by J. A. Jance
“Where exactly is it?”
“Silver Creek. The vehicle smashed through a Jersey barrier at a construction site and plowed into the wash. Hold on, Sheriff Brady,” Tica added. “I’ll have to get back to you.”
While she waited for Tica, Joanna thought about Silver Creek, a mostly dry, sandy creek bed that meandered through the Perilla Mountains. The community of Silver Creek may have been little more than a blip on even the best road map, but when it came to smuggling, the tiny community had a long and colorful history.
Joanna’s father, an amateur historian, had delighted in telling Joanna the story of how, in the early days, prior to Arizona’s statehood, Texas John Slaughter had once decoyed a Border patrol detail to Silver Creek, telling them some notorious smugglers were on their way through. While the hapless Border Patrol agents waited in vain for the nonexistent smugglers to appear, Slaughter himself brought a herd of illicit cattle across the line from his own ranch in Old Mexico. By the time the Border Patrol agents wised up and returned to Slaughter’s ranch, the illegal cattle were mingled in with and totally indistinguishable from Slaughter’s home herd in the States.
Years earlier, while Highway 80 had still been a main thoroughfare for cross-country traffic, Silver Creek had boasted a celebrated steakhouse. Since the completion of Interstate 10 forty miles north, both traffic and business had migrated there. For decades the old highway had been left to languish in neglect. The steakhouse, having opened and closed in various incarnations, was now permanently shuttered.
In the past several months, however, the Arizona Department of Transportation had embarked on an ambitious program to rehab Highway 80 between Douglas and the New Mexico border. A mile or two at a time, the roadway was being widened and straightened. Decrepit bridges and worn-out culverts were being replaced and widened as well.
Approaching Silver Creek from the west, Joanna was surprised at how abruptly the relatively straight and flat roadway suddenly evolved into a series of steep dips and blind curves just as the orange road-construction signs began appearing on the shoulder. No wonder the speeding Suburban had come to grief.
An ambulance came barreling into sight in Joanna’s rearview mirror. She pulled over to let it pass, then sped up and kept pace behind it. She hated to think of the dead and wounded scattered across the desert floor in the searing afternoon heat. Driving in air-conditioned comfort, she found it easy to ignore how hot it was outside, but with temperatures hovering in the low hundreds, the injured were as likely to die of heat and dehydration as they were of their injuries.
And so, since there was nothing else to do as she drove, Joanna Brady went ahead and prayed. “Please, God,” she whispered aloud. “Be with those poor people. Comfort the injured and the dying, and guide all those who would help. Amen.”
Nine
It was just after five when Joanna, still driving behind the ambulance, rounded the last curve and saw a clutch of first-responder emergency vehicles lining the road. From where she was, though, the accident scene itself remained invisible. The sun had dipped behind the tall cliffs that topped the rugged Perilla Mountains, casting the whole area into shadow. Joanna parked her Civvie and then hurried to a spot where a shattered wall of Jersey barriers spilled down the rocky cliffs onto the baked-sand floor of Silver Creek.
It wasn’t until Joanna was standing directly over the newly constructed culverts that she was finally able to see the smashed SUV. Looking like the work of a suicide bomber and crushed beyond recognition, the Suburban lay upside down in the midst of what appeared to be a scatter of brightly colored rags. It took several moments for Joanna’s mind to come to terms with the awful reality. Those scattered bits of colored cloth weren’t rags at all—they were pieces of clothing with dead and injured people still inside them. Uniformed officers—some of them EMTs—and a few concerned civilians crouched here and there, offering aid to the victims, some of whom moaned and whimpered softly while others shrieked in agony. A few of the victims, lying still as death, had either been abandoned as beyond help or were as yet untended and uncomforted.
Rushing back to the Civvie, Joanna grabbed one of the several jugs of bottled water she kept there. Then she plunged down the rocky bank toward the nearest victim. This isn’t an accident scene, she told herself grimly. It’s a damned war zone!
The first person Joanna reached was a man who appeared to be in his mid-thirties. A streak of bright red blood dribbled from one corner of his mouth and disappeared into the equally red bandanna he wore around his neck. His pencil-thin mustache was neatly trimmed, even though his dusty, threadbare shoes and the rank odor of sweat told her that in his effort to cross the border, he must have walked across miles of scorching desert.
Kneeling beside him, Joanna picked up his limp arm and felt for a pulse. Finding none, she let his wrist drop back to the ground. Knowing there was nothing she could do for him, she rose and moved on to someone else. This one was an older man in his fifties or sixties, with his left leg crumpled unnaturally under the right one. The skin on one whole half of his face had been scraped away, leaving behind a raw, seeping wound.
His eyes fluttered open as soon as she touched his hand. “Agua, por favor,” he whispered weakly. “Agua.”
She helped him raise his head and then held the bottle of water to his parched lips. He gulped a long drink and then sank back gratefully. “Gracias,” he murmured.
“Don’t move,” she told him in her awkward textbook Spanish. “It’s your leg.”
He nodded and motioned her to move on. “The others,” he said. “Help the others.”
With a screech of its siren, yet another invisible ambulance arrived on the roadway above her. A new team of EMTs scrambled down the bank carrying a stretcher and cases of equipment. “Over here,” she shouted, waving at them. “This man needs help.”
As Joanna stood up to move out of their way, Deputy Debbie Howell, who had been the first Cochise County deputy on the scene, appeared at Joanna’s elbow. “How bad is it, Deb?” Joanna asked.
Deputy Howell’s face was grim. “Five dead so far. We’ve counted twenty-three injured and several of those are critical. The Air-Evac helicopter should be here soon. We’ve alerted hospitals in Douglas, Willcox, Bisbee, and Tucson.”
Joanna was dumbfounded. “You’re telling me there were twenty-eight people crammed in that SUV?”
Debbie nodded. “Twenty-nine, counting the driver.”
“Where is he?” Joanna demanded. “Dead, I hope?”
Debbie Howell shook her head. “No such luck. He’s evidently the only one who was wearing a seat belt. As far as we can tell, he isn’t here.”
“You mean he took off?” Joanna demanded.
“Exactly.”
“Call Dispatch,” Joanna ordered. “Tell them to get the K-9 unit out here on the double. That man’s a killer, and I want him found!”
“Right away, Sheriff Brady,” Deputy Howell answered. She turned and headed back toward the roadway.
“Wait a minute,” Joanna called after her. “Who’s in charge?”
Debbie nodded impatiently toward a group of uniformed officers who stood near the damaged Suburban. Joanna recognized one Department of Public Safety uniform and three from Border Patrol. “Beats me,” she said. “It looks like those guys got here first, but with any kind of luck, you’re the one in charge.”
Joanna hurried over to the officers, most of whom she knew personally. When she had first arrived on the scene, the other officers had been scattered among the victims, checking them out and, in some cases, administering whatever aid they could. Now, though, with the arrival of several more EMTs, the four uniformed men stood wrangling among themselves, arguing about how best to proceed with the investigation. Jurisdictional considerations aside, Sheriff Joanna Brady outranked them all, and the accident was on her turf.
“What’s going on, gentlemen?” she asked.
She was answered by Officer Bill O’Dea of the Arizona Department of Public S
afety. “Oh, hello, Sheriff Brady,” he said. “We’re discussing who pays.”
“Who pays?” Joanna repeated.
“For the medical care,” O’Dea answered. “For the dispatched ambulances, the air ambulance, everything. Ed Coffer here of the Border Patrol was first on the scene.”
Ed Coffer nodded in agreement but said nothing.
“UDAs are a Border Patrol problem,” O’Dea continued. “I talked to my captain on the radio. He says Border Patrol needs to step up and take responsibility for this situation.”
The momentary anger Joanna had felt toward the missing SUV driver now coalesced and focused in laserlike fashion on that invisible captain who, far removed from the bloodied and broken bodies, was interested only in protecting his department’s bottom line.
“This is everybody’s problem,” Joanna snapped. “People are hurt. How about if we take care of the victims first and worry about the medical bills afterward? Since the driver took off, I’ve got a K-9 unit on the way. Does anyone know which way he went?”
More than happy to let Joanna take charge, the other officers breathed a collective sigh of relief.
“Somebody said he took off in that direction,” O’Dea told her, pointing to the left of the roadway.
“I want that man caught,” Joanna declared. “Bill, how about driving up the road a mile or so to look for him. My guess is that sooner or later he’ll be back on the highway trying to hitch a ride.”
“Yes, ma’am,” O’Dea responded. “Will do.” He set off for his waiting patrol car at a fast trot.
Behind her, a woman screamed out in a torrent desperate Spanish. “¿Dónde está mi niño? Mi niño…mi niño…¿Dónde está mi niño?”
Joanna turned toward the EMT, who was fitting the woman with a back and neck brace. “Did she say something about a baby?”
The medic nodded grimly. “That’s right. She’s looking for her baby.”
Joanna turned at once to the three remaining Border Patrol officers. “Has anyone seen a baby around here?”
The three officers looked blankly from one to another, shrugging and shaking their heads. “Not so far,” Ed Coffer said.
“If she says there’s a baby, there’s a baby,” Joanna growled at them. “How about if you three go look for him?”
As the Border Patrol agents set off, Joanna once again scanned the scene in time to see the man with the broken leg and flayed face being strapped to a stretcher and then carried up the steep embankment. Then, for the first time, Joanna noticed a middle-aged Anglo woman in shorts and sandals sitting on a nearby rock. With her face buried in bloodied hands, she was sobbing uncontrollably.
Joanna hurried up to her. “Excuse me,” Joanna said. “Are you hurt?”
When the woman removed her hands, her face, too, was stained with blood, but it was the vacant expression in her eyes that provided an answer all its own.
“Who, me?” the woman replied dazedly. “No, I’m not hurt. I’m fine, but I’ve never seen someone die before. I was holding him—that man over there.” She pointed at the still and bloodied form of yet another man.
Little more than a boy, really, Joanna thought. A teenager.
“I asked him if he was okay.” Her body shook as though she had just emerged from a pool of icy water. “But just then he stopped breathing,” the woman continued. “I learned about giving mouth-to-mouth years ago. I tried to help him. I did my best, really I did, but there was so much blood coming out of his mouth…You’ve gotta believe me, I tried, but…but he died anyway. I’ve never felt so…useless.” She broke off into another fit of sobs.
Joanna crouched down next to the woman and put an arm around her shoulders. “You did what you could,” she said. “Nobody can fault you for that.”
The woman nodded vaguely, but she didn’t stop crying. Or shaking.
“Would you like a drink?” Joanna asked, offering her the water. While the woman stopped weeping long enough to gulp some water, Joanna realized that although this innocent passerby wasn’t physically injured, she, too, was wounded.
“You should probably use some of the water to wash off,” she suggested as the woman finished drinking.
The woman looked down in amazement at her bloodied clothing and hands. Using the remaining water, she began to sluice off. “Your face, too,” Joanna added.
As the woman doused herself with water, Joanna pulled the notebook and pencil out of her pocket. “You saw the accident?” she asked gently.
The woman shook her head. “No,” she said. “But I was right behind it, by only a minute or so. When I came around the curve and saw it, the dust was still flying. I couldn’t believe it. That idiot had passed me a mile or so back, out while we were still on the flat. I was doing seventy. He came tearing up behind me like I was standing still and almost ran me off the road. He must have been doing ninety when he went flying past. Then when he hit the first set of curves, I don’t think he even slowed down. At least I never saw any brake lights.”
Finished with the water, the woman looked questioningly at Joanna’s notebook. “Who are you?” she asked.
“Sorry I didn’t introduce myself,” Joanna said. “My name’s Brady. Sheriff Joanna Brady of Cochise County. When the call came in, I was at a rodeo waiting to see my daughter’s first barrel race. Who are you?”
“Suzanne Blake,” the woman answered.
“Are you from around here?”
Suzanne shook her head. “From Douglas originally, but I live in Las Cruces now,” she said. “My folks still live in Douglas. I come down once a month to check on them.”
“You’ll need to be interviewed,” Joanna told her. “So if you could give me your parents’ names and numbers…”
For the next several minutes Joanna gathered Suzanne Blake’s pertinent information, including the exact time of the accident and where and when she had been passed by the speeding Suburban. “If you want to continue on your way,” Joanna said as she returned her notebook to her pocket, “one of my investigators will be in touch with you tomorrow.”
“Fine,” Suzanne said. “And you’re right, I should go. I called my parents when I left Cruces. My father knows exactly how long it takes to drive from my house to his. He timed it with a stopwatch once. He’ll be worried sick.”
As a still shaken Suzanne Blake tottered off, Joanna glanced around at what were now several teams of EMTs from various jurisdictions who were busy carting loaded stretchers back up to the roadway. An Air-Evac helicopter, returning after its first run, hovered overhead, looking for a place to land and receive the next load of injured patients.
Joanna had no idea how much time had passed since her own arrival on the scene, but now the sun was definitely setting. It was still hot, but in the increasingly dark shadow of the mountains it was already noticeably cooler.
The K-9 unit arrived and sought Joanna out. “We’re here, Sheriff Brady,” Terry Gregovich announced. “Now what can Spike and I do to help?”
“Find the asshole driver who caused this mess,” Joanna ordered. “According to witnesses, he was wearing a seat belt, so he wasn’t ejected along with everyone else. I’m told he took off into the desert, and I want him found.”
Nodding, Terry headed for the wrecked Suburban with Spike. Not wanting to interfere with their work, Joanna let them go. Instead, she walked to the far end of the debris field, hoping that, by looking at the trajectory the vehicle had followed through the Jersey barriers, she would gain a better understanding of exactly how and why the accident had occurred.
As she turned around to examine the scene, her eye was drawn to a splotch of white barely visible beneath a nearby mesquite tree. She hurried over and was appalled to see a child lying there—the wounded woman’s missing baby. Pushing her way through the mesquite, Joanna saw that the toddler wore a diaper and nothing else. One look at the unnaturally still body and at the blood pooled around the back of his dark-haired head was enough to tell Joanna that he was probably beyond help. Droppi
ng to her knees, she felt for a pulse, but there was nothing—not even the smallest flutter.
For a few moments, Joanna wavered in a maelstrom of indecision. The boy was dead. In terms of crime scene investigation procedure, dead victims are to be left where they’re found until the scene can be properly documented—measured, photographed, and recorded—before being packed off to the icy chill of a morgue.
But the desperate cries of the injured woman as she had called for her missing child still echoed in Joanna’s heart. Dead or alive, that mother wanted her child—needed her child—to be with her. As a police officer, Joanna was obliged to leave the dead baby where he was. As a woman and mother, she wanted to return him to his mother. A fierce skirmish shook Joanna’s very soul. In the end, motherhood won out.
Gently, Joanna lifted the limp child. With one arm supporting the boy’s bloodied head, she carried his still body through the rocky underbrush and stumbled with him up the steep embankment.
“Where’s the woman with the baby?” she demanded of the first EMT she saw. He gave her a blank shrug and a dismissive look that made Joanna wish she were still wearing her uniform. And her badge. She went on to the next EMT and to the next and to the one after that. Finally she found a medic she had never seen before but who at least knew what she meant.
“Oh, her,” the medic said. “I think she took off in that last helicopter. They’re taking her to Bisbee.”
“Call them back,” Joanna said.
“But, lady…”
“My name’s Brady,” Joanna snarled back at him. “Sheriff Joanna Brady, and I said call them back! Do it now!”
The EMT backed warily away from her and reached for his radio. After his summons, the helicopter was back within minutes. By then Joanna’s shoulders ached from the strain of holding the lifeless form, but she was unwilling to relinquish her burden to anyone else. When the door of the helicopter flew open, she alone carried the little boy through the sand and grit raised by the whirling blades. With muddied tears streaming down her own face, she handed her precious burden over to his mother’s outstretched arms and then fled from the helicopter. She didn’t want to be within earshot when the mother learned her baby was dead.