by J. A. Jance
“Lucky,” Joanna echoed. “Why, Frank, I didn’t know you were even dating.”
“Not that kind of lucky,” he replied wryly. “I got to the Board of Supervisors meeting and found out it was canceled. They had their annual retreat over the weekend at a guest ranch up in the Chiricahuas. This morning the whole bunch of ‘em is sicker ‘n dogs.”
“What was it?” Joanna asked. “Food poisoning?”
“I guess. That’s what it sounds like. So since I happen to have all this unscheduled free time on my hands this afternoon, I was wondering if there was anything in particular you needed me to do.”
“As a matter of fact, there is,” Joanna said. “Hold on a minute. Let me give you a phone number.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out the notebook in which she had jotted Jay Quick’s number. Once she found it, she read it off to Frank.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“It’s a telephone number Lucy Ridder called Saturday morning at three a.m. The man’s name is Jay Quick. Years ago, Mr. Quick’s mother, Evelyn, was Lucy Ridder’s ballet teacher at the Lohse Family YMCA in Tucson. Not knowing that Evelyn Quick died some time back, Lucy called the son’s house trying to reach her.”
“That’s a relief then,” Frank breathed. “We may not know where Lucy Ridder is, but at least she’s still alive.”
“She was early Saturday morning,” Joanna returned. “Naturally she didn’t leave a number where she could be reached, but Mr. Quick told me he heard what sounded like eighteen-wheelers rumbling in the background. He thought maybe she was calling from a truck stop.”
“Want me to find out where the call came from?” Frank asked.
Joanna laughed. “How did you guess? Out of my whole department, you’re the best-suited to ferreting information out of faceless corporate entities and balky bureaucrats. Go get ‘em, Frank.”
“Was that a compliment or not?” he demanded.
“That’s how it was intended.”
“All right, then. Let me off the phone so I can see if I can live up to it.”
Once Frank hung up, Joanna radioed into the department and asked to be patched through to either Ernie Carpenter or Jaime Carbajal. Since Jaime Carbajal was planning to go to Tucson that afternoon, she hoped he could also stop by and see Jay Quick.
“Where are you?” she asked, when the detective’s voice came over the speaker.
“Between Elfrida and Douglas. We’re on our way to a place east of Douglas, where a border-patrol officer reported spotting an abandoned white Lexus parked along the border fence.”
“Melanie Goodson’s missing Lexus?”
“According to license information, it’s the very one. The officer saw what he believes to be bloodstains in the backseat. I’ve called up and canceled my appointment with Melanie Goodson. Ernie and I talked it over and decided that right this minute it’s more important for us to check out the vehicle than it is to go running up to Tucson to interview secondary witnesses.”
“That’s probably a good call,” Joanna agreed. “Are you going to try to change the appointment to later this afternoon?”
“No. Tomorrow should be plenty of time. Once we finish with the Lexus, Ernie and I will have to hotfoot it back to Bisbee. Doc Winfield is chomping at the bit to tackle the Sandra Ridder autopsy, and one or both of us should be on hand when he does it.”
By that point in the conversation Joanna had driven as far as the traffic circle. At the intersection where she should have turned right to head back to the department, she made a last-minute decision. Since there was no chance Jaime Carbajal was going to go see Jay Quick that afternoon, Joanna decided to copy the Little Red Hen and do so herself. Instead of turning right, she went straight ahead.
“I’m on my way to Tucson right now,” she said. “At three o’clock on Saturday morning, Lucy Ridder attempted to place a phone call to her old ballet instructor up in Tucson.”
“She called somebody?” Jaime demanded. “Where is she, then? Is she all right?”
“I don’t know the answers to any of those questions at the moment,” Joanna told him. “I’m on my way to talk to the instructor’s son and see if I can learn anything more.”
“With this kind of a new lead, do you want either Ernie or me to skip the Lexus and follow up on the Tucson deal instead?” Jaime asked.
“No, that’s all right. I’m fine this way. Now tell me, did you and Ernie learn anything useful out in Elfrida today?”
“Not a whole lot other than the fact that Lucy Ridder wasn’t the most popular girl in town,” Jaime said. “I’d say she’s probably right at the bottom of the heap in Elfrida High School’s social pecking order. We didn’t find a single person who would admit to being her friend.”
“Sounds to me like we’re dealing with the classic teenaged loner,” Joanna observed, thinking of the disaffected youths who had, in recent years, wreaked schoolyard havoc with guns and/or explosives.
“And we’re not the only ones worried about it, either,” Jaime added. “We went out to the ranch and talked to Catherine Yates before we went to the school. She told us that, as far as she knew, Lucy’s only friend was the damned hawk. Then, while we were at the school, the principal’s secretary brought us a message that we should talk with a guy named Wayne Hooper.”
“Who’s he?”
“His wife, Agnes, drives Lucy’s school bus. We spent quite a while with him. Somehow or other he found out we were in town and insisted on talking to us. He doesn’t know Lucy Ridder personally, but claims his wife does. He says Lucy Ridder sounds like a weird kid. He’s afraid she’s going to show up at school with a gun and mow down everybody in sight. After we talked to Wayne, we tracked his wife down at the school district bus garage. Her take on the situation is a little different from her husband’s. She says Lucy’s never been any problem—that Wayne is pushing panic buttons for no reason. Agnes did say, though, that on Friday afternoon on the bus, Lucy Ridder looked unhappier than usual. Like she was upset. Like she didn’t want to get off the bus to go home.”
Joanna thought about that for a minute, trying to remember exactly what Catherine Yates had said about Sandra Ridder’s release from prison and her expected homecoming.
“I’m pretty sure Catherine Yates told us that she had just heard on Friday afternoon that her daughter was being released from Perryville. But if Lucy was more upset than usual on Friday afternoon and if what was upsetting her was the unwelcome prospect of her mother’s homecoming, then how did she know about it before she got off the school bus?”
“Good question,” Jaime Carbajal said. “Maybe Catherine Yates called the school and told her so.”
“That’s one possibility,” Joanna agreed. “But since Catherine knew all about Lucy’s negative attitude toward her mother, I doubt it. No, I think Lucy herself had some kind of advance notice—probably from Sandra herself.”
“You’re saying maybe Lucy knew about her mother’s upcoming release before Catherine Yates did?”
“Maybe,” Joanna said. “Speaking of Catherine Yates, did she give you any more helpful information about either Sandra or Lucy?”
“Some, but not very much. According to Catherine, compared to her mother, Lucy’s a peach. She said Sandy was a headstrong handful from the day she was born. By the time she hit junior high, she was in so much trouble that she spent several months in juvie. We don’t know why she was sent up because the record was expunged once she turned eighteen.
“Then, in high school, Sandra more or less got her head screwed on straight. She started staying out of trouble and hitting the books. Since her father was an Anglo, she’s not a full-blooded Apache, but she had enough Native American blood to win a BIA scholarship to the University of Arizona, where she majored in Business and Native American studies. She didn’t graduate, though. Her senior year she got hooked up with a radical group called NAT-C.”
“You mean like Hitler Youth?” Joanna asked.
“No, something called the Na
tive American Tribal Council—NAT-C for short.”
“That’s an unfortunate acronym,” Joanna murmured.
Jaime laughed. “Isn’t it, though! NAT-C is made up of Indian radicals and wannabe Indian radicals from all over the country who take the position that the Indian wars never ended. Once Sandra got involved with the group, she quit school and hit the road with them doing demonstrations, picketing, that kind of thing.”
“Is that where she met her husband?”
“No. They met later. By then, Sandra had given up demonstrating and had gone to work at Fort Huachuca. That’s where she and Tom Ridder met—working on post. She was civil service, and he was career army—a staff sergeant.”
“Was Tom Ridder a Native American?”
“Evidently not. When Tom got pushed out of the service, Sandra stayed on working at the fort. They rented a house in Tucson. She carpooled back and forth to Fort Huachuca, and Tom started a Tucson-based landscaping business.”
“That’s what he was doing at the time he was killed, running a landscaping business?” Joanna asked.
“That’s right.”
“But didn’t you say just a few minutes ago that he was a staff sergeant in the army?”
“Right again,” Jaime said.
“Going from staff sergeant to running a landscaping outfit is a pretty big step down,” Joanna observed.
“That’s what I thought, too. According to what Catherine Yates told us, one way or another, Tom Ridder got himself crosswise of his commanding officer. He left the army with a general discharge. I would expect that having one of those on your record puts a damper on potential career opportunities.”
“Did Catherine give you any details on that, on what caused Tom Ridder to be booted out of the service?”
“No. We asked. If she knew, she wasn’t talking.”
“We should probably find out.”
“Right. Ernie Carpenter has some fairly good connections out at Fort Huachuca. He’ll take a crack at finding out those details; if not today, then first thing tomorrow for sure.”
“Good work, Jaime,” Joanna told him. “You two keep after it.”
Once across the divide and out in the wide valley between the Mule Mountains and Tombstone, Joanna tried calling Kristin. It was only fair to let her secretary know that her lunch date in Bisbee had turned into an afternoon drive to Tucson. Unfortunately, Kristin was away from her desk. Several minutes later, Joanna’s phone chirped its distinctive rooster-crow ring. The cell phone’s caller ID readout told her Frank Montoya was on the line.
“Hello,” she said. “What’s up?”
“I traced that phone number for you,” he said. “The U.S. West phone logs say it’s a pay phone, all right, but not at a truck stop. The calls were made from that I-Ten rest area in Texas Canyon east of Benson.”
“As the crow flies, that’s only about fifteen miles or so from Catherine Yates’ place,” Joanna observed. “Less than that from Cochise Stronghold. But did I hear you to say calls? As in plural?”
“That’s right,” Frank said. “There are three different calls on that phone, all made within a few minutes of three a.m. Saturday morning. All of them went to different numbers in the Tucson area. The first one, at three straight up and down, is the one placed to your friend Mrs. Quick. That one lasted about six minutes. You’ll never guess where the next one went.”
“Where?”
“At three ten the log shows a call to one M. Goodson out on Old Spanish Trail.”
“That has to be Melanie Goodson,” Joanna repeated. “Sandra Ridder’s old defense attorney, and the place where Sandra was supposed to be spending the night Saturday night. Is there a chance Lucy was calling there looking for her mother?”
“Could be. Or maybe she had reason to believe that she would soon be in need of a capable defense attorney, although Melanie Goodson hasn’t worked as a public defender in years. Whatever the reason for the call, my guess is Lucy didn’t connect with anyone in person. The call lasted for just over thirty seconds.”
“Long enough to be picked up by an answering machine?” Joanna asked.
“Sounds like. The last call was placed at three-fifteen. That one went to a Catholic convent at Santa Theresa School in the twenty-four hundred block of South Sixth Avenue in South Tucson. Somebody took that one because the call lasted a full fifteen minutes.”
“So there, at least, Lucy must have made contact with whoever it was she was looking for. What’s that address again?”
Frank gave it to her, and Joanna jotted it on her dash-mounted message pad.
“It just so happens that I’m on my way to Tucson right now to see Jay Quick,” Joanna told Frank. “If I finish up with him in time, I may stop by the convent and see if I can find out who it was Lucy was calling so early in the morning.”
“Anything else you want me to do on this end?” Frank asked.
“Jaime and Ernie think they’ve located Melanie Goodson’s missing Lexus. It was found abandoned out east of Douglas. They’re on their way to the scene right now. Ernie was going to look into this tomorrow, but as long as you’re in a bureaucracy-busting mood, how about if you call out to personnel at Fort Huachuca? See what you can find out about Tom Ridder and why he was run out of the army back in the early nineties. He was a staff sergeant when they booted him out, so my guess is the infraction was something more serious than an unauthorized walk in the park.
“When you finish up with that, call Terry Gregovich and tell him comp time’s over for the day. I want our canine unit to get their butts up to that rest-area telephone in Texas Canyon and see if they can pick up Lucy Ridder’s trail from there. Between Saturday night and now, lots of different people may have used that particular pay phone, but it won’t be nearly as many as those hundred-plus Volksmarchers who went meandering through the crime scene out at Cochise Stronghold. We also need to schedule deputies to stop through the rest area overnight for the next several days to see if there are any regular three a.m. users of the rest area who might have seen Lucy Ridder and her sidekick red-tailed hawk.”
“Anything else?” Frank asked.
“One. Have you seen Kristin?”
“She wasn’t at her desk when I got back to the department.”
“I wonder where she went. She didn’t say she was going to lunch. Well, anyway, when you see her, let her know I’m on my way to Tucson. I probably won’t be back until fairly late, but if you have any more good ideas, give me a call back.”
As Joanna continued driving north toward Tucson, she puzzled over what it all meant. Why on Saturday night had Lucy Ridder succumbed to a sudden urge to reconnect with people from her distant past? For a fifteen-year-old, reaching back eight years was going back more than half her life. So the question was: Had she stayed in touch with these folks through all the intervening years, or was this series of phone calls a bolt out of the blue to all three recipients?
The fact that Evelyn Quick had died years earlier without Lucy’s knowing about it made Joanna think the lightning-bolt option was actually the correct one. And if that was true, that meant the phone calls had to do with Sandra Ridder’s sudden and—as far as her daughter Lucy was concerned—unwelcome release from prison.
Joanna also mulled what Jaime Carbajal had told her about Lucy Ridder being a loner. That wasn’t much of a surprise. Anyone who would prefer the company of a red-tailed hawk to the company of people couldn’t be called outgoing or even normal—whatever that might be. Joanna thought back to her own high school days in the years after her father died. She had grieved over D. H. Lathrop’s death and blamed herself for it, too, since her father had been bringing Joanna and members of her Girl Scout troop home from a weekend camp-out when he was struck and killed by a drunk driver while changing a tire. Eleanor Lathrop may have been annoying at times and downright wrongheaded on occasion; still, Joanna had had the benefit of her mother’s love and guidance during those years when she had felt her father’s loss most keenly. None
theless, even with her mother’s help, Joanna had felt like the odd man out at school. Kids her age might have had parents who were divorced, but when you were a sophomore or junior or senior in high school, hardly anybody else had a parent who was dead.
Bearing all that in mind, it was hardly surprising that Lucy Ridder was a loner. Her father was dead, and now so was her mother. And all those years she had lived with Catherine Yates—all during the time when the awful pain of losing her father would have been at its peak—Lucy had been in the care and keeping of someone who more or less thought Tom Ridder got what he deserved—of someone who thought Lucy’s father’s killer was being wrongly imprisoned. That had to have hurt. And even if it was true that Tom Ridder had physically abused his wife, it might not have made any difference to his daughter’s broken heart. It seemed clear enough to Joanna that Lucy had loved Tom Ridder as much as or more so than she despised Sandra, her mother.