Devil's ClawJ

by J. A. Jance

  “Reba,” Joanna said. “I’ve done nothing of the kind.”

  “The hell you haven’t!” Reba Singleton snarled back while her whole body trembled in a fit of ill-suppressed fury. “I guess you don’t want these nice people to know that their little Miss Goody Two-shoes of a sheriff is actually a double-dealing bitch! What I want to know is what makes you think you can get away with it? Who says I’m not going to stop you?”

  Behind Reba, Marliss Shackleford’s eyes widened. Like Joanna, she too must have feared that Reba’s attack would escalate from verbal to physical. “Come on, Reba,” Marliss said, grabbing the other woman by the arm. “Let’s go.”

  They left then, leaving behind a silent room full of people and a stunned and flushed Joanna Brady. Reeling like the victim of a hit-and-run, Joanna could think of nothing at all to say. Gradually the level of conversation in the room resumed its former level, while Carol Hubbard shook her head.

  “I take it from that she’s learned about Clayton’s will,” Carol said in a low voice.

  “You knew about that too?” Joanna asked in surprise. Clayton may have kept the news from Joanna, but obviously he hadn’t kept it to himself.

  “Oh, yes. Clayton told my husband and me all about it when he first had his will redrawn. He and Reba had that huge falling-out when Molly got so sick. Reba wanted her father to send Molly out to California to some specialist she knew about, and neither Clayton nor Molly wanted to do that. When they refused, everything went downhill in a hurry. It was right about then—right after Molly’s funeral—that Reba went to court and tried to have her father declared incompetent. She wanted to be appointed his legal guardian so she could have power of attorney over him and manage his affairs. But Clayton fooled her. He hired his own attorney. The guardianship petition never went through.”

  “That was what the quarrel was all about?” Joanna asked.

  “The quarrel was about control,” Carol Hubbard replied. “Reba is the kind of person who has to be in the driver’s seat at all times. Once Clayton beat her back, his first intention was to leave his ranch to the Nature Conservancy. But then Clayton changed his mind. He said he didn’t think you’d ever want to actually move into his place because it’s so old and run-down, but he knew you’d like having the land. I believe he told me you’re planning to remarry soon?”

  Blushing again, Joanna nodded. “This coming Saturday,” she said.

  “Well,” Carol Hubbard said, rising. “I’m sure you and your new husband will be very happy together. Whoever he is, he’s lucky to have found you. And your daughter, too. Now, I have to be going. It’s a long drive back to Tucson, and we don’t like being out after dark. My husband’s night vision is none too good these days.”

  She held out her hand. Joanna shook it, and then Carol Hubbard was gone.

  “She was nice,” Jenny said a moment later. “Why couldn’t Butch’s mom be somebody like her?”

  Joanna laughed and shook her head. “You know what they say: Some days you eat the bear; some days the bear eats you.”

  Jenny scowled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that Butch’s mother is the way she is, and we’re just going to have to learn to live with it and accept her the way she is.”

  “Even if we don’t want to?”

  “Even if.”

  By four o’clock, Joanna and Jenny were back at the Justice Complex. Jenny took her homework and disappeared into the empty conference room. In the meantime, Joanna headed into her office to go through her messages and return calls.

  Talking about Butch had made her realize that she hadn’t heard from him all day long, and she was missing him. However, having just made a big stink with Kristin and Terry about the hazards of mixing love and work, she was glad no calls from Butch had come in through the switchboard during the course of the day. “Do as I say, not as I do” wasn’t the way Joanna Brady wanted to run her ship.

  Once the most pressing calls had been handled, Joanna went looking for Frank Montoya. “I take it your pager is still turned off?” he asked.

  Guiltily, Joanna reached into her pocket, removed the pager, and switched it on. “Sorry about that,” she said meekly. “I turned if off during the funeral and must have forgotten to turn it back on.”

  “No problem,” Frank said, “but I didn’t know you were back, and I thought you’d want to hear the news.”

  “What news? Did Search and Rescue locate Lucy?”

  Frank shook his head. “No, but we think we’ve found her bike. At least we found somebody’s bike. It was hidden in among some of those huge rocks in Texas Canyon about half a mile from the rest area. It looks like somebody took a sledgehammer to it and turned it into a piece of junk. There was also a canteen and a sleeping bag.”

  “Do you know for sure the gear is Lucy’s?” Joanna asked.

  “We haven’t confirmed it yet, but we’re pretty sure. Catherine Yates told us there was a leather thong tied to the handlebars to give Big Red something to hang on to. The bike S and R found had a leather thong on the handlebars.”

  “And Lucy?”

  “No sign of her. She had been there, but she’s evidently not there any longer, and there’s no sign of that damned hawk of hers, either. But that’s not why I called you. The real news is about Melanie Goodson.”

  “What about her?”

  “She’s dead,” Frank said.

  Joanna’s jaw dropped. “She’s what?”

  “You heard me. Dead.”

  “When? What did she die of?”

  “No way to tell. The Pima County ME’s office says they saw some signs of needle tracks, so maybe she overdosed. At any rate, she didn’t turn up for work today. Nobody was really all that concerned because her first appointment wasn’t until after one, when she was supposed to meet with Ernie and Jaime. According to her secretary, if she had worked late the day before, she sometimes didn’t come in at all in the morning. By the time somebody started to worry and called Pima County to go out to her place on Old Spanish Trail to check on her, she’d been dead for some time.”

  Joanna shook her head. “This feels bad to me, Frank. This isn’t some accidental overdose. She didn’t look like even a recreational drug user to me. This has to be connected to Sandra Ridder and what happened to her. Did Ernie and Jaime go out to Melanie Goodson’s house?”

  “The last I heard, they were on their way, but it’s Pima County’s deal, Joanna. As you know, our relationship with the Pima County Sheriff’s Department hasn’t been exactly cordial of late, so don’t hold your breath as far as interdepartmental cooperation goes. It isn’t gonna happen.”

  “Can we get either Jaime or Ernie on the horn?” Joanna asked.

  “I don’t know. We can try. The last time I talked to Ernie, his cell phone was cutting in and out. The coverage may be pretty spotty out in that neck of the woods.” Nonetheless, Frank picked up his phone and began dialing.

  “How can the cell phone coverage be that bad?” Joanna asked. “Old Spanish Trail is in Tucson, for God’s sake.”

  “Not South Old Spanish Trail,” Frank told her. “From what Ernie told me, Melanie Goodson’s house is out in the middle of nowhere, almost to Vail.” He listened intently for several seconds, then shook his head. “Says he’s left the service area.”

  “What’s the phone company thinking?” Joanna asked. “Angie Kellogg’s boyfriend can make cell-phone calls from Skeleton Canyon—which is the godforsaken middle of nowhere—back home to England, but we can’t call from here to Vail?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Frank told her. “The phone company doesn’t have to think, and our two-way car radios don’t stretch over the mountains that far, either. We’ll just have to wait for one of them to report in.”

  “Waiting isn’t something I’m very good at,” Joanna said.

  Frank Montoya grinned at her. “Really,” he said. “I never would have guessed.”

  Joanna did a few more pacing-style tur
ns around the office and checked on the progress of Jenny’s homework. Finally, at five-thirty, she went back to Frank’s office. “All right,” she told him, “I’m leaving. Somebody has to go home and feed the animals. Leave word with Dispatch that as soon as either Ernie or Jaime comes within hailing distance, I want a call to me on my cell phone. Even if Jenny and I are out doing chores; I’ll have the phone with me at all times.”

  After that Joanna cleared her desk of everything she’d left undone during the course of the day by stuffing a pile of untouched paperwork into a much-used briefcase. Taking work home was something she did by force of habit almost every night these days. Often she never even got around to opening the briefcase between leaving the office and returning the next morning. Still, it made her feel better somehow that her desk usually looked more or less cleared when she left work at the end of the day.

  She and Jenny were home, had fed all the animals, and were on their way back into the house to fix dinner when the cell phone rang in Joanna’s shirt pocket. Hoping the caller would be one of her two detectives, Joanna answered hurriedly.

  “Congratulate me,” Butch Dixon said. “It worked.”

  “What worked?”

  “Butch Dixon Tour Guide,” he said. “I’ve worn my parents out. I offered to take them out to dinner, but they said they’d had enough. All they wanted to do was go back out to the RV park and hit the hay. And all I want to do is come see you.”

  “Butch, really,” Joanna began. “I’ve brought a briefcaseful of work home. If I’m going to be gone for the better part of next week, there’s a lot I need to get caught up on before we leave town.”

  “Please,” he said. “Have pity on me. I’ve spent the whole day trying to dodge one of my mother’s negative comments after another. ‘Wherever did you get the odd idea that you could write a book?’ is my personal favorite. As far as I’m concerned, that was the topper on the cake. What my ego needs now is a little dose of positive feedback from my two favorite people in the world. I promise, I won’t try to talk. I’ll sit in the corner quiet as a mouse and watch you work—make you work—if need be. And I won’t even hint about spending the night.”

  By the time Butch finished his sad lament, Joanna was laughing at him. “All right,” she relented. “But no more whining, either. I can’t stand it when you whine.”

  “I don’t like it either,” Butch agreed. “I’m afraid my folks bring out the worst in me.”

  He was out at the High Lonesome within fifteen short minutes. By then Joanna had thawed out some ground beef and was frying corn tortillas for tacos. Jenny had chopped up tomatoes and onions and was busy grating cheese when Butch walked in the door.

  “Boy,” he said. “Are you two a sight for sore eyes! I’ve had about all of Maggie Dixon I can stand, and she’s been in town for barely twenty-four hours.”

  Jenny wrinkled her nose. “You mean you don’t like her either, even though she’s your own mother?”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Butch said.

  Joanna’s phone rang just then. When she dragged it out of her shirt pocket, Butch relieved her of the tongs. “I’ll finish frying the tortillas,” he said. “You talk on the phone.”

  “Where are you?” Joanna asked when she heard Jaime Carbajal’s voice.

  “Benson,” he said. “We’ve given up for the day, and we’re on our way home. Dispatch said you wanted us to call.”

  “I did—do,” Joanna said. “How’s it going?”

  “Not too bad, considering. I guess Frank told you that we missed the boat when it came to talking to Melanie Goodson. And the nun you wanted us to talk to, the one who’s the principal at Santa Theresa’s . . .”

  “Sister Celeste,” Joanna supplied.

  “Right. We didn’t see her, either. She was out sick today, but we did have one bit of luck.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Not surprisingly, the Pima County homicide detectives weren’t too thrilled when we showed up hot on their heels. Since they wouldn’t let us anywhere near their crime scene, Ernie and I were stuck just sort of milling around down on Old Spanish Trail at Melanie Goodson’s turnoff, which, by the way, seems to be paved from there all the way to her house. That had to have cost a fortune. Anyway, we were left cooling our heels there, and since people are just naturally curious when they see a couple of stopped police vehicles, we did manage to talk to some of Melanie’s neighbors.”

  “Jaime, could you stop stringing me along and try getting to the good part?”

  “We ended up talking to a lady named Karen Gustafson who lives just up the street, if you could call it that. It’s a road, really. Anyway, she told us that she and her husband were coming home from Webb’s Steak House on Friday night about ten when they saw Melanie Goodson’s Lexus coming down the road. Karen said she was sitting in the car while her husband went over to the mailbox to pick up their mail. She said that when the car came by, she saw there were two people in it—Melanie Goodson and some other woman. The thing is, until we started asking her questions, she didn’t even know Melanie’s car had been stolen.”

  “Good grief!” Joanna exclaimed. “Pima County’s supposedly investigating that case. What did they do, drop the ball?”

  “I don’t think they ever bothered to pick it up. Grand-theft auto evidently isn’t a very high priority around here. In most cases they don’t do much more than take the report over the phone. I believe Melanie Goodson got an in-person officer visit because of who she was and what she did for a living. Of course, now that she’s dead, a possible homicide case is gathering a lot more attention than her stolen car did.”

  “Could it be that Melanie Goodson and Sandra Ridder both went to Cochise Stronghold that night?”

  “That’s how it sounds to Ernie and me,” Jaime answered.

  “But why would she go along?” Joanna asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Jaime, “but my guess is, once we have an answer to the first question, we’ll also know how come she’s dead. She was Sandra Ridder’s attorney, right?” Jaime asked.

  “Right.”

  “And Ridder went to prison on a plea bargain. That means there was never any trial in regard to Tom Ridder’s death, so maybe there wasn’t much of an investigation, either,” Jaime continued. “The detectives probably figured they had a slam-dunk domestic-violence case. Frank told us Tom Ridder got thrown out of the army for assaulting one of the brass. And since Sandra was willing to stand up in front of a judge and accept full responsibility for plugging her husband, the detectives on the shooting case probably figured, why waste any more time digging any deeper? She goes to prison. The detectives clear one case and go on to the next.”

  Joanna considered the possibility. “So you’re thinking the same way I am—that all this has to have something to do with Tom Ridder’s death?”

  “It’s the only tie-in Ernie and I can think of.”

  “Me, too, Jaime,” Joanna said. “And maybe we’re on to something. Melanie Goodson told me that Sandra was planning to buy some new clothes, have her hair done, and pretty much get herself fixed up before she went on home to the Dragoons to see her mother and daughter. She also said she didn’t have any money worries about her upcoming makeover and shopping spree. We need to find out whether or not Catherine Yates sent Sandra get-out-of-jail money or if she had savings from her prison wages. If neither of those options pans out, maybe she was expecting to collect some cash somewhere else. What if somebody else killed Tom Ridder and Sandra stepped up to the plate and took the rap for it? What if she knew who really did do it? Then, after all these years, she gets out of jail and decides to collect on that old debt. What would happen then?”

  “Whoever she was trying to put the squeeze on might prefer some other medium of exchange—say a hot bullet in place of cold cash.”

  “Exactly,” Joanna said. “And since Melanie Goodson was Sandra Ridder’s attorney back then, she may have known about the connection as well. So where do we go fro
m here?”

  “I don’t know about you,” Jaime Carbajal said, “but I’m on my way home. Whatever we’re going to do next will have to wait until tomorrow. If I don’t get home in time to see at least the last couple innings of Pepe’s game, Delcia is going to kill me.”

  “Your wife isn’t going to kill you over missing a Little League game,” Joanna said. “But if she does, we’ll see to it that Delcia doesn’t get any less of a sentence for knocking you off than Sandra Ridder did for shooting her husband.”

  “Thanks, boss,” Jaime Carbajal said. “You’re all heart.”

  CHAPTER 19

  Over dinner, Butch turned serious. “What’s this I hear about Reba Singleton making a scene at Clayton’s funeral?”