, she could probably survive—order food and make her most basic needs known—but she had no illusions about her ability to communicate or to be understood. Complex ideas would have been far beyond her.

But here was Yuri Malakov, a grown man able to communicate only basic messages. No doubt he had taken a good deal of classroom instruction in English years earlier—his formal, nonidiomatic way of speaking indicated as much. But still, it had to be terribly difficult to be living and coping with complex day-to-day issues in a foreign country where virtually no one other than perhaps a few second-generation Slavic miners spoke some version of his native tongue.

As someone who had lived in one small Arizona town all her life, Joanna found the very idea of Yuri Malakov fascinating. What would drive a man to turn his back on everything familiar? To leave behind all family and friends? What kind of work had he done before coming here, and what career path had he abandoned in order to work as a hired hand for strangers on an isolated Arizona ranch? And what would possess a man, somewhere in his mid-forties, to set himself the task of grasping the intricacies of a whole new culture?

Maybe that was it, Joanna theorized. Perhaps Yuri's concern for Ivy Patterson was based primarily on her helping him make that difficult transition; gratitude for the invaluable role she was playing in his life as his English-language tutor. For a few moments, Joanna considered asking him, but then she let the idea go. He sat staring out the window, effectively shutting out any more questions. Besides, it didn't seem worthwhile to fight her way through the difficulties of the communication barrier in order to discuss something as esoteric as motivation. Instead, they rode the rest of the way to the Rocking P ranch house in silence.

As they entered the yard, the place looked positively idyllic. With a plume of inviting smoke curling out the chimney, the house and surrounding ranch seemed an improbable setting for two unexplained deaths. Several loose chickens scratched lazily in the dirt, and a fully adorned watchdog peacock strutted his stuff in the clear November sunlight. Marianne's VW was still parked beside the gate, as was Ivy Patterson's Chevy Luv.

The ranch house was surrounded by a white picket fence that set off the yard proper with its blanket of winter-yellowed Bermuda grass from the rest of the grounds. The house was an early-twentieth-century period piece—a single story of living space topped by a steeply pitched tin roof. The metal roof shone with a coat of freshly applied paint as did the wooden siding, shutters, and trim. Everything about the place looked neat and properly maintained.

A wide covered porch ran the entire length of each outside wall, creating a good eight feet of extra overhang and shade to help cool the house's interior from Arizona's scorching summer heat. Although the porch had to be close to ninety years old, none of the flooring sagged. Not a single spindly rail was missing or broken from the long span of banister. If some pieces of woodwork were no longer original, it didn't show. They had been replaced and repaired so carefully that it was impossible to tell old millwork from new.

Two massive wisteria vines, thick-trunked with age, stood guard on either side of the front entrance, sending out a tangle of naked gray branches that clung tenaciously along the front lip and gutters of the overhang. In the spring, the porch would be all but obscured by a curtain of lush greenery and cascading lavender flowers.

Joanna was quick to note that the grounds of the Rocking P were surprisingly clear of junk. The outbuildings were all fully upright and freshly painted. No hulks of dead cars or rusting farm equipment had been left to crumble within sight
of the house. Joanna's High Lonesome suffered terribly in comparison.

The wheels on the Eagle had not yet come to a complete stop before Yuri Malakov had the door open. He would have leaped out and been long gone if Joanna hadn't stopped him. “Let me tell her,” she said. “It'll be better if I do it.”

Yuri glowered at her, but he subsided in the seat. “You do it then,” he said.

As if on cue, the front door of the house opened. Ivy Patterson and Marianne Maculyea appeared on the porch together. Not surprisingly, Ivy's usually cheerful face was shrouded in grief, but even Marianne's features were frozen in an atypically grim mask.

Joanna opened the gate and started up the walkway. To her surprise, Ivy left Marianne on the porch and came running forward. Instead of stopping when she reached Joanna, Ivy darted past and threw herself sobbing against Yuri Malakov's massive chest. He reached down, folded her in his arms, and touched his chin to her hair.

Yuri clicked his tongue soothingly. “Is okay. Yuri is here.”

That small series of loving gestures turned all of Joanna's previous conjecture on its ear. Yuri and Ivy might have known each other for only a matter of weeks, but clearly they meant far more to one another than simple teacher and pupil. They were in love. Even the desolation of her grief didn't entirely obscure the glow on Ivy's face as she abandoned herself to the comfort of Yuri's encircling arms.

Joanna cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Ivy, but I need to talk to you. There's something you need to know.”

Instead of looking at Joanna, Ivy stared up at Yuri's stolid face, as if whatever she needed to know would be clearly written on his broad features. He shook his head. “She tells,” he said, nodding in Joanna's direction.

“Tell me what?” Ivy asked. “What's wrong now?”

This was Joanna's first experience at delivering bad news in some kind of official capacity. Like a child thrust suddenly into the spotlight of a Sunday-school Christmas pageant, she was instantly out of her depth, stymied about what to say or where to begin.

“Maybe we should go inside and sit down,” she suggested lamely.

Glaring at her but holding tightly to Ivy's hand, Yuri strode up onto the porch and inside the house. “What about me?” Marianne asked, as Joanna started by.

“Come ahead if you want to,” Joanna said.

By the time Joanna and Marianne entered the living room, Ivy and Yuri were already seated side by side on an old-fashioned, faded leather couch. They sat close to one another, with Yuri's long arm sprawled intimately across Ivy's shoulder. A good-sized woman in her own right, Ivy Patterson seemed dwarfed and diminutive beside the hulking Russian. The fiercely protective look on his face was out of place—unless he and Ivy knew
more about how Harold Patterson had come to be in the glory hole than Yuri had so far admitted.

But still, Joanna's first order of business was to inform Ivy of the presence of that second body. The cozy fireplace-warmed living room now seemed as bad a place to deliver that kind of news as the front porch had moments earlier.

“What is it?” Ivy asked.

Feeling every bit the unwelcome interloper, Joanna stumbled her way into a chair. For a few moments, she almost wished she were a man, wearing the lawman's stereotypical Stetson. At least that way she would have had something to take off and put in her lap, some tangible object to use as a physical buffer between Ivy Patterson's already significant pain and the news Joanna was about to add to it.

“I'm so sorry about your father,” she began haltingly. “Harold Patterson was a wonderful man, and he's going to be greatly missed.”

Ivy Patterson nodded. Tears threatened, but she held them in check. “Thank you,” she murmured.

“As you know, Yuri and I have just come down from up on the mountain,” Joanna continued. “From up at the glory hole. Did he have a chance to tell about what's going on up there?”

“Just that they wouldn't let him bring Dad's Scout back down the mountain.”

Joanna nodded. “There's a roadblock near the top, and the Scout is stuck on the wrong side of it.”