by J. A. Jance
”This was clearly a woman who felt violated and betrayed by the very people who should have protected her,” says August Benson, professor of criminal psychology at the University of Colorado. “When the people who should have offered protection failed her, Anne Rowland Corley took matters into her own hands.”
Joanna paused in her reading and glanced at the accompanying photo and the sidebar. The Anne Rowland Corley pictured in a posed black-and-white portrait was a lovely young woman with long dark hair and a reserved smile.
No wonder cops talked to her, Joanna thought. And no wonder J.P. Beaumont fell so hard.
Joanna was about to return to her reading when the phone rang. “Sheriff Brady?” Tica Romero, the day-shift dispatcher, asked.
“Yes. What’s up?”
“We’ve got a situation unfolding just west of Miracle Valley, out by Palominas. An unidentified intruder walked up to what he thought was an unoccupied house. He broke in and stole some food from the kitchen of Paul and Billyann Lozier’s place on River Trail Road. Then he went out to a corral, saddled up one of their horses, and took off. Billyann’s mother, Alma Wingate, was in an upstairs bedroom and saw the whole thing. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a phone with her at the time and couldn’t call 911 until after he left.”
“Undocumented alien?” Joanna asked.
“I don’t think so,” Tica replied. “For one thing, the guy on the horse seemed to be headed south, not north. For another, from the description Mrs. Wingate gave me, the suspect might very well be the guy on our APB. She said he was tall and skinny, with a single gray braid hanging down the middle of his back.”
“You’re right,” Joanna breathed. “Sounds like Jack Brampton.”
“I’ve got units on their way,” Tica continued, “but they’re clear over by Benson. It’ll take time for them to reach the scene. The problem is, the border fence is only four miles away, and it looks like that’s where the perp is headed. As of now, he’s got a ten-minute head start.”
Joanna Brady was already on her feet. “Give me the address,” she urged. “We’ll get on this right away. I’m a lot closer than Benson. I’ll take a couple of cars and a squad of officers along with me. Thanks for letting me know, Tica. And how about calling out Terry Gregovich and Spike? If we lose him, Spike may be able to track him down.”
“Will do,” Tica said.
Pulling on her Kevlar vest, Joanna raced to the conference room. “Okay, guys,” she announced. “On the double. Somebody who looks like Jack Brampton just stole a horse from a corral between Palominas and Miracle Valley. According to an eyewitness, the guy who did it is headed for the Mexican border. Let’s get rolling.”
I CAME DRAGGING IN LATE, feeling like hell and ashamed to think that I had overslept – again. By the time I showed up, I had already missed the morning briefing. Frank Montoya introduced me to a guy named Ernie Carpenter, Detective Carbajal’s homicide counterpart, who had evidently just finished interviewing the two little boys who had found Dee Canfield’s body.
Ernie Carpenter was around my age, which made him by far the oldest officer I had met in the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department. He was a big bear of a man with a pair of bushy eyebrows and a knuckle-crushing handshake. In other words, Ernie was my kind of guy. After introductions were out of the way, Frank Montoya passed both Ernie and me two tall stacks of computer-generated printouts.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Background on your friends at UPPI,” Frank told me. “I downloaded it from the Internet and thought you might find it interesting. They’re even more litigious than I thought they were when we found out about that law firm in Illinois yesterday.”
As I settled in to read, I realized this was information I should and could have had from the beginning. If Ross Connors had wanted to keep a lid on things, he couldn’t have chosen better when he entrusted the problem to Harry I. Ball and me. Of the two of us, I’d be hard-pressed to decide which one was less likely to go surfing the Internet.
But, as Frank Montoya said, the material was interesting. UPPI had ventured into prison construction and management when the field was booming, but whoever drew up their business plan had failed to predict the sudden drop in crime at the end of the nineties that would leave them holding thousands of unoccupied and shoddily built prison beds.
To make up for their own bad planning, they had tried to staunch the flow of red ink by filing breach-of-contract suits in twelve different states, all of them still pending. Although one article hinted that at least one UPPI executive was suspected of having links to organized crime, no firm connections had ever been established.
Lost in the material, I paid no attention as people came and went from the conference room. Ernie Carpenter and I were the only ones left when Joanna Brady burst in a while later to tell us that something was going down at a place called Palominas. When she first mentioned a stolen horse, I thought she was joking. But as soon as she said the suspected horse thief was most likely Jack Brampton, Ernie and I dropped what we were doing and headed for the door.
I was two steps down the hallway when she stopped me. “Wait a minute, Beau,” she said. “Where’s your vest?”
“Not on me.”
“You’d better go see Frank Montoya then,” she said. “You’re sure as hell not riding along without one.”
“But…” I began.
“No buts,” she said. “My way or the highway.”
With that, she turned and sprinted away, leaving me with a whole mouthful of unspoken arguments still superglued to my tongue.
Nineteen
BY THE TIME JOANNA NEARED PALOMINAS, she had learned from Dispatch that the backup cars Tica had called for, although en route, were still ten and twelve miles away, respectively. The assets she had brought with her from the Justice Center – the two cars driven by Detective Ernie Carpenter and Chief Deputy Frank Montoya – were the only immediate help she would have at her disposal. She had expected someone else to show up as well.
“What happened to Beaumont?” she demanded into her radio. “He was supposed to come with Frank.”
“By the time Frank was ready to leave, Mr. Beaumont was nowhere to be found,” dispatcher Tica Romero told her.
Just as well, Joanna thought. “What about Deputy Gregovich?” she asked. “Is he on his way?”
“I still haven’t been able to locate him,” Tica said.
“Keep trying.”
Joanna swung the Blazer off Highway 92 and onto the short stretch of paved street that ran through Palominas. Overall, the tiny community ran along the highway and was far longer than it was wide. At River Trail Road, where she had turned off, the town was barely two lots deep. The pavement ended just beyond the second house. Now she sped down the dirt road that ran alongside the eastern bank of the north-flowing San Pedro River. The turnoff to Paul and Billyann Lozier’s place was half a mile south of town.
With Joanna leading the way, the three patrol cars pulled into the Loziers’s yard, spewing dust behind them. Eighty-two-year-old Alma Wingate met them on the front porch. She was a frail-looking woman, thin beyond belief, and leaning heavily on a cane, but her blue eyes sparkled with determination.
“Thank God I had my cataract surgery,” she exclaimed as Joanna sprinted onto the porch. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to see a thing. When he broke in, I hid in a closet and didn’t come out until I heard the screen door slam shut. I went to the window and saw him grab Princess – that’s Billyann’s horse, and she loves that animal to pieces – then I knew I had to do something.”
The frightened woman’s words poured out in a torrent. “Please, Mrs. Wingate,” Joanna interrupted. “Slow down. Which way did he go?”
Alma pointed a shaky finger. “That way,” she said. “Toward the river.”
Joanna nodded wordlessly at Frank, who sprinted off in the direction of the river, following a trail of fresh hoofprints.
“Do you know if he was armed?” Joanna asked.
Alma nodded. “Must be,” she said. “I just checked. The door to my son-in-law’s gun cabinet is smashed to smithereens. I don’t know what all’s missing. You’ll have to ask him.”
“Look,” Joanna advised. “You should probably go back inside the house and stay there. Backup officers are on the way, but in the meantime, you need to be safe.”
“You think he’s dangerous then?” Alma demanded. “I thought he was just a dirty low-down horse thief.”
“I’m afraid this guy’s far worse than just a horse thief, Mrs. Wingate,” Joanna said as Frank came racing back toward the house. “Much, much worse.”
By the time Joanna had guided Alma Wingate safely into the house, Frank was leaning against his Civvie, gasping for breath. Ernie had disappeared.
“He went down into the riverbed and turned south,” Frank reported. “It’s a good thing we didn’t come with sirens blaring. It looks like he’s walking the horse rather than running her.”
“Where’s Ernie?”
“He’s going to move south, sticking to the riverbed to make sure he doesn’t turn out somewhere between here and the border. I’ve put in a call to the federales across the line in Old Mexico. They’re sending a squad of agents over from Naco. They should be here within fifteen minutes. I told them someone would meet them where the river crosses the border.”
Knowing her own lack of proficiency in Spanish, Joanna had no doubt about who should be at the border to meet the federales.
“Do it, Frank,” she said. “I’ll drive along the riverbank and see if I can spot him somewhere between here and there.”
Frank nodded. “Be careful,” he warned. “There’s lots of thick cover in there, places where he could hide and see you without being seen.”
“You be careful, too,” she told him.
Moments later, with tires spinning in the dirt, both cars swung out of the yard and headed south. A quarter of a mile down the road, Joanna stopped and got out. Crouching behind the trunk of a cottonwood tree, she used a pair of binoculars to peer up and down the river. Even though there was no movement in the dry bed of the river, she could make out the pattern of blurred hoofprints that said a horse had recently passed that way.
Parallel to her and across the river, a cloud of fast-moving dust rose skyward. She didn’t remember there being another road over there, but obviously one existed nonetheless.
Whoever you are, she told the faceless driver in that invisible vehicle, just stay the hell out of our way.
With that, she jumped back in the Blazer and headed south again. As she drove she was glad she’d had the good sense to use lights only; no sirens. Out here in the silent desert, Jack Brampton would have heard those sirens from far away and would have known they were coming. This way, there was still a chance of surprising him.
Joanna stopped for a second time and got out, crouching in the dead grass, keeping under cover. And that’s when she heard the sound of sirens, wafting up from the south. The federales were coming, all right, with their sirens blaring to kingdom come!
“Damn,” she muttered. “Damn! Damn! Damn!”
GRUMBLING UNDER MY BREATH, I went looking for Frank Montoya. It turns out he did have a vest, but it wasn’t my size. He said he thought there were larger ones back in the supply room, but since he was on his way to Palominas, I’d have to have one of the clerks in the lobby get it for me. By the time I had the blasted thing in my hand and made it out to the parking lot, everyone else, including Chief Deputy Montoya, was long gone. So much for hot pursuit!
“Damn!” I hurried back into the lobby. “Where’s Palominas?” I demanded.
“West of town, on Highway 92,” the clerk told me. “It’s beyond Huachuca Terraces. Do you know how to get there?”
I’m a native of Seattle. There, geography poses no problem. I know the streets and my way around them. In Bisbee I was totally useless, but the name Huachuca Terraces sounded vaguely familiar. I was pretty sure that’s where Dee Canfield’s house was located.
“Thanks,” I told her. “I think I can find it.”
Racing back out to the parking lot, I jumped into the Kia and wound it up as fast as it would go. If somebody gave me a speeding ticket, it was just too damned bad, although the idea of getting a speeding ticket in a Kia might have been worth it. Then again, out here in the world of the Wild West, where crooks used stolen horses instead of getaway cars, maybe state patrollers just shot speeders instead of handing out tickets.
Retracing the route Joanna Brady had driven the day before, I was relieved when I finally saw a sign that read: palominas, 10 miles. I knew then that I was on the right track. And with the Kia running on the flat and wound up to a full eighty-five miles per hour, I knew that meant I was six minutes out.
Driving through the desert, I looked ahead. In the distance I saw a long meandering line of greenish-yellow autumn-tinged trees stretching south to north. Near that line of trees I saw what appeared to be a cluster of buildings. That must be the town of Palominas, whatever that means.
Isn’t that some kind of horse? I wondered.
Crossing a railroad overpass, I caught my first glimpse of flashing red lights as the fast-moving police cars ahead of me swept into that tiny community. I was thrilled to think that I was actually closing the distance between me and them. They had all left the Justice Center a couple of long minutes before I did. Maybe my Kia wasn’t so terribly lame after all.
Soon I was near enough to tell that the rearmost vehicle was signaling for a left-hand turn. About that time, however, I met a pair of oncoming dodoes who never should have been issued driver’s licenses. As soon as one guy pulled out to pass, the other one sped up, thus making the passing process take far longer than it should have. As they rushed toward me side by side in both lanes, I started looking for somewhere to hit the ditch and dodge out of the way. Finally, at the last moment, the passing car gave up and pulled back into the right-hand lane. By the time I looked again, the police cars had disappeared.
As I entered town, I slowed down. When I reached what I assumed to be the correct intersection, I turned left. After a hundred yards or so, the pavement ended and I bounced down a narrow, rutted cow path without another vehicle in sight. I stopped finally, rolled down the window, and listened. I was hoping for sirens. I saw clouds of dirt billowing skyward east of me, but I heard nothing, at least not at first. But then, very, very faintly, I did hear a siren. Not the standard kind of siren we use here in the States. No, this one had a decidedly foreign flavor to it.
I was watching the clouds of dust off to my left and listening to the siren when it finally hit me. I had made a mistake and overshot the turn. The action was there, all right – to the south and east of where I was.
I pulled ahead, looking for a place to turn around so I could go back the way I had come, but then I stumbled on another dirt road. This one, little more than a two-wheel track, was even narrower than the one I was already on, but at least it wandered off toward the southeast, the same general direction I wanted to go. So I went that way as well.
The Kia and I were tooling along just fine until we came up over a ridge and dropped down toward that line of trees I had seen earlier. I knew now for sure that the trees marked a riverbed. In fact, I remembered flying across a bridge back on the highway immediately after I had been looking for a place to ditch. There had been a sign attached to the bridge announcing the name of the river that ran under it, but I didn’t remember the name, and I hadn’t spotted any water, either.
Where I come from, rivers usually contain water. Actually, in the Pacific Northwest, it’s a rule.
Whatever the unknown river’s name might be, water wasn’t required. What it lacked in moisture, however, it made up in sand – loads of it. Ahead of me, the bone-dry riverbed was a good fifty yards wide. On the far side of that long expanse of sand I spotted another narrow set of tire tracks. It seemed reasonable to assume that those tracks might be a continuation of the road I was on.
I paused long enough to consider my options. Going back and taking the other road would use up the better part of half an hour. By then, whatever action there was across the river would be over and done with. If I could cross the sand, though, I might be able to catch up with Joanna and the others before I missed out; before they had Jack Brampton handcuffed and thrown in the back of a patrol car.
Naturally, my low-priced rental Kia wasn’t equipped with four-wheel drive. Even so, I thought that if I built up a good-enough head of steam before I hit the sand, maybe momentum would carry me across.
That was the plan, anyway, and that’s exactly what I did. I shoved the gas pedal all the way to the floor and charged into the riverbed. I was doing fine. In fact, I probably would have made it to the far side without a hitch, except for one thing. All of a sudden, right in the dead center of the sand trap, a horse and rider appeared out of nowhere. They came galloping down the riverbed straight at me.
When I finally realized that the crazy bastard on the horse was headed right for me, I took my foot off the gas and slammed on the brakes. The Kia stopped dead. At the same time, something smashed into and through the windshield. It smacked into the shoulder rest of the passenger seat only a foot or so from where I was sitting. Simultaneously, a spiderweb of tiny cracks spread across the windshield’s safety glass.
By then I had seen the gun and understood that the son of a bitch on the horse was shooting at me – shooting to kill! Covering my head, I dived for cover and put the Kia’s engine block between me and any more flying bullets. Even muffled by sand, I could hear the thud of the horse’s hooves as it pounded by. I waited until I couldn’t hear it anymore. Only then, with my small backup Glock in my hand, I cautiously raised my head and peered out.
Off to the south, the riverbed curved slowly to the left. Horse and rider were fast disappearing around that bend. By then, they were already far beyond the range of my wimpy backup handgun. Shaking my head in disgust, I climbed out of the car. I plowed through deep sand in my once pristine Johnston and Murphys and surveyed the damage. The windshield was a goner. Both axles were buried up to the hubs. It would take time and a well-equipped tow truck to dig me out.