Devil's ClawJ

by J. A. Jance

  “Since before she went to prison?”

  “That’s right,” Joanna told him. “We found an empty container, but there was no sign of what had been in it.”

  Pete shook his head. “Most likely not a missing ring,” he said. “The whole thing gives me the willies.” He shivered. “I guess I’m lucky she didn’t accept my offer of help. No telling what might have happened then. When you hang around campgrounds like this, you meet up with a lot of really nice people. It lulls you into believing that everyone’s pretty much the same. Know what I mean?”

  Joanna nodded.

  “I guess I’ll be more careful after this,” he added with a rueful grin. “Being a good Samaritan is supposed to be a good thing. On the other hand, being a dead good Samaritan is downright stupid.”

  “After you left the woman by the sign and came on up to the campground, did you hear anything?”

  “You mean like a gunshot?” Pete Naujokas asked. “No, I didn’t. I’ve asked around. As far as I can tell, nobody else did, either.”

  Frank and Joanna left a few minutes later. After a brief stop to check in with Jaime Carbajal, they continued back to Joanna’s Blazer.

  “That is weird,” Frank mused along the way.

  “What is?”

  “If Sandra’s mother lived just a few miles away, why not hide whatever it was on her mother’s property instead of someplace as public as the entrance to a national monument?”

  “Because she didn’t want whatever it was she was hiding to be connected to her mother or to her,” Joanna said. “A weapon, maybe. What about the gun that was used to kill Tom Ridder? Was that ever recovered?”

  “I don’t know,” Frank replied. “I can probably find out tomorrow. It would have to be damned small to fit inside that bowl.”

  “So we’re looking for something that’s small and valuable,” Joanna added. “What about you, Frank? Supposing your house was on fire or about to be washed away in a flood, and all you could rescue was whatever would fit in a bowl that size. Given that set of circumstances, what would you have put in there?”

  “My grandfather’s Purple Heart,” Frank replied with hardly a moment’s hesitation. “My birth certificate, a couple of photos, and my wallet. That way I’d have some ID and my credit cards when it came time to start over. What about you?”

  Joanna nodded. “I’d probably do pretty much the same thing, only instead of a Purple Heart, I’d save my father’s sheriff’s badge.” As a teenager, Joanna had been given D. H. Lathrop’s sheriff’s badge after her father’s funeral. It had been one of her most treasured mementos before she was elected sheriff. Now it was even more so.

  By then Frank had stopped the Crown Victoria next to Joanna’s Blazer. “See you Monday,” he said as Joanna climbed out of the Civvie. “If not sooner.”

  “Let’s hope not sooner,” she returned. “I’d like to have one whole day to myself this weekend.”

  Driving back across the Sulphur Springs Valley toward home, Joanna kept mulling the same question. What would have been in a bowl that small? And why Tupperware? The one thing Joanna remembered from her abortive and relatively unhappy career as a Tupperware representative was that those sturdy plastic containers—especially the round ones—were supposed to be both air- and watertight. Driving through the night, Joanna smiled at a recollection of Andy teasing her back then, telling her that if nuclear warfare ever broke out, that, after hundreds of years, the only artifacts left to testify to human existence in the late twentieth century would be warehouses chock-full of still usable Tupperware and still edible Twinkies.

  Part of what had made selling Tupperware difficult for Joanna had to do with the fact that many people in town were broke. Once the mines closed, most of Bisbee’s economic base disappeared. For a long time the expected boom in out-of-state visitors had simply bypassed the little town. In those cash-strapped days, Tupperware had been hard to come by. You had to be invited to a party, go and play dumb games, and then fork over hard-earned cash in order to cart home a set of four of those stupid bowls. And, for Joanna, that had been the real difficulty in selling the stuff—she didn’t actually believe in it. Her mother did. Eleanor claimed to adore the stuff. Joanna remained firmly in the camp of margarine containers.

  Joanna couldn’t remember her mother ever storing a dishful of leftovers without first using the distinctive little tab to raise the lid and let out excess air. And in Eleanor’s fastidiously run household, no Tupperware-stored leftovers were ever allowed to spoil or go to waste.

  The same thing couldn’t be said of Joanna Brady’s more casually managed existence. Containers of food were sometimes inadvertently shoved to the back of a lower shelf in her refrigerator where the contents might well mutate into a new life form before finally being rediscovered. With margarine tubs or cottage-cheese or sour-cream containers, there was never any question of what to do then—throw them out, leftovers and all. But Tupperware was different and came with an entirely different set of rules. No matter how disgusting what had been left to molder inside, those had to be cleaned out and rehabilitated with bleach, detergent, and elbow grease. To do anything less seemed un-American somehow.

  Taking Joanna’s own deep-seated prejudices and experience into account, that meant Sandra Ridder hadn’t intended to lose her Tupperware bowl—ever. Not the first time when she hid it, and not the second time when she had gone back to retrieve it. And whatever she had stowed in the bowl all those years earlier, she had meant it to be protected from the elements.

  By the time Joanna neared High Lonesome Ranch, she had left off worrying about Sandra Ridder’s Tupperware and was dealing with concerns much closer to home. She wondered what had happened that evening in her absence. It was one thing to be a hands-on sheriff, but how about being a hands-on mother? What had her presence contributed to the investigation into Sandra Ridder’s death, and how much had she missed by being away from the High Lonesome and Jenny and Butch? The fact that she wasn’t alone—the fact that Joanna Brady was dealing with the daily ball-juggling contest of every other working mother in America—didn’t make her feel any better about it.

  Halfway up the winding road that led to the house, Joanna had to slow to negotiate the wash. A tow truck had removed Reba Singleton’s stranded limo, but in the process the well-worn track across the dry creek bed had been obliterated. Boulders that hadn’t been there before had been churned to the surface, while wheel-swallowing pits had been left behind in the sand. Using the Blazer’s four-wheel drive to negotiate this new obstacle path was the only thing that kept Joanna herself from becoming stuck in her own driveway. As a result, Joanna wasn’t thinking fond thoughts about tow-truck drivers, limo drivers, or Reba Rhodes Singleton by the time she finally pulled into her own yard.

  She was relieved to see Butch’s Subaru was still parked near the gate. Knowing Jenny had been looked after in the meantime was the only thing that made being gone so long possible or bearable.

  The lights were on in the living room as she parked the Blazer, but as soon as she opened the car door, the back porch light came on and Sadie and Tigger came tumbling out of the house. Behind the two dogs walked Butch, in stocking feet, gingerly picking his way across the yard.

  “You shouldn’t be out here without shoes,” she scolded. “Don’t you know there are sandburs in the yard?”

  “I do now,” he said, hopping gingerly on one foot. “How are things?”

  “It’s late, and I’m tired,” she told him. “How are things with you?”

  Butch wrapped one arm around her shoulders and gently pulled her against his chest. “We had some company,” he said, leading her toward the house.

  “Not your parents!” Joanna exclaimed. “Don’t tell me they turned up early.”

  “Not my parents.”

  “Who then?”

  Butch waited until they were all the way inside the house before he answered. “Dick Voland,” he said.

  Joanna blinked. Dick Voland had been a l
ong-term deputy with the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department. He had served as chief deputy in the administration of Joanna’s predecessor, Walter V. McFadden, and had continued in that capacity, sharing responsibility with Frank Montoya, once Joanna was elected. She had been able to deal with the man in the beginning, when he was simply gruff and overbearing. The situation had become much more complicated when Joanna discovered that he had developed a serious middle-aged crush on her. Voland had mostly pined in silence, but Joanna’s betrothal to Butch had pushed him over the edge. The morning after her engagement was made public, Voland had turned up on High Lonesome Ranch, drunk and belligerent. He had handed in his resignation on the spot. Under the circumstances, Joanna had been only too happy to accept it.

  Since then, Joanna had seen little of the man. She had heard that he was in the process of hanging out his shingle as a private investigator. She had also heard that he and Marliss Shackleford were now an item. Marliss, a columnist for a local rag called The Bisbee Bee, wasn’t one of Joanna’s favorite people either. When she heard Marliss and Dick were dating, Joanna figured that the two of them deserved each other.

  “Dick wasn’t drunk, was he?” Joanna asked carefully.

  At six-four, Voland was a massive bear of a man who outweighed Butch by a good fifty pounds. “Not that I could tell.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He didn’t say. I offered to take a message, but he said he needed to talk to you. He wanted you to call as soon as you got home tonight. I left the number there on the table.”

  Joanna felt a sudden fury wash through her. “I know his number,” she stormed. “And if it was that damned important, he could have called me on my cell phone. He knows my numbers, too. I sure as hell haven’t changed them! He just wanted to come by, hassle me, and nose around in my business.”

  “Come on, Joey,” Butch said, using the private nickname he had bestowed on her. “Don’t be upset. He didn’t cause any trouble, and he didn’t say anything out of line.”

  “He should have told you what he wanted,” Joanna insisted. “That was rude, treating you as if you’re incapable of passing along a simple message.”

  Butch laughed aloud at that. “You don’t understand very much about men, do you?”

  Joanna frowned. “What’s so funny? And what do you mean by that?”

  “I mean Dick Voland and I were in a contest, and I won. Dick’s the big loser here. I’ve got you, and he doesn’t. Believe me, Dick Voland isn’t ever going to sit down and have a long, heart-to-heart discussion with me. He hates my guts, and he’s going to do his best to pretend I don’t exist.”

  “What about you?” Joanna asked.

  “I feel sorry for him, but not that sorry.”

  “Regardless,” Joanna said. “It’s late, and I’m not calling him back tonight. Whatever the big secret is, it’s going to have to wait until morning.”

  “Good enough,” Butch said. “Now, did you have any dinner?”

  “No,” Joanna answered, noticing for the first time that she was hungry.

  “After that big, late lunch, all Jenny and I had were a couple of scrambled eggs and toast. Would you like me to make you some?”

  “Please.”

  While Butch scrambled eggs, Joanna undressed and locked her weapons away. Then, wearing her nightgown and robe, she returned to the kitchen to make toast and pour a glass of milk while she told Butch about the situation with Catherine Yates, her dead daughter, Sandra, and her missing granddaughter, Lucy.

  “Not a very happy story,” Joanna concluded. “Here I should have been spending the weekend enjoying Jenny’s birthday celebration with you and getting ready for our wedding. Instead, I’m busy worrying about who’s killing whom and why.”

  “Which reminds me,” Butch said, getting up to clear the table. “George called, too. Just a little while ago. He said it was something to do with Clayton Rhodes, but he also said that he and your mother were going to bed as soon as the news was over. He said he’d talk to you about it in the morning.”

  Joanna looked down at her watch. By then it was close to midnight. “It’s almost morning right now,” she observed. “If we’re going to church tomorrow, we’d better get to bed.”

  “You go on, if you want to,” Butch said. “I’ll clean up the kitchen and then shove off for home.”

  “You mean you’re not staying?”

  “Waking up naked this morning with Jenny right there in the room made a believer of me,” Butch said with a rueful smile. “No more sleep-overs for us until after the wedding. I don’t want people to talk any more than they already do. But don’t worry. I’ll come out first thing in the morning and help with the animals.”

  “It’s all right. Jenny and I can feed the animals.”

  “Well, I’ll come fix you breakfast, then. We have to build up our strength so we’ll be ready to clean that oven tomorrow afternoon.”

  Joanna laughed aloud at that. She came across the kitchen and hugged him close. “I love you, Butch Dixon,” she said. “Thank you for caring about what Jenny thinks and about what people say.”

  Firmly Butch moved her away from him, leaving her standing in the middle of the room and safely out of arm’s reach. “And I love you, but no more thanks like that,” he said. “If you’re not careful, I’ll end up changing my mind and I’ll stay over after all.”

  It was late in the afternoon before Lucy once more ventured out of her hiding place among the gigantic boulders scattered across the Texas Canyon landscape. Emotionally and physically exhausted, she had slept most of the day. Now chilly, lonely, and longing for the comfort of a soda or candy bar from a vending machine, she approached the fenced freeway rest area.

  There were half a dozen eighteen-wheelers parked in the designated truck parking area, but there was only one car—an SUV—parked near the entrance to the rest rooms and the vending machines. There was a man standing leaning against it, talking on a cell phone. When Lucy was close enough to distinguish his features, she gave a gasp of dismay. It was the same man she had seen the night before—the man who had shot her mother.

  Panicked and sobbing, Lucy fled back into the desert. How did he find me? she wondered. How did he know I was here?

  CHAPTER 9

  Sheltered by a wall of Texas Canyon house-sized boulders and huddled in her sleeping bag, Lucy tried to sleep. It was far colder than she had thought it would be, but she didn’t dare start a fire. She was too close to the rest area. Someone might notice and come looking. The rocks in the ground beneath her—sharp-edged rocks that had seemed insignificant when she was choosing a place to put her bedroll—now cut into her back and legs.

  Lucy was still shaken by what had happened earlier. She had gone down to the rest area to use the phone again, and her mother’s killer was still there—waiting. Stunned, she had melted back into the desert before he or any of the half dozen truckers stopped there noticed her. The rest of the afternoon and evening and far into the night she had struggled to find answers. He must have known she was there, but how? What he wanted she didn’t need to ask. He was looking for her—for Lucy—and for his computer disk. Once he found them, there was no doubt in Lucy’s mind about what he would do—take the diskette and kill her, the same way he had killed Lucy’s mother.

  At last, as the sky gradually grew lighter in the east, Lucy slept. She was still sleeping hours later, when Big Red’s warning screech issued an alarm. He had made that peculiar noise other times when they had been together on their solitary Cochise Stronghold adventures. And always that particular sound meant the same thing—a warning that someone was coming.

  Panicked into full wakefulness, Lucy scrambled out of the bedroll. Standing shaking in the full morning sun, she looked skyward. Outlined against the blue sky, Big Red flew in frantic circles, pinpointing the position of something or someone who was coming toward Lucy’s camping place from the south, from the direction of the rest area.

  In a futile effort to keep warm overnig
ht, Lucy had stayed dressed. Not only was she still wearing her jacket, she was also wearing her sneakers. Now she was glad she was. Grabbing only her backpack, she fled uphill and away from whoever it was who was coming—as if she didn’t know.

  In Cochise Stronghold, she had often tried to teach herself the things her ancestor, the Apache chief, Eskiminzin, must always have known. With careful practice she had taught herself to run long distances over rough terrain, leaving behind little or no trail. She did this now. Leaping from rock to rock, she sprinted for nearly a mile, leaving no discernible footprints to mark her passage. At last, gasping for breath, she squirreled herself into a cleft between two huge boulders, and there she stayed—listening, waiting, and wondering how long it would be before he somehow tracked her there as well.

  Joanna Brady awakened Sunday morning as Jenny eased herself onto the side of the bed. “Where’s Butch?” Jenny asked.