by J. A. Jance
Frowning, Jeannine stared at the screen. “What am I looking for? What am I supposed to see?”
“I want you to notice what you’re not seeing,” Joanna said. “Junior is wearing short sleeves. Do you see any bite marks or scratches on either of his hands or forearms?”
Jeannine peered at the screen again. “Not really,” she said with a frown.
“May I look, too?” Marianne asked.
Joanna nodded and Jeannine passed the phone to Marianne, who also stared at the photos for several long seconds.
“We know Junior died last night. It’s safe to say the cat ended up in the glory hole about the same time. Believe me, when Lieutenant Wilson handed that kitten over to me a little while ago, she scratched the daylights out of me. If Junior was responsible for her injuries, she would have fought him, too, but there’s not a single scratch or bite mark anywhere on his arms or hands.”
“He might have had her in some kind of restraints,” Jeannine suggested.
“True,” Joanna agreed, “but I didn’t see any evidence of that on the cat, either. If he’d used duct tape, for example, there’d still be adhesive clinging to her coat.”
“You’re saying that someone else besides Junior might be involved?” Marianne asked.
Knowing that anything said at the scene would be subject to Marianne’s chaplaincy vow of silence, Joanna wasn’t concerned about answering.
“We’ll get Dave to use the photos to re-create some 3-D images. Lieutenant Wilson thought the spot where Junior landed was farther away from the side of the hole than a simple fall would suggest.”
“Like maybe he was pushed?”
“Maybe,” Joanna agreed. “And it’s possible whoever tortured that kitten might have had something to do with it.” Joanna turned to Jeannine. “Have there been any reported cases of missing kittens recently?”
The head of Animal Control nodded. “A couple,” she answered. “And now that you mention it, we had a missing Easter bunny, too. In fact, the rabbit and at least one lost puppy were from houses up in the canyon, here. Most of the time when pets go missing like that, we chalk it up to coyotes.”
“In this case, the coyotes may be getting a bum rap,” Joanna observed, “and perhaps Junior Dowdle is, too.”
“What do you want me to do?” Jeannine asked.
“Take the kitten to Dr. Ross. Tell her that there’s a slim chance that a killer may have left trace evidence on the kitten’s fur. We’ll need her to take swabs of every speck of blood she finds, in case there’s been some DNA transfer.”
“Will do,” Jeannine said.
“In the meantime,” Joanna continued, “I’ll dispatch a detective to Dr. Ross’s clinic to stand by while the animal is being treated and the samples collected. If human DNA is present, we’ll need to maintain the chain of evidence, the same way we do when Dr. Machett performs an autopsy.”
Nodding, Jeannine strode off, cradling the injured kitten’s crate in her arms as tenderly as if she were carrying a baby. She was driving away when a sheriff’s department unmarked patrol car pulled up. Detective Deb Howell, one of Joanna’s three homicide detectives, stepped out.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “Dispatch told me somebody was dead. When I asked homicide, suicide, or accident, they had nothing to tell me.”
Joanna responded to Deb’s question with one of her own. “Who’s back at the office, Ernie Carpenter or Jaime Carbajal?”
“Both,” Deb answered. “They were there doing paperwork when I left. Why?”
“I have an assignment for one of them,” Joanna said. “Whoever draws that short straw isn’t going to thank me.”
Over the years Joanna and her entire investigation team had stood in on their share of autopsies. Still, it was one thing to be in the morgue while an M.E. dissected a dead body. It was quite another to be in a treatment room with a veterinarian working on a living, breathing kitten. Joanna wasn’t sure if she’d be able to handle a situation like that, and she wasn’t sure how either one of the Double C’s would respond, either. When her call was put through to the bullpen, Ernie Carpenter answered.
“We’ve got a chain-of-evidence problem,” Joanna told him. “I need someone to go to Dr. Ross’s office and stand by while she works on a badly injured kitten.”
“As in a kitten that’s still alive?” Ernie asked.
“Junior Dowdle was found dead, and the injured kitten was found nearby,” Joanna explained. “There may be blood evidence on the kitten that will help us determine what happened to Junior.”
“Sorry,” Ernie said. “It sounds like Jaime’s your man. I fainted dead away in the delivery room when my son was born. I caused such a fuss that Rose wouldn’t let me anywhere near her when our daughter was born two years later. So, no. I can deal with autopsies on dead guys until hell freezes over, but I’m squeamish as all hell when it comes to living creatures.”
Ernie Carpenter had a reputation for being tough as nails, but Joanna didn’t even rib him about his admission.
“All right, then,” Joanna replied. “Send Jaime to Dr. Ross’s office. Since Deb’s going to be making like a mountain goat and heading back to the crime scene, I’d like you to meet me at St. Dominick’s. I want you there when it’s time for me to give Moe and Daisy Maxwell the bad news.”
“They don’t know he’s dead?” Ernie asked.
“Not yet,” Joanna said. “At least I don’t think they know.”
“All right,” Ernie said. “I’m on my way. I’ll find out everything else there is to know when I get there.”
By the time Joanna ended the call, her lead CSI tech, Dave Hollicker, had arrived and was awaiting orders. “What’s the deal?” he asked.
“Junior Dowdle ran away from home last night,” she explained. “He was found dead inside an old mine shaft halfway up the mountain. A crew from the Bisbee Fire Department was called in to retrieve the body and bring it back down here.”
“I saw Ralph Whetson leaving in the minivan,” Deb said, “but where’s Dr. Machett? Shouldn’t the M.E. be here in person? Isn’t that his job?”
“Not today,” Joanna replied. “The M.E. is currently out of town and out of the picture.”
“What about the autopsy, then?” Deb asked. “When is it and who’ll do it?”
“Dr. Machett will do it when he gets back,” Joanna answered. “We don’t have a firm schedule on that. Most likely it won’t happen before Saturday afternoon at the earliest.”
“Where’s the crime scene?” Dave asked.
Joanna pointed. “Up there. The shaft is a glory hole inside a limestone cavern. The entrance to that is hidden inside that second big grove of scrub oak halfway up the hill. If it hadn’t been for Terry and Spike, we never would have found him. The scene’s been pretty well disturbed because of all the comings and goings of the recovery crew. Some additional evidence was found once Junior’s body was moved. Once you retrieve that, I want you to measure the distance from the rim of the glory hole to the point of impact so we can do a computerized simulation. We need to know if he simply fell, took a running jump, or was pushed.”
“Did you take photos?” Dave asked.
“Some, but I want you to take a whole lot more.” She paused and gave Dave a searching look. “How are you in caves?”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said with a grin. “I’m an old spelunker from way back.”
“Good; go talk to Adam Wilson. Bisbee F.D. still has equipment up there to help you in and out. Once you’re back on solid ground, I’d like you and Deb to cover the whole area, starting from the entrance to the cave and working your way down the trail Junior followed. From there go all the way back to his house. Terry and Spike can show you the route. Collect whatever you find along the way.”
“Are we looking for anything in particular?” Dave asked.
“Anything that doesn’t belong,” Joanna said. “Somewhere between point A and point B, I’m hoping you’ll find a mess of cigarette butts or
chewing gum and maybe even some helpful DNA. I also want you to be on the lookout for any kind of blood spatter. Whatever you find, bag it, tag it, and bring it back.”
“What about you?” Deb asked.
“Reverend Maculyea and I are going to meet up with Ernie Carpenter down at St. Dominick’s, where the three of us will have the dubious honor of breaking a few hearts.”
CHAPTER 5
AS JOANNA HEADED BACK DOWN TO ST. DOMINICK’S, TWENTY-FIVE hundred miles away on a hillside outside Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Selma Machett’s small, sad funeral was just getting under way.
Liza Machett had heard about Haven’s Rest Cemetery from one of her customers at Candy’s, and she was surprised to learn that was also the cemetery in which Selma herself had chosen and partially paid for a plot well in advance of her final illness. From its website Liza learned Haven’s Rest offered a low-cost, all-inclusive service that came complete with a memorial service on the grounds, cremation, and burial in a two-foot-by-two-foot plot that was much smaller in both size and cost than a standard burial plot.
Each grave came with a flat granite marker that would cover half of the plot itself. The old cemetery in town featured a motley collection of moss-covered headstones in all sizes and shapes. Some had fallen over completely. Others stood canted at crazy angles. The carved inscriptions there, some of them barely visible, dated back for most of three centuries. Haven’s Rest was different. One of the reasons it was so “affordable” was due to the fact that the uniformly flat headstones meant the whole thing could be mowed by one guy—the funeral director’s brother-in-law—who could cover the entire cemetery on a riding mower in twenty minutes from beginning to end.
Even though Guy had been out of their lives for years, once Selma had gone into hospice, Liza had swallowed her pride and tracked her brother down at his new office somewhere in the wilds of Arizona. He had immediately made it clear that he had written Selma off years ago and that, for him, showing up at the funeral would be nothing short of hypocritical.
“So that’s it, then?” Liza had demanded, her voice rising. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? You wash your hands of everything. You go off to live your perfect life and leave me stuck cleaning up the mess!”
Guy had hung up on her then, and that was the last time they spoke. When Selma died, Liza didn’t bother calling. There was no point. That was why, on this rainy Thursday morning, there was only one folding chair reserved for grieving family members under the blue canvas canopy next to Selma Machett’s tiny grave.
As Craig Masters, the funeral director, intoned his comforting words, Liza was struck by the fact that her mother had had no friends of her own. The people who had come today were Liza’s friends, and most of those were people from work—her fellow employees at the diner and the customers from there as well, all of whom seemed like family but were far less trouble.
Studying those gathered there, Liza sorted the familiar faces in her customary fashion, by order rather than by name: two eggs over easy, hold the hash browns, with English muffin on the side; French toast, no cinnamon, crisp bacon; two eggs scrambled with sausage patty, cottage cheese instead of hash browns; short stack with scrambled eggs, sugar-free maple syrup. These were Candy’s stock-in-trade—guys who worked hard, drove hefty pickup trucks, and brought their big appetites to the diner for breakfast almost every day. When the city had come through and tried to restripe the parking lot to make more spaces for compact cars, Clifford “Candy” Small had gone ballistic.
“These guys all work for a living,” he had told the clipboard-wielding and very much cowed emissary from the City Planning Department. “They need someplace to eat where they can park their trucks without having to worry about scratching somebody’s precious Prius. Now get the hell out of here and leave me alone.”
The guy with the clipboard left. The faded parking lot striping big enough for pickups stayed put, at least for now, and so did the guys who drove them. Many of those same guys had come to the funeral today, along with the restaurant’s full contingent of worker bees. Candy, Liza’s boss, was there, as were her fellow waitresses—Sue Ellen, Honey, Jeanette, Frieda, and Lois. The funeral’s attendees included all the busboys and dishwashers—Ricky, Salvatore, Xavier, and Tommy—and the other two cooks, Alfredo and Cosmo, had shown up as well. Liza was touched that they had all come to the funeral to show their support, and she was equally sure they’d all be coming back to the diner later where some of them would have to work. Candy’s had been closed to the public for the day both so employees could attend the funeral itself, and also because it was the site of the postfuneral reception.
In the twenty-six years Candy had owned the place, he had shuttered his doors only twice before. Once he had been forced to close because the power had gone off for twelve hours and all the food in the coolers went bad. The second time had been in honor of his own mother’s funeral. This was number three.
Someone pushed a button, and the earthenware urn began its slow descent into the ground as Liza, dry-eyed and stone-faced, watched it disappear. The top had just slipped out of sight when a beefy hand dropped heavily onto Liza’s shoulder.
“Sorry,” Candy Small muttered under his breath. “So sorry. Take as much time off as you need. Whenever you’re ready to come back to work, you’ll still have a job.”
Liza looked up at him gratefully because she knew that that single word from him, “sorry,” was meant to cover it all—not only for the fact that Selma Machett was dead, but also for everything that had gone before. He understood more than anyone else the tangled relationship she’d had with her mother because Candy was the only person in town to whom Liza had confided the gory details. Candy was her boss, her friend, and the closest thing to a father Liza Machett ever had.
When it came to stature, Candy Small didn’t match his name—he wasn’t in the least bit small. He had been born with the name of Clifford, although hardly anyone in town remembered his given name. As a child he had never gone anywhere without at least two jawbreakers in his possession—one tucked into his cheek and another held in reserve in the pocket of his jeans. By the time he graduated from eighth grade, the other kids and most of the teachers, too, had started calling him Candy. In high school a few of the older kids had tried making fun of him for having a girlish-sounding name. Back then, Candy had yet to grow to his full height of six foot four. Even so, once he had cleaned the clocks of all his would-be tormentors, no one ever made fun of his name again, at least not to his face.
Occasionally a new traveling salesman, making a cold call, would stop by Candy’s Diner with the preconceived notion that the owner of the place would turn out to be some blue-haired lady in her sixties or seventies. That would have been true if Candy’s widowed mother, Wanda, had still been at the helm. Instead, she had retired to Florida several years before her death, passing the family diner, previously named Wanda’s, along to her oversize son. Employees always got a kick out of seeing the startled expressions on the hapless newcomers’ faces when Candy, all three hundred pounds of him, emerged from the kitchen, wiping his huge hands on his apron and demanding to know what they wanted.
The newbies quickly learned that when it came to business, Candy Small drove a hard bargain. When it came to people, however, the man was a pushover. If a kids’ sports team in town needed a sponsor, he was there. If the high school band was looking to raise money for new uniforms or a trip to the Rose Bowl, he was happy to oblige. And if someone was down on his or her luck, Candy would help out by having a load of groceries delivered to the home of a struggling single mother or sending one of his busboys out to shovel the sidewalks of elderly people who could no longer handle that task themselves. Candy’s innate kindness was how he had come into Liza Machett’s life in the first place.
He had heard about her situation from one of Liza’s teachers at school. When she had fled home that morning with a high school diploma, no money, and no prospects, he had taken a chance on her. First he gav
e her a job in his restaurant and then he helped her find a place to live, advancing her enough money to cover the first and last month’s rent on an apartment. Liza wasn’t the first employee he had helped, and she wasn’t the last, either, which partially explained the diner’s stable of long-term and very loyal employees.
As Craig Masters closed out Selma’s brief ceremony, he announced that everyone was welcome to come to the reception. Liza knew that she’d be given a ride to the restaurant in the funeral home limo, so she stayed where she was as the small crowd dispersed. Only when the others were gone did the single stranger in attendance—a stoop-shouldered, balding old man wearing a rain slicker and leaning on a cane—make his approach. When he arrived at Liza’s chair, he spoke to her in a quiet voice as if concerned about being overheard.
“I knew your father,” he said. “Back when he still drove a bread truck, back before he took off. I’ve been out of the game for a long time now, but I still hear things on occasion. I’d be careful if I was you, Miss Machett. Those guys don’t never forgive, they don’t forget, and they don’t play around, neither.”
Having delivered what sounded very much like a warning, he turned abruptly and limped away, threading a path between the granite markers and leaving behind a trail of footsteps in the damp grass. Watching him go, Liza was left with a hundred unasked questions. She wanted to chase after him and say, “You knew my father? Who are you? What bread truck? What can you tell me?” But she did not. Could not. It was almost as if she were bolted to that flimsy folding chair.
She was still watching him walk away when Mr. Masters appeared at her elbow, holding out a hand to assist her to her feet. “Ready?” he asked.
“That man,” she said, pointing toward the figure disappearing in the distance. “Do you know who he is or where he’s from?”