Devil’s Claw

by J. A. Jance

  Burton Kimball sighed and nodded. “Let me remind you that I’m also a damned fine defense attorney, but that is what I meant when I warned you that she might make trouble.”

  And now, as Joanna sat in church not listening to the sermon, that was what she was worried about, too. Clayton Rhodes had probably been dead for several hours when she had found him in his exhaust-filled garage, but she had had no way of knowing that at the time. She hadn’t been worried about preserving evidence when she smashed a hole in the door to get inside. She hadn’t been wearing gloves or worrying about leaving a trail of fingerprints when she reached in through the driver’s window to turn off the ignition key. She had been intent on saving the man’s life.

  Unfortunately, her fingerprints would be found there, and they wouldn’t be wear-dated. If Reba set out to do so, she might be able to make the case that the prints had been placed on Clayton Rhodes’ ignition key long before he died rather than after. The idea that Sheriff Joanna Brady herself could turn into a homicide suspect should have been laughable. It might have been, if it hadn’t been so scary.

  “Therefore choose life,” Marianne was saying from the pulpit. “Choose it for yourself and for your children. Choose it with all your heart and all your mind and all your soul. Because it’s how you choose life now that determines both the now and the hereafter. If you can’t choose this simple living and breathing life, how will you choose eternal life? Because they go hand in hand, you see. It’s like what that old fifties song says about love and marriage,” she added, aiming a beaming smile in Joanna and Butch’s direction. “You can’t have one without the other. Therefore choose life. Let us bow our heads in prayer.”

  With his shaven head glowing deep-red, Butch reached over and folded Joanna’s hand in his. “I told you we should have sat in the back row,” he muttered under his breath.

  After the closing hymn, Butch and Joanna went hand in hand as they worked their way down the center aisle to where the Reverend Marianne Maculyea and her husband, Jeff Daniels, stood greeting attendees. Wanting to have a private word with her best friend, Joanna stalled long enough to be last in line.

  Once Marianne’s early bouts of pregnancy-related nausea had finally subsided, she had gone on to have an uneventful and so-far uncomplicated pregnancy. Because Marianne would be officiating at the wedding, Butch and Joanna had set the ceremony for early April so as not to conflict with the baby’s due date. The wedding was now less than a week away. According to Dr. Thomas Lee, Marianne’s attending physician, the baby was expected in three.

  Finished with shaking hands at the door, Marianne stood with one hand massaging her sore back and with the other resting on a belly so swollen that it left a telltale shelf protruding beneath her clerical vestments. With a squeal of joy, Jeff and Marianne’s adopted three-year-old daughter, Ruth, escaped the nursery attendant and slipped under her mother’s robe for a game of peekaboo with whoever happened to be nearby. As the last of the congregation headed for the fellowship hall and coffee hour, Jeff captured Ruth, scooped the squirming child into his arms, and carried her downstairs. Butch and Jenny followed, leaving Joanna and Marianne with a rare moment of relative peace and privacy.

  Always attuned to what was going on with other people, Marianne gave Joanna a searching look. “Are you all right?” she asked. “You seemed pretty distracted during the service.”

  “What makes you say that?” Joanna countered.

  Marianne smiled. “Because you missed not one but two of the in-crowd jokes I put in the sermon especially for you. What’s going on?”

  “Clayton Rhodes died and left me his place in his will,” Joanna blurted.

  Surprise washed over Marianne’s face. “The whole thing?”

  Joanna nodded.

  “What about his daughter?” Marianne asked.

  “I talked to Burton Kimball on the way to church this morning. According to him, she’s not a happy camper. She may go so far as to try to accuse me of murdering her father.”

  Marianne’s gray eyes turned dark and stormy. “You can’t be serious.”

  “I am. Dead serious.”

  Marianne took a deep breath. “We need to get together and talk about this. We should also discuss any last-minute hitches or glitches in wedding plans. What are you and Butch and Jenny doing this afternoon?”

  “Cleaning house,” Joanna replied. “My new mother-in-law shows up tomorrow, remember? We’re doing the oven, cabinets, closets-the whole bit.”

  “I have an idea,” Marianne suggested. “I was supposed to have a steering-committee meeting this afternoon, but it’s been canceled. Before you and Butch go tear into your house, how about if we all meet at Daisy’s for lunch as soon as coffee hour is over? I’ll con Jenny into looking after Ruth, and that way maybe the four of us will have a moment or two to think straight.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me,” Joanna replied with a laugh. “I’m sure Butch will agree to anything that will delay working on the oven that much longer.”

  Joanna had barely set foot inside the fellowship hall when she was pounced upon by Marliss Shackleford, who had clearly been waiting just inside the door. It was an unfortunate piece of small-town life that both Sheriff Brady and her fourth-estate nemesis attended the same church-one which both of them refused to leave. Usually Joanna managed to avoid Marliss. This time she was trapped.

  “It sounds as though you’ve had a busy few days of it,” Marliss began sweetly enough. “It’s too bad about what happened to Clayton. I know he’s been such a help to you all this time. How are you and Jenny managing without him?”

  “We’re doing all right,” Joanna said stiffly.

  “And then, of course, you do have Butch. I understand he’s something of a city slicker, but he seems bright enough.”

  “He is trainable,” Joanna returned. “Just barely.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply that he wasn’t.”

  Of course, you didn’t, Joanna thought. “Of course not,” she said aloud.

  “Have you spoken to Reba Singleton yet?” Marliss asked. “Clayton’s daughter? She’s in town, you know.”

  “We touched base,” Joanna said. “That’s about all.”

  “The Bee is trying to set up an interview for me with her. Molly and Clayton Rhodes were such old-timers around here that Clayton should get more than just the standard, run-of-the-mill obituary. It’s a little out of my usual line of work, but I told my editor I’d be glad to write the piece for them. I’m sure Reba will be able to give me all sorts of insights into the kind of person her father was.”

  Great, Joanna thought. That’s just what I need. The poisoned daughter being interviewed by the original poisoned pen.

  “I’m sure it’ll be very interesting,” she said, sidling away. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, Marliss, I need to catch up with Jenny before she fills up on cookies and punch and makes herself sick.”

  CHAPTER 10

  When it came time to park at Daisy’s Café, Joanna was dismayed to see that the lot was full to overflowing. “Great,” she grumbled. “If it’s already this crowded, it’ll take forever to get a table.”

  “Maybe not,” Butch said cheerfully. “There’s Jeff and Marianne’s VW. If they’re here ahead of us, maybe they’ve already snagged one. If nothing else, they’ll have put our names on the list.”

  Jenny let herself out of the backseat and scampered into the restaurant. Meanwhile, Joanna studied some of the vehicles in the unpaved lot. A surprisingly large number of them looked familiar. In addition to Jeff Daniels’ sea-foam green Bug, Joanna recognized Jim Bob and Eva Lou Brady’s Honda and Angie Kellogg’s aging Omega, along with Eleanor Lathrop’s brand-new Buick. She also caught sight of the fire-engine-red Geo Metro driven by her secretary, Kristin Marsten.

  Joanna looked back at Butch. “Wait a minute,” she said. “Something’s fishy here. Bisbee may be a small town, but it’s a little too much of a coincidence for everyone I know to turn up at the same place at the sam
e time. What’s going on?”

  “Why don’t we go in and see,” he said.

  As soon as Butch held open the door, Joanna caught a glimpse of a bank of balloons lined up down the middle of the dining room. Once she saw the balloons, she knew she’d been had. A burst of applause, accompanied by shouts of “Surprise!” erupted from half the room, which had been screened off to create a semi-private banquet room.

  Joanna turned on Butch. “It’s a shower,” she said accusingly. “Butch Dixon, you tricked me.”

  He tried his best to look contrite, but it didn’t work very well. “I told you I hate cleaning ovens,” he said. “I’ll do almost anything to avoid it.”

  Accompanied by gales of laughter, Marianne Maculyea stepped forward, grabbed Joanna by the arm, and led her toward the far end of the room, where a mound of gifts had been stacked on one table. A grinning, self-satisfied Jenny stood next to the table.

  “You were in on this, too, weren’t you!” Joanna said accusingly.

  Jenny nodded. “But I didn’t tell.”

  “No, you certainly didn’t.”

  “So we pulled it off?” Marianne asked.

  “Completely.”

  “Good.”

  Just then, Joanna found herself enveloped in the warm embrace of her former mother-in-law, Eva Lou Brady. Eva Lou’s exuberant greeting was followed by a reserved hug and a dignified peck on the cheek from Eleanor Lathrop Winfield, Joanna’s own mother. Joanna pulled away from Eleanor in time to see Butch and Jim Bob Brady sidling toward the door.

  “Wait a minute,” she demanded. “Where do you two think you’re going?”

  “This is a shower,” Butch said. “Girls’ stuff,” he added with a wink in Jenny’s direction. “You can’t expect us men to hang around here.”

  “But when will you be back? How will Jenny and I get home?”

  He grinned. “I’m sure someone here will give you a ride. In the meantime, we’re going up the street for a guy lunch. No girls allowed. Except for Ruth, of course, who already left with Jeff. But since she’s just a baby, she doesn’t count.”

  Butch followed Jim Bob out the door before Joanna could lob a rejoinder in his direction. By then an apron-clad Junior Dowdle had walked up behind her, grinning broadly and carrying a black baseball cap with the word bride embroidered on the front.

  “Put on!” he demanded urgently, handing Joanna the cap. “Put on now.”

  Knowing the cap would give her a terrible case of hat-hair, Joanna tried to weasel out of it. “Do I have to?” she asked.

  “Put on!” Junior ordered again. Amid another burst of general laughter, Joanna did as she was told.

  Within minutes, Joanna lost herself in the carefree mood of a wedding shower. Daisy Maxwell, owner of Daisy’s Café, had provided platters of nachos, tacos, and mini burritos. For a change, instead of hustling around with a pencil in her beehive hairdo and taking orders, Daisy herself was seated among the guests while a wait staff that included her husband, Moe, took care of the shower guests as well as the other Sunday diners on the far side of the balloon barricade.

  After lunch and pieces of a wonderful lemon chiffon cake, it was time for Joanna to tackle the mountain of gifts. She was assisted in the unwrapping process by Angie Kellogg, who had finagled a day off from her relief bartending job at the Blue Moon Saloon and Lounge up in Old Bisbee’s Brewery Gulch. Angie, a former L.A. hooker, was someone whose rehabilitation Joanna and Marianne Maculyea had taken on as a joint project. Together they had helped her exit her previous line of work and had eased her way into a far more settled existence in Bisbee. Her new life came complete with a boyfriend named Dennis Hacker, an English biologist who specialized in reintroducing parrots into the wild forest lands of southern Arizona.

  Angie’s newfound happiness was a testimony to the fact that Joanna Brady was making a contribution with her own life-that her efforts were accomplishing some good. That afternoon it was especially gratifying for Joanna to see Angie laughing, talking, and seemingly completely at ease among a group of women in whose presence she would have been petrified and/or self-conscious only a few years earlier. It was also fun to see Angie, as designated maid of honor, set about the mundane task of stringing colorful package-wrapping ribbon through a paper plate in order to make the traditional shower ribbon bouquet.

  Not far into the pile of gifts, Joanna was grateful the men had been banished to parts unknown. Angie Kellogg’s carefully understated gift was a beautiful box of perfumed bath oils and powders. Other attendees’ gifts, however, weren’t nearly so restrained. There were several sets of sexy, slinky underwear, including a particularly racy black bikini-cut duo from Kristin Marsten, Joanna’s secretary. There were two separate peignoir sets. One, from Joanna’s mother, was a stylish but chastely cut long gown and robe in a demure cream. To Joanna’s amazement, the one from Eva Lou Brady, her former mother-in-law, was a short, flimsy see-through froth of emerald lace and silk that left nothing to the imagination.

  “Eva Lou!” Joanna exclaimed. “It’s lovely, but where on earth did you get this?”

  Eva Lou Brady blushed and beamed with pleasure. “Victoria’s Secret,” she said. “I ordered it from a catalog. You don’t think I’d actually set foot in a place like that, do you? I’d be too embarrassed.”

  Glancing back at the growing pile of unwrapped lingerie on the table, Joanna looked around the room. “Are you guys trying to tell me something?” she asked.

  Eva Lou nodded. “You’re a little too practical for your own good at times,” she said. “It’s time you lightened up. Time you stopped taking everything so seriously.”

  “I’ll try,” Joanna said with a laugh. Then, ignoring the strictures about not breaking any strings at a wedding shower, she tore into the next package.

  By two o’clock, the party was winding down. Most of the guests had left. Marianne was sitting on a chair with her feet up while Joanna and Kristin Marsten loaded the gifts into Eleanor Winfield’s Buick. “I’ll bet you were in on planning this, too, weren’t you?”

  Kristin, a good-looking blond, twenty-something, had been the previous sheriff’s private secretary long before Joanna’s election. Attached to the previous administration and resentful at having a female boss, Kristin had been difficult to handle at first. She and Joanna had lived through several stormy periods, not only right after the election but again when Dick Voland, Joanna’s former chief deputy, had left the department. Things were better now. Joanna was somewhat concerned about the fact that Kristin was dating Terry Gregovich, her department’s K-9 officer. However, since the secretary and deputy were being discreet about their relationship, and since they didn’t hang around mooning at one another on the job, Joanna hadn’t voiced too many complaints.

  “I did help,” Kristin admitted. “Reverend Maculyea wanted to have the party sometime during the week, but I told her she’d be better off having it on a weekend when I could make sure Chief Deputy Montoya was on call and looking after things.”

  “Is that why my beeper hasn’t gone off even once today?” Joanna asked.

  Kristin glanced shyly in her boss’s direction. “Could be,” she said. “I told Frank not to call you out unless it was a dire emergency.”

  “Thanks, Kristin, it must be working. I was beginning to worry that maybe my pager was out of order.”

  “I’ll go get the last load of presents,” Kristin told her. “You wait here.”

  Joanna was standing next to the open passenger door when she heard a car waiting to park in the next space. She moved out of the way. Only when the driver unfolded his long legs and stepped out of a late-model white Camry did she recognize Dick Voland. It was the first time she had encountered the man in person since their confrontation on the road to High Lonesome Ranch months earlier.

  “Hello, Dick,” she said, struggling to keep her tone of voice even. It was bad enough seeing him again after so many months. The fact that she had to peer up at him from under the brim of that ridiculous
bride-inscribed baseball cap made it that much worse. “How’s it going?” she asked.

  “Fine,” Voland answered. When he hoisted his pants, Joanna noticed they were quite loose around the middle. His belt showed marks where it had once been fastened before a considerable loss of weight. Joanna could see that the man was in far better shape than he had been in those first unhappy months after his divorce when he had been drinking too much and not taking care of himself.

  “You look good,” she said. “You’ve lost weight.”

  Nodding, Dick Voland patted what had once been a bulging belly. “I’ve been working out again,” he told her.

  “I’ll say,” Joanna replied.

  Just then Kristin emerged from the restaurant bearing the last load of gifts. On top of the stack was the box from Victoria’s Secret. Kristin paused uncertainly when she caught sight of Dick Voland.

  “Hello, Mr. Voland,” she mumbled. “Good to see you.”

  As she bent over to put the armload of gifts in the car, the topmost lid caught on the side of the trunk door and spilled a flimsy froth of tissue-wrapped green nightgown out onto the ground. “Oh, no,” she wailed. “I’ve probably ruined it.”

  Dick Voland reached down and picked it up, dusting it off as he did so. “No harm done,” he said, holding it out to her. “A little bit of dust never hurt anything.”

  Embarrassed, Kristin ignored the proffered gown and fled back inside, leaving Joanna the task of dealing with the gown herself.

  “Thanks,” Joanna said as she stuffed it back into the box. Waiting long enough for her own blush to dissipate, she closed the trunk. When she straightened up, Dick Voland was still looming over her. He may have lost weight, but he was still six feet four. Joanna was wearing two-inch heels. The top of her baseball cap barely grazed the bottom of his chin.

  “What can I do for you, Dick?” she asked, trying to put their conversation on some kind of businesslike basis.

  For his part, Voland didn’t appear to be any happier about the situation than Joanna was. Acting for all the world like a dumbstruck teenager, he stared down at his feet for some time before he spoke.