Remains of Innocence

by J. A. Jance

  Then there was Junior. Poor Junior had been anything but arrogant. In fact, he appeared to be innocence personified, but he was dead, too. Was he also involved in some kind of secret life that Moe and Daisy Maxwell knew nothing about? Now that George Winfield had found the bruising and declared Junior’s death a homicide, it was time to take a closer look at that crime scene. Someone must have been in the cave with Junior when he died, someone who had gone in and out of the cave by slithering under the grate the same way Junior had.

  Joanna remembered that after Adam Wilson had used his saw to cut through the grating, he had wrenched it open wide enough for people to pass through, but the metal bars themselves were still sitting there, cemented into the limestone. Joanna sat up in bed and used her iPhone to write herself a note: Find out if Casey dusted the grating for prints.

  Feeling she had finally done something constructive, Joanna put down the phone and tried to sleep. Then, just as she was about to drift off, she remembered little purple-haired Ruth Nolan trotting along at Marliss Shackleford’s side. Ruth had used her self-proclaimed status as a blogger to justify her presence at the Machett crime scene. If she was pals with Marliss Shackleford, the girl probably also viewed herself as something of an intrepid reporter.

  The thing that made Joanna’s eyes pop back open was the realization that Ruth’s family lived just up the street from Moe and Daisy’s house. Ernie had questioned the next-door neighbors, the Radners and their son, Jason. They had claimed no knowledge about what had happened. Now Joanna found herself wondering if anyone had bothered to interview Ruth or Lucas Nolan. They were kids who lived on the same street. They were also kids who didn’t seem to have the same kind of parental supervision as some of the other kids in town. If the mother had a reputation for staying out until all hours, maybe the kids came and went at odd hours, too.

  Back at the Machett crime scene Ruth Nolan had asked Joanna for an interview. That was a request Joanna was now prepared to grant at the first possible opportunity. Before she did so, though, Joanna planned to take a look at Ruth’s blog and see what kind of stuff was posted there.

  With that much resolved in her head, Joanna was finally able to fall asleep.

  CHAPTER 16

  BRUISER HANDED LIZA OFF TO KIMI SUE AND JONATHAN “OXMAN” Warner in the coffee shop at All Truck Travel outside of Kansas City. Based on size alone, it was clear why Howard Prince had earned the moniker Bruiser. It wasn’t at all clear how Jonathan had become Oxman, but no one bothered explaining the origin of the nickname to Liza, and she didn’t ask. Once turned loose, however, her new drivers told her everything else.

  Kimi Sue and Oxman were a cheerful couple in their late forties. Onetime banking executives from Columbus, Ohio, they had been forced out of their former careers by a series of bank consolidations that had occurred in the late nineties. Lucky enough to come away with generous severance packages, they had pooled their resources, bought a truck, gotten their CDLs, and taken their show on the road. Fifteen years later they were still traveling together, and, to all appearances, enjoying it immensely. They now owned a home in Barstow, California, the home base of the trucking firm they worked for, but they generally spent very little time there. Instead, they traveled the country eighteen-wheeler style with Major, their tiny goateed Yorkie, along for the ride. Kimi Sue estimated that they listened to at least two hundred books a year as their truck rolled back and forth across the country.

  Even though Bruiser had long since taken his leave, Kimi Sue and Oxman were content to hang around the truck stop, chewing the fat with friends, until well after dark. “Driving directly into the sun is a killer,” Kimi Sue explained. “We usually take an afternoon break until after the sun goes down and then we drive through the night. At least that’s what we do when we’re heading west.”

  While the driving team was taking a break, Liza took one, too. Leaving Kimi Sue and Oxman in the truckers’ lounge, she went into the restaurant and took a seat at the counter, where it felt odd to be on the customer side of things. Ready for a hot meal, she ordered the daily special—fried pork chops, mashed potatoes, and green beans. The pork chops were fine, the mash was instant. The green beans were canned and would never have made the cut at Candy’s. At the end of her meal, when the waitress brought Liza a final coffee refill, she told Liza about her mother who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and who would be having a lumpectomy the following week.

  That was something Liza had learned. The scarf that worked so effectively as a disguise was also a license for strangers to strike up unwelcome conversations about their own or their friends’ or relatives’ battles or near misses with cancer. When the waitress walked away, the man seated next to Liza picked up the cancer thread and ran with it.

  “A lot of people from around here head down to MD Anderson for cancer treatment,” he said. “They’re supposed to be good.”

  Liza had noticed the man when he came in. Wearing a sports jacket, white shirt, and tie, he was better dressed than most of the people in the restaurant. She had him pegged as a salesman of some kind. His next words threw her.

  “So what part of Massachusetts are you from?” he asked.

  Liza almost choked on her coffee. How did he know that’s where she was from? Was he one of the people following her? If so, how could they possibly know she was here? What were his intentions? Would he try to snag her outside in the parking lot and keep her from making it back to the truck?

  Feeling as though she had been stripped of all her supposedly effective disguises, Liza looked around desperately for help. The waitress, coffeepot in hand, was at the far end of the counter. Kimi Sue and Oxman had come into the restaurant, but they were seated in the section reserved for professional drivers.

  The man next to her glanced in her direction, as if waiting for an answer. Had he seen her picture in the news and was he mentally comparing that high school photograph from the Herald with the features of the woman next to him?

  “Boston,” she murmured. It was the best she could do and as far away from Great Barrington as she could manage.

  “Thought so,” he said with a grin. “I can tell a Boston accent a mile away.”

  So that was it—her accent! On the one hand, she was relieved. On the other hand, it was a blow to her confidence. What good were disguises if someone could suss out where she was from the moment she opened her mouth? The less she spoke to anyone, the better.

  “Is that where you’re headed?” he asked.

  “My aunt lives in Dallas,” she said. “I’m going to visit her.”

  When Kimi Sue stood up to leave, Liza happily followed suit. “Nice talking to you,” she said to the man, whose dinner order had just arrived. After paying her tab, she headed for her eighteen-wheeled moving refuge. Crossing the parking lot, she had to force herself to walk rather than run.

  Once at the rig, Kimi Sue gave Liza the option of riding up front with whoever was doing the driving at the time or using the sleeping compartment upstairs, which she would most likely have to share with its usual occupant, Major.

  Having spent ten of the previous twelve hours with Bruiser, a regular fire hose of conversation, Liza didn’t have a problem making the choice. “I’ll take the bunk,” she said. “But are you sure you don’t mind? If one of you needs to sleep, I’ll be glad to come back down.”

  “Don’t you worry about us, honey,” Kimi Sue said. “It’s Oxman’s turn to drive. After all these years, I can sleep damned near anywhere. I’ll grab some shut-eye between now and the next fuel stop. If his back is bothering him by then, he might want to go upstairs. If not, we’ll leave you be. And don’t mind Major. His bark is worse than his bite.”

  Clearly, Major was not fond of having strangers invade his space. When Liza first came up into the bunk, he barked nonstop for the next half hour. By then Liza was seriously questioning her decision. At last, though, with one final grumbling bark, Major turned tail and retreated to the far end of the bunk, where he curl
ed up on one of the two pillows, daring Liza to even try appropriating one of those. For a long time, she simply sat on the edge of the bed, safe in her traveling cocoon, sensing the passage of miles and marveling at how much bigger this long swath of country was—bigger than she had ever imagined. When it finally came time to sleep, she curled up across the foot of the bed, careful to keep from coming into too close contact with the dog’s declared territory.

  They stopped for fuel at a place called Hank’s, a truck stop on the far side of Topeka, a place so deep in the middle of nowhere that no other lights were visible in any direction. During Bruiser’s interminable conversation, he had explained how some male truck drivers used empty milk or juice jars to relieve themselves along the road without having to make numerous stops. The bottle routine evidently didn’t work for Kimi Sue, and Liza knew it wouldn’t work for her, either.

  While waiting for Kimi Sue to exit the restroom, Liza stood in front of the cashier staring up at a huge framed map of the United States that served as a wall decoration. The map depicted the country’s system of interstates with references to major cities rather than small ones.

  Studying it, Liza retraced her travels, remembering how long it had taken to get from place to place. Now, staring at New Mexico and the distance from Albuquerque to where she knew Bisbee must be, she realized that she had been sadly mistaken about how long it would take her to get from one to the other. Still, going south from Denver seemed like a good bet.

  “Planning your route?” Kimi Sue asked.

  Liza nodded.

  “Where do you want to end up?”

  “L.A.”

  “You could stick with us,” Kimi Sue suggested. “We’ll be back in Barstow by the end of next week. But you’ll get there faster if you head down to I-10. Lots of long-haul guys there. Someone in the UR will find a good one for you.”

  “The UR?” Liza asked.

  “The Underground Railroad. I thought you knew,” Kimi Sue said. “That’s what we call it. With me it was growing up with a father who beat my mother. With Oxman it was the other way around—his mother was the violent one. But we both grew up living that nightmare. It’s one of the reasons we never had kids. We didn’t want to put anyone else through that kind of living hell.”

  When Liza climbed back up into the upper berth, Major glowered at her, but he was now resigned enough to her presence that he didn’t bother barking this time. She remembered what Bertha had said to her in the restaurant where Joe and Sam had dropped her off—that she’d once had a husband she’d had to put in her rearview mirror. Sam had hinted about some kind of violence in his past, and so had Bruiser. His truck driving company partnership had been in conjunction with a stepfather rather than a father.

  And what did that say about Candy Small? When he had put those telltale bruises on her arm, he had known exactly what he was doing. Was it something he had seen as a kid with his father taking his frustrations out on his mother? Or perhaps it was the other way around. Maybe Candy was a confirmed bachelor for the same reason Kimi Sue and Oxman didn’t have kids—because he didn’t trust himself to be any better at marriage than his parents had been. And what about Aimee and the women who worked in that salon that was really a front for a mostly invisible women’s shelter? Were they all victims, too? If so, Liza realized, the numbers were staggering. She had grown up trapped in her own particular brand of misery. She had always known that her own life was bad, but it had somehow escaped her understanding that other people’s lives might have been just as bad if not worse.

  Now, here she was benefiting from all those other people’s experiences and from their misery as well. The UR, as Kimi Sue called it, was a loose-knit but effective army dedicated to rescuing domestic violence victims, one battered spouse at a time. It occurred to Liza then that perhaps she did belong here. The obvious bruises Candy had placed on her arm were phony, but the physical abuse she had suffered as a child at her mother’s hands had been real enough. It turned out her mother’s violence was the price of admission for this journey and for what she had originally considered to be undeserved assistance from this cadre of kind and motivated folks.

  Traveling through the night, Liza no longer felt undeserving. With that thought in mind, she took off her scarf and folded the long strip of material into a small silk square. Holding it close to her breast, she closed her eyes and fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 17

  IN THE DREAM JOANNA WAS RUNNING DESPERATELY AFTER DENNIS, who flew down High Lonesome Road, riding bareback on Spot. The horse was racing at a full gallop. Joanna chased after them, barefoot, screaming at Dennis that he needed to stop—that the horse couldn’t see where she was going. All he did was turn back, look at her, laugh, wave, and keep right on going.

  It was a relief when her rooster-crowing telephone awakened her out of the nightmare. “Good morning,” George Winfield said. “Just like old times. I’m on my way to do the Machett autopsy. When I came through Bakerville, Daisy’s was open, so I decided to stop in for breakfast. Care to join me?”

  “I’m surprised they’re open,” Joanna said.

  “So am I,” George agreed, “but since they are, I wanted to give them my business—as a show of solidarity if nothing else.”

  “Where’s Mom?” Joanna asked.

  “Ellie was asleep when I got home last night, or at least she pretended to be, and she was still asleep just now when I left. If I can finish the autopsy in time to make it to church, I might start to worm my way back into her good graces. She has dinner plans scheduled for this evening. If I know what’s good for me, I won’t be late or absent.”

  “I’ll come to breakfast,” Joanna agreed, “but I have to shower and dress first.”

  “Take your time,” George said. “I’ll sit here, look at the paper, and drink coffee. Matt Keller is meeting me at the morgue at nine, so there’s no rush.”

  “Since this is a joint case, do you want one of my people there?” Joanna asked.

  “Up to you,” George said. “It’s Sunday. With two separate cases to solve, you’ve got to be chewing up overtime like crazy.”

  That was true. When Joanna had handed out work assignments for today, she had hoped that Guy Machett’s autopsy wouldn’t happen until Monday. Doing it on Sunday would increase the cost if she had to pay for one of her detectives to be on hand to witness the procedure. With Matt there, it wasn’t as vital to have one of her people present, but still . . .

  “You could do it,” George pointed out, interrupting her thought process. “You’re on salary. You get paid the same no matter how many hours you work. As you said, it’s a joint operation. I know things are all hunky-dory with Alvin Bernard right now, but if that goes south, you’re going to want your department to have its own record of what went on during the autopsy.”

  “I’ve witnessed some autopsies,” Joanna cautioned, “but not that many.”

  “Neither has Matt Keller,” George advised. “That’s one of the reasons I think you should be there.”

  Joanna liked the fact that George was a straight shooter. When he passed out unsolicited advice, she tended to pay attention.

  “Fair enough,” she said. “I’m on my way.”

  With no kids to juggle, no animals to feed, no pets to dodge, and no breakfast to eat, Joanna was showered, dressed, and in the car in record time. She paused at the stop sign on High Lonesome Road long enough to send a text to Casey asking if she had dusted the metal grate for fingerprints.

  Inside Daisy’s, Joanna was surprised to find Moe Maxwell stationed at the front door with a stack of menus in hand. She was dismayed not only at finding Moe filling in at Junior’s usual station but at his being there at all. Her thoughts must have been written on her features because Moe’s face darkened.

  “I told Daisy we had to open,” he explained. “All we were doing was sitting at home, crying, and driving each other nuts. Besides, you can’t leave a restaurant inventory of food sitting around forever—use it or lose it.�
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  George waved to her from the far corner of the room. “Don’t bother with a menu,” Joanna told Moe. “I know what I want, and you don’t need to lead me to the table, either. I can find my way.”

  “Coffee?” Moe asked.

  “Please.”

  While he went off to fetch it, George looked at her over the top of his reading glasses as well as over the top of the print edition of the Arizona Daily Sun. “Hope you didn’t make the mistake of suggesting that it was too early for Moe and Daisy to be back at work. I did, and he nearly bit my head off.”

  Moe arrived at their booth with coffeepot in hand. He filled Joanna’s mug. Then, without a word, he slopped enough coffee into George’s mug to top it off before stomping away.

  “Fortunately I was smart enough to keep my mouth shut,” Joanna said. Then, after pausing long enough to take a sip of coffee, she added, “I’m glad to have you back.”

  George frowned. “That’s the same thing Madge said last night when she called—that she was glad I’m back. I’m not, really. I told you I’d help you with these two cases, but that’s it. Your mother and I have plans to leave town next week, and we’re going. In the unlikely event that you make a quick arrest and the case goes to trial before we get back in October, then I’ll have to fly in to testify if need be, but this isn’t a permanent arrangement.”

  Moe came over to take their order. The retired letter carrier wasn’t especially good when it came to taking orders or waiting tables, so it took some time. Once Moe walked away, George apologized to Joanna. “I didn’t mean to growl at you, but I spent too many of the years with my first wife working too hard and not paying attention to the relationship. I’m not making the same mistake with Ellie. I said as much to Claire Newmark, too.”

  “Got it,” Joanna said. “I won’t ask again. Now, what else can you tell me about Junior’s autopsy?”