Remains of Innocence

by J. A. Jance

  “First we’ll get her some veterinary care,” Joanna answered. “Then we’ll try to find her owner.”

  When Joanna pulled her telephone out of her pocket, she was surprised to discover it was nearly eight o’clock. Close to two hours had passed since she had first arrived in the parking lot at St. Dominick’s. With the victim found and identified, Joanna’s first call was to Chief Bernard.

  “I’ve seen him,” she said. “It’s Junior, all right.”

  “He’s dead then?” Bernard asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Figured as much,” Bernard said. “Someone from the fire crew just called for Reverend Maculyea and she took off in a hell of a hurry. My guess is she’s on her way to you right now.” He paused then asked, “How did it happen?”

  “He either fell or was pushed,” Joanna answered. “In any case, I’d say he died on impact. That’s not official, but it’s what I saw.”

  “Have you called Dr. Machett?” Chief Bernard asked. “If the body’s on the far side of the highway, it’s not inside the city limits—your jurisdiction instead of mine.”

  “I haven’t called him yet,” Joanna answered, “but I will.”

  “Best of luck with that,” the chief said. “So what’s the deal? Are we dealing with an accident, a suicide, or a homicide?”

  Joanna remembered what Lieutenant Wilson had said about the possibility that Junior might have jumped or been pushed. “Too soon to tell,” she answered.

  “He died on impact?”

  “That’s how it looks.”

  “Knowing he didn’t suffer will be a comfort to Moe and Daisy.”

  Joanna thought about the horribly damaged kitten. Hearing about that wouldn’t provide the Maxwells any comfort at all.

  “There are some troubling details at the scene that will need to be investigated and could be difficult for Moe and Daisy to handle,” she told him. “Whatever you do, don’t let them come here. For one thing, it’s rough terrain. I doubt either one of them is in any condition to make the climb.” She paused for a moment. “The Maxwells belong to St. Dom’s, don’t they?”

  “That’s my understanding,” Chief Bernard said.

  “Before you call off your search teams, have Father Rowan take Moe and Daisy into his office. Ask him to have them wait with him there until Marianne and I arrive.”

  “Does that mean you’ll be doing the next-of-kin notification?” Chief Bernard asked. “What about Dr. Machett? Shouldn’t he be there, too?”

  “As I said, he’s one of my next calls.”

  “Okay,” Chief Bernard said with a sigh. “Better you than me on both counts—doing the notification and dealing with the M.E.”

  Joanna’s first call was to Dispatch. Tica Romero was now off shift. Joanna’s lead dispatcher, Larry Kendrick, had come on duty.

  “I need a homicide detective and the CSI unit at a crime scene above the highway west of Old Bisbee,” she told him. “I don’t know which detective is up right now. I’m hoping for Deb Howell. I don’t think Ernie Carpenter can handle the climb. Whichever it turns out to be, tell him or her to drive as far as milepost 337. We’re straight up the gully from where the emergency vehicles are parked. If they come that way, they’ll walk right into the crime scene. Have them call my cell when they’re close, and I’ll direct them the rest of the way up the hill.”

  “Got it,” Larry said. “Anything else?”

  “Yes, I need to call the M.E. next, and after that Jeannine Phillips at Animal Control. I’ll make those calls while you’re summoning everybody else.”

  When Joanna dialed the M.E.’s office, the phone was answered by Machett’s gravelly voiced receptionist and secretary, Madge Livingston. Madge had adored Guy Machett’s predecessor and made no bones about despising her current boss. She was a pushy sixty-something who could have retired years earlier. Rumor had it that she was staying on now for no other purpose than to make Guy Machett’s life miserable.

  “Good morning,” Joanna said when she answered. “Sheriff Brady here. Could you put me through to Dr. Machett?”

  According to Guy Machett’s playbook, the M.E. expected to be addressed as Dr. Machett no matter what. None of this informal Doc stuff for him. “Doc,” he had informed Joanna snippily early on when she had erred in that regard, “is one of the seven dwarfs. Do I look short to you?”

  You look like a jerk, she had thought, but she hadn’t said so.

  “Does this have anything to do with you guys having the highway shut down? What happened? Did a couple of drug dealers off each other?” Madge demanded. “Good riddance. Maybe it’ll spare the taxpayers some expense.”

  “It’s not a couple of drug dealers,” Joanna said patiently. “Now could you please put me through to Dr. Machett?”

  “I can’t. He’s on his way out of town and won’t be back for two days. He just left.”

  “Call him back,” Joanna said. “We need him.”

  “It’ll be better for me if you call him,” Madge said.

  Joanna found the situation almost laughable. Chief Bernard didn’t want to call Guy Machett and neither did the M.E.’s own secretary. No doubt Madge was right. Whoever had the misfortune of interrupting whatever was penciled into Dr. Guy Machett’s day-planner was going to get an earful.

  “Do you have his cell-phone number?” Madge asked.

  It was Joanna’s turn to sigh. “Yes,” she said, scrolling through her contacts. “I’ve got it.”

  She punched in the number. “Sheriff Brady here,” she said when Dr. Machett answered. “We’ve got a body for you.”

  “Crap,” he grumbled. “Just what I wanted on a bright spring morning. Who and where?”

  “It’s a male named Junior Dowdle who took a bad fall.”

  “You’ve already identified him?”

  “Junior is someone I know,” Joanna explained. She wasn’t surprised that the M.E. didn’t recognize the name. Daisy’s Café was far beneath Guy Machett’s level of sophistication. “Junior was found at the bottom of a glory hole inside one of the limestone caves above Highway 80 in Old Bisbee. Outside Old Bisbee, actually,” she corrected. “My jurisdiction rather than Alvin’s.”

  “Did you say he’s in a cave?” Machett asked.

  “That’s right. He went off a thirty-foot drop into an old mine shaft. The guys from the fire department can probably raise and lower you in and out on a rope.”

  “Me on a rope?” Machett said with a short laugh. “Are you kidding? Couldn’t I just swing in on a vine?”

  Cochise County—Joanna’s jurisdiction as well as Dr. Machett’s—included huge tracts of empty, mesquite-covered desert. Dr. Machett always seemed offended that the people who lived and died there often did their dying in inconvenient, out-of-the-way places.

  “I’ve never been in a cave,” Machett declared, “and I’ve never wanted to be, either. Just because some brain-dead spelunker decides to die in a hole in the ground doesn’t mean I’m going to go up and down a rope ladder to examine the guy in situ. No way. They don’t pay me enough money to go crawling around in snake-infested caves.”

  Joanna remembered what Adam Wilson had said about the M.E. not wanting to dirty one of his precious suits, which, Joanna had noticed, were almost always of the expensive Italian-made variety. Cochise County obviously paid him enough to make Dr. Machett’s expensive wardrobe possible. As for snakes? Joanna had seen no sign of one of those anywhere inside the cave.

  “Are you saying you want me to have the guys from the fire department retrieve the remains before you take a look at them?”

  “By all means. Tell ’em to have at it!”

  Joanna heard the genuine relief in Machett’s voice. It occurred to her that maybe his reluctance wasn’t just about the suit. Maybe the M.E. was actually afraid of cold dark places and of snakes, too.

  “Once they get the dead guy out, have them call my new diener, Ralph Whetson, to come pick up the body.”

  The first time Machett had dropped the
five-dollar word “diener” into casual conversation, Joanna had gone to the trouble of looking it up. She knew it was highbrow, in-crowd jargon that meant nothing more or less than “morgue assistant.” She might have liked Dr. Machett more if he hadn’t insisted on using it at every possible opportunity. She also noted that where the rescue crew on the mountain had spoken with unfailing respect about “the remains,” Guy Machett felt free to refer to “the dead guy” with something verging on contempt.

  “Any idea when you’ll be able to do the autopsy?” Joanna asked.

  “Not until Saturday sometime. I’m out of town today and tomorrow, getting back late in the evening, so probably not first thing in the morning, either. Maybe in the afternoon. I’ll have to let you know. Do you want Ralph Whetson’s number?”

  “I can get it,” Joanna said. “Thanks.”

  Ending the call, she went over to the group of men gathered near the entrance of the cave. “Dr. Machett isn’t available. He says you should bring the remains up now,” she told them. “I’ll call Ralph Whetson and have him wait down on the highway for you to bring Junior there.”

  As the crew went into body-retrieval mode, Corporal Fisher stood up and handed the kitten to her. “Duty calls,” he said.

  Tucking the sleeping feline inside her shirt, Joanna dialed Animal Control. The woman in charge, Jeannine Phillips, was a longtime Cochise County Animal Control officer. Years earlier, when the unit had been moved over to the sheriff’s department, supposedly on a temporary basis, Jeannine had been none too happy about the new chain of command. There had been a period of bad blood between her and Joanna. Then, just when their relationship was finally smoothing out, Jeannine had been severely wounded in an altercation with people running a dogfighting ring at the far north end of the county. When her injuries left Jeannine incapable of returning to active duty, Jeannine had accepted a desk job. With her in charge, Joanna’s Animal Control unit had a reputation for being one of the best in the region.

  “Sheriff Brady here. I’m up above Old Bisbee. Where’s your closest ACO?” Joanna asked. “I need one.”

  “Natalie Wilson is somewhere out around Double Adobe,” Jeannine answered. “She’s coming to the shelter with a load of north county strays. Why? What’s up?”

  “I’ve got a badly injured kitten who needs some immediate attention from Dr. Ross.”

  Millicent Ross was the only vet in town these days. She was also Jenny’s boss and Jeannine Phillips’s longtime domestic partner.

  “What happened?” Jeannine asked.

  “She took a bad fall among other things,” Joanna answered. “There may be some internal injuries, but she’s also been severely traumatized. Somebody shredded her ears, most likely with a razor blade. They also covered her body with burns from lit cigarettes.”

  Joanna heard a sharp intake of breath over the phone.

  “Okay,” Jeannine said. “I’ll put the phone on voice mail and come there myself. The last thing that poor kitten needs is to be stuck riding around in a truck full of barking dogs. Where are you?”

  “A little north of the old Glory Hole,” Joanna said. “Milepost 337. We’re up the mountain right now. A dead man was found in a cave along with the kitten. The fire department is in the process of recovering the remains. When they bring him down to Dr. Machett’s minivan, I’ll bring the kitten down, too.”

  After calling Madge back and asking her to dispatch Ralph Whetson, Joanna stood up gingerly so as not to disturb the kitten. She walked over to the entrance of the cave in time to see a group of sweat-soaked men emerge, carrying Junior’s blanket-swathed body in a basket.

  Once outside, they paused long enough to remove their helmets and stand at attention, waiting. Terry Gregovich and Spike joined them. Corporal Fisher did not. He was the only one of Wilson’s crew who moved determinedly away from the quiet gathering, his helmet still firmly atop his head.

  Lieutenant Wilson was the last to emerge. When he saw Fisher walking away and still wearing his helmet, the lieutenant called after him. “Get back here, Fisher,” he ordered. “Helmet off. Show some respect.”

  “Respect?” Fisher repeated. He stopped moving but he didn’t turn around, and he didn’t remove the helmet, either. “Are you kidding me? Did you see what that monster did to that poor cat? He doesn’t deserve any respect. If you think I’m going to be part of this . . .”

  “If you want to have a job when this incident is over,” Wilson growled, “then you will be part of it because I’m ordering you to be part of it. I don’t care what you think Junior Dowdle did or didn’t do. Now get back here and stand at attention with everybody else.”

  “But—” Fisher began.

  “No buts,” Wilson warned him.

  Sighing, Corporal Fisher complied. He returned to the crew, removed his helmet, and came to attention. Once he was in place, Wilson assumed the same stance and bowed his head.

  “Let us pray,” he said quietly.

  One by one the men clustered around the blanket-shrouded body bowed their heads, too, including Deputy Terry Gregovich and Sheriff Joanna Brady.

  “Into thy hands, O Lord, we commend his spirit,” Wilson intoned. “Amen.”

  “Amen,” the others agreed.

  “Amen,” Joanna added.

  It was a quiet moment—a simple moment. It was also, Joanna feared, the last vestige of real respect that would ever be paid to Junior Dowdle. If it turned out he was responsible for torturing the kitten, the good things the man had done before would soon be forgotten. She was sorry to have been there for the solemn ceremony and glad to have been there—sorry Junior was dead and glad to have witnessed the quiet decency of the group of hardworking men who were taking his remains back home to the people who would grieve over Junior’s death no matter what he had done.

  Some of the men made as if to gather up their equipment. Lieutenant Wilson forestalled that with a shake of his head. “Leave it for now,” he said. “We’ll get it later. Right now let’s walk him down the hill.”

  One by one the other members of the crew fell into step behind the four guys charged with carrying Junior’s body. The ungainly procession made its way back down the rugged pathway to the highway in complete silence. Joanna, bringing up the rear, occasionally had to scoot along on her butt in order to keep from falling and jarring the sleeping kitten tucked inside her shirt.

  Her descent was the exact opposite of dignified. When she finally reached the bottom, she scrambled to her feet and brushed off the coating of gray dust that covered her clothing. Looking around, she was grateful to find Marliss Shackleford had not yet arrived on the scene. The last thing the sheriff of Cochise County needed right then was to have her photo plastered on the front page of the next day’s Bisbee Bee with a demeaning caption saying something to the effect of SHERIFF JOANNA BRADY FALLS ON BUTT WHILE RESCUING INJURED KITTEN.

  With Moe’s and Daisy’s broken hearts hanging in the balance, Joanna thought the less said about that poor kitten, the better.

  CHAPTER 4

  BY THE TIME JOANNA REACHED THE HIGHWAY, THE BASKET LADEN with Junior Dowdle’s earthly remains had already been loaded into the Dodge Caravan known around town as the M.E.’s “meat wagon.” As the van pulled away, Lieutenant Wilson sidled up to Joanna. “A word, please?”

  “Of course,” Joanna said. “What’s up?”

  In answer, Wilson removed an iPhone from his pocket. After turning it on and locating a file, he handed it to Joanna. Squinting at the screen in the bright sunlight, all she could see was what looked like a pile of brown and white rags, lying on the rubble-strewn floor.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “This mess was under Junior’s body,” Wilson said tersely. “I can’t tell for certain, because they were all pretty well smashed together, but I think it’s a bunny, a puppy, and at least one other kitten. They weren’t visible until we moved the body.”

  Joanna swallowed hard. That was why the whole cavern had reeked of death. Junior D
owdle wasn’t the only victim who had died there; so had several others.

  “I guess I’ll need to send one of my techs back down to take more photos and gather more evidence,” Joanna said after collecting herself.

  “I thought you would,” Wilson agreed. “That’s why I told the guys to leave our equipment in place.”

  Marianne’s VW appeared on the scene. In her role as chaplain, she was there to offer support for the first responders as well as to comfort the other people affected by the incident. Joanna had finished briefing her when the folks from her department began showing up.

  Jeannine Phillips had something of a reputation as a speed demon. This time, fueled by a case of severe moral outrage, she was the first of Joanna’s officers to arrive. Jeannine came equipped with a tiny receiving-blanket-lined pet crate. When Joanna removed the sleeping animal from inside her shirt and placed her in the crate, the exhausted kitten didn’t so much as stir.

  “Poor little thing,” Jeannine murmured, peering at the animal’s visible injuries. “Who would do such a thing?”

  “At first glance,” Joanna replied, “it looks like the bad guy could be Junior Dowdle.”

  “Daisy Maxwell’s Junior?” Jeannine asked in disbelief. “The guy who always hands out the menus?”

  Joanna nodded.

  “No way!” Jeannine exclaimed.

  “As I said, that’s how it looks,” Joanna replied. “Junior was found dead on the floor of an old glory hole. We found the kitten in the glory hole too, and she’s not the only animal victim. I’ve just been told the bodies of three other dead animals were found under Junior’s body—another kitten, a rabbit, and a puppy, too.”

  “I can’t believe Junior would be capable of a stunt like this,” Jeannine declared. “I would have sworn the man didn’t have a mean bone in his body.”

  “That’s my thought, too,” Joanna agreed. “My initial assumption was that he was responsible, but as I came down the mountain, I arrived at a different conclusion, and I believe the crime scene photos bear that out. Let’s take a look.”

  Removing her iPhone from her pocket, Joanna turned it on, found the camera roll, and then scrolled through the set of photos she’d taken inside the cave. After studying several of them closely, she handed the phone over to Jeannine. “Here,” she said. “Take a look at this one and the three that follow.”