Devil's ClawJ

by J. A. Jance

  After puzzling over the problem for several minutes, Joanna wondered if it wasn’t possible that the dogs had simply gotten into something they shouldn’t have. Tigger especially was always sticking his nose into places where it didn’t belong. That was especially true when it came to porcupines. To her knowledge, Joanna kept no harmful chemicals lying around the place, but maybe there were some she didn’t know about—maybe something Clayton Rhodes had used in the course of his chores during his last few days on the ranch and had neglected to put away. Even so, thanks to Butch’s prompt action, the dogs were being cared for by Bisbee’s newly arrived vet. Joanna prayed that Dr. Millicent Ross would be able to work her curative magic.

  Maybe the house was hit by a fire, she thought. If it is, we’ll rebuild. It won’t be that bad. Then, a little later she added, Please, God. Whatever it is, don’t let it be that bad.

  Coming through the highway cuts between Bisbee and the Double Adobe turnoff, Joanna scanned the upper reaches of the Sulphur Springs Valley. In the spot where she knew her house to be, she saw the telltale pulsing glow of lights from any number of emergency vehicles. There were lots of lights, but there was no dark smudge of smoke rising skyward, no layer of smoke drifting north across the valley. So no, it wasn’t a fire then, or, if a fire had occurred, someone had put it out much earlier.

  Joanna slowed down and turned off, first onto Double Adobe Road and then onto High Lonesome. The whole situation seemed weird to her. On the one hand she was a police officer responding to the report of an incident. It could have been an ordinary car wreck or homicide, except this one was different. When she arrived, the smashed car or worse would belong to her. How was that possible? How could it be?

  Turning onto the one-lane track that led to her house, she saw that the pulsing halo of lights was much larger, much brighter. Usually she recognized the separate tire tracks that traveled her mile-long dirt access road. This time there were too many strange tracks for her to be able to identify any of them. When Joanna reached the wash, she had to slow to a crawl. The Crown Victoria, built far lower to the ground than Joanna’s Blazer, had a difficult time negotiating the rugged terrain where first Reba Singleton’s limo and subsequently the tow truck as well as numerous other vehicles had torn the established roadbed to pieces.

  Once through the wash, Joanna sped up again, only to be forced to a stop once more when she broke through the grove of mesquite and found her way blocked by a clot of emergency vehicles. That was when the reality of the situation finally hit home. Whatever had happened, it was serious enough to have brought all these people out in the early-evening twilight. And it had happened here, on High Lonesome Ranch, in Joanna Brady’s own safe haven.

  She looked at the house. From the outside it seemed all right. There were lights on throughout, and they cast a comforting, familiar glow. See there? Joanna told herself as she took a deep breath. It’s going to be fine.

  She stepped out of the Crown Victoria and took stock of some of the nearby vehicles scattered haphazardly around on the roadway. There were Frank Montoya’s Civvie, Ernie Carpenter’s Ford van, Butch’s Outback, and even Dick Voland’s new Camry. She noticed the vehicles and the small clutches of people standing here and there. The groups of onlookers all seemed to be watching her questioningly, waiting for direction, perhaps—waiting for her to tell them what they should do. She heard the sound of a few voices, of people speaking to one another in the low, earnest, and self-consciously controlled voices usually reserved for guests at funerals, for broadcasters at golf tournaments, and for stunned bystanders at fatality auto accidents.

  Butch Dixon detached himself from a trio of men and walked toward her. His face materialized through Joanna’s growing fear like a ship emerging from a cloud of fog. She tried to read the messages written on his features—concern, anger, and more besides.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, reaching for her and pulling her close.

  “I’m fine, Butch,” she said with a catch in her throat. “At least I think I’m fine. What’s happened here? What’s going on?”

  He took her hand. “Come inside,” he said grimly. “You’ll see.”

  As soon as Butch opened the back door, Joanna caught the whiff of a jarring mix of odors. The sharp smell of mustard, hot sauce, peanut butter, vinegar, and ammonia all came flowing at her in an eye-watering mix.

  “Watch your step,” Butch murmured, steadying her by holding on to her elbow. “There’s lots of broken glass and lots of water, so it’s all terribly slippery.”

  Once at the doorway to the kitchen, Joanna realized he was right. Nothing Butch could have said on the phone could possibly have prepared her for the wanton destruction that had been visited on her house. She felt her pulse quicken, felt the disbelieving panic rising in her throat. For a few seconds, she could barely breathe. The oxygen came into her mouth and throat but didn’t seem to pass from there to her lungs.

  Months earlier, watching a television newscast, Joanna had seen the image of a dazed woman pawing through the splintered remains of her tornado-shattered home. Now, as her own pulse accelerated and as she fought back a rising sense of panic, she remembered the disbelief written on that woman’s face and knew exactly what she had been going through in those awful moments—knew exactly what she had been thinking and doing. That unknown woman—that stranger—had been searching through the shattered wreckage of her home for some sign or shred or crumb of her former life. Now Joanna Brady was doing the same thing.

  Standing in the doorway of her own destroyed kitchen, it seemed impossible to Joanna that any such particle existed. The devastation, beyond anything she could have imagined, was almost complete. Cupboard doors had been wrenched off their hinges and the contents of the faceless, broken shelves swept out onto the floor. Broken jars and bottles of food mingled with the remains of shattered glassware, of broken plates and dishes and serving bowls. Plastic bottles that hadn’t shattered on impact—the brand-new bottle of Log Cabin pancake syrup, a half-used gallon of Wesson Oil, a partially full container of Palmolive dishwashing detergent—had all been opened and poured over the mess, with the empty bottles allowed to fall in place.

  All the kitchen drawers had been pulled out, emptied, and then used as sledgehammers on the counter and the breakfast nook, smashing to pieces Andy’s carefully routered Formica and demolishing the drawers themselves in the process. And all around—on the walls, the ceiling, the light fixtures—were zany fingerpaint patterns of squirted colored matter—mustard, ketchup, barbecue sauce, hot sauce—crusted with crumbs of thrown cereal and flour and sugar.

  The refrigerator lay on its side, with the hacked-off end of an electrical cord dangling from the back of it like an amputated appendage. On the counter was a line of broken appliances also devoid of cords. The kitchen sink had evidently been plugged up and filled to brimming, which accounted for the soup of inch-deep soapy, greasy water that covered the floor.

  Stunned beyond speech, Joanna simply looked at Butch. He shook his head. “You’d better come see the rest,” he said. “Then we’ll talk.”

  If anything, the dining room was worse. The buffet had been turned over on its side, spilling out and smashing all of Joanna’s good china and crystal. Someone had taken her good flatware—the monogrammed silver Eva Lou had given her—and had used that to gouge long scars in the smooth surface of the oak dining room table and in the upholstery of every chair.

  The top of the buffet was where Joanna had kept her treasure trove of framed family pictures—casual and professional photos of Joanna and Andy; and of Joanna, Andy, and Jenny together. There were pictures of Jenny with Santa Claus and a set of ever-changing school pictures. All of those were gone. Not only had the glass been broken and the frames been bent beyond recognition, the pictures themselves had been torn out and pulled to pieces.

  Unable to move, Joanna braced herself by holding on to the scarred surface of the dining room table. From that vantage point she looked as far as the living room. The
re, every piece of upholstered furniture had been sliced with short, jagged cuts. Handfuls of stuffing had been pulled out through the holes in great white globs of cotton. The drapes on the windows had all been cut off halfway up the walls. The blinds behind the drapes had been wrenched from their moorings.

  Shaking her head, still speechless, Joanna started toward the bathroom. “You can’t go in there at all,” Butch said.

  “Why not?”

  “All the fixtures were broken off,” he said. “I’ve turned off the water, but the drywall is soaked. It’s so full of water, the walls and the ceiling may come down at any minute.”

  Shaking her head in astonishment, Joanna headed for her own bedroom. There it was the same story all over again. Drawers had been torn out, upended, and then smashed to smithereens. The bedding and the bed itself had been sliced to pieces, as had most, if not all, of her clothing. Joanna had left the gifts from her Sunday-afternoon bridal shower neatly stacked in one corner of the room. The boxes had all been torn open and the contents ripped to shreds. What remained had been piled into a heap in the middle of the room, where the better part of a gallon of bleach had been poured over it.

  In fact, nothing seemed to have escaped the destructive frenzy, not even the creamy silk dress—still in its distinctive Nordstrom bag—that Joanna had planned to wear for her wedding ceremony on Saturday afternoon. Seeing the ruined dress, a single involuntary sob escaped her lips.

  “It’ll be okay,” Butch whispered. “Don’t worry.”

  Joanna took a deep breath. Standing in the middle of her wrecked bedroom, she finally regained the power of speech. “This had to take hours,” she managed.

  Butch nodded grimly. “Whoever it was must have turned up this morning right after you and Jenny left and made a day of it. That’s why Dr. Ross is so worried about Sadie and Tigger. It may be touch and go for them because the poison was in their systems for such a long time.”

  Stunned, Joanna looked at him. “You mean they could die?”

  Butch nodded, his eyes dry but red. “They could,” he said.

  Unable to say anything more, Joanna turned away from Butch so he wouldn’t see the tears blurring her own eyes. When she did so, she caught sight of the shattered top of her rolltop desk—the place where she kept her various weapons under lock and key.

  “My Colt Two Thousand is missing,” she said as a sudden chill passed over her body. She had stopped using the Colt due to dependability problems, but she also knew that when it did fire, it was a powerful and deadly weapon.

  “I know,” Butch said. “I noticed that, too.”

  “What about Jenny’s room?”

  “It’s fine,” Butch said.

  It sounded to Joanna as though he was telling her that to soothe her rather than because it was the truth. “Fine?” she demanded. “What do you mean, fine?” Even she could hear the threat of hysteria rising in her voice. “You mean, like this is fine?” she asked, swinging one arm to encompass the wreckage of her bedroom.

  “I mean it’s fine,” Butch said. “Whoever did this left Jenny’s room entirely alone. It’s untouched. Nothing is broken; nothing wrecked. Now come on. We have to go back outside.”

  “I don’t want to go outside,” Joanna protested.

  “We have to,” Butch insisted. “Frank Montoya didn’t think you should come in here at all, not until after the crime-scene techs have had a chance to process the scene. But I told him that wouldn’t work—that you’d have to see it firsthand. The only way I got him to agree to that was to promise we wouldn’t touch anything and that we’d come back out as soon as you had seen it for yourself. Come on.”

  Joanna tried to dodge away, but he caught her hand and pulled her toward the doorway. “Really, Joanna. You’ve seen enough. Standing here in the mess isn’t going to make it any better.”

  “But who would do such a thing?” Joanna murmured. “Who could possibly hate me this much?”

  “Good question,” Butch said, leading her back the way they had come. “It’s what we were talking about outside just before you drove up. Dick Voland was telling us he had a call from Reba Singleton late last night.” Butch paused. “She’s missing, by the way. Did you know that?”

  “Of course I knew that,” Joanna replied. “I’m the one who told Dick about it in the first place.”

  “What you maybe don’t know is that Reba’s husband had her served with divorce papers at her B and B here in Bisbee yesterday afternoon after the funeral and just before she was getting ready to leave town.”

  “He what?”

  “You heard me,” Butch replied. “He had the divorce papers served on the poor woman just hours after her father’s funeral. The no-good son of a bitch must have been planning it for days. No wonder she didn’t go flying straight home when she was supposed to. I’d be a missing person, too, if somebody had pulled that kind of asshole stunt on me.”

  A power surge of mind-clearing anger erupted in Joanna’s head. “So that’s what happened!” Joanna exclaimed. “Dennis Singleton did Reba dirt, and so she turned it all on me.”

  “That’s the general consensus,” Butch agreed.

  “How could he do such a thing?”

  Butch shrugged. “Some men are all heart,” he said.

  Looking around the mayhem that had once been Joanna’s home, she saw the damage in a new light—as the manifestation of a broken woman’s rage and hurt and utter despair. In her outrage, Reba Singleton had focused her anger on property—on things. Dennis Singleton, on the other hand, had aimed his heart-seeking missile directly at his wife’s very soul. As Joanna grasped both those concepts, her perspective shifted. A toggle switch in her head went from off to on.

  “Where’s Dick Voland now?” she demanded.

  “Outside,” Butch replied. “At least that’s where he was when I left everybody else to go meet you.”

  They were crossing the dining room and heading back toward the shattered kitchen when something bright and sparkly reflected back the light from the broken chandelier and caught Joanna’s eyes. Up against the mopboard and almost out of sight behind the swinging door was a tiny piece of glassware—Joanna’s maternal grandmother’s cut-glass toothpick holder. Seeing it, Joanna realized that the light pink Depression-era piece had been knocked out of the buffet along with everything else. Something must have cushioned its fall because it had landed without breaking. Spilling a thin trail of toothpicks, it had rolled across the floor and come to rest in a place where it was almost out of sight and hidden away from the frenzy of ongoing devastation.

  Escaping from Butch’s grasp momentarily, Joanna bent over and scooped up the fragile piece. Holding it up to the light, Joanna examined it for cracks and chips, but it was perfect. All this while she had managed to hold her tears in check. Now they burst through and threatened to overwhelm her. Seeing the glowing toothpick holder was like catching sight of the first rainbow after a terrible thunderstorm. And, like a rainbow, the delicately colored glass held a promise that perhaps the worst was over and that somehow, someday, the sun would shine again.

  With a sigh, Joanna plunged the piece deep in her pocket.

  “Wait a minute,” Butch objected. “I told you I promised Frank that we wouldn’t touch anything as long as we were in here.”

  “Too bad,” Joanna said. “This toothpick holder belongs to me, and I’m keeping it. If it turns out this is the only thing in the whole house with usable fingerprints on it, that’s too bad as well. In that case, we’re going to have a hard time catching the perp who did this.”

  Butch looked at her. “It sounds like Sheriff Brady is back,” he said. “I think you’re going to be okay.”

  She nodded. “I will be okay,” she agreed. “Seeing all this was a shock to the system, but this is all stuff—inanimate objects. I’m far more upset about what happened to the dogs. What about Kiddo and the cattle?”

  “They seem to be fine.”

  “Good.”

  “There is one th
ing that really pisses me off,” Butch added.

  “What’s that?”

  The shadow of a grin played around the corners of his mouth. “Here we spent all that time and effort on Sunday cleaning your damned oven,” Butch told her. “In all this mess, nobody’s ever going to notice—not your mother, and not mine, either.”

  Hearing his good-natured grousing, Joanna felt some of the strain drain out of her own body. After all, this was Butch Dixon’s way of dealing with a crisis—to make light of it if at all possible. Under most circumstances, it would have been Joanna’s preferred way of coping as well, but she allowed herself only the smallest of giggles. She didn’t dare laugh out loud. It would be only the merest of baby steps to go from dissolving into real laughter and then tumbling downward into a fit of hysterics and unstoppable tears. Right that minute, none of those were acceptable options.

  As Joanna and Butch emerged from the house, Frank Montoya and Ernie Carpenter met them on the back porch. Concern was written large on both men’s anxious faces. “Are you all right?” Frank asked.