by J. A. Jance
When it came time to schedule Grandpa Jeb’s funeral, there was no question that it would be held at Elfrida’s First Baptist Church, where Jeb and Juanita had both been lifelong members, and on the day of Jebediah Raymond’s funeral everybody in town turned out, packing the small white church to overflowing.
Cooper and Laurie were in attendance, of course, but when the service was over, Garth was the one Grandma Juanita asked to escort her down the aisle and outside to the waiting hearse. They were standing there in an unofficial receiving line, greeting people and waiting for the pallbearers to bring out the casket, when a tiny red-haired woman wearing a khaki uniform with a badge on the shirt appeared in front of them. A name tag identified her as Sheriff Joanna Brady.
Garth recognized the name, if not the person. In the aftermath of Grandpa Jeb’s death and while working on his grandmother’s behalf, he had dealt with any number of people from the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department—with deputies and detectives—but not with the sheriff herself.
“Why, Sheriff Brady,” Grandma Juanita said, extending her hand in welcome. “I didn’t see you inside. It’s very kind of you to come.”
“I came to tell you that we got them,” Sheriff Brady announced. “Our BOLO on your husband’s pickup got a hit on a vehicle parked at a motel in DeKalb County, Georgia, yesterday afternoon. This morning an arrest team of U.S. Marshals picked them up. The killers are being held in the county lockup in Decatur, Georgia. Arlee Jones, the county attorney, is currently initiating extradition procedures. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Thank you for coming to tell us in person,” Grandma Juanita said. “That was very kind.”
“It’s my job,” Sheriff Brady had said. “It’s what the people of this county trust me to do.”
That small act of kindness on Joanna Brady’s part had stayed with Garth Raymond from then on, and it was one of the reasons, when school started back up in the fall, he changed his major over from the College of Agriculture to criminal justice. The other reason was the relatively swift and successful outcome of the case.
Because Grandpa Jeb had died during the commission of a felony—grand theft auto—the county attorney had charged both assailants with first-degree homicide. Faced with the possibility of a death-sentence conviction, they had seen fit to accept plea bargains of life without the possibility of parole. The agreement took lethal injection off the table, but it also denied them the right to initiate any future appeals of their respective sentences.
Originally, since the stolen pickup had been regarded as evidence in a possible homicide trial, it had been transported from Georgia back to the county impound lot at the Justice Center near Bisbee. Once Grandpa Jeb’s killers were shipped off to the state prison in Florence, and with all further criminal proceedings canceled, the county attorney determined there was no longer any reason to continue holding the vehicle. The pickup was returned to Grandma Juanita, who promptly handed it over to Garth.
Given all that, it was hardly surprising that Grandpa Jeb’s murder had changed the course of Garth’s life and set him on his current path, one that had him spending this bitterly cold night out in the wilds, pacing up and down the roadway beside a field of bones. And because of that long-ago hunting trip, he spent most of that night thinking about Jebediah and Juanita Raymond, the people who’d raised him and nurtured him when his own father had turned away.
The traumatic events of that summer had forced Garth to grow up fast. In a matter of days, he was transformed from a carefree college kid without a care in the world to the man in his grandmother’s household. Between then and the time school started, Garth did most of the chores around the place. In advance of going off to school, he helped his grandmother look for and find a suitable hired hand. And once school started back up, he came home almost every weekend to help out and make sure things stayed on track.
Within three months of Grandpa Jeb’s death, Garth’s father turned up with a ready buyer for Juanita’s farm and a plan to move her out of her home and into an assisted-living facility in Mesa, where, as Coop assured her, he and Laurie would be able to keep an eye on her. Not wanting to be bullied, Grandma Juanita had turned to Garth for help. Garth, too, could see that running the farm on her own was too much for Grandma Juanita, but he also discerned that his stepmother’s money-grubbing ways were behind his father’s scheme to move Grandma to Mesa. Not only did Garth want to keep his grandmother from being dumped in among a bunch of strangers, he also wanted to help preserve her nest egg and maintain her independence.
To that end, although Garth might have changed his major over to criminal justice, he still had a few connections inside the College of Agriculture. One of his former professors was intimately involved with the burgeoning winemaking industry developing in southeastern Arizona. The professor put Garth in touch with an ambitious young vintner who was willing to pay almost double the lowball offer from the buyer Coop had located.
It wasn’t until the day of the scheduled closing that Cooper Raymond learned of his son’s successful end run around him. Furious, he had shown up uninvited at the title company’s office, barging into the meeting fully intent on getting Juanita to back out of the deal. When Coop started berating his mother in public, Garth grabbed his father by the arm and bodily escorted him from the office.
“You’re behind all this, aren’t you!” Cooper snarled accusingly, bristling with anger. “You’re the one who got her to go with this deal instead of the one I found for her. How dare you pull an underhanded stunt like that?”
Standing under a warm October sun, staring into each other’s eyes, Garth suddenly saw his father in an entirely new light. They’d never been close, not even when Garth’s mother was alive. As a child Garth had regarded his somewhat distant father with a certain amount of awe. Cooper Raymond was a smooth operator, a sophisticated businessman who presented himself as the ultimate professional. Now Garth realized that entire persona was a fraud designed to smooth over who and what his father really was—a small-minded, weak-willed man who leaped to do his grasping wife’s bidding.
For a long time, father and son stood there in a silent eyeball to eyeball stalemate. Back when Garth was a kid and his father had lit into him for some infraction or another, he remembered thinking, Just wait until I get big and you get little. And now that very thing had happened. Garth was a good two inches taller than his father, and years of hefting bales of hay and helping on the farm had made all the difference. He was taller and heavier than his father now and could easily have whipped his ass.
For a time it seemed likely that the situation might deteriorate into a physical confrontation. Instead, after several tense moments, Garth took a careful backward step. “You know what, Coop?” he said. “It was easy.” With that he turned and walked away.
“Don’t you turn your back on me!” Cooper raged after him. “And don’t you go calling me by my first name, either. I’m your father, damn it. Show a little respect!”
Just outside the door to the office, Garth’s forward progress came to an abrupt stop.
“Respect?” he demanded, spinning back around. “Are you kidding me? If I’d had a shred of respect left for you, it would have evaporated the moment you charged into this office and started yelling at your mother. And as far as being my father is concerned? Forget about it. That ended about the same time you brought me down here and dumped me off on your parents’ doorstep. So good-bye, Cooper. May you rot in hell, and don’t let the car door hit you in the ass.”
With Cooper Raymond no longer the middle of it, the real-estate transaction had moved forward without a hitch. Proceeds from the sale of the farm had paid off the remainder of the medical bills from Jebediah’s three-week stay in the ICU with enough left over to allow Juanita to pay cash for a small two-bedroom home inside Elfrida proper, where she could live out her days in the same community that had always been her home.
The sun was well up, and Garth was back in the Tahoe warming his fe
et again when a marked patrol car, another SUV, pulled up behind his and flashed the light bar. Moments later a uniformed deputy tapped on the window, and Garth rolled it down.
“Deputy Hernandez,” the new arrival announced. “You about ready to head home? I’m your relief.”
“Thanks,” Garth said, handing over the satphone “Nothing much happened overnight.”
“That’ll change,” Hernandez said. “I’ve heard there’s going to be a big push today. Everybody will be canvassing the area looking for leads. If you want more overtime, I’d go home, get myself some shut-eye, and then turn up later to help out. According to the lieutenant, it’s gonna be all hands on deck.”
“Good advice,” Garth told him. “I’m on my way.”
Chapter 18
IN THE EARLY HOURS OF THAT SUNDAY MORNING, AS THE SUN CAME up over Brawley, California, nearby rigs firing up their engines and heading out awakened Jim Ardmore from a sound sleep. The first thing he noticed was that his damned head still hurt. If he’d had an Aleve handy, he probably would have taken one. Instead he walked as far as the food mart at the gas station and grabbed some coffee. There was no sense in rushing. There was a decent Denny’s in Yuma, one he visited often. He’d stop there, fuel up, have some breakfast, and do his shopping.
Although there was no indication that anyone was actively looking for him, Jimmy was still shaken by his near miss from the night before. Obviously he’d become complacent. That had to change as of right now, and next time he went hunting, he’d be more careful. As for doing that in California? Not anytime soon. Those fresh-faced California girls might be cute as all hell, but they could also be dangerous. When it was time to hit the road again, he’d ask Jake to assign him to trips that would take him east—back to Dallas or Houston or New Orleans or Atlanta, where the pickings might be easier. For right now, though, it might be a good idea to back off and consider keeping only one girl at a time.
Jimmy turned onto eastbound I-8 south of Brawley. As often happened when he was headed home, he thought about Arthur, his brother—his half brother, that is. Although he’d had his suspicions about that all along, it wasn’t until Arthur told him about their mother’s deathbed confession of infidelity that he’d finally learned the truth about his own parentage.
James Edward Ardmore had been the unfortunate by-product of an out-of-wedlock fling between his mother, Phyllis, and her husband’s younger brother, Tim. Tim had died shortly thereafter in a fatal car accident, and Jimmy had been raised by Phyllis’s husband, Harry (Harrison) Ardmore. Had Harrison known the truth about his wife’s affair? Probably. That would help explain why he’d beaten the crap out of Jimmy on an almost daily basis.
As a result of the continuing abuse, Jimmy had grown up seething with hatred. He hated Harry, his presumed father, for the brutal beatings. He hated his mother for never sticking up for him and for not walking away from the marriage. But most of all he hated his brother, Arthur, for the unforgivable sin of being perfect.
Jimmy had been only eight and Arthur five years older when, at Sunday school, he’d first heard the story of Cain and Abel. Even then it was clear to Jimmy that Cain had a point. Abel was perfection itself, the kid who was the favorite and who did no wrong, while Cain did nothing right. That was the script for his and Arthur’s lives, too. Arthur did everything he was supposed to do—he never talked back, studied, got good grades, went to college, and earned an M.B.A. He inherited Harrison Ardmore’s wholesale auto-parts business just in time to make a fortune by unloading it to a group of investors.
Jimmy, in the meantime, did whatever it took to garner attention, and not in a good way. He acted out; he never did his homework; he bad-mouthed his teachers; he got into fights at school; he did drugs, drank alcohol, and raced hot rods. He got out of juvie on his twenty-first birthday, having been locked up for two years on a charge of involuntary manslaughter.
While driving in an illegal street race, he’d been behind the wheel of an out-of-control vehicle that had slammed into three innocent bystanders, fatally injuring two of them. Fortunately for the sole survivor as well as for the families of the deceased, Harrison Ardmore’s insurance company had stepped up to the plate. Once the family’s umbrella policy finished covering a fortune in ensuing liability claims, Harry’d had enough and washed his hands of this difficult offspring who was in reality his brother’s son. By the time Jimmy emerged from juvie, Harry Ardmore was dead, Jimmy himself had been disinherited, and Arthur was richer than Midas.
The problem with Arthur and the thing Jimmy found so revolting about him was that, with one notable exception, he really was perfect. He was in fact a good guy. He had nursed their mother, Phyllis, through several bouts with cancer before her eventual death. He had sought out his dispossessed younger brother and did what he could to help him. Arthur made it possible for Jimmy to purchase his first big rig, allowing him to set himself up in the long-haul trucking business.
The only serious blot on Arthur’s presumed perfection—the single unresolvable contradiction in his life—stemmed from the fact that he was gay. Try as he might, he was unable to reconcile those two polar-opposite realities. Homosexuality went against the grain of everything Arthur believed to be good and true. It was a glaring defect—something he refused to acknowledge, much less embrace.
In his late thirties, after a single exploratory same-sex relationship ended badly, Arthur had what he later referred to as his coming-to-God moment. Determined to live a simpler, more godly existence, he had sold out all his real-estate holdings back east in favor of taking up residence on a small section of Calhoun Ranch, a vast cattle-raising enterprise located in a sparsely populated corner of southeastern Arizona.
Throughout his life Arthur had been interested in the Old West. For him the major attraction of the Calhoun Ranch was that it contained the remains of a short-lived 1880s boomtown called Calhoun. Rather than constructing a modern-day ranch house, Arthur had chosen to use hand tools to refurbish a few of the ghost town’s crumbling shacks, turning them into humble dwellings where he could live out the remainder of his days in monastic solitude and simplicity.
Over time that very solitude got the best of him and Arthur began to withdraw from the world entirely. As he morphed into being a hermit, Jimmy, by necessity, transitioned into the role of his brother’s keeper. He stopped by regularly—bringing the mail, dropping off groceries, handling the finances, and making sure Arthur’s bills and taxes got paid.
While Jimmy was doing this, he discovered that just because Arthur lived the life of an impoverished ascetic, that didn’t mean he was broke, not by any means. Jimmy learned that there were comfortable sums of money stashed away here and there in banks and investment houses back east. Since there seemed to be plenty of cash to go around, and with no other possible heirs to gum up the works, Jimmy—under the guise of handling Arthur’s financial affairs—began spending some of that excess cash on himself.
He paid off his rig so he owned it free and clear. When it came time to find a place to live, he settled on Road Forks, New Mexico—a dusty stopping-off place at the junction of I-10 and US Highway 80. His loads took him cross-country on I-10 on a regular basis, and Road Forks was the freeway interchange closest to Calhoun Ranch.
Using some of Arthur’s money, Jimmy paid cash for several big-ticket items—a utility-equipped lot on the edge of town, a brand-new forty-by-sixty-foot double-wide mobile home, and an equally new sturdy four-wheel-drive pickup that he could use to ferry goods and supplies back and forth to Arthur’s ranch.
By the time Arthur turned sixty-five, he was losing his grip on reality. His mental impairments included carrying on long, one-sided conversations with personages as varied as God, Moses, and Wyatt Earp. He could be completely lucid one day and totally out of it the next. He alternated between unreasoning rages, where he threw things, ranting and raging for hours on end about anything and everything, and periods filled with profound silence, where Arthur sat in almost catatonic stillness
, refusing to utter so much as a single word, sometimes for days at a time.
Jimmy was already contemplating the necessity of hiring some kind of caretaker when, during one of Arthur’s relatively lucid moments, the patient himself had first suggested and then outright insisted that Jimmy go through the process of obtaining a durable power of attorney so he’d “be able to look after things when the time came.”
It didn’t take long for Jimmy to decide that “the time” needed to come sooner rather than later. He enlisted the help of a pair of brothers from Douglas, one a physician and the other an attorney. The doctor diagnosed Arthur as suffering from some form of early-onset dementia, and the lawyer was happy to draft a durable power of attorney and put it in place, leaving Jimmy completely in charge of his brother’s affairs.
Wanting to do bad things to women was something that had been part of Jimmy Ardmore’s psyche for as long as he could remember. Top on his bucket list was having a place where he could take women, hold them prisoner, and do whatever he wanted. One of the falling-down buildings in Calhoun seemed to be just what the doctor ordered. And if he was going to go gathering women to bring back home, it occurred to him it might be handy to put Art out of his misery while at the same time maintaining a second identity—a variation on the theme of having his cake and eating it, too. The close family resemblance between the two men would make that plan entirely feasible.
First, however, Jimmy needed to establish a suitable home base. With Arthur’s permission he took over the town’s only remaining redbrick building. Back in the day, it had served as the Calhoun City Jail. When marauding Apaches had shown up from time to time, the basement under the jail had served as a community safe house.